Ottawa International Animation Festival: Part 2

In our final piece of coverage from Ottawa International Animation Festival Josh reviews three more favourites he saw on the big screen including SKRFF, Stampfer Dreams and Grand Prize for Short Animation winner La Voix des Sirènes.

SKRFF, dir. Corrie Francis Parks, Daniel Nuderscher

Whether it is created in protest or revolution, as an act of defiance or civil disobedience, graffiti has offered a means of communication and self-expression for members of socially divided communities and can be used as a tool for establishing dialog. SKRFF—the sound of an aerosol paint can—uses stop-motion animation to reveal decades of history in just a few minutes of film, finding traces of the 80s and 90s next to that past moment’s future, now visible in the present. Directors Corrie Francis Parks and Daniel Nuderscher began “SKRFFology” as an excavation of the public graffiti walls around Vienna, layered with paint since the legalization of public graffiti in 1982. Treating the walls like archaeological sites with over 40 years of history, the brilliant SKRFF reveals hundreds—thousands—of layers of colourful paint representing decades of political, artistic and cultural expression. 

The idea came to sculptor Nuderscher when he started to carve shapes through the colourful layers found covering the walls. With his tools he uncovered fragments of graffiti history. Graffiti can be a metaphor for remembering the past; past mistakes are revealed as a reminder for individuals and society not to make those mistakes again. By carving into the graffiti, the artists who created SKRFFfound new way of creating movement; the tunnels and holes growing frame by frame make it seem like the wall is writing with breath, history come back to life, a palimpsest of layer after layer of meaning and history. The creation of the film is almost like an act of reverse graffiti, carving into the layers of the past to create a new artistic and historical meaning.

SKRFF preserves the physicality of Vienna’s graffiti walls while taking viewers on a visual journey that excavates the past. The past is far too rich and complex, too dense with meaning to be uncovered and understood completely, but SKRFF proves that above all, it is still worth trying to uncover history, for the understand of the past can emerge from the process. This excavation, its recording and exhibition, lends a sense of permanence and meaning to what were meant to be ephemeral works. Seeing decades of paint revealing the past like rings of a tree can’t help but leave viewers wondering—what else is hidden in these layers? This shows the role that history can play in our understanding of the future; by better understanding where we as a society have come from, we can turn to where we are going.

While it is easy to focus on the aesthetic or philosophical meaning of SKRFF, it is also enormously fun. The quick 7-minute film rushes by in an explosion of colour as thousands of layers of colours—maybe more colours than have ever been on screen at the same time—are uncovered like the layers of a giant rainbow jawbreaker. The propulsive music that keeps SKRFF pummeling toward the future was created by musician Sandro Nicolussi, who made recordings of the carving into the graffiti and combined the rhythmic sounds with hydrophone underwater recording and generative digital feedback to make layers and layers of percussive sound; both human and mechanical. SKRFF shows that, although history can’t ever be seen clearly, juxtaposing physical abstractions of past and present can sharpen the view for a clearer future. 

Review by: Joshua Hunt

La Voix des Sirènes, dir. Gianluigi Toccafondo 

In Gianluigi Toccafondo’s delirious undersea fantasia La Voix des Sirènes, nothing is as it seems. Undulating black blobs morph into sharks and dissolve back into nothingness, frogs turn into alligators, scales and fins reveal a woman’s face, which lets out a piercing shriek from a sharp-toothed mouth. But is it a scream? Or a song? An almost entirely abstract work, La Voix des Sirènes has jellyfish blobbing through heaving algae, gurgling underwater sounds in swirling blue-greens, corals and plants, then an unexpected wisp of hair. A mermaid swims across the screen, beautiful and terrifying; the voice belongs to this Siren.

Bright colours and impressionistic brushstrokes make La Voix des Sirènes feel like a scene from a primitive Gauguin painting come to vivid life. The way that Toccafondo’s strokes leave colours globbed across single frames makes the animation throb in seasick pulses. La Voix des Sirènes is an almost overwhelmingly sensory experience; everything sounds wet and feels cold like the fish guts that spill across the screen. But the bright candy colours belie the spooky history of Sirens. This is not Disney’s Ariel—these mermaids don’t sing about their collection of thingamabobs to their crustacean friends, these are the dangerous temptresses of Homer’s Odyssey, luring sailors to their watery graves with their beauty and their alluring song.

