SCI-Arc Graduate Thesis Research Design Advisor: Dev yn Weiser Spring 2022
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Lilith Ren
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M r. NUL LUS from N US QUAM
© SCI-Arc GT2022 Graduate Thesis Research Spring 2022 Design Advisor: Devyn Weiser
Lilith Ren
1 STATEMEN T
2022 Spring Thesis Prep
P O S T FAC T UA L COUNTER-FICTIONAL COLLECT IVE R EA L I T Y
Fig 2 A movie scene from Mirror directed by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1975
Lilith Ren
POSITION
DI S J O I N TE D N A R R AT I V E
CO UNT ER- C U LT U R E
AN O N Y MO US E X I ST EN CE
Cinema in its essence is about reproduction of reality, which is, reality is reproduced. To me, it's not a storytelling medium. What the ontology of film has to do with is what photography has, except it adds time and greater realism. It shouldn't be based on the script; it should be based on the person or the thing. Everything is layers. 05
Auteurism
05 Waking life, Richard Linklater, 2001.
''The falsehood of reality is created through fragmented and incomplete perception of individuality. Reincarnation is a poetic expression of what collective memory is. We are all telepathically sharing our experience. Postfactual / Post truth are based on the selective fragment and reassembly of those disjointed narratives or the manipulation of a perceived reality.'' 05
''What, exactly, does it mean to be 'countercultural'? A counterculture defines itself in opposition to mainstream norms, values, and behaviours: it is a rejection and rebuke of hegemonic cultural mores.''
2022 Spring Thesis Prep
SPONTANEITY OF ORDINARY LIFE A LT E R N AT E P E R C E P T I O N , T H E LIFE OF THINGS AND PERSONAL, SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE
Lilith Ren
A LEX A ND R H ACK ENS CH M IED 19 0 7 - 2 0 04
''He believes the art of tomorrow would be logical but there was also a side of man that hungered for the bizarre, the fantastic, and the absurd. He violates the cannons of conventional film composition and in the spirit of; the new naturalness', searches for beauty elsewhere than in the artificial transformation (which is actually the distortion) of reality.''
The New Naturalness
a Bradbury Building China Girl, 1943 The White Cliffs of Dover D.O.A, 1950 Indestructible man, 1958 Marlowe, 1969 Blade Runner, 1982 In Murder in the First, 1995
b The Ennis house The replacement killers, 1998 female,1933 the karate kid iii, 1989 blade runner, 1982 a passion to kill, 1994 the thirteenth floor, 1999 timestalkers, 1987
c The union station species, 1995 under the rainbow, 1981 the way we were, 1973 mike’s murder, 1984 to live and die in L.A., 1985 Nick of time, 1995 bugsy, 1991
d LAX The replacement killers, 1998 why do fools fall in love, 1998 the morning after, 1986 the outside man, 1973 the morning after, 1986 the net, 1995 the morning after, 1986
''BUT MOVIES HAVE SOME ADVANTAGES OV TRAVEL BY LAND. THEY EXIST IN SPACE. WE GENEROUS? OF COURSE, I KNOW MOVIES A IF WE NOTICE THE LOCATION.'' 06 06 Los Angeles Plays Itself, Thom Andersen, 2003.
S TA RT I N G P O I N T Lilith Ren
a
b
c
d
VER US. THEY CAN FLY THROUGH THE AIR.WE MUST E LIVE AND DIE IN TIME. SO WHY SHOULD I BE AREN'T ABOUT PLACES, ...THEY'RE ABOUT STORIES. IT CAN BE
A H O T E L , A H O S P I TA L , A N OFFICE, FUTURAL RUINS AND EVEN A SITE OF MURDER. IT HAS AN UNCANNY F E E L I N G A S I T A LWAY S L E AV E S T R AC E S O F FA M I L I A R I T Y B U T T H E Y A L L L O O K D I F F E R E N T. T H E Y A L L D E M O N S T R AT A G E S T U R E O F D E FA M I L I A R I Z AT I O N A N D C R E AT I N G D I F F E R E N T S C E N E S TA K I N G A DVA N TAG E O F A N O N P L AC E .
2022 Spring Thesis Prep
Fig 1 Drawing from A Field of Marigolds by Monica Patel from Royal College of Art, 2021
"Anthropocene is the current Earth’s geological epoch revealing permanent changes caused by human activity. It suggests a different take on the relationship between human and non-human, being and becoming. This paradigm shift involves seeing human beings in interdependence with non-human nature. Fredric Jameson identifies the postmodern By doing so, it seeks a brand new agency closely with this kind of rapid but unstructured flow of language and imagery, which he relates in the contemporary non-human world."01 to “the breakdown of the signifying chain . . .
"Extract the utopias that are inadvertently posed on the scene of our daily life, because as Gaudí explained, our search for the original is found in our origins." 02
an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time.” The effect, says Jameson, is that the instantaneous present “suddenly engulfs the subject with undescribable vividness, a materiality of perception properly overwhelming, which effectively dramatizes th e p owe r o f th e m a te r i a l — o r b e tte r still, the literal— signifier in isolation.” 03
01 Macrobes. Narratives of post-Anthropocene milieus, Jean-Emanuel Tremblay, 2020 02 Before all of this was Countryside, Jorge Muñoz Bonet, School of Architecture of Madrid (ETSAM) 03 From Ground Zero to Degree Zero: Akira from Origin to Oblivion, Christopher Bolton, 2020
Lilith Ren
S T A T E M E N T Cinema in its essence is about reproduction of reality, which is, reality is reproduced. To me, it's not merely a one direction storytelling medium. What the ontology of film has to do with is what photography has, except it adds time and greater realism. It shouldn't be based on the script; it should be based on the person or the thing. The falsehood of reality is created through taking the fragmented and incomplete perception of individuality for an assembled whole. Continuous narrative tends to be massively popular when it comes to seek independent reincarnation as a proof of parallel existence o f i n d iv i d u a l i t y. Howe ve r, t a ke n t h e doubling population and synchronization across the world, the notion of singular and comprehensive story along with the reality it configurates is compromised. Reincarnation is a poetic expression of what collective memory is. We are all telepathically sharing our experience. The medium of representation may become an organizational system and mode of reorganization in and of itself. Postfactual / Post truth are constructed based on the selective fragment and reassembly of those disjointed narratives or the manipulation of a perceived reality. During the construction or layering of individual reality, subjectivity comes to interfere. The moment is not just a passing empty, nothing, yet this is the way in which these secrete passages happen, It's empty with such fullness. And each one, each object, each place, each act, leaves mark. That story is singular, but in fact, it's story after story, which leads to Radical subjectivity as the story is of the cosmos now. This thesis attempts to exemplify a particular c a s e o f u n re ve a l i n g t h e m u l t i c i t y o f postfactual reality. Start with the assemblies of found assets, the project focuses on the notion of inter-objectivity, grotesque bodyand their anonymous existence. It’s simultaneously an act of distancing from banality into a world of endless, enchanting metamorphosis. Through various camera framing, such as close tracking, dolly shots and automavision towards one particular corner of existence, a single event thus spawns into multiple realities. Cuts are not motivated by linear narrative,
''A WORLD OF ENDLESS ENCHANTING META MO RPHOSIS'' 04
but more a collage of events and folding of space in a visual simulated way. the viewer is left to determine what he trusts, who he believes. the mind tried to blend spaces together, intuitively conjuring a connective tissue that is itself never represented. The visualization of the project will be approached cinematically. While referencing back to the work of Brother Quay and Jan Svankmajer in terms of their image compositing styles of stop-motion animation, the project will combine the live-action and the digital-made to form a hybrid image that emphasizes the tactile experience of a Mimicry and legendary psychasthenia dream.
04 Some Observations Pertaining to Cartoon Physics; or, The Cartoon Cat in the Machine, Scott Bukatman, 2014
2022 Spring Thesis Prep
Lilith Ren
2 REFERENCES
2022 Spring Thesis Prep
Yellow Submarine George Dunning, 1968 mixing of codes, subculture, remix of representation
Annihilation Alex Garland, 2018 "a memory of the book" unknown BDO unknowable fear incapability
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Mirror Andrei Tarkovsky., 1975 Mirror is structured in the form of a nonlinear narrativeThe film combines contemporary scenes with childhood memories, dreams, and newsreel footage.
Lilith Ren
Innocence Mamoru Oshii, 2004 create a different world — not a future world with an autobiographical element
The Breadwinner Nora Twomey, 2017 Image metaphor
The Fall Tarsem Singh, 2006
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Terry Gilliam， 1998
High-Rise Ben Wheatley, 2015
FILM Series 2022 Spring Thesis Prep
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NO GHOST JUST A SHELL
“MIMICRY AND LEGENDARY P S Y C H A S T H E N I A .”
'THE IDEA OF NO GHOST JUST A SHELL AS AN ARCHIVE ON THE O N E H A N D B U T, O N T H E O T H E R , A L S O A S A D I S S E M I N ATO R O F I N FO R M AT I O N – W H E R E H I STO R I C I N FO R M AT I O N CO N TA I N S SEEDS FOR THE FUTURE WHILE C A R RY I N G T H E I N FO R M AT I O N O F T H E PA S T. '
2022 Spring Thesis Prep
Do It Yourself Dead on Arrival (2002) by Joe Scanlan The form each artist gave to this idea would not be definitive but would serve as a catalyst for the following work; and finally, copyright would no longer be attributed to the authors but to the sign itself. Gradually the world of AnnLee began to take shape and the numerous questions raised by its authors slowly linked together – questions on the status of the image, of representation, of beings in the world of the character, and on the very polyphony of the work. Perhaps above all, the question for these artists became, “How can a community constitute itself on the basis of the same sign, identifiable to all, yet peculiar to each person?” “I am a product. A product freed from the marketplace I was supposed to fill. . . I was bought but strangely enough, I do not belong to anybody. I belong to whomever is able to fill me with any kind of imaginary material anywhere out of the world. I am an imaginary character. I am no ghost, just a shell.” The artists then legally transferred the ownership o f A n n L e e’s i m a ge to A n n L e e , t h e c h a ra c te r i t s e l f, creating a closed circuit of production and distribution. Yo u c a n s ay A n n l e e w a s a n e m p t y ve s s e l a n d d i f f e r e n t authors made that vessel living or at least metaphorically living. But, it could also be a metaphor for an organism—it can also be Annlee as a living organism.
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LOUISE BOURGEOIS
Lilith Ren
J A N S VA N K M A J E R
T
4
K A D E R AT T I A
2022 Spring Thesis Prep
I
I L LU M I N AT I
The p draws
Illum palett Hobo with t
Lilith Ren
ION #1
piece, which calls up 120 years in 12 minutes, s from six epochs specific to the site.
minations #1 lived up to its promise: A historic te magically lighted out of thin air. Patrons at o’s, a bar across the street, stood in the windows their drinks in hand, entranced.
