Tearing up the Tracks: Virgil Widrich’s Fast Film
With few exceptions, there haven’t been many films on the animation festival circuit over the last year that tickled me. One of those that did though was a technological and conceptual dandy from Austria called Fast Film.
On the surface, the plot is a bit been there, done that. A man and woman kiss. The woman is imprisoned in some Doug Henning-like trunk and taken away. The man follows after her via horse, train, car and plane. He finally locates her in the villain’s underground lair. The duo flees from the lair and survives a dramatic airplane chase/shootout, before finally reaching safety where they end as they began: with a kiss.
OK… so… yeah, it’s not all that impressive a story. Seen that three or 36 times before. But remember that wacky Luis Buñuel film, That Obscure Object of Desire, where he had one character played by two actresses? Well, in Fast Film, the hero, heroine and villains are portrayed by different actors every 5-10 seconds. The hero is played at various points by Gene Kelly, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grantx2 (young and old), Buster Keaton, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Sean Connery and even Rod Taylor. The woman shifts from Lauren Bacall and Mary Astor to Eve Marie Saint, Grace Kelly, Vera Miles, and my favorite old hottie, Cyd Charisse. And the villains include Vincent Price, James Mason, Dr. Strangelove, Frankenstein, Godzilla, John Garfield and the creature from the Black Lagoon.
Still not impressed? Well, how about that this 14-minute short is composed of more than 65,000 paper printouts of individual images from 400+ live-action films (including Maltese Falcon, The Bandwagon, Videodrome, Psycho, North By Northwest, Godzilla, The General, Dr. Strangelove, Raiders of the Lost Ark, To Catch a Thief, Breathless and a variety of Sean Connery era Jimmy Bond performances). Director Virgil Widrich and his production team took the paper printouts and folded them into a variety of objects including train cars, planes (e.g. a photograph of John Wayne as a fighter pilot is folded into a paper airplane), landscapes and a clever little “wheel of fortune” torture device that mix and matches heads with body parts. (The best one features the head of James Woods with a body comprised solely of a hand flicking a lighter.) The printout landscapes and scenarios were photographed using a Canon EOS D30 digital still camera with 2,048x1,536 pixel resolution and then loaded into the computer one image at a time. Adobe After Effects was the most technical tool used in the process in addition to the computer hard drive.
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