Woman in the Attic is a rich visual and aural experience. © 2005 University of Southern California — School of Cinema-Television.

Woman in the Attic
Woman in the Attic is a stop-motion film from USC animator Chansoo Kim, a dream about a dream about a woman’s memories of her younger self. The delicate wisp of incident in the short crumbles under the scrutiny of rational examination, but a good reference would be the Star-Child sequence at the end of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (which was just as irrational, and just as lovely).

In a tall attic space, an old woman sits with a fan staring at her image in a mirror and listening to distant noises and dripping water. She enters her dream as a child’s voice from above murmurs, “I’m getting old.” Looking up, she sees the toddler version of herself teetering in a ceiling-tall highchair. A man’s voice drifts up to her, an overlapping insistent mumble, unintelligible but for the final command of “Wake up.” She lights a match, and we see her as a young woman sitting at a table, staring into a candle and drumming her fingers. There’s a knocking at the door behind her and she goes to open it. In the room beyond she sees herself on her deathbed. Here the frames of reference really begin to fracture, and with every cut of film observer and observed play musical chairs: now the young lady, now the child. The woman/child sits and watches the old woman, who wakes only briefly to acknowledge her before lying back and breathing her last.

As she dies we see the young girl awaken and cry, but she dissolves into nothing in the light of morning coming through the old woman’s window. The old woman gets out of bed, mutters, “I’m getting old,” and goes on with her day.

Woman in the Attic is a rich visual experience, with warmly lit characters and set dressing done entirely in antique shades of cream and chocolate. With no articulation on the faces of his armature characters, Kim does his acting exclusively through gestures. Kim also did the short’s sound design, and that’s where home viewers — assuming this makes it to a video anthology —will be in for a real treat. Every room in the house has a unique tone, and the silence isn’t silent at all but filled with the distances between walls and the weather behind the windows.

Chansoo Kim has three other shorts in his filmography, Island (2001), Floating (2001) and Rainy Day (2002), all in traditional drawn style, and still images are available at his website (spell out his name). Kim studied graphic design at Seoul National University and worked as a graphic designer for five years, and now he’s at USC to earn an MFA in animation and digital arts, for which this is his second-year project. Kim shot Woman in the Attic using an Olympus E-10 digital still camera, and the finished product was output to 35mm. At a school with a reputation for overabundant resources and the cultivation of commercial instincts, it’s perhaps appropriate that when Kim finished this highly personal endeavor, his Olympus camera died, like Townshend’s guitar, at the completion of the last shot.

Patricia Grey is a darkly ambiguous piece that vacillates between a present-day interrogation and a woman’s reminiscences. © 2004 Afterhours Prods.

Patricia Grey
Patricia Grey is a darkly ambiguous stop-motion piece from Japanese-Canadian animator Anne Koizumi. Koizumi lives in Alberta and is a member of Calgary’s Quickdraw Animation Society, and she completed Patricia Grey as her fourth-year project at the University of British Columbia Film School.

The short alternates between a present-day interrogation of a mother named Patricia and her reminiscences of a family life that’s gone forever. In the present day, Patricia sits in a chair wearing a simple red dress as an unseen voice asks her some simple questions. She’s slow to respond, but when asked to describe her marriage sighs and calls it “Good,” as if it were a colonoscopy that took 10 minutes less than usual this week. Something’s happened, and between her interrogator’s questions and Patricia’s memories, we end up with a clear view of the results but a murky, cryptic picture of who’s responsible and why.

The act took place in her home, a feeble space with paint peeling off the walls. There was a daughter, seen dragging her jump rope behind her, reading books by herself, and falling asleep on the floorboards. There was a husband, who approaches his daughter in stealth and hovers over her in an uncomfortable straddling pose. And there was Patricia herself, who is last seen in flashback cradling her daughter in her arms, the girl unmoving, her neck encircled by the jump rope. All these reminiscences drift across the screen as the voice asks her about photographs of her various family members, and the piece ends as he offers her own picture to identify and gets only a stony silence. “Take your time,” he murmurs.

Koizumi shot Patricia Grey on 16mm using an animation motor-equipped Bolex. The sound design is evocative of real-world spaces, from windowless rooms to playgrounds full of children; the music is ambient, with electronic noises over chords from a Fender Rhodes. Koizumi blended two styles of stop-motion in her short, with the present-day scenes done in clay animation and the flashbacks in puppet animation, and it’s perfect for the dramatic needs of the piece. The flashbacks take on a look of solid three-dimensional substantiality, the ground solid, the faces stoic and unmoving — her interrogation, animated in plasticine on glass, is flat and gelatinous, her countenance literally falling to pieces, a nightmare she wishes would go away.

Taylor Jessen is a writer living in Burbank. He is currently shopping a pitch for a new daytime soap about the tragic lives of health-obsessed young professionals called Land Without Carbs.