2022 Spring Thesis Prep
STOP-MOTION
JAN SVANKMAJER Jabberwocky
CZEC H PRAG NETHERL ANDS LONDON AMERICA BURBA NK Lilith Ren
“For me, animated f ilm magic. This is how mag part of daily life, invad life.... Magic enters int ordinar y contact with m things ... (making ) rea doubtful. ” ALICE IS FILM,
m is about gic becomes ding daily to a quite m undane lity seem
BROTHER QUAY
TIM BURTON
Mythic forest
Burtonesque
Wh o dares it—has no courage To whom it is missing—feels well Wh o owns it—is bitterly poor Wh o is successful—is damaged Wh o gives it—is as hard as stone Wh o loves it— stays alone Wh at is “it?”
“Have you ever heard a joke so many times you've forgotten why it's funny? And then you hear it again and suddenly it's new. You remember why you loved it in the f irst place.”
ALICE IS FILM,
ALICE IS FILM, 2022 Spring Thesis Prep
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Lilith Ren
4
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Darkness Light Darkness Jan Svankmajer, 1989 A human body gradually reconstructs itself as its various component parts crowd themselves into a small room and eventually, after much experimentation, sort out which part goes where.
3
Jabberwocky Jan Svanlmajer, 1971 The poem by Lewis Carroll is read as a wardrobe is shown moving through a forest.
4
Alice Jan Svankmajer, 1988 "Something from Alice"
Ruka Jan Svankmajer, 1965 5 A gigantic hand in a white glove invades his space, demanding that a sculpture of itself is made
Dimensions of Dialogue Jan Svankmajer, 1982 "Eternal conversation" (Dialog věčný) "Passionate discourse" (Dialog vášnivý) "Exhaustive discussion" (Dialog vyčerpávající)
2022 Spring Thesis Prep
H Lilith Ren
Obsession about not the dead b o d y b u t c o p y w i t h o u t l i f e Mythic forest, no map provided for it. T h e m a s k p re s e n t s t h e o t h e r n e s s, a re a l m which you have to read it, to penetrate it, and it doesn't provide easy answers The music becomes the blood/ dialogue. Dramaturgy is in the music fetishistic/blind/blandness/suffocating Create a very powerful climate through architecture, that each scores a universe that you can conduct the fiction literally through the portals of this architectural space. A m o r g u e , b u t t o a t i m e , t o a h i s t o r y, and they're not living. The puppet f ilm, t h e y h a v e a l i f e , a m y t h i c , a p a t h o l o g y. Q u i e t m e t i e r o f a l c h e m y, o f o b j e c t s and silences and things inhabited. It's rigor mortis, they are frozen, they're caught in the last breath of Victoriana.
We w a n t t o m a k e a w o r l d t h a t i s s e e n t h ro u g h a d i r t y p l a n e o f g l a s s. O f co u r s e , i t ’s n o t r e a l l y p o w e r f u l l y s h o t a n d c l e a r. Yo u c a n ’ t e x a c t l y g e t a t i t b e c a u s e i t i s elusive. The question of focusing is also ce n t ra l b e c a u s e wh e n yo u’re wo rk i n g w i t h s uc h a b i g l e n s, a n d you’re fo c us i n g up on a d e t a i l , e ve r y t h i n g wa c k s out , n o l e n s c a n h a n d l e t h a t k i n d o f r a n g e o f d e t a i l . We s aw t h a t a s a p l u s. T h e l a n d s c a p e o f wh a t i s i n f o c u s a n d o u t o f f o c u s f o rce s yo u to concentrate on a detail. As we got more e x p e r i e n c e d w i t h f i l m s , we go t m o r e a n d m o re c a re f u l . We t r y a n d c re a te u n ive r s e s in which we constantly ask ourselves how much we really want to show and how much we want to leave in the dark.
J 01 Cha pte r 1: Portrait of Ja n T he double id en tity of Ja n Sva nk majer, tu rn in g hi m i nto a pu ppet mad e put of old objec ts
02 Cha pte r 2 : P in s for lo ose ge og raph ies Wha t ha ppen s wh en we se e t he map in a di ffe re nt perspec tive?
03 Cha pte r 3: Atelier of Sva nk ma jer Unrave l of th e bac kof- house of Jan Sva nk ma jer' s c abin an t, cl e a ri ng t h e boy' s h ead
Lilith Ren
04 Chapter 4: P u rsu it of th e objec t Un ravel of th e bac kof-h ou se of Jan Svan kmajer' s c abin a nt
05 Chapter 5: Th e u n d e r kammer Spaces fold in g an d tran sformin g betwee n 2D an d 3D
06 Chapter 6: Th e c h ild ' s d ivin g of th e objec t A c h ild in a h ou se of c abin et tr yin g to pu l l ou t an d pu sh in obje ct s
07 Chapter 7: Metaphysical pl ayro om_ A t a ct i l e exper i ment A b oy l ayi ng pl ayi ng a b a l l , pi ns r u nni ng d ow n t he st a i r s. Ja n work i ng on a spi d er
08 Cha pter 8 : T he chi l d ren receives a l esson i n 1 /2 4 t h o f a second Jan and the boy rotating a ma chi ne, a b a l l d roppi ng
09 Cha pter 9: For a new d aw n Ja n pu t i ng t hi ng s b a ck to the boy's head, giving hi m t he sa me ha i r
2022 Spring Thesis Prep
Lilith Ren
The comb by Brother Quay (1990)
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2022 Spring Thesis Prep
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Rehearsal of Extinct Anatomies
Lilith Ren
2022 Spring Thesis Prep
D
Lilith Ren
2022 Spring Thesis Prep
De Artificiali perspectives (1993)
Lilith Ren
S Street of crocodilies (1986)
2022 Spring Thesis Prep
CINEMATIC FILM LOOKING OUT
Open Scene Camera looking outwards from inside
Rear Window Alfred Hitchcock
Lilith Ren
IMMOBILIZED MAN OBSESSIVE CURIOSITY OBSESSIVE VOYEURISM
Behind the Scenes Cameara outside the facade
IT HAD TO BE MURDER 1954
Mise-en-scène Flattened room/space
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B
Lilith Ren
Do It Yourself Dead on Arrival (2002) by Joe Scanlan
2022 Spring Thesis Prep
The House (2022) Corpse Bride (2005)
Move Mountain Kirsten Lepore,
The Maker Christopher Kezelos, 2013
Lilith Ren
Human Mask Pierre Huyghe, 2014
The Boxtrolls Graham Annable Anthony Stacchi, 2014
Working my way up… Niels HoebersPLUS, 2014
2022 Spring Thesis Prep
Lilith Ren
3 THEORY
2022 Spring Thesis Prep
CLOSE READING
Fig 3 A movie scene from Alice directed by Jan Švankmajer in 1988, showing the coeixistence of triple reality in an image
Lilith Ren
''SVANKMAJER'S OBJECTS ARE ALIVE AND FULL OF EMBODIED MEMORIES AND EXPERIENCES. THE ORDER THAT DELINEATES HIS COLLECTION IS THE COMPLETE ANTITHESIS OF THE CHAOTIC DISPLAY OF OBJECTS AND HYBRID FORMS PORTRAYED IN HIS FILMS, ALTERING THE BIOLOGICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL CATERGORIES OF EVERYDAY OBJECTS'' 2022 Spring Thesis Prep
Aspiring, deepening, disassociating, and erotising the ever passing and changing surfaces and bodies – abstracting, critically engaging, demeaning, traversing, transcending, collaging – regressing, violently processing, splitting open, pressing through, deepening, furthering, dissociating, collapsing, fragmenting.We witness this frenzy with utter amazement and bewilderment and are enthused and appalled by its repetitive patterns and overwhelming strangeness.Sensing terms of opacity, inertia and indifference associated with the presence of the object world, we really sense “its preobjective status as real, a sense of a presence that is undifferentiated for us in its materiality – that is not yet an object and not yet a subject.” Repetition in masochism serves the aim of aesthetic and dramatic suspension and atmospheric thickeningThe rhetorical power of mythic and ritualistic imager y should not be underestimated.‘Staging’ responds differently to the textual need of interpretation; it explores the textual need at different levels of bodily expansion and varying degrees of conceptual intensity. Indefinitely folding scenes, gestures, acts, scenarios, etc. into one another. They map out subtle dramas and conflicts, which are deeply erotic and meaningful in a fragile sense – destructive and healing, regressive and predicative, unknown and familiar. l a n g u a g e i s ‘ w e a k ’, b o r n o u t o f t h e d e s i r e f o r t h e powerlessness and inferiority of thought, looking subtly for a way out of the unbearable. They stand at the margin of consciousness between the known and the unknown, the perceived and the unperceived, calling into question the adequacy of our ways of organising the world, of dividing t h e co n t i n u u m o f e xp e r i e n ce i n to k n owa b l e p a r t i c l e s
T h e m o v i e A l i ce ' s p ra c t i ce of recontextualisation of the objects' identities, breaks the invisible ontological barriers between them and forms the foundation of his grotesque methodology. Jan Svankmajer manages to alienate the context of everyday objects by rearranging and assembling them in such a way that a new meaning is revealed. Grotesque is the amalgamation of the comic and the horrific, it presents itself in paradoxical forms and evokes paradoxical reactions. Thus, while Kayser underlines contrast as being is the foundational to the grotesque, he also emphasises its ambiguous nature.
Dirk de Bruyn 2018
'Chasing Rabbits out of the Hat and into the SHEDding of Childhood: Alice'
''AMONG ALL THE THINGS O F T H I S WO R L D, INFORMATION IS THE H A R D E S T T O G UA R D, SINCE IT CAN BE STOLEN W I T H O U T R E M O V I N G I T. ' '
Alice is an 86-minute film, a 125,000-frame puzzle, and a meticulously constructed infantile dream. Jan Svankmajer has stated that he considers his childhood an equal partner in his life, a place easily and continually revisited: ”Childhood is my alter-ego.” (3) As articulated in his art, Svankmajer’s is not a nostalgic or distant childhood but an unsettling one saturated by a harassing malevolence, with puppet characters imbued with a disturbing ambiguity suspended between a static innocence and a moving, stalking dread.
.In the English language version of Alice there is also the added displacement of the overdubbing of the Czech voice. In a moment of self-reflexivity, Alice begins to relate the story of ‘Alice’ after she tells us we are about to see a film. As a narrative device the rest of the film is then intermittently punctuated with sync sound close-ups of Alice’s talking mouth, overdubbed in English. This is both personal and ominous. This further act of translation has cut up the film even more. Would Svankmajer, in the tradition of Duchamp, approve?
At the time Grace Slick was contemplating the lyrics for her anthem for the drug counter-culture in the West, Svankmajer’s ‘Iron Curtain’ East was a vastly different place, more likely to achieve its political goals through coercion than entertainment and distraction. In an article about his latest feature Little Otik (2001), Svankmajer outlined his experience with LSD and talked about his belief in the creative act as “autotherapy,” a means to help him gain respite from the demons that have plagued him since childhood. (4) As well as artistic creativity, Svankmajer states that he also sees erotic love as another such path to liberation.
