The DVD of Piotr Kamler’s animations released by aaa a few years ago contained almost all of the director’s works, comprising a handful of short films together with the 50-minute Chronopolis. The most recent film in the collection was Une mission éphémère, made in 1993, but this wasn’t the last of Kamler’s films. He was still active in the 2000s, and exploring new animation methods using computer graphics. Four shorts resulted from this period: Telemann (2006), Continu-discontinu 2010 (a reworking of one of his earliest films), Five Visual Pieces for Solo Computer (2013), and Perpetuum Mobile (2015). Continu-discontinu 2010 turned up on Vimeo a few years ago, and still seems to be there although you now have to be logged in to see it. The other three films were uploaded recently to the Internet Archive, and together form a distinct quartet in the Kamler filmography.
Five Visual Pieces for Solo Computer.
All four films are exercises in abstract animation, where shapes and colours evolve and change in time to a musical accompaniment. This is a very old cinematic form yet one that still seems fresh because of its scarcity. Telemann, which harks back to the “visual music” of Oskar Fischinger, pairs a dancing group of vertical lines with a piece by Baroque composer Georg Telemann. The animation isn’t as strictly choreographed as Fischinger’s films or Lejf Marcussen’s Tone Traces but it functions well enough as another abstract rendering of musical transcription. The other two films are closer to Kamler’s earlier shorts in the restless motion of their separate elements, with music by Beatriz Ferreyra and Polish group Kwadrofonik.
I thought for a while that the Kamler DVD was out of print but the aaa website still has a page with an active purchase link. A high-definition collection of all of Kamler’s films would be the ideal but for now the DVD is the best you can get.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Continu-discontinu 2010, a film by Piotr Kamler
• L’Araignéléphant
• Le labyrinthe and Coeur de secours
• Chronopolis by Piotr Kamler