ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.10 - JANUARY 2001

The Philosophical Stone of Animation
(continued from page 1)

As a child I always preferred animated films to live-action movies. In an animated film the magician does not wear a fake beard and no actress has to pretend to be a princess: the princess is real and so is the magic. The very stuff that such films are made of is magical. Besides, I experience all the old silent films as horrors, since not a single person who moves around on the screen is still among the living.

The singular language of animation can be defined as a very primeval form of communication which does not originate from the intellectual or linguistic thought structures. It is a language of the gesture, image, pantomime, a plastic symbol subjected to a very strict regime of temporal sequence, that is, to editing. Unlike live-action movies, it is disconnected from reality, in which it has no direct equivalents; it tells its own truth, nevertheless, as an emanation of pure imagination. Just like Chinese script, which has grown out of a particular image and through a process of abstraction which has given it universal meaning.

For me the language of animation is a direct expression of our psyche — of the world of myths, dreams and metaphors hidden within us. It expresses something that one can define as the sort of spirituality proper to the psyche of a child, to primitive peoples, to schizophrenics, but also to the wise seekers of the philosophical stone, who (like many artists) profess an attitude of eternal amazement and childishly believe in miracles. Their belief is evidenced by their insane occupation as a magician -- or animator.

During the reign of King Rudolph II, black magicians confined to the cramped cubicles in the Golden Lane (also called the Street of the Alchemists) in Prague used their sooty kettles to melt quicksilver so that it changed into gold. That image seems pretty close to the weird studios of such contemporary animators as the Quay brothers in London, Yuri Norstein in Moscow, Barry Purves in Manchester -- or even to my own basement in Warsaw -- where an invisible force makes us conjure whole worlds pulsating with mysterious life, using scraps of paper, paint, static dolls and objects as well as the lifeless texture of plaster of Paris.

On the one hand it is a fulfilment of the childish dream to make one's toys come alive, to enter a depicted, invented, fairy-tale world. On the other hand it is an obsessive urge -- well-known to magicians and mad scientists -- to create an artificial man: a homunculus, a Golem, Frankenstein's monster, a cyborg, a clone.

In the early twentieth century Karol Irzykowski, a Polish thinker and film theorist, intuited that animation would develop into "the real cinema of the future," pure cinema defined as a movement of forms hatched from under the animator's hand, setting no barriers to his imagination. Indeed, even at that time animation did appear in films, employed as magic through which the limits of what was feasible could be transgressed in live-action movies by Méliès or in Fritz Lang's Metropolis. In the pioneering work of Winsor McCay, the animator recreated the catastrophe of the steamship "Lusitania." The animals in the uncanny puppet films of Ladislaw Starewicz were also brought to life and made more human through animation. It was the flame of animation that emanated pure energy in Len Lye's abstract films. Nowadays, due to the staggering range of possibilities that computers offer, animators evoke the extinct world of dinosaurs and the breathtaking horror of the sinking of the "Titanic." Whenever high-budget feature films enter the realm of fantasy and overstep the limits of what is possible, the results suddenly make me think of Karel Capek's 1922 novel The Absolute Factory, where a scientist's invention gives rise to a large-scale production of the absolute -- a substance which catalyses parapsychological qualities, turning those hitherto unique phenomena into common events. Anyone who has read the novel knows that a world-wide cataclysm followed.

Now let us focus our attention on the modest work of animators who spend their days in solitude, sitting in their attics, basements or some such places -- that is, naturally, at the fringe of the world.

When Yuri Norstein visited Warsaw more than ten years ago and someone from the audience asked him -- in a doubtful tone -- about the future of animation, he answered: "Animation is just beginning to develop." I have to admit that those words, or rather Yuri's certainty, made me realise there and then the infinite possibilities at the threshold of which I stood at that time. A direct result of that insight is the film Franz Kafka in which I not only had the effrontery to show an animated Kafka but also -- to put it more precisely -- saw animation as the most perfect medium for the evocation of his spirit. It took two years in a dark basement to produce a sixteen-minute long flash of magnesium and thus tear out from the darkness of non-existence bits and scraps of the writer's life which lasted forty one years. I have fed those images with my own energy during several thousand hours of voluntary confinement.

This recollection of my work on Kafka leads me to the last question that I would like to discuss -- namely, to certain animated films in which the very subject matter clearly proves how self-aware their authors are, showing that they are quite conscious of the aspect that I am dealing with in this text. In other words, they do not overlook the connection between their work and alchemy. I have to limit myself to just two examples.

I remember how Miroslaw Kijowicz, the outstanding Polish animator, commented on The Street of Crocodiles by the Quay brothers, having seen it at the 1986 festival in Zagreb: "This is no longer animation but some kind of a mystery play." Indeed, what we see in that film is a long-extinct world resurrected on the screen, or perhaps brought to life by a drop of saliva from the mouth of an old man (could it be God?); that world describes itself as a town filled with "cheap human material," a shoddy imitation, "a photo-montage composed of clippings from stale, last-year's newspapers." The above sentence might perhaps serve as a credo for the Quay brothers who -- enchanted with the early works of Jan Svankmajer and inspired by them -- devoted their talents to the conjuring of life out of everyday objects and crippled dolls. Surrounded by dusty stage-sets that whisper in our ears scraps of long-cancelled meanings, the Quays weave patterns of connections which escape our perception like paths dissolving inconspicuously in a forest. Their expert use of scarce light and the depth of focus is akin to the effects employed long ago in silent films.

 

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