Svankmajer’s mark on film culture is significant. The Tim Burton produced, The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), and David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1978) have been suggested as connected works. Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995) can also be compared in terms of its appropriation of found objects brought to life. Nevertheless, there is something much darker about Alice’s inner odyssey compared to the plastic adventure and sheen of the inventive animated objects of the digitally animated Toy Story. Toy Story is about plastic objects found in a plastic toy box at the foot of the bed, whereas Svankmajer’s materials are more likely to be found discarded and forgotten on the nature-strip for a council refuse collection. (Often the creation of such piles of ‘rubbish’ can be considered as a cathartic process in itself, as can its gleaning by others).
Swankmajer’s experience with LSD in 1972 was as a volunteer for research in a military hospital in Prague, curing him of seeing drug experimentation as another path of liberation. Initially, he felt a “regression to infancy and a feeling of utter helplessness.” (5) Later, he became seized with panic and fear as he was allowed to walk around the room, rushing around corridors trying to get out until he was finally sedated and placed in a padded cell till the morning. At one point, he also felt as if he was drowning. This experience led to anxiety attacks for years after. For example, he was unable to ride on trams at night because the static reflection of the tram’s interior meshed with the moving exterior. This “crossover of dual realities” would trigger the initial disintegrating feeling he had felt at the onset of taking the drug. Such images recall the visual layering pursued by other film artists in their work: Castro Street (Bruce Baillie, USA, 1966), Glimmer (Paine/ Liddel, UK, 2001), and Watersmith (Will Hindle, USA, 1969). For Svankmajer, it seems, LSD focused and invoked those demons of childhood rather than liberated him from them. Many anxieties are invoked in Alice, offering a virtual shopping list for the hypochondriac: of being plunged under ground, chased by inanimate objects, lost, judged, disoriented by place and or logic/illogic, late for an appointment, and of spoiling the bed. Svankmajer’s quote about “pedophiliacs”, which opens this essay, perhaps relates to the sexual dimension of these anxieties. Allusions within both Carroll’s and Svankmajer’s Alice may lead in this direction. Within Svankmajer’s work it may relate to an amplification of his creative imagination through the artistic use of the erotic.
Svankmajer’s objects have their own interior life, promoting a philosophy of self worth and inherent self-awareness in his puppets. The difference between the ‘objects’ in Alice and Toy Story, is comparable to the difference between sanitized plastic and rotting sawdust. Alice is about the organic, the cellular; for example, the sawdust leaking out of the rabbit’s body that is continually, ritualistically wiped off its timepiece. Though Svankmajer constructs his world out of the rubble of the past, an act of which Walter Benjamin would approve, his work speaks in an empowering Present. It is about recognizing and reconstituting a dark anxious past, rather than being in total denial of it. The film finishes in a garden shed strewn with objects that are now as dead as a doornail. Alice’s mind goes through the panic rush of a stream of characters, a stream of selves, a sifting, a sorting, perhaps even a last gasp. Is she an adult now? And what traces, what anxieties will Svankmajer’s Alice carry with her into adulthood? How many forays back to the scene of the crime will she have to make, to make sense of it all? Will the adult Alice get to the point of thinking, wishing that the objects of her childhood could talk, reveal their secrets to her, tell her what they have witnessed? Will she have time?
'Though Svankmajer constructs his world out of the rubble of the past, an act of which Walter Benjamin would approve, his work speaks in an empowering Present. It is about recognizing and reconstituting a dark anxious past, rather than being in total denial of it.' For Svankmajer, Carroll’s Alice is a place from which to rework the Lewis Carroll’s preoccupation with the erotic photographs of young girls, and his seeking of their company, as well as that of older women, as ‘child-friends,’ has led to an interest in the nature of his sexual practice. (6) The nature of such relationships and his interest in young girls is seen as the dark side of a man who created a classic of English literature.
memories, images and fears of his own childhood. His wonderland is much more visual and tactile than Carroll’s. As you would expect, Carroll’s wordplays are generally displaced. Svankmajer’s is a much more contemporary world of cut-up, collaged material, as well as in terms of the feelings it explores. Gone is Carroll’s vision of Alice as a perfect English upper-class girl, who through her refinement and her bossy natural superiority protects herself from this topsy-turvy world. Svankmajer’s world, here as in his other films, is more inherently fearful, where everyday objects, the tools of our comfort, are capable of turning on us. It is a world that an ‘innocent’ Alice negotiates, sifts through, inspects
2022 Spring Thesis Prep
Grotesque is
forever
Bring out the coarse materiality of objects, recurring use of extreme close-ups of body parts, objects, and surfaces Conspirators of Pleasure disgust and discomfort to liberate the analogical imagination of touch.
Lilith Ren
Grotesque is
Dirk de Bruyn, 2002
everyone
''Meticulously Constructed Infantile Dream & Erotic Love''
''Though Svankmajer constructs his world out of the rubble of the past, an act of which Walter Benjamin would approve, his work speaks in an empowering Present. It is about recognizing and reconstituting a dark anxious past, rather than being in total denial of it.''
Scott Bukatman, 2013
''He was part of my dream, of course – but then I was part of his dream too.''
2022 Spring Thesis Prep
Noheden 2013
“the imagination of matter,” where matter is seen as a highly potent stimulant for the imagination. Bachelard's notion of the imagination's multi-sensory properties further lends credence to Švankmajer's aims to liberate the imagination of the spectator through images that invoke touch. Švankmajer's films evoke touch like few others. Transforming matter, putrefying foodstuffs, coarse or sticky surfaces, and the sudden stop-motion animated life of otherwise inert objects are some of the elements that combine to create tactile sensations through a combination of the director's surrealist inventions with the viewer's own sensory experiences. In Jan Švankmajer's 1983 short film Down to the Cellar (Do pivnice), a little girl encounters teasingly f leeing potatoes, a man resting on a bed of coal, and a woman mixing coal dust and eggs into a black dough. The Czech filmmaker and artist skilfully evokes the tactile properties of these phenomena as they are played out in the half-illuminated darkness of a cellar in an apartment house. The film fuses reality and the imagination in a way that recalls both dream logic and a child's f lights of fancy, but it does so with a concrete materiality that not only enhances the film's tactile properties but also invites the viewer's own active imagination into the equation.
“MIMICRY AND LEGENDARY P S Y C H A S T H E N I A .”
Švankmajer found that touch has some capacity to afford objective knowledge, but, more importantly, in the right context, it can also activate the imagination in ways that trigger analogical associations that diverge from the habitual stimulus of purely visual sensations. In Communicating Vessels (1932), Breton states that surrealism strives to “cast a conduction wire between the far too distant worlds of waking and sleep, exterior and interior reality, reason and madness.” Švankmajer's tactile experiments can then be seen as one very concrete way of fulfilling these ambitions. He uses tactility to dissolve the descriptive registering of the world that sight is so often the hallmark of, in an attempt to liberate the analogical imagination of touch. Underlying the experiments were a conviction that touch has been neglected in an instrumentally rational and ocularcentric civilisation. “The Magic Ritual of Tactile Inauguration” “Because touch, freed from its practical contexts and constantly realised as an experience ... begins to speak with the voice of a poet.” The embodied imagination, then, adds another explicit dimension to the surrealist attempts to liberate dormant faculties from habitual existence.
TAC T I L I S M
“[w]e are in fact all synaesthetes – and thus seeing a movie can also be an experience of touching, tasting, and smelling it” can be applied to surrealist cinema just as well as to realist films. Bring out the coarse materiality of objects, recurring use of extreme close-ups of body parts, objects, and surfaces, a stylistic device that emphasises textures and materiality. Both aurally and visually, in Conspirators of Pleasure disgust and discomfort stand out as key features in creating tactile impressions, whether it is in the form of direct bodily identification with unpleasant actions or sensory impressions of matter, dead or living, that one is reluctant to touch. These are some of the means by which Švankmajer creates a surrealist tactility, which not only lets us experience the touch of things we would never have encountered in real life but also may trigger further analogical associations of the kind that structure the dream logic of the film. Švankmajer's use of stop-motion animation means not only that he can make the most unusual, otherwise inert things come alive—he frequently animates meat, skeletal body parts, and furniture—but also that more undifferentiated matter—dirt, clay, and coal— can transform into solid but often temporary shapes, always on the verge of new and unexpected metamorphoses. This is closely connected with the locations and props he uses, even when they are not animated: the environment in itself is highlighted in its materiality. T h e a n a l o g i e s s o va l u e d by Šva n k m a j e r wo rk n o t o n ly t h ro u gh t h e p o e t i c i m a ge s or the fantastic depictions of for instance shoes that suddenly have mouths, but also through the ver y locations and the matter of the ever yday as it is e s t ra n ge d a n d e n c h a n te d w h e n p u t i n d i a l e c t i c a l re l a t i o n w i t h t h e i m a g i n a t i o n . Vankmajer has often claimed that he believes certain objects to be charged with events from the past and that we need to learn to listen to them, a conviction derived from his interest in esotericism. Through the eyes of the child, the world becomes strange and the objects in it are once again permeated with a threatening sense of mystery, as already exemplified by the shoes that grow teeth and the potatoes that come alive, so that the very cellar in itself turns into a mythical underworld. Švankmajer is committed to engaging the viewer's analogical associations and plays on memories of childhood to de-familiarise the world from the blasé and utilitarian adult viewpoint. The image is largely shrouded in darkness and the field of vision is further limited through close-ups and her f lashlight that selectively illuminates parts of the walls and f loor and the wooden boards from which the storage rooms are constructed. This denies the spectator an overview and instead forces attention to move to the details, bringing increased focus to surfaces and their materiality and textures. The feeling of tactile sexual objects against the skin of the characters is evoked through the use of materials both coarse and gentle: nails and feathers, brushes and metal lids combine to heighten the tactile sensations.