Toccafondo’s ingeniously animated works are an inspired mix of painting, cinema, and animation. La Voix des Sirènes was created through his usual process, in which he takes photos from found film clips and other sources, xeroxes them on paper to distort them, then paints these papers with acrylic paint, one frame at a time, transforming the original subject. Finally, he shoots them on 35mm film, and they become cinema again. The instantaneous gesture that Toccafondo uses in his application of paint at times reveals indecipherable fragments of missing images.

The overpainting style that Toccafondo uses means that La Voix des Sirènes is almost nonstop motion. The movement is impressionistic; it is never fully clear what is going on, or who is where; this indecipherability is of a piece with the mysterious temptation of the Sirens. The shapeshifting forms are both figural and gestural simultaneously, the painting on top of photos give exact proportions to every floating fish and sneering shark, but the sweeping motion of the application gives them a rippling algal unknowability.

La Voix des Sirènes features evocative music and incredibly detailed sound design by Marco Molinelli, lending every frame a sense of damp terror. The wordless voice performance by Valeria Sturba as the Sirens is as evocatively beautiful as it is hauntingly frightening; her singing and vocalizing alternately gorgeous and grotesque. The Sirens’ beautiful singing while their horrible mutant offspring is born is evocative of the whole of La Voix des Sirènes; the thing to fear isn’t the dreadful sharks and terrible sea creatures but rather the allure of the dangerous beauty.

Review by: Joshua Hunt

Stampfer Dreams, dir. Thomas Renoldner

Thomas Renoldner’s “pre-cinema found footage film” Stampfer Dreams is an inventive animated short film based on the moving images of the pioneering Simon Stampfer, made during the Industrial Revolution. Stampfer Dreams takes the idea that the young Stampfer, in his childhood imagination, dreams of the further evolution mankind might make based on simple first machine like a mill, water pump, or geared mechanisms. The film opens with a pastoral shot moving through a rugged mountain glacier, and out of nowhere comes a giant hand which drops in a storybook image of a young boy. This is Stampfer, and these are his dreams.

Simon von Stampfer grew up in a mountain region in Austria in the beginning of the 19th century and later became a mathematician, surveyor and inventor. In 1833, by this time a high-profile scientist, he presented his “stroboscopic discs” in Vienna. By far his most famous invention, the stroboscopic discs have a claim to be the first device to show moving images and are often described as an important milestone in the invention of film.

The stroboscopic disc was the first tool that showed a moving picture, and the first widespread animation device that created a fluid illusion of motion. The disc uses the optical illusion called stroboscopic movement: there is a rotating disc with images, and there are small slits between the images, and looking through slits at the reflection of the image in a mirror, from behind the disc the viewer will see the images move. The animated sequences in Stampfer Dreams are all taken from or based on these stroboscopic discs, composed and expanded on by animators Reinhold Bidner and End Brandner.

Director Thomas Renoldner has tried himself in many kinds of art forms: drawing, painting, photography, object art, installation, performance, music. For him, animated film is used as a medium to combine the art disciplines he has experimented with. In this way he is following in the footsteps of Stampfer and breaking the boundaries between genres, by being inspired by the tools available to him and creating something totally new. Renoldner photographed the collection of Stampfer’s discs at the Museum at the Abbey Kremsmünster in Austria and used this as the basis of Stampfer Dreams.

Stampfer’s stroboscopic discs show all kinds of animated loops from abstract to figurative and from experimental to documentary; in this way they force the variety of genres in animated film. Renoldner uses this inspiration, and practically each shot of Stampfer Dreams is a different genre. From “documentary” style shots of walking through Austrian woods to an offbeat musical number made from hammers and anvils, and from a dazzling circus performance to a long kaleidoscopic abstract section, Stampfer Dreams is never less than visually stunning. The incredibly lush orchestrations composed by Chrisof Dienz and performed by Die Knödel make the film sound as good as it looks.

Eventually the simple Austrian folk from the mill and the waterpump are left behind as bigger, increasingly complex take over the screen in pulsing, strobing machines. The film follows Stampfer’s technological dream of the future, and it ends in a nightmare. Technology has taken over the world, and changed it, often for the worse. The glacier behind Stampfer’s birthplace will soon be gone…and it all started with a wheel.

Review by: Joshua Hunt