Pour ceux que ça intéresse! Une programmation hors pair conçue par Marco de Blois, conservateur pour le cinéma d'animation à la cinémathèque québécoise, qui regroupe les meilleurs films d'animation de la planète.

If anyone is interest. This is a fabulous selection of the best animation movies of the year. This is at the cinémathèque québécoise next week end. After all, we were in an animation course!

The Close-up bites

Nadine Gordimer

Andrew Wyeth

I just received a link to a site/film/book/process presentation called Wisdom which has some very interesting portraits of "celebrities" at http://www.wisdombook.org/

The director/photographer, Andrew Zuckerman, http://www.andrewzuckerman.com/ comes from the nether-world of advertising where he does some fast-shutter speed pics of animals and of various objects/products exploding. The Grey Goose Vodka video with slo-mo pours and air bubbles through vodka on ice was kinda nice.

Zuckerman gives a good interview in the making-of video of Wisdom and the various portraits are quite interesting. Although most of the celebrities presented are not part of my firmament of star celebrities, the portraits present a stillness that I have not seen in portraits by Avedon, Newman, Bourque-White, Penn, Arbus or Liebowitz. The portraits are the antimatter of Weegee's crowd shots. Not all the portraits have this "still" quality about them, but the ones that seem to exude it (to my eye) would be: Dave Brubeck, Zbeniew Brzezinski (though it is more distant), Dr. Terrence FitzGerald, Frank Gehry, Dr. Jane Goodall, Nadine Gordimer, Henry Kissinger, Willie Nelson, Michael Parkinson, Helen Suzman, Andrew Wyeth.

The portraits seem to be part of a different tradition than what we conceive today as a head shot. They mix Avedon's white background portaits with romanticized 1930's portraiture: the informality of Avedon travels inside while exhibiting a romanticism devoid of passion, as if the face conveyed their individual process of spatializing ideas but without the ideas.

Traditionally, it is contended that the eyes are the mirrors of the soul, but the framing would seem to argue for a different stance: Zuckerman would have it happen on the bridge of the nose and parts of the cheeks! The framing gives undue weight to the lower part of the face--and though usually this means below the nose, in these images it would mean everyting below the eyes. The eyes are relegated to the back-seat as the face is presented as a whole rather than as a association of provileged parts. There is something going on between the nose and eyes that makes you look at the face in its entirety. It's as if Zuckerman tries to decenter the gaze and force you to see the face as a totality. In the way that we would pull out features from the background, i.e. she has a stong chin or he has soft eyes, the face conflates the individual features into a whole that metaphorically exudes their take on life. If I say that metaphor is the process by which concepts are spatialized, it could mean that these images of faces individually impose intervals and duration whose particular time signatures would be stamped on these faces. I don't know what they are thinking, but I feel like I might have an idea as to how they process the world... perhaps this is why I look so puzzled and bewildered in photographs? Peace out. Felix

Anime and Games: transcending style and time in the east

It can be said, that Japanese Anime is a culturally specific form of animation that based its visual style on its early limitations. Budget and time limits ended up defining, what Lamarre calls "limited animation", in which many short-cuts where developed in order to create illusions of movement that where less time intensive to produce. Processes such as repeated loops, sliding figures across backgrounds, segmentation of body parts, and cut and paste facial features,  first developed out of necessity and later became part of the inherent style of this unique form of animation. What was a concession later became a strength. 

What struck me most about this revelation (as I admittedly, have almost no knowledge of the Anime art form) was its very marked similarity to 2D video game animation. All the limited animation processes mentioned in Lamarre's article as well as others mentioned in Mark Stein's lecture where almost identical to the techniques used in sprite animation in video games. 

While this in itself is not a major revelation, it is worth noting that whereas in traditional animation (western) as well as video games, the tendency is often to approach the cinematic whenever possible. With emphasis on techniques such as motion-capture to create realistic movements (animation and video games), removal of looping or sliding to encourage movements based on set fps fixed meter segments, or rotoscoping (drawing the animated cells over captured film or video footage), it seems like in the west we still judge movement according to "reality" which really means the cinematic. As it is commonly thought that cinematic movement is analogous to "real" movement.

Conversely, in Japan, from what I gathered from the Stein's lecture, after having found creative solutions to their limitations, the animators started to embrace these limitations as a unique style or process. They became the seeds to a new way of conceiving animation and movement. And this is strangely similar in the video game world as I mentioned earlier. While technology in video games has grown even more explosively that of film or TV animation, games in the west are still working towards the holy grail of the cinematic experience. Hardware is being pushed to the limit to allow for more polygons (triangles that make up the mesh of modeled 3d Characters), higher resolution textures and more motion-captured key frames for animation. The general feeling is that of a constant struggle to reach "real movement".