Lilith Ren
'The imagination of touch: surrealist tactility in the film of Jan Svankmajer'
Rocha 2016
Czech animator Švankmajer, for instance, uses elements such as toys, stones, dolls and clothes in Jabberwocky (1971). In Dimensions of Dialogue (1982), he takes advantage of the tactile nature of food, clay and objects such as a toothbrush, shoes, a knife and others, to show a more surreal approach within the exploration of dark and political topics. Cardinal (2008) comments that even though Švankmajer’s extravagant aesthetic choices may seem shallow sometimes, they are counterbalanced by the care he shows for the tactile and by the visual impact of the vivid transformations which the elements and materials of his animated films undergo. Therefore, it is possible to affirm that Švankmajer attributes unusual significance to the sensations of touch. Thus, Sundholm’s concept of deixis evokes the definition of a materiality that recalls some specific memory, such as a special food someone used to eat when she was a child. Here, Sundholm argues for the presence of the artist, traditionally concealed in Western art. By using Gunvor Nelson’s films as examples, in particular Red Shift (1984), he explains that traces of memory may appear as an aspect from the past, a simple skin texture, the use of colors, the graininess of film, and camera shots. According to Wells, it “plays out an alternative version of material existence, recalling narrative out of constructed objects and environments, natural forms and substances, and the takenfor-granted constituent elements of the everyday world (p. 90). Thus, issues of materiality are present not only in strict representations of the real world, but also in the tactile sense that the nature of real built objects evoke both when animated and when watched by the viewer. In her book Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Laura U. Marks (2002) defines the materiality of the image by asserting that features other than only the objects’ texture should also be included, such as imperfections like a strand of hair that falls over an actor’s face, wrinkles on a piece of cloth, lighting, and other minimum details perceived by the viewer. By emphasizing more engagement than only a symbolic identification, Marks establishes an analysis centered on a closer relationship between the audience and the film; the viewer is not supposed to be distant from the cinematic experience, she/he must engage with it through haptic visuality. Although almost unknown in the West until the early 1980s, Švankmajer has inf luenced other animators with his obscure themes and the use of found and used inanimate objects. The work of American identical twins The Quay Brothers encompasses films that depict disconcerting atmospheres due to their dark themes and their choice of materials to match narratives. By bringing objects that seem dead to life, such as pieces of meat, dark earth and old, broken and dirty dolls, their films resemble bizarre experiments with undead elements, in which textures play an essential role in the construction of an original aesthetics, emphasized even more by the use of stop-motion as their main technique. This draws on phenomenology, in which the analysis of the process is more experimental and immersed, focused on the dynamics of the self, instead of the semiotic approach, in which the analysis is objective and distant, more centered on the text. Thus, Sundholm’s concept of deixis evokes the definition of a materiality that recalls some specific memory, such as a special food someone used to eat when she was a child. Here, Sundholm argues for the presence of the artist, traditionally concealed in Western art. By using Gunvor Nelson’s films as examples, in particular Red Shift (1984), he explains that traces of memory may appear as an aspect from the past, a simple skin texture, the use of colors, the graininess of film, and camera shots.
ELECTRICIT Y OF LIFE
PHENOMENOLOGY DISCONCERTING AT M O S PH E R E S
Memory consequently implies a poetics – the practice of putting the bits and pieces into meaningful constellations and therefore creating discourses that will foster images and stories about the past triggered by the present. Such a poetics is dependant on both the material in the sense of technique and in the sense of object or thing, that is; the material that is used as a technique for remembering (in my case, film and its aesthetic means), and the very material that is depicted as objects filled with memories. As a digitally-shot stop-motion animation, I replaced the technique for remembering by ‘stop-motion and its aesthetic means,’ as it allows emphasis on textures and tactile s u r f a ce s a n d , t h u s, e vo ke s t h e t a n g i b i l i t y o f m a te r i a l s u s e d . Mo re ove r, t h e “ ve r y material that is depicted as objects f illed with memor y ” (p. 56) is denoted by the objects and fabricated elements that create an environment for memory representation. What are the strengths of stop-motion? What should we try to hold on to? There are a lot of strengths: it’s touched by the hand of the artist — you can feel that. You can sense that life force, but it’s imperfect. It can’t be done perfectly — that’s what CG can do. And I’m trying to get people to embrace that: if it pops, if cloth shifts a little, if the hair is buzzing. It’s like this electricity of life. (qtd. in Desowitz 2009, p. 2) In this handmade process, the animator and the animated object are in a tactile relationship that also translates into the sense of touch evoked by the textures that is, consequently, embodied by the viewer. In order to achieve this goal, as I have outlined, close-ups are used in the animation, so that textures can be emphasized and invite the caressing look that comes with haptic visuality. Purves (2008) comments that “These lifeless bits of wood, brass and silicone suddenly connect with each other; not only have we appeared to give them life, but they are responding to each other” 'Beyond Materiality in Animation: Sensuous Perception and Touch in the Tactile Existence of “Would a Heart Die?”'
Frost 2016
It is worth considering the everyday nature of animating the inanimate, as this has a bearing upon Švankmajer’s understanding of puppetry and animated film. In 1853, Charles Baudelaire observed how children will animate any object, but also felt that looking for the ‘soul’ in the toy “is the first metaphysical stirring” (1994, p.24). Rainer Maria Rilke further developed Baudelaire’s suggestions. Children make an emotional investment in dolls and thus breathe life into them, while knowing that behind the mask face of the doll there is nobody there. For Rilke, the doll is a silent vessel which we fill with our own incomprehension of being: “We mixed in the doll, as if in a test-tube, everything we were experiencing and could not recognize” (1994, p.31). Behind the doll, there is thus a nothingness which we fill with meaning; it becomes a signifier for the meaning of our own existence. Similarly, contemporary puppeteer Roman Paska recently discussed the puppet as also hiding a profound nothingness. Dolls and puppets, however, differ from the mask, which hides a living being. As Paska notes, “the mask of an actor or dancer conceals a density of humanity; the puppet, nothing but emptiness” (2012, p.136). Alan Cholodenko distinguishes two uses of the term ‘animation’ – in one sense, as the mechanical simulation of motion in animated film; in another as the animistic or magical notion of endowing something with life; that is, “transforming the inanimate into the animate” (1991, p.16). The animation of a doll, a marionette, or a stop motion object creates what he calls the “illusion of life.” Its seeming presence never ceases to be only seeming. For Cholodenko, animation always implies the inanimate, dead, suspended or inert (1991, p. 21). The animated object works as a metaphysical signifier by nature of its evident inertness. If the illusion was entirely convincing we would not take the object as a signifier, we would accept it as life itself. Rilke refers to this kind of soulless effigy which is invested by human feeling as the “doll-soul.” As he explains, “one could never quite say where you really were; whether you were at that moment in us or in that drowsy creature to whom we were constantly assigning you” (1994, p.36). By relating this idea to other kinds of animated figures we can turn to Steve Tillis, who coined the term “media figure” to encompass characters created by stop motion, cell animation or CGI. According to Tillis, media figures “share with puppetry the crucial trait of presenting characters through a site of signification other than actual living beings” (2001, p.175). They become signifiers for something outside of themselves. What lies outside themselves is a notion of self; without human investment they are empty representations. Thus the doll, puppet, effigy, or media figure is a signifier for an “other self:” it is empty of soul, but when we animate it with movement and therefore character, we fill it with meaning. Stop motion figures and puppetry alike appear to stand as signifiers; their very point is that they are not living but instead are objects used to signify otherness or emptiness.
'THE DOLL IS A SILENT VESSEL WHICH WE FILL WITH OUR OWN'
“Film has one great advantage over theatre. It can wait for its audience” (cited in Hames 1995, p.99). Often animation is integrated with live action and used sparingly to disrupt the sense of realism. Švankmajer uses “real animation for mystification, for disturbing the utilitarian habits of the audience, to unsettle them, or for subversive purposes” (cited in Hames, 1995, p.112). For Meg Rickards, this editing style intentionally disrupts the narrative into “more of a collage than a synthesis” of stop-motion and live action elements (2010, p.36). There are some significant differences between live and filmed puppetry. A live performance is present for the audience in a unique temporal way: it inhabits the space of the audience and sometimes interacts with them. In the ghostly realm of the cinema, filmed puppetry does not have the same ontological ground that it does in performance. As Laura Ivins-Hulley points out, however, performance through stop motion “carries a paradoxical indexality: the puppet tangibly exists outside the film, but its movement does not” (2008, p. 61). The filmed live puppet similarly has an ontological status outside the film but its movements are indexical. Suzanne Buchan discusses how, in live action film, “the moment of shooting is unique. Yet the actors, settings and the physical world in which they carry out their actions are extant, tangible and constitute a part of the real world” (2006, p.21). For Buchan, stop motion animation is a “complex hybrid form” in that the events did not occur but the puppets do exist. The puppet itself is a simulacrum of a living being; in cinema it exists within an entirely simulated reality where even the actors are not ‘live.’ In a sense, then, the whole of cinema is a kind of puppetry; it is a world that can be fully manipulated.
SIGNIFIER
However, Švankmajer makes no attempt to animate the puppets’ facial expressions. Their expressions remain blank, their gazes fixed. The ‘doll-soul’ is made manifest in his films; it eats and drinks (Jabberwocky) and defecates (Faust); it experiences the world for itself, but its expression remains blank to remind us that it is still just an empty vessel after all. Whether filmed or performed in a theatre, in puppetry we are discussing an event in real time. The stop-motion ‘puppet’ however cannot be operated in real time; it is manipulated through an often painstaking, labour-intensive process. The objects of stop-motion are tangible, like other puppets, but their movement is illusory. With a performed puppet the illusion of life is conveyed by actual movement, but in stop-motion the illusion of life is conveyed through the
Lilith Ren
illusion of movement. As Steve Tillis puts it, “their visible movement is not being reproduced at all, but produced for the first time through the medium of film” (2001, p.181). Buchan considers stop motion as a bridge between worlds; “a world” and “the world” of real objects (2006, p.21). In Švankmajer’s films the relationship between the filmed puppet performance and the stop-motion figure creates a bridge between the tangible world of things and the illusory world of film: between live movement and the mechanical simulation of movement. According to Švankmajer, the story of Faust had broader themes which touched upon other aspects of life such as politics and psychology. He notes that “I felt a great urge to bring my own obsessive theme into the work: the theme of manipulation. Manipulation is not just a principle of totalitarian regimes. Of this I am becoming more and more convinced” (qtd. in Hames 1995, p.114). By creating a “manipulated reality” in Faust, in which modern-day Prague was intercut and intersected with theatrical sets, Švankmajer also made extensive use of traditional Czech marionettes. As they are visibly and directly manipulated by strings, marionettes are, for Švankmajer, the supreme metaphor for other kinds of manipulation. He asserts further that “man is in a certain way determined. I am convinced that we are still manipulated: by the stars, by our genes, by our repressed feelings, by society, its education, advertising – repression of all kinds. We have to rebel against this manipulation – by creation, magic, revolt” (Švankmajer 1996, p.xiii). The implication here is that filmmaking, as an act of creation, is a form of rebellion against manipulation, as is Faust’s use of occult arts. Demonic magic is against nature and against the natural order of things; The ‘dead thing’ of the puppet is contrasted with the continuous living presence of the actor and deliberately confused when the actor breaks out of the puppet shell.
