{animation} – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

The Return, a film by Jerzy Kucia

“Jerzy is the greatest among the living—the greatest Polish author of animated films that is still alive.” So says Piotr Dumala, a formidable animator in his own right, in a video discussion of Jerzy Kucia’s films. The first of these, The Return (1972), is collected on Studio Miniatur Filmowych, a YouTube channel devoted to Polish animation. My complaints about YouTube are legion but the place is still worthwhile when it allows channels like this one to exist. The same goes for the channel devoted to films from the Zagreb Studios. The only trouble with these outlets is a lack of translation for the films that feature dialogue.

This isn’t an issue with The Return, however, a wordless account of a nocturnal train journey undertaken by a shuffling man in a cloth cap. Stills don’t convey the remarkable sense of verisimilitude that Kucia creates with the patterns of light flashing over the walls and against the windows of the unlit carriage. The whole piece is meticulously observed, and a reminder to keep searching for the director’s other films.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Crime and Punishment, a film by Piotr Dumala
• Walls, a film by Piotr Dumala
• Academy Leader Variations

Hon by Yasmine Hamdan

If you’ve seen Jim Jarmusch’s vampire film, Only Lovers Left Alive, you may remember the scene near the end where the film stops for a moment in Tangier so that Yasmine Hamdan, a Lebanese singer, can perform one of her songs. I’ve got the soundtrack CD which includes Hal, the song she sings, but despite my predilection for Middle Eastern music I’ve been remiss in chasing down the albums that she’s released since. Hon is a new Yasmine Hamdan song, her first in a while if the YT comments are correct (her last album was in 2018), with an animated video credited to Khalil. The video is a wholly animated piece which is one reason why it’s featured here; as I’ve said in the past, I lost patience with the live-action video format years ago but still like those that use animation provided the technique is well-deployed.

The song itself is a political one, you might say inevitably so given the singer’s background and the state of current events. No prizes for guessing what the “tiny country with a gaping wound” refers to. Khalil’s animation uses its variety of collaged objects to spell out Arabic words. Is one of these a fleeting reference to the opening shots of Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomengrates? Maybe. The link to the song came via Animation Obsessive, a favourite Substack which teaches me something new with every post. The latest instalment concerns Robert Sahakyants, an Armenian animator described as a Soviet hippy, or the closest you could get to such a thing in the Soviet Union of the 1970s. That’s another lead to go chasing after.

Sabin Balasa animations

The Drop (1966).

Changing the appearance of a painting frame by frame is one of the techniques available to animators but you don’t usually see artists working in this manner as offshoots of their gallery careers. Sabin Balasa (1932–2008) was a Romanian artist who created a number of short films from 1966 to 1979, all of which are animated equivalents of the paintings he was producing at the time.

The City (1967).

Having discovered these in a week when I’ve been rewatching all of David Lynch’s films there’s a notable similarity between Balasa’s first film, The Drop, and the animated sections of Lynch’s The Grandmother (1969). This isn’t to suggest that there’s any influence at work, the similarities are more a consequence of both artists painting bold shapes on black backgrounds. Where Lynch’s film was soundtracked by disquieting combinations of organ drone and various noises, Balasa uses dissonant orchestral music which creates equally disturbing moods. None of the music is credited, these soundtracks appear to be collages of pre-existing recordings.

The Phoenix Bird (1968).

The Wave (1968).

Fascinations (1969).

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Short films by Hideki Inaba

Berg.

One of Scotto Moore’s recent newsletters pointed to Flow , a short video by Japanese animator Hideki Inaba whose collection of similar works may be seen at YouTube. Inaba’s specialty is bewilderingly complex scenes of kaleidoscopic metamorphosis. His older films like Berg are populated by clusters of fungal forms or simple organisms that look like refugees from some of Haeckel’s zoological studies, writhing or dancing together in a manner and style that wouldn’t be out of place in an old Disney cartoon. His more recent works tend towards greater abstraction with a sharper edge, although the most recent one, Time Tides, takes an unexpected change of direction at its very end.

Tape, a music video for Canigou.

Flow.

Time Tides.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The teamLab experience

Weekend links 748

• In Tate Britain yesterday afternoon I finally got a proper look at Frederic Leighton’s An Athlete Wrestling with a Python (1877). It’s been part of the Tate collection for years but I never used to see it there, my only sighting being a view through a glass door into a locked gallery where the exhibits were being rearranged. I put the statue into my adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu in 1988 (see this post). Virgil Finlay also borrowed the pose for a Tarzan illustration in 1941.

• At Smithsonian magazine: See the first section of the largest-ever cosmic map, revealed in stunning detail by the Euclid space telescope.

• At The Daily Heller: Your Next Stop, The Twilight Zone. An interview with Arlen Schumer about the TV series.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine on Punch and the Surrealists.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – October 2024 at Ambientblog.

• New music: A House Where I Dream by Mattias De Craene.

• RIP Lillian Schwartz, pioneering computer animator.

• At Bandcamp: The Acid Mothers Temple Dossier.

• Where to start with Alan Garner.

• Jim Reid’s favourite music.

• The Twilight Zone (1963) by The Ventures | The Twilight Zone (1979) by The Manhattan Transfer | Twilight Zone (1998) by Helios Creed