In games coming out of Japan, like with anime, this does not seem nearly so important. The concept of movement seems less rigid and more open to experimentation within the limits of the genre. In fact, it sometimes even appears that they exaggerate the limitations purposefully. It feels like a form of self affirmation. They know they are making games and they are not afraid to say so. Examples like the legendary "Street Fighter" series are still animating with sectioned, looped, pixels based character sprites like in the good old days of 8-bit systems, in lieu of more modern 3D motion capture techniques. 

Though I couldn't tell you why this seems to be the case, it is interesting nonetheless to know that culture could play a large part in how we are willing to work with movement and how we judge it in different situations. Of course I am generalizing greatly here as there are many games and animations that transcend these concerns in both cultures. I feel it is worth mentioning that there does seem to be a division in the way movement is generally expressed. I find it interesting that two vehicles (cell animation and video games) separated by over 80 years could still parallel each other so faithfully across time and culture.

Abstract Space

Two of Sarah’s films that were screened at the last class made me reflect upon the power of the black color in particular. In this regard, Wassily Kandinsky in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art underlines that “Black is something burnt out, like the ashes of a funeral pyre, something motionless like a corpse. The silence of black is the silence of death. Outwardly black is the colour with least harmony of all, a kind of neutral background against which the minutest shades of other colors stand clearly forward” (39). The viewer’s sense of space is significantly distorted because a black background erases the feeling of depth. Since Sarah mentioned that those films were related to the death of her close friend, the interplay between the figure of the white dancer and the black mise-en-scène accompanied by strong rhythmic sound brought me somehow closer to experiencing the unknown feeling of space. I think that Sarah brilliantly articulated in these films the space the viewer cannot inhabit – he or she can only slide on the black surface alongside the dancer’s figure without going inside.

Len Lye - sculpture animée tangible

«son approche de l'activité artistique tient plus d'une philosophie de la création que d'une simple préoccupation technique.»  - Pierre Hébert sur Len Lye

Encore une fois je reviens sur Len Lye - artiste obsédé par la cinétique - qui prolongea son art du mouvement jusque dans des sculpture animées de matière métallique.  De 1958 jusqu'à sa mort, en 1980, il produisa d'imposantes sculptures cinétiques.  Il avait l'intention de produire des oeuvres d'une immensité impensables pour, entre autres, reproduire les forces de la nature. «Il envisageait un nouveau type, à vivre hors les murs des musées, un art qui susciterait un sentiment physique d'empathie entre le spectateur et l'oeuvre, un art qui jouerait sur les sensations de danger et d'exaltation.» - Hurrel/Webb Danser avec le danger dans le temple de Lye 

Expérience physique, autant visuelle que sonore, ces oeuvres font vivre le mouvement.  En posant ces sculpture en mouvement, on peut voir une partie de l'intervalle.  La mouvance de l'objet se fait ainsi sentir physiquement par son vacarme auditif de certaines oeuvres. 

J'ai eu la chance de vivre l'expérience au musée Len Lye.  Visuellement, mes perceptions étaient amplifiées par l'ajout cinétique du son.  Une oeuvre d'art d'un musée n'a rarement été si physique.

Artiste d'animation, du mouvement, de la cinétique et de la sensation, Len Lye demeure un artiste à (re)découvrir.

Relating to Rhythm

I can't say that I know very much about the concept of rhythm, even though my early high school aspirations where to be a bass payer. I never really developed the sense of rhythm required in order to make that a reality. From the little I managed the acquire, I realized that articulating rhythm is easier said than done. It is something that is felt more than articulated. 

In my humble interpretation, I would say that rhythm is a recursive process in which movements – mechanical, acoustic, or visual –  that reflect and modify each other infinitely. One movement creating or affecting the next one and so on, even across mediums. The interplay of micro-adjustments as each movement informs and redefines the subsequent movements is precisely what makes it so hard to adequately articulate the concept since you can't separate the elements in order to define them. They either co-create rhythm or they don't.

Perhaps that is the reason, that the general trope is that rhythm cannot be learnt. It needs to be felt. Those that teach bass players and dancers to "feel" it, are in fact trying encourage the students into allowing these relationships to form naturally; to open up the possibility without making it formulaic and timed. If that recursive relationship is missing, and the timing (meter) takes precedence, the rhythm is empty and mechanical. 

Perhaps my previous attempts to master rhythm failed due to my adherence to meter and timing over that of movement and relation. Maybe I should try again. I do still have a beautiful 5-string Washburn, sitting in the corner, just waiting to be played. I wonder if philosophy makes better musicians! 

Thought and Cinema//And Readings for Thursday

Hello All,



In case any of you are interested further in thinking about that Deleuze chapter from the Time-Image- I can email you my second chapter of my thesis that directly responds to that concept of thought or thought's outside. Let me know, I would love some feedback.



Also, Stamatia will have photocopies of the readings ready for tomorrow afternoon. Please go by Erin's mail box and pick them up there, like last time, if you're having trouble opening up the attachments.



Nasrin