“A W O R L D ” A N D “ THE WORLD” OF REAL OBJECTS'
Archaic-looking marionettes also appear in Švankmajer’s first feature-length Alice and hand puppets in the short Punch and Judy (1966). Along with the metaphorical power of puppets Švankmajer was also drawn to their latent meaning as objects. All such objects suffer the impact of time and touch, and become meaningful through the emotional attachments we have to them. Thus he comments how old objects carry the traces of former owners, being “witnesses of the various histories inscribed in them” (1999, p. 462). The puppets, even if replicated in large-scale papier maché, are chipped and battered having apparently undergone heavy handling in performance. Many objects in his films are from his own extensive and bizarre personal collection, exhibiting his “weakness for the decayed genres of folk art: puppets and the scenery of folk puppeteers, old toys, shooting ranges, mechanical fairground targets” Thus, what is defunct and abandoned is given new life and new meaning. This contrast between the living and the lifeless is seen elsewhere in Švankmajer’s films: the beetle which crawls inside and around the papier maché heads in The Last Trick; the live guinea pig which Punch and Joey the clown squabble over in Punch and Judy; the cat which disrupts the game in Jabberwocky. The Hebrew word golem means ‘unformed’, or simply ‘matter’. The golem is thus the silent effigy waiting to be animated.[11] Švankmajer’s puppets, hanging lifeless in the theatre wings in Faust, or slumped in a box at the beginning of Alice, are in the state of golem. For Ivins-Hulley the material of clay is itself a kind of performer in Švankmajer’s films and also shows evidence of its maker’s hands, which is how “Švankmajer inscribes himself as a performer within the film” (2008, p. 64). For the Czech Surrealist František Dryje, Švankmajer’s unanimated ‘gestural marionettes’ could not be considered actors but were instead “a kind of proto-fetish” Švankmajer himself discussed the fetish as a ‘contract’ with an external object, one which is invested with imagination, desires and secret wishes (2003, p.471). There is an inherent power in the fetish object and as I have argued, clay has historically been considered to have the most fundamental of symbolic and magical properties.
‘Jan Švankmajer: Film as Puppet Theatre’
' ' A P s y c h o l o g y, About Freedom, Eroticism, the Subconscious''
Lilith Ren
''Reconfiguration of An Ever-shifting Ontological CoExistence that Will Never be Complete In and of Itself.''
2022 Spring Thesis Prep
Hayashi 2019
'Ghost in the Shell: An After-Thought on Pierre Huygue's Human Mask'
' ' M A S K ’ S M E A N I N G I S H I G H LY CONTROLLED BY THE PREE X I S T I N G S C R I P T O F T H E P L AY. I N C O N T R A S T, I N T H E L A T T E R , T H AT S TA B L E L I N K B E T W E E N THE SIGNIFIER (MASK) AND THE SIGNIFIED (EMOTION) I S R E S O L U T E LY B R O K E N . T H E GHOST WHO IS SUPPOSED TO RETURN THROUGH THE MASK IS NO LONGER A KNOWN POSTHUMOUS BEING BUT REPL ACED BY AN AMORPHOUS P O S T- H U M A N G H O S T LY. '
it is this sense of the beyond-human or the transcendence of the impersonal gaze that brings our attention to the onto-ecological dimensions of and around our existence, including the invisible effect of radiation, which have remained outside our consciousness for a long time. Inous ref lection about what constitutes the boundaries —perhaps multiple and overlapping—between human and non-human beings. Instead of performing the role of surrogate humans, the gaze, in other words, looks at us from some ambiguous or indeterminate outside that unsettles the very opposition between the inside (subject) and the outside (the other). The durational presence of the material “world” that envelopes us but never makes itself available for an easy conceptual capture. Anthropocentric imagination may dissolve like “tears in rain,” but may also be opened to a radical reconfiguration of an ever-shifting ontological co-existence that will never be complete in and of itself. Nothing in the film clearly explains the cause of the post-apocalyptic landscape in the opening sequence or offers any notion of what is to come. For the entire length of the film, which is about nineteen minutes long, the camera stays inside an abandoned house after the opening sequence and follows the aimless movements or nonmovements of a monkey This apparent contextual vacuity or indeterminateness leaves the film open to a range of comparative analyses and, indeed, invites the viewer to drift into the space of an uncertain but fertile connectivity. Human presence is reduced to its empty shell, namely, a mask that needs to be animated by being worn by the monkey, somewhat like in Noh plays in which expressionless masks are brought to life by being worn by actors.
No matter how often you tell the same story if there is anything alive in the telling the emphasis is different. It has to be, anyone can know that. It is very like a frog hopping, he cannot ever hop exactly the same distance or the same way of hopping at every hop. A bird’s singing is perhaps the nearest thing to repetition but if you listen they too vary their insistence. (Stein 1935 p. 167) According to Lee, his preference is to “organize my images so that there is a dramatic development, drama in the sense of a series of events, rather than an interaction between characters” (Lee, 1987 p. 29). Lee had also absorbed Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python sketches. Gilliam’s short sequences were cut-out animations that mixed graphic, photographic and cartoon like imagery into absurdist chains of cause and effect. Gilliam’s Magic Realism, like Lee’s, is “about expanding how you see the world” (Gilliam, 2003). Problems regarding continuity are resolved in deeply personal ways: All the symbols of the carnival idiom are filled with this pathos of change and renewal, with the sense of the gay relativity of prevailing truths and authorities. We find here a characteristic logic, the peculiar logic of the ‘inside out’ (a l’envers), of the ‘turnabout,’ of a continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings. (Bakhtin 1984 p. 11) 'Magic Realism is characterized by its mixture of fantasy and the everyday. In it the magical and supernatural blends with mundane everyday life.' 'Re-processing The Mystical Rose' - Bruyn 2016
Both, in other words, are designed to force the viewer to reimagine the boundary or lack thereof between the human and the nonhuman; The use of confinement or enclosure as a frame for their work corresponds to this critical awareness and embodies their alienation or self-exile from the damning human world outside of it. 'The complete absence of a clear reference to Fukushima in the film is quite effective in delocalizing this image of survival, making it a global allegory.' A doubly marginalized figure in the human world by virtue of being both female and young—to be worn by our protagonist The overlayering of the “almost-non-human” character of a girl and the “almost-human” character of a monkey further intensifies the uncertainty of the boundary between the human and the non-human; but, on the other hand, a mask being a mask, an artificial “shell,” as it were, the viewers are also constantly reminded of the subtle but irreducible gap between the wearer and the worn. That gap or fissure is, to put this another way, a differential void that simultaneously connects and disconnects—or conditions and undermines—the two ontological categories on its either side, and as such seems to harbor a ghostly being in its fold whose presence can only be felt and is eerily material but never perceived. This complete absence of voice also seems to have the curious effect of opening viewers’ sensors to a wide range of other aural or tactile sensations that are evoked, for instance, through various close-up shots throughout the film, they all contribute to opening us to the inability to sense those invisible ontological dimensions. It is the sense of a profound melancholy that can be transvalued as the path to those different dimensions A close-up of Fukuchan’s eyes moving anxiously behind the two empty holes of the white mask invites us into a vertig.
Spaces such as that depicted are also given meaning by the absence of, or the eminent arrival of characters: akin Beckett’s characters in Waiting for Godot, these are spaces in waiting, hanging on the tensions of anticipation, framed by outside narratives. “the drama on the screen can exist without actors” Bazin calls our attention to the details, asserting that “a banging door, a leaf in the wind, waves beating on the shore can heighten the dramatic effect” (Bazin 2005, p. 102). Thus, the absence of characters requests more of our attention to what is on the screen. The original idea was to capture the passing of time through an animated camera movement over the city and, as the moon turns from right to left of the screen, we zoom out and play with space to leave the cat to disappear within the city, highlighting the distance that separates him from the moon. A balcony opening towards the reader (employed in many instances throughout the Krazy Kat series), subverts the conception of the frame as closed, and reveals the intentionality of leaving the flatness of the page to merge the image with the viewer’s space. L’Arroseur Arrosé (1895) – after being watered, the gardener must ensure that the mischievous boy who just tricked him was not going off-screen to the left, but brought right to the center of the frame instead (see Figure 6 below). An awareness and respect for the limits of the screen highlights the strict staging and f latness typical of early cinema. 'Spatial constructions: A practitioner’s view of animated space' - Serrazina, 2016
2022 Spring Thesis Prep
Undermining the familiar; by enacting animism; by dismembering, repeating and doubling; and by effacing the line between life and death, and between reality and imagination. Švankmajer resists defining which medium should be employed to express a particular idea, insisting instead that he makes his work according to an ‘inner order’. Švankmajer bemoans the fact that Surrealism is often superficially perceived in terms of aesthetics, and insists that Surrealism is rather “a psychology, about freedom, eroticism, the subconscious”. Surrealism has a defamiliarising effect akin, then, to that of the uncanny: according to Nicholas Royle, the uncanny’s “happening is always a kind of un-happening. It ‘ununsettles’ time and space, order and sense” (Royle 2003: 2). Their mutual destabilisation of the familiar brings the uncanny effect and the Surrealist agenda into close alignment. Švankmajer consistently infiltrates the familiar with destabilising, unconscious elements; for instance, by his subjective treatment of recognisable space in Alice. Yet, despite this erratic movement, we never feel that we have entirely abandoned the waking world in that the mise-en-scène is so prosaic in its elements. Hames describes the Prague of Faust as “no tourist picturebook, magic city or Expressionist vision, but an all too tangible world of the everyday – of trams, greasy raincoats, beer and sausages” (Hames 1995: 412). The uncanny’s intervention, however, is to estrange these familiar spaces and render geography indeterminable, to evoke the disorienting effect of the dreaming unconscious. To my eyes, objects have always been livelier than human beings. More static but also more telling. More moving because of their concealed meanings and their memory, which beats human memory.... In my films I have always tried to extract content from the objects. To listen to and to put their stories into images. Švankmajer consistently animates and anthropomorphises inanimate objects with stop-motion animation. He shoots these objects predominantly in close-up, to render them in sharp detail. He feels that the close-up “searches out every last scratch on the illusion”, and claims to be attracted to “brute reality” rather than “representational illusionism” The uncanny here acts as the ‘joker in the pack’ – de-familiarizing objects through unexpected transitions – so undermining our expectations and allowing the realms of conscious and unconscious, of reality and imagination, to co-exist in close proximity.
Švankmajer’s passion for objects and their inherent instability not only sees them morph into living beings, but also fall apart or decay. Freud perceives “dismembered limbs, a severedhead, a hand cut off at the wrist” and “feet which dance by themselves” as having “something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when they prove capable of independent activity” Like fragmentation, the occurrence of repetition is a frequent catalyst in Švankmajer’s work for engaging with unconscious material, as he presents his viewer with recurring motifs and re-enacted scenes. In the scene of the Mad Hatter’s tea party, repetition evokes a dream-like helplessness and entrapment, each movement being replayed with increasing frenzy. The March Hare keeps spreading butter onto his fob watch and wiping it off. The Mad Hatter marionette drinks cup after cup of tea, crying endlessly for clean cups. The editing gathers speed as the characters move round the table, the montage repeating the same elements over and over, against a soundtrack of ticking clocks. It is a nightmarish loop that evokes what Freud describes as fateful, inescapable and involuntary repetition. Connected to repetition is the concept of the double, considered by Freud to be one of the most prominent themes of the uncanny. Notably both Alice and Faust’s live action characters have animated doppelgängers.
