{animation} – { feuilleton }

Locked Groove

It’s been a while since Scotto Moore’s newsletter turned up any of the abstract animated visuals I enjoy. Locked Groove by Emanuele Kabu fits the bill perfectly, an exercise in vibrant random symmetry which bears the subtitle “A hypnotic audiovisual animation inspired by pareidolia”. The video might also have been inspired by psychedelic hallucination given the way it captures the tendency of the abstract patterns generated by psychedelic delirium to continually change their size, shape and colour. This is one feature of the psychedelic experience you don’t see reproduced very often even though animation has long been the ideal medium for creating such effects. Kabu has soundtracked the metamorphoses with analogue synth noises but you could just as easily watch them with a suitably psychedelic piece of music.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Short films by Hideki Inaba

Turris Babel, a film by Jan Mimra

Another short animation, a collage film from 1989 which concerns everyone’s favourite Biblical megastructure, the Tower of Babel. Jan Mimra’s film doesn’t recount the creation of the building but uses the tower as a symbol for the human world, its history and its culture. The building itself is a hybrid structure made of architectural elements from the whole of human history, with a pyramid at the base and a platform at the summit supporting a collection of modern tower blocks.

The narrative purpose of Mimra’s tower is never very clear; to judge by the soundtrack the fragmentation of a universal language has already occurred, even though the Biblical story has this taking place only after the tower has been destroyed. There’s further confusion in a flood which threatens the tower and its inhabitants, something which may be another Biblical reference but could equally be a metaphor for modern warfare (the sinister planes suggest as much) or even climate change. Mimra’s film was made at the Jiří Trnka Studio in Prague, and includes a reference to another Czech collage animator, Karel Zeman, in a brief glimpse of Jules Verne piloting the paddling submarine from Zeman’s The Invention for Destruction.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Babel details
• Athanasius Kircher’s Tower of Babel
• La Tour by Schuiten & Peeters

Weekend links 815

A photograph by FR Yerbury of St George’s-in-the-East, London. From Nicholas Hawksmoor (1924) by HS Goodhart-Rendel.

• “Sixty years later, the Spectacle saturates us in ways the Situationists never imagined. Online platforms structure our personal relationships; algorithms nudge us toward the platform owners’ preferred choices. ‘Intelligence’ is embedded into everything from our phones to our kitchen appliances. But back in the Sixties, the Situationists saw the physical environment of the city as an expression of the mass society created by consumerism and governed by the Spectacle, and they felt power closing in around them: ‘All space is occupied by the enemy. We are living under a permanent curfew. Not just the cops—the geometry.'” Hari Kunzru takes a psychogeographical dérive through the streets of London, encompassing the Hawksmoor churches, Iain Sinclair’s own peregrinations, Alan Moore’s Sinclair-influenced script for From Hell, Arthur Machen and more. (No mention of Alan’s ongoing Long London series, however, the first book of which is a deep dive into Machen territory.) Kunzru could be accused of being 30 years too late with his piece but for younger readers and many Americans these paths are worth retracing.

• Enemies from Venus!: “The only surviving fragment of a Dutch science fiction series for children from the mid-sixties (that never was).” CGI animation by Ernst-Jan van Melle in the style of black-and-white puppet shows like Fireball XL5, Space Patrol, etc.

• “If this is a horror story, it’s a horror story about being desperate for love, and about the vulnerability, loneliness, and difficulty in understanding other people that might drive this state.” Olivia Laing on Jonathan Glazer’s second feature film, Birth.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty selects 10 great British heist films.

• At The Daily Heller: Posting Posters about Fellini.

• RIP Sly Dunbar; James Sallis; Catherine O’Hara.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Peter Whitehead’s Day.

• The Strange World of…Toumani Diabaté.

• New music: Errata by WF 98.

• Birth (1971) by Keith Jarrett | Birth (1995) by Howie B | Birth (2013) by Roly Porter

Ex Libris, a film by Garik Seko

Garik Seko (1935–1994) is an animator whose work I hadn’t encountered before. He was born in Tiflis, Georgia, but worked in Prague where a number of his shorts (this one among them) were made at the Jiří Trnka Studio. Seko’s speciality was the animation of physical objects, in the case of this film a quantity of anthropomorphised books populating the shelves of a bookcase. Jan Švankmajer comes immediately to mind when watching Ex Libris, especially when two philosophy books chew each other to pieces following a vociferous argument. Švankmajer also made films at the Trnka Studio but I’d wary of suggesting an influence in one direction or another when the similarities are superficial ones. Ex Libris was made in 1983, by which time Švankmajer had been animating physical objects (and people) for many years. His own films are more aggressive than Seko’s, usually with a philosophical or Surrealist subtext. Ex Libris may be seen here.

Nezha Conquers the Dragon King

From an Arabian story with a Chinese theme to a Chinese adaptation of a Chinese story. Nezha Conquers the Dragon King is an hour-long animated presentation of an episode from Chinese mythology, in which Nezha, a magical boy born from a lotus flower, uses his powers to defend his home town and its inhabitants against four destructive dragons. The film was made in 1979 by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio, and directed by Wang Shuchen, Yan Dingxian and Xu Jingda. It was dubbed into English by the BBC for a TV broadcast a few years later, something I never saw at the time but the dubbed version sounds like one to avoid. They also replaced the original score and no doubt cropped the widescreen image as well. The BBC dubbed René Laloux’s marvellous Time Masters for its TV broadcasts in the 1980s but they did at least leave the music alone.

One of my most enjoyable cinematic discoveries of the past year has been the wuxia films of Zhang Yimou: Hero (2002), House of Flying Daggers (2004), and Shadow (2018). Also Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) which is more of a straightforward historical drama for the most part, without any of the displays of balletic martial arts that are a common feature of wuxia films. Nezha Conquers the Dragon King is pretty much a wuxia story for children, with Nezha being a skilled fighter almost from the day he’s born. His feud with the dragons culminates in a battle in which he takes on an army of anthropomorphic animal opponents. (Another common feature of wuxia stories is pitting one or two skilled combatants against a mass of armed men.) The stylised animation, replete with motifs borrowed from traditional paintings, is beautifully rendered througout, while the basic storyline is so similar to Marcell Jankovics’ Son of the White Mare (1981) it’s tempting to wonder whether the Chinese film gave Jankovics the idea for his second feature. Son of the White Mare is based on Hungarian folk tales but it too concerns a magical child (born from a horse rather than a flower) whose super-strength enables him to fight three dragon beings who have been threatening the land. Like their Chinese counterparts, the Hungarian dragons can assume human form, and each has a special power related to a different element. Jankovics’ film was released on blu-ray recently; I ought to watch it again.

Nezha Conquers the Dragon King may be seen here in a print with embedded English subtitles.