ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.10 - JANUARY 2001

Fresh from the Festivals: January 2001's Film Reviews
(continued from page 1)

Just In Time. © Kirsten Winter.
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Just in Time
In 1995, when I saw Kirsten Winter's powerful experimental film, Clocks, I was impressed by the manner in which she managed to capture the process of composer Elena Kats-Cherin at work (and I do not mean process in the sense of a 'procedure,' but rather as the spiritual working through of her material). Winter's latest work, Just in Time, is motivated out of the same aesthetic as Clocks, though the resulting film is very different. Whereas Clocks is dynamic and energized, Just in Time feels much more meditative. However, the two films are definitely of a kind in that they are both impressionistic, striving to create the feeling of an experience rather than a narrative about it. Just in Time is Winter's observation of many aspects of America, where she traveled by train for four weeks. In the film, she analyzes some icons of American culture, such as the Statue of Liberty, and the country's landscapes, both natural and man-made.

Winter's filmmaking technique has parallels to the process of music composition, as she considers her visuals and her music to be of equal importance. She thinks of her film visuals as notes, and uses a 'visual score' to create high and low tension as well as rhythm. In this respect, she can be seen as a practioner of visual music, an art that has existed for many years. Winter collaborated on Muratti und Sarotti, a film about German animators of the 1920s, when the visual music tradition was at a high point and Winter sites these films as a strong influence on her own work. It's easy to see how German visual music artists such as Oskar Fischinger or Walther Ruttman have impacted her use of oil painting in Clocks, as bold strokes accompany the equally strong, pulsing score. However, in Just in Time, I also feel the influence of future generations of visual music filmmakers, such as James Whitney or a handful of other abstract filmmakers working during the 1950s and 1960s. I say this because of the almost solarized effects in portions of her film as well as the mandala-like use of bright, centered light that creates the meditative quality I sense in the film. Whether this influence is actual or coincidental, there are affinities between Just in Time and Whitney's films, for example, in their exploration of the essence of things and our inner experience of them. The contemplative quality of Just in Time, like SMASH before it, is partly the result of Winter's brush with death in a bad car accident, which almost killed her.

Winter has experimented with different techniques as she creates her works. She made Clocks using photos and oil painting. High 8 video and oil painting applied directly to a computer monitor were incorporated into her second film, SMASH, in 1997. In Just in Time (her third work), she has begun using scratching on film, along with filters applied in the lab, in her assemblage of live-action footage, oil paint and computer-generated imagery. Here sometimes digital video images were treated in After Effects and combined with painting while she shot frame-by-frame off a computer monitor, using a 35mm animation camera. Like her previous two films, Just in Time is without dialogue, but in this case her composer was Simon Stockhausen. Winter's work is supported in part by sponsorship by the German government, which has a system for funding independent film production. She currently teaches part-time at a College of Fine Arts in Hanover, plus she is working on a number of new short pieces. She works out of her studio, anigraf filmproduction, which she co-founded with Gerd Gockell in 1990.

Vision Point. © Stephen X. Arthur.
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Vision Point
In Vision Point, director Stephen X. Arthur takes viewers on another journey, this time across the landscape of Canada, which he traversed with his wife, Joyce Arthur. While she was driving through the Western portion of the country on the Trans Canada Highway, Arthur captured time-lapse images with a Pentax 35mm still camera, zooming in with a 200 mm lens. These images were later manipulated with Adobe After Effects, which also was used to create a heartbeat-like sound track for the film. Flight of the Stone (directed by Susanne Fränzel), a similar work that I recently reviewed, uses the 'narrative device' of a stone flying through the air to tie its 15 minutes of international landscapes together. In contrast, Arthur's images are united only thematically, as his goal was to abstract fundamental differences among regions of Canada. This strategy works in part because Vision Point is only one and a half minutes long; the repeated images form a rhythm in combination with the soundtrack, while changes in perspective and landscape types provide visual interest.

With a background in zoology and physiology, as well as an MFA in film production from the University of Southern California, Arthur brings an interesting scientific, analytical perspective to his work in animation. Among his strongest influences, he cites Norman McLaren, Paul Driessen, Jan Svankmajer and Werner Herzog, and he most admires the Bros. Quay for their employment of surrealism as 'true freedom from the intellect' and for their total devotion to their art. I do not see Vision Point as particularly surreal in its aesthetic, though Arthur himself describes it that way. However, I think he has achieved an entertaining and even slightly humorous film that is enjoyable to watch and might be studied for the way in which movement helps to sustain visual interest.

Arthur also explains that his inspiration came in part from Bart Testa's 1989 book, Spirit in the Landscape, which focuses on Canadian avant-garde landscape films in terms of the Canadian landscape-painting tradition. Vision Point was funded by a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. It has been screened at events worldwide.

 
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