Lilith Ren
In his discussion of the uncanny, Freud suggests that dolls are closely connected with childhood life. In a scene that is likely to instil particular disquiet in the viewer, the tiny stop motion figurine of Alice is forced to ‘walkthe plank’ backwards into a pot of hot milk. She rises out of the milk as an enormous effigy, which cracks open in turn, to reveal the real-life Alice. The doubling in the transformation of doll to effigy, and redoubling in the return to the live-action Alice, uncannily perturbs us. It is a Chinese box of a situation, the effect of which is troubling. The doubling in this case erases customary distinctions between death and life – yet another device of the uncanny. The existence of portals within portals defies any notion of distinct waking and dreaming states: rather Alice continuously journeys into new tiers of the unconscious. Although Alice ostensibly re-enters the waking world back in the nursery, Švankmajer implies that activities taking place in the unconscious realm impact on the conscious one. On Alice’s waking, playing cards are scattered over her body where there were none before; the glass case is really broken and the stuffed rabbit has truly disappeared. What is more, Alice finds a hidden drawer under the rabbit cage, and so the portal to the unconscious remains, suggesting that these transitions could recur
at any given moment. The line between reality and the imagination is indistinct. Even in its resolutely ‘concrete’ nature, Švankmajer’s sound design articulates his characters’ states of mind, and their oscillation between real and imagined spaces. And even in working with diegetic sound, with a verifiable onscreen source, Švankmajer plays on the difference between ‘natural’ and ‘staged’ effects. Despite Švankmajer’s commitment to ‘concrete’ sound, he does occasionally include sound that is not literally appropriate. But in the vast majority of cases, sound retains an indexical relationship to its source, even as realms are traversed. Stop motion, after all, presents a more direct and indexical relationship between object and camera, even when used to communicate the idea of the unconscious. Possibly it is the ver y familiarity that stop motion’s use of real objects and spaces injects into the unfamiliar that helps create the disturbing sense of the uncanny. Indeed, according to Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, the uncanny not only “concerns a sense of unfamiliarity which occurs at the very heart of the familiar”, but also what they call a “familiarity which occurs at the very heart of the unfamiliar”
' . . . C R E AT I N G A F I C T I O N A L I S E D NOTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS, W H I C H , I F I M A G I N E D ‘ R E A L ’, B O T H R E C A L L S T H E P L AY F U L A N D L I B E R A L A P PA R AT U S OF CHILDHOOD AND MAKES CONCRETE THE IRONY AND CONTRADICTION OF THE A D U LT S E N S I B I L I T Y ' 'THE EFFECT OF THE UNCANNY PROXIMIT Y OF LIFE AND D E AT H I S TO M A N I F E ST FAU S T ’ S U N CO N S C I O U S F E A R OF AGING AND DYING.'
Rickards 2011
'Uncanny breaches, flimsy borders'
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ES SAY: Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia
Lilith Ren
INTRODUCTION Severed limbs of dolls, writhing maggots, wriggling tongues, and rotting food from the surface of the analogical reality constructed by Jan Svankmajer. For many viewers who do not know Svankmajer, his work is beautiful and incomprehensible. In addition to his Manneristic political metaphors, his works are also full of unique visual symbols, synesthetic tactile experiences, encyclopedic displays, collages, complexes, and surreal wild expressions. Unlike other animators dealing with refined objects, Svankmajer is known as an alchemist of waste who resurrects the inanimate things of everyday life through hybrid sensations. The work of Svankmajer is closely associated with the Czech and Slovak cultures. Influenced by the Surrealist Group in the 1970s (Hames, 1995), Svankmajer focused on experimenting with the subterranean existence, manifesting in the unusual images of everyday objects as resistance to imposed norms. Apart from the feature of Czech Surrealism, Svankmajer’s work also shows strong evidence of Mannerism, where personal expression and inner experience weigh over rational construction (Hauser, 1986). For example, Neco z Alensky (Alice, 1988) can be seen as a dialogue with his childhood. Suffering from isolation and anorexia as a child, he reflected on his negative impression towards childhood in his obsessiveness on infertile. The symbolic gestures such as eating and swallowing are a projection of his own physical suffering. Later, as the authorities clamped down and banned him from the film industry for seven-year, Svankmajer’s work became opaquer and more pessimistic. After his return, he created the Dimensions of Dialogue (1982), Food (1992), Darkness, Light, Darkness (1989), and other work to express his thoughts on politics, civilization, and society. Deeply rooted in his woeful life experience, a sense of melancholy remains in the creation of Svankmajer. Under the influence of politics, his work became a condensation of Surrealism and Mannerism. This paper will dive into the melancholy dream curated by Jan Svankmajer by examining his film Alice. By unraveling the Surrealism and Mannerism embodied inside the film, this essay will anatomize the layers of the scenes in the movie and depict the analogical metamorphoses within CONSTRUCTION OF A TACTILE POETRY_ SVANKMAJER AS AN ALCHEMIST POET OF OBJECTS The exploration of tactility emerged especially after the mid-1970s through all of his movies share this quality. Defining himself as a poet than a director, Svankmajer considered Alice one of his poetic experiments on Tactilism. The film starts with the depriving of sight in a tone of command to enter the tactile world: Close your eyes, or you won’t see anything. Besides confrontation, the director's poetics lies in the images of interruptions, cracks, discontinuities, and externalities that characterize the plasticity of alchemical transformation. While his tactile art experiment focuses on the texture, temperature, density, surface, and malleability of objects, aiming to reconfigure the analogical imagination of touching. It is not about simply conveying the physical properties of things or creating tactile images of physical objects but aims to liberate the sense of touch from practical organic functions (Vasseleu, 2009).
A synthesis of word and image
The use of stop motion animation not only provides the technique for animating those initially inert things, with which Svankmajer often furniture for meat, bones, body parts, and animation. It also complicates the distinction between materials, as they are always on the verge of a new and unexpected deformation. The experience of stop-motion animation is related to exposure to the natural material world, dancing with the relationship between photographic images and the.original objects that are part of our daily lives. Stop-motion animation thus becomes a handy tool to build an extension of our experience of fabric, objects, materials, and space in the phenomenological world and the world presented by the film. As Ratclle (2016) puts it, materiality evokes specific tactile memories, especially those of everyday objects. In Alice, the director shows how materiality deepens narrative meaning by evoking memories and nostalgia embedded in the story. For example, when Alice was whereabout, she picked up a jar with coins and yellow jelly inside, or when she was in the cabinet, she observed skulls breaking out from eggs covered in juice. This bizarre mixture of materiality might never be experienced in everyday life. However, it is still easy to imagine the feeling of metal coins mixed with sticky jelly in a glass jar. The notion of surrealist operation allows us to experience the touch of things that have never been encountered in real life. It may also trigger other analogical associations that constitute the film's dream logic.
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To further evoke the tactility of the objects, operations are taken on the effaced surfaces of the body through the established contrast between the coarse and the soft materiality. Elements such as bits of wood, triangular rule, clips, scissors, socks, and pillows are combined to enhance touch. The emphasized construction of a coarse surface differentiates Alice from other commercialized animations. There is something darker about Alice's inner odyssey than the plastic adventure and sheen of the creative animated objects of the digitally animated Toy Story. While Toy Story is about plastic objects found in plastic toy boxes at the foot of beds, Svankmajer's materials are more likely to be found discarded and forgotten in the dirty zones of municipal waste collection in the shadow. Such as the stains on the wall, peeling paint, scratches on the furniture, the stained yellow hair of the white rabbit, the worn outfit of Alice, and the traces of rust and wear on the tableware. Svankmajer seemed to focus more on the worn and dirty quality of the discarded instead of showing dust-covered objects kept away from touch. In the scene where Alice is chased into a dead end by the skull animals, when she looks up, the walls of the surrounding building can locate the corner as a place where people discard garbage, which can also be confirmed by the scatted objects on the ground. According to Bruyn (2002), constructing this "garbage" pile can be seen as a cathartic process in and of itself, as can others. The association with the ruinous and abandonees can be considered a political call for the restoration of those useless defined by consumerist capitalism. Svankmajer restores the rejected and displaced objects into a structure of meaning in resistance to contemporary commodification. Apart from the inherent property of stop-motion animation that essentially evokes materiality through its textures and surfaces, this sense of touch can also be aroused by defects in the manufacturing and animation process. Imperfect signals, such as slightly different eyes of the skull animals, wrinkled cloth pieces of Alice’s washed-out dress, imperfectly sewn puppets, and even misplaced shirt buttons, demonstrate how the presence of this corporeal relates to the physical reality. Although digital image correction can be used, the evitable imperfection during the making of stop-motion animation is still of great value. In this handmade process, the animator is in a tactile relationship with the animation object, translated into a tactile impression evoked by the texture. For example, the animator's presence can be sensed through some wrinkles left on the doll and slight movements printed on the white rabbit. This indication of manipulation can be considered a hint of reality within the constructed illusion. Instead of a groof lens, the trace of construction adds layers to the tactile texture of the film by mixing the physicality of the two worlds. Svankmajer further dramatizes sensation with the establishment of a foreign body. Acts like pulling out a pocket watch from the belly with bits of wood, sealing the stomach with a clip, or sewing the hole on the White Rabbit's hand with a needle and thread, emulates the vulnerability of the undead doll. The director even uses bits of wood to imitate the blood. This artificial familiarity stimulates the sense of pain to exaggerate the touch. It is also revealed through the alienation of food, such as the bread with nails, the aggressive duck and nails in a jar, bugs in a can, skull in eggshells, oils in the metal box, and coins in jelly. Being at the same time edible and inconsumable, the thought of another body enduring and desiring ingestion of this adorned object results in an awkward perception tainted by masochistic pleasure and displeasure. This embodied perception, which draws on the imaginary bodily exchange between objects and projects, actualizes the materiality and sense-ability of their shared carnal perception. In addition, the inedibility of food represents the notion of denied access to things that resonate with masochistic connotations. In parallel to the notion of edibility is the erotic gesture that repetitively appears in the movie. According to Mareike (1997), erotic and hermeneutics are explored in dialectical tension to each other, as the fragility of sense and thought seem central to Švankmajer’s Alice. The act of licking can be considered a way to exaggerate the sense, which becomes a repetitive pattern in the film. The lick can be killing the other when the frog ate the flies, healing when Alice and the White Rabbit hurt themselves, or cleaning when the dormouse licks the cup. As Mareile (1997) states,they map out subtle dramas and conflicts, which are profoundly erotic and meaningful in a fragile sense – destructive and healing, regressive and predictive, unknown and Familiar. The fact that the dolls and Alice share similar behavior can be read as a filter to blend the two analogs. Apart from the analogical association, the inter-objectivity of material sometimes becomes an independent performer. For instance, clay is one of the most used creative materials in Svankmajer's tactile experimentation. As a highly malleable material, the process of shaping and dismantling clay is essentially a creation. From his perspective, clay is also simple, natural, and life-giving, in addition to plasticity. This material itself can evoke people's tactile memory, and the combination of clay and liveaction animation also makes the audience more realistic and perceptible. The clay itself is a performer in Švankmajer's tactile experimentation and shows evidence of the hand of its maker, which is the way he inscribed himself as a performer in the film (Ivins-Hulley, 2008).
