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The Launch of the Lucerne International Animation Academy

Read how last December's initial Lucerne event nurtured and deepened the dialogue on animation.

The animation exhibit at Lucerne. All images courtesy of Marcin Gizycki.

When a few years ago Otto Alder announced that he would step down as the head of the animated film program at the DOK film festival in Leipzig, Germany, to devote himself to academic work in Lucerne, Switzerland, everybody who knew him could be sure that sooner or later this beautiful town in the Alps would become an important place on the map of international animation events. And so it happened.

On Dec. 8, 2009, the Lucerne International Animation Academy, an initiative of Otto Alder and the Faculty of Design at the Lucerne School of Art of Design, was officially opened. This intriguing name hides in fact a combination of an academic symposium, a discussion forum allowing practicing animators to share secrets of their craft with other filmmakers, and a display window for artists' work. As Otto, the head of the LIAA, put it in a statement printed in the catalogue: "The LIAA, located at the interface between theory and practice, has set itself the goal of nurturing and deepening the dialogue on animation."

In contrast to another big conference that had taken place in Changchun, China, a few weeks earlier, the Lucerne meeting was an informal, low key event, despite its loaded program and an impressive list of speakers. According to the LIAA website, the main theme of the debates had been specified as the role of dramaturgy in animation, although the spectrum of subjects discussed was actually much broader. In fact, the schedule was so busy and overlapping that everybody had to find his or her own way through it, picking up some presentations and leaving others aside. This writer, for example, decided to skip his compatriot Jerzy Kucia's conversation with Gil Alkabetz, in favor of Normand Roger's presentation of films he had written music to, etc., etc. Obviously one person could not attend all the lectures, screenings and discussions, so everybody's impression of the event has to be slightly different. Fortunately, nothing competed with the very first speeches of the Academy's opening night: Yuri Norstein's splendid lecture on the importance of poetry in animation and the Quay Brothers' revealing talk about the role of music in their films.

Yuri Norstein talks about subtlety as poetry.

According to Norstein, poetry lies in subtle nuances rather than mastery of the craft. It is more about following one's instincts, looking for the right intonation, listening to the inner voice than going along well-trodden paths. In his second speech, that took place the next day, Norstein disclosed some secrets of his amazing animation technique and produced on the spot his famous mist effect.

The Quays talked about how music had always stimulated their imagery. They work with their composers in an unusual way: the score comes first, the images and movement follow. The conversation between the twins and Suzanne Buchan focused mainly on In Absentia, the film that they had made to Karlheinz Stockhausen's music. When the composer saw the film for the first time, thought that it had been inspired by the life-story of his mother, which the filmmakers had not known. This is apparently the power of following one's intuition.

Other celebrities' presentations included lectures by Priit Pärn and Paul Bush and George Schwitzgebel's introduction to his own work. Priit's speech was especially entertaining, since it resembled a real time animation show with charts being drawn and projected on screen. His recipe for a successful story can be summarized like this: instead of looking for the best way to get from the beginning to the end, go from one little event to another and watch carefully what happens.

One of the most educative moments of the Academy was the panel called Research Window. All the speakers had something interesting to say but two of them revealed things that had been totally neglected or overlooked by academic film studies. Georges Sifianos talked about hidden details from the Parthenon in Athens and proved convincingly that these elements could be easily separate, arrange in a sequence and animated. The most surprising speaker of the day (if not of the hole conference) was Olia Lialina, who talked about gif animations on the Internet. Despite her young age, Olia (born in Moscow and living in Stuttgart) is one of the pioneers of net.art and a celebrity in the world of net artists. Her presence in Lucerne is very significant and might indicate that our, so to speak, 'conservative' animators' circle is finally opening up to a totally new realms of digital communication. The artist, who is not an animator, turned her attention to animated gifs after 2000 when they already started do disappear from web pages giving room to more sophisticated designs. She then realized the necessity of collecting and preserving these little animations for posterity.

The beauty of Lucerne.

I have been always convinced that the rise of animated film was not merely a matter of technical development but rather a result of certain historical vulnerability. The moment was just right for a medium that epitomized speed and movement. So it was a particular pleasure for me to listen to Ediwn Carels' splendid lecture in which he discussed animation in context of other two broader notions: Modernity and animism. The speaker started with a provocative statement that the "motive of animation in Modernity was never far from its opposite: the preservation and mummification of life." Animated film has to be seen, according to Carels, as a cultural phenomenon of its time, a form of animism.

The organizers did not forget to take an opportunity to promote their own local achievements. A visit to the Lucerne School of Art and Design, which was combined with a sightseeing tour, since the institution is scattered around the city, was a nice and enlightening experience, as was a screening of student films from the school.

The Lucerne International Animation Academy was definitely a well organized, well structured forum for exchanging ideas, probably the best conference of this type I have ever attended. The speakers were competent and diverse, the presenters (Suzanne Buchan, Edwin Carels, Christian Gasser, Timo Linsenmaier and Jayne Pilling) affable and proficient and the program rich but not tiring. Let's hope that LIAA will not be remembered as a one-time event and Otto Alder and his colleagues in Lucerne will manage to continue it in the future. I am certainly looking forward to it.

Marcin Gizycki is a Polish art historian and critic and senior lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design.

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