Insignificant and occasionally interesting contributions to the cognition of reality…

Illustration by Andreas Hykade.

Saw an interesting program at the Holland Animation Film Festival in November (2002). It was called Not Done and was put together by a Belgian chum of mine, Edwin Carels. The three-part program consisted of films and videos (by the likes of Martha Colburn, Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow and Leslie Thornton) that challenge the notion of what is and what is not animation in terms of both content and technique. What I found more interesting was Carels accompanying text where he asks: "Why does a medium in which virtually anything is possible, in which the imagination has free reign and the laws of physics don’t apply, so rarely shock its viewers?" And in particular, he takes animation festivals to the carpet for contributing to this stale situation by: not seeking out filmmakers in the experimental, avant-garde or art gallery world; not showing more performance-based work from animators like, for example, William Kentridge; not being a forum for serious debates about animation.

This is not the first time I’ve heard this complaint. In an article in the 2000 Holland Animation Film Festival catalogue (which was reprinted in the Spring 2001 ASIFA magazine), Canadian animator Pierre Hébert was critical of the current state of animation suggesting that it had become a recluse unwilling to open its doors to new possibilities.

Conservative and Homogenous
Although Carels is attacking my bread and butter, I tend to agree (in principle) that animation festivals have all become fairly conservative and homogenous. No one really cares about animation festivals as a forum for serious discussions. They are primarily a forum for buyers, recruiters, ASIFA members and drunks. From retrospectives to competitions to jury decisions, everything is relatively peachy keen. Sure, some folks mildly bitch to their friends about this or that decision, but rarely is there any sort of loud, meaningful debate about a film or a program. Even at Ottawa '98, when we got into trouble for showing this apparently racist Polish film called Black Burlesque, it wasn’t the animation community that yelled and screamed at me, it was two Canadian Jewish associations.

And despite all the talk about experimental and cutting edge animation, festivals are not actually showing anything overly radical. We hear that Robert Breer, Stan Brakhage and Martha Colburn are animators, but when did you last see their work at an animation festival? Rather than rely on the same old crowd of independent, student and studio animators, festival programmers have got to attend mixed-media and experimental festivals, art galleries, video shows — i.e., the other cinema. We can kick animation in the balls and awake it from its decades long drool and bring in some fresh voices.

And as Carels suggests, why limit presentations to traditional film-video screenings? What about installations, dance performances, theatre? Artists like Pierre Hébert, William Kentridge and Kathy Rose all merge animation with performance arts. The problem here however (at least from an Ottawa Festival perspective) is that a single performance costs significantly more than a regular film screening. So, you know…what can I say…I’m copping out a bit here, but do I spend thousands of dollars for a one night performance that’s going to attract half capacity and leave me with no money for any other programs JUST to win the respect of assorted intellectual-artistic hipsters?