Lilith Ren
a synthesis of picture and poem, set in motion by film A resistance to imposed norms
THE CABINET OF SVANKMAJER AND THE 'DOLL-SOUL' At the beginning of the film, when the audience follows Alice's whereabouts, they can have a quick glimpse into the director's cabinets filled with private collections. Taking Surrealism as a worldview, Svankmajer rooted his imagination in psychic automatism and unconscious matter (Hames, 1995, pp. 38), reflected through the obsession for found assets, as many objects in his films come from his own extensive and bizarre personal collection. Abandoned and shabby things being given life and meaning becomes a gesture of alienation. In his discussion on Mannerism, Hauser (1986) links the notion of soulless being in substitution of self-enchanted as a motivation for narcissism-the psychological form of Mannerism. Infiltrated by time and the touch of the hand and enchanted by the owner's emotional attachment, Svankmajer (1999, p,462) believes that the antiques bear the traces of their previous owners, soaked in history and memory that can expand outwards into an anonymous existence of storytelling narrative in parallel to the ordinary life. In his movie, Svankmajer brought this spontaneity side to screen through animating antique dolls and other assets that echo the surrealists' tendency to distort reality. Filled with the designer's incomprehension of existence, the doll becomes a silent vessel, a medium of expression. According to Rilke (1994, p.31), behind the dolls is nothingness but inserted denotation. Therefore, the dolls become the signifier of individual existential ideology. Similarly, contemporary puppeteer Roman Pascal (2012) discussed that puppets hide a profound notion of the noun, which distinct dolls from masks, as behind the latter hides living things. For Pascal, however, the boundary becomes blurry as puppets tend to lose their identity as things when adopted in cinema, being strangled by frequent interaction with mannequins, masks, automata, stop-motion characters, dummies, robots, and other staples of the animation's fantasy as well as the horror genre (Paska, 2012, p. 138). Rilke (1994) refers to this embedded soulless portrait of human emotion as the "doll soul." In other words, a doll, puppet, portrait, or media image is the signifier of an "alter ego": it has no soul, but when being animated with movement and character, it becomes a shell with a ghost. Therefore, the key to baking the initial setting of stop-motion characters and puppetry is that they are not alive but shells within which hold the capacity of the other or the void.
In his seemingly simple and everyday, even randomly selected frames, whose composition rejects established conventions, he brings to the screen the spontaneity of ordinary life... He violates the cannons of conventional film composition and in the spirit of ;the new naturalness', searches for beauty elsewhere than in the artificial transformation (which is actually the distortion) of reality.
THE ILLUSION OF LIFE Instead of staging a show with only animated dolls, stop-motion animation is often combined with liveaction and fused sparingly to further scratch the surface of realism. The juxtaposition of live-action and animation tends to disturb the utilitarian habits of the audience and unsettle them for subversive purposes. For instance, the machinal nature of the live-action characters is emphasized while the inert becomes overactive. The fact that those animated objects are all collections from everyday life conflates the familiar with the unfamiliar, which unravels the audience with uncertainty. Daily collaborations such as squeezing toothpaste onto a brush or smearing butter on the bread are queried in the alternative reality. What if rubbing butter on the watch and biting wood mushroom for a change? The commonsense associated with unconscious human habits are brought to ponder. The illusion in animation is also created by erasing the boundaries between life and death, reality, and imagination. Buchan (2006) claimed that in stop motion, the illusion of life is conveyed through the illusion of movement, as the whole movie is a complete step-by-step manipulated puppet show. Unlike live puppet shows, the puppet operator is invisible. The fact that the moving object is tangible while the movement itself is illusory jeopardizes the relationship between illusion and reality. The fully engineered movement of the puppet embodies the obsession of Svankmajer for a manipulated reality where everything is unconsciously driven by the stars, by the genes, by society, and by potential hidden rules. He promotes resistance to that manipulation through creation, magic, resistance (Svankmajer, 1996), where the movie becomes a form of repellence to the inevitable force. It can also be read as a tangible metaphor for possibly playing God as Svankmajer describes his work as a way of bringing inert or inanimate things to life, which challenged the definition of death or living of an object. (Frost, 2016). Stop-motion animation has been Svankmajer's preferred medium to animate and anthropomorphize inanimate objects. He mainly photographed these objects in close-ups to focus the audience's attention on coarse details. He claims the close-ups search out every scratch on the illusion and amplify the traces of the invested time and touch a surface, such as the tea stain in the cup, grooves on the appliance, and patina sheen on the surfaces. Svankmajer consistently combines the inherent properties of objects and enchants them with a touch of humanity. For example, Alice's socks come to life in the film as caterpillars wriggling, burrowing on the floor. The caterpillar never loses the texture of the sock, and it mends its eyes with needle and thread, emulating the action of sleep. The materiality of socks becomes the basis of their vivid life, while the equipped false tooth makes it kin to humans.
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In extracting their essence, Svankmajer often mutates his objects, even turning them into living counterparts through mutating and morphing. In the ending sequence of Alice, the poker Queen of Hearts orders Alice to pick a flamingo to use as a croquet club. Like the queen, the flamingo is a twodimensional figure that can be taken out of a card, and the croquet is a sewing kit. However, just as Alice strikes, the flamingo becomes a live croaking hen, and the pincushion becomes a live hedgehog. What this extraordinary transformation from object to living thing does is a fusion of inanimate and animate things. On the other level, the transition juxtaposes the prosaic and fantastical, making the two worlds rub against each other. This transformation does not represent a complete return to the mundane, as the animated white rabbit stuffed toy reappears as soon as the hen flies out of the window. This plot reveals that the conscious and unconscious worlds are not separate and discrete but exist and overlap simultaneously. Referring back to the work of Hoffmann, Freud (1919) stated a sense of uncanny when it comes to marionettes and dolls in his essay Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny). According to Rickard (2011), the uncanny in Svankmajer’s movie is like a 'joker in the pack' - making objects unfamiliar through unexpected transformations - thereby undermining our expectations, allowing the conscious and unconscious, real and imagined realms to coexist in close coexistence. ALMOST-HUMAN AND ALMOST-NON-HUMAN Apart from estranging and enchanting the object matter, Svankmajer also materializes humans to assimilate the hierarchy between a live-action human and the doll. In other words, Svankmajer decomposes people and objects and redirects their inner energy where their identities fade, but the essence remains. In this case, things cannot be written off as dead in the world he created. This assimilation can also be considered a disruption of the ordinary division between the animate and the inert, providing a counter-case of ordinary perception. Foster (1993, p. 21) claimed that the alienation of the human figure was rendered as a capitalistic commodity in the form of the mannequin, which is usually in the form of the female body in Surrealism. In comparison, Svankmajer exemplified this through the doll of dilapidation. The puppet's inert existence of being 'dead' contrasts with the actor's continued presence is deliberately confused during the transformation process. In one scene that may be particularly unsettling for viewers, Alice's stop-motion figurine is forced to "walk the plank" backward into a pot of hot milk. She rises from the milk as a giant portrait, followed by a scene where the actor walks out of a fully carved puppet body. In addition, the fact that the large portrait is dropped into the cabinet of Svankmajer indicates that the actor is valued equally as one of the objects on the shell, eliminating the hierarchy between humans and objects. Throughout the movie, the director did not avoid the relationship between the live Alice and her twin doll but directly showed the audience the transformation process repetitively. Freud (1919) elaborates on the concept of the doppelganger, which can be the shadow, mirrored reflection, or soul of one being that escapes the fate of death, which is associated with the uncanny feeling. The doll, as the doppelganger, is reborn every time it is performed, rather than having the illusion of a continuous character. The doubling of doll-todoll, and the doubling of the return of the real Alice, act as a constant crossing between the boundary of the two worlds, amplifying the uncanny notion through its looping emergence. The doll does not rule over Alice, nor does Alice over the doll. They share a dialectical relationship instead of a dominant confrontation. It can be stated that in the works of Svankmajer, the live-action human character does not have the attributes of ordinary human beings but is more objectified. He may be a tool as a producer, a manipulative puppet, or a personification of desire. The usage of the human body as a material for creation is similar to clay and stone. Therefore, during the viewing process, the audience will also consciously feel alienated from the characters in the film, showing less empathy and substitution. It is even said that this human "tool attribute" is one factor that makes some viewers feel unsettled and uncomfortable. Regardless of the two analogical existences, a shared expression of detachment remains on both sides. In the wonderland, a dream of mimicry and legendary psychasthenia existence is curated with the 'doll-soul' manifestation through animating the inanimate and objectifying the actual human. The expressions of both the puppet and live-action characters remain blank, their eyes fixed. "Doll's Soul" is thereby reemphasized in his films. The accentuated alienation, on the one hand, carries out an automatic experience and leaves blank for expression, reminding viewers that it is just an empty container, doubling eliminates the customary distinction between living and death; on the other hand, the overlayering of Alice- 'almost-non-human' and the dolls- 'almost-human' intensifies the uncertain boundary between the non-human and the human, the shell and the ghost. In other words, creating a world where humans' being deprived of life' and inanimate objects' being brought to life is a means of making something grotesque (Zhonga, 2021). The emptiness of Alice becomes a part of the things that thicken the melancholy atmosphere of an estranged world.
Lilith Ren
Non-narrative, an emphasis on formal concerns, abstract, using realist imagery as a springboard fir aesthetic or psychological investigation, and deriving principally from the inspirations of photography and the visual arts.
Objective humour, humour that is neither abstract nor cynical, since it springss from the depths of a reality that has turned sour.
An emphasis on the image, the rejection of classical convention, and a close interaction with literature, theatre and the visual arts.
