Phantom Canyon (2006) is another short animated film by Stacey Steers where many of the backgrounds and other details are collaged pieces from old engravings. There are so many of these films by Steers and older directors like Lawrence Jordan that I’m starting to think they should be considered a sub-genre inside the general body of film animation, just as engraving collage is almost a separate class of paper collage.
In Stacey Steers’ The Edge of Alchemy the human character was animated from repurposed footage of Janet Gaynor and Mary Pickford. For this earlier film the humans have been borrowed from Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering motion studies. Muybridge is popular with animators for the obvious reason that his photographs were early forms of film animation (or cinema) in themselves; his photo experiments are even the subject of at least two animated films: Le Cheval de Fer (1984) by Gérald Frydman, and Muybridge’s Strings (2011) by Koji Yamamura. In Phantom Canyon a Muybridge woman travels through a surreal landscape where she’s assailed continually by monstrous insects and other objects while being pursued by a bat-winged Muybridge man. “A true story” says a subtitle, but it’s left to us to decide how much this may be metaphorical.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Cosmic Alchemy, a film by Lawrence Jordan
• Edge of Alchemy, a film by Stacey Steers
• Still Life, a film by Connor Griffith
• Hamfat Asar, a film by Lawrence Jordan
• Carabosse, a film by Lawrence Jordan
• Labirynt by Jan Lenica
• Heaven and Earth Magic by Harry Smith