GHOSTLY SILENCE: ANTI DIALOGUE As a visual artist, Svankmajer pursues visual influence on the audience than linear storytelling. The knowledge of a foreign language or a specific background is not required, as his work depicts the shared nightmare of humankind. The absence of dialogue seems to have the curious effect of opening viewers’ sensors to a wide range of other aural or tactile sensations that are evoked. Besides building a sense of a profound melancholy that can be transvalued as the path to those different dimensions, one should note that Svankmajer uses sound to enhance the touch of the image. Both auditory and visual, disgust and discomfort are critical features in creating tactile impressions, whether directly physical recognition of unpleasant behavior or sensory impressions of substances, dead or alive, that people are reluctant to touch (Noheden, 2013). Svankmajer's sound design also expresses the psychological states of his characters and their oscillations between natural and imagined spaces. The sound maintains an indexed relationship to its source even when traversing the realm. As Alice sinks into the depths of her unconsciousness, the mechanical screeching of an industrial elevator transports her; when White Rabbit wakes up in the nursery, she regains consciousness with the sound of White Rabbit's scissors bumping and a spoon hitting a jar. Although Švankmajer is committed to direct providential sounds, he occasionally adds inappropriate sounds. For example, in Alice, the bones of fish and birds, apparently not horses, drag a cart with a huge whine. The lo-fi voice expresses Alice's unconscious free associations, where reality and imagination overlap. When Alice hears the baby's cry, the sound has a similar dreamlike treatment. The White Rabbit threw the weeping package at Alice, and as soon as she touched it, it turned into a purring pig. Švankmajer (1987) claims that the transition sequence is part of the "logic of dreams," and moments are directly adapted from Lewis Carroll's original work. Unlike the original, however, Alice of Švankmajer never sees the baby's face when she hears the cry but only sees the snorting pig emerging from its swaddling clothes. Being almost an anti-dialogue film, continuous dialogue is chopped and messed up. As a narrative device, the scene of Alice telling is intermittently punctuated with sync sound closeups of Alice's talking mouth, overdubbed in English with an added displacement of the Czech voice. This complete absence of dialogue also seems to induce sensation in a wide range of other auditory. For example, various close-ups throughout the film help arouse unseen ontological dimensions that cannot be comprehended. Hence, a sense of deep melancholy can be translated into a path to these different dimensions and helps to remove the line between reality and imagination. All the sounds effect in the film is pre-recorded and later added. Instead of having any soundtrack, a collection of fragmented bits of sounds hodgepodge, enriching the audio texture of the film. Sounds such as the squeaking sound from the movement of the white rabbit, the background clicking of the clock, the crackling and snapping sound of the objects, and the squelching sound of butter rubbing the pocket watch become independent assets in parallel to the collective objects together construct a place of wonder. It is worth associating the making of those sounds with the tactile quality of the film, as the production of the sounds is also an experiment on materiality and mismatching. For example, the sound of Alice transforming is created by pushing a moving trolley. The heightened and maximized sound effects can cumulate and create an unsettling atmosphere for the audience. For instance, the approaching footsteps and bones creaking can easily evoke a nightmarish feeling. Because of the stopmotion animation, some sounds have to be made otherwise, which presents louder than their normal states, such as the sounds of Alice’s clap and the rubbing between surfaces. Even though there are cases where the sound on-site can be used, Svankmajer preferred similar sounds from an alternative source as an add-on to the unfamiliarity. This disruption between images and audio draws the audience’s attention to those noises that otherwise will be ignored and further fragment the film. MISE-EN-SCÈNE: DISMEMBERING AND REPEATING Like any other film, Mise-en-scène plays an essential part in Svankmajer's stop-motion animation. Despite his grotesque assemblies of objects, he maintains a mundane background as a stabilized stage for the performance. Svankmajer places his live actresses and animated creatures in seemingly actual rooms or on rocky terrain, creating a realistic narrative space. Svankmajer is constantly infiltrating familiar, unstable, unconscious elements through his subjective processing of identifiable areas in Alice. Similar to an actual dream, the audience loses sense of direction as Alice wanders between the basement, stairs, and hallways. A door within a door, a stream flows from a field within a room, and a house stands behind the facade of a house made of children's building blocks. Nevertheless, despite this erratic movement, the audience never feels like given up on the waking world entirely because of the prosaic elements of the site's arrangements.
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Svankmajer's passion for objects and their inherent instability made them not only living things but also maintain the characteristics of falling apart or decaying. The fragmentation of elements in his movies reflects Hauser’s (1986) view of Surrealism. Freud (1919) believed that dissembled parts of a body, such as served limbs and chopped heads, have an uncanny potential for independent existence and automatic utility. Influenced by the cinema of Eisenstein, the sense of dismembering is reached through camera framing and montage, which can be considered an embodiment of Mannerist techniques. For example, the beginning sequence of a room begins with multiple close-up shots framing one object at a time; the camera zooms in to the foot of Alice when she runs; and when she reaches out her hand through the window, the hand becomes an independent dismembered limbs that carry out repetitive movements of waving and throwing the stone. Alice's "Reawakening" scene can be a vivid showcase of fast-paced montage, in which her head changes in rapid succession dissolves into March Hare, Mad Hatter, Fish, and Frog Trooper, Crocodile, Queen of Hearts, White Rabbit, finally comes back to her mind when she wakes up in her nursery. Even the movie itself results from reassembling the fragment, as it is a collage of 2000 independent shots (Hames, 1995). The constant montage suggests that one mental state is superimposed on another, uncannily blurring the line between waking and dreaming. The answer as to whether Alice's experience is a dream or reality is paradoxical, echoing the film's opening line: "Close your eyes, or you won't see anything." Repetition is another typical catalyst for engagement with unconscious material in Svankmajer's work. He presented the viewer with recurring themes and reenacted scenes, where uncanny aroused due to a strange return to familiarity. Alice begins with a complex presence of repetition and foreshadowing that immediately blurs the conscious and unconscious lines. After the title sequence, Alice sits next to her nanny and throws pebbles into the river, then reenacts the action in the next scene - this time using the dolls in the playroom, emulating the former sequence with two dolls sitting side by side in the same dress and the real Alice throwing rocks into a cup than the river. At the end of the scene, Alice runs straight from the floor of her nursery to the bare earth, stomping on a mini-doll version of herself on the way: the clip is so brief that it is almost subconscious, making the audience question if the whole story is an infantile dream. This repetitive doll theme also paved the way for Alice's live-action to be turned into a doll. Additionally, there is a reappearance of objects throughout the film. The objects from the cabinet have multiple appearances in the movie. They are first shown in the opening sequence, where the camera zooms in to them in different room corners. Then when Alice sink, they are exhibited on the cabinet. Later, when Alice floods the room, they all flow with the river of tears. Some inanimate objects in the nursery reappear as animations in subsequent scenes. A taxidermist's white rabbit from a glass cage later leads Alice into the mindless underworld. Once there, the skulls she has collected will accost her; a rat caught by a trap on the nursery floor will set her hair on fire, and half-drinked tea will reappear in the Mad Hatter's hands. In Mad Hatter's tea party scene, repetition evokes dreamlike helplessness and distress, with each action being repeated more and more frantically. The March Hare kept putting butter on his watch and wiping it off. The Mad Hatter puppet drank cup after cup of tea and kept weeping over the clean cup. The clip speeds up as the characters move around the table, and the montage repeats the same elements repeatedly, to the clock's ticking, which is a nightmarish cycle. High-speed editing and repetitive montages are also adopted in Svankmajer's work. In the late scene where the heads shift around between the puppets and Alice, quick cutting shots, constant switching of repetitive images, and continuous close-ups bring solid visual stimulation to the audience. It can be seen as a collage of artistic attainment for surrealist planes. Svankmajer's world is a hybrid of linear and non-linear, as Alice's journey between reality and imagination, conscious and unconscious, is varied. The different portal representatives can be a leading thread of the narrative. Alice walked out of her nursery for the first time, across a windswept plain to a table with only one drawer. To hunt down the White Rabbit, she squeezed herself into an impossibly small drawer - a portal connecting the ordinary world to the underworld. However, this slippage is not straightforward because portals exist within portals. Alice emerges from a drawer in the hallway, only to fall down the iconic rabbit hole, reimagined as an elevator shaft. Alice found several more desk drawers in the underworld, some containing ink or pies that made her shrink or grow. In a sense, these drawers or their contents - act as other portals that allow Alice to access different realms. After all, she needs to be small to get through the tiny door inside the door, the first in a series of doors she must pass through. The existence of portals within portals defies any clear notion of waking and dreaming states: instead, Alice is constantly entering new levels of unconsciousness. Although Alice ostensibly returns to the waking world in the nursery, Svankmajer suggests that activities taking place in the unconscious realm affect the conscious realm. Alice woke up with cards scattered all over her that had never been there before; the glass case was broken, and the plush bunnies were gone. What is more, Alice discovers a hidden drawer under the rabbit cage, so the portal to the unconscious still exists, suggesting that these shifts could happen again at any given moment. The line between reality and imagination is blurred.
Lilith Ren
Reality in this sense is a series of fragments, each with equal status and underlying which is nothing
CONCLUSION_ A PROFOUND MELANCHOLY Svankmajer’s Alice is an infant dream, a projection of his alter-ego. Constructing in the shadow, Svankmajer tends to make places such as a crypt, underworld, or other places blocked from daylight. Being both a place of nightmares and warm reverie, the subterranean functions as the realm of dream logic and fantasy, with which events do not exist during the day. The underworld of Alice can be interpreted in a rather obvious way as a place of the unconscious, which is further emphasized by the White Rabbit, a common symbol of the unconscious in Svankmajer movies. Constantly disturbing the disordered spiritual world to enchant the dead, Svankmajer tries to evoke the common nightmare of humanity in a surrealist way by manipulating images, scratching the surface of human desire through erotic movement. Through his poetic approach, the semblance of humdrum existence is presented to the audience to remind the unconscious side of everyday waking life. In general, Svankmajer’s work is an analogical pursuit of the restoration of magic to the utilitarian. Rooted deeply in brute reality, he emphasizes the confrontation and artificiality of existence, the manipulation, and the disruption of aesthetics. Besides the alienated feature and narcissistic atmosphere signified by Mannerism, Svankmajer emerges for his sensuous construction of the materiality and theatricality aspects of the world. As he mentioned in his interview with Peter Hames (1995), his work is a communication vessel of dreams and reality. To him, it all comes to provocating a tactile imagination for the viewers and through whose own associative morphology hidden content of the work can be deciphered. Only then the inter-subjective communication between the director and the audience can take place. Dealing with material aberration, the audience is submitted to vertigo and the bewildering world where they are guided to ponder the limitation of mundane association and routine human habits. It’s time to challenge the cliché.
2022 Spring Thesis Prep
Lilith Ren
4 WORKFLOW
2022 Spring Thesis Prep
Painting Finding geometry and space flattening logic from artist's painting Digital Object Learn from existing digital assets
Lilith Ren
Installation Art Collecting fraction and space logic
Reality Show Gathering eveyday objects
COLLECTING CABINET
Alternate perception, the life of things and personal, subjective experience
2022 Spring Thesis Prep
Everything above is like everything below everything inside is like everything outside
Alternative Nature Define new bio-environment as a morph
Digital Materiality Explore digital-only material with specific aesthetic
Lilith Ren
Matter-of-factness Mannerism Objective humour
THE NEW SPECIES Through digital sculpting, something new can merge from the everyday objects
MAKING ALCHEMY
Lilith Ren
Visual Poetry of objects Non-narrative, an emphasis on formal concerns, abstract, using realist imagery as a springboard fir aesthetic or psychological investigation, and deriving principally from the inspirations of photography and the visual arts.
2022 Spring Thesis Prep
SHELL S TAG I N G
Postprocessing
Compositing hybrid existence
Lilith Ren
COLL AGE DJ
Mutiple perspectives contrasting
2022 Spring Thesis Prep
Thesi s Res earch SC I- Ar c Gr ad ua te
Spring
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D so D es ig n Ad vi e v ry n We is e r
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