Cinematic Motion by Hand
by Marina Estela Graça
Download this article as PDF.
View this article in HTML.
What is (not) so French in Les Triplettes de Belleville
by Pierre Floquet
Download this article as PDF.
View this article in HTML.
The complete volume is available for download as PDF here.
Within Cinema, animation has had an unclear relation with live-action recording since its very beginning. We learned – helped by ASIFA (International Animated Film Association) – that we should separate one from the other and we also realized that we (still) don’t have a general theory of cinema that embraces both. Yet, over the last years, animation and live-action footage became completely tangled in cinematic productions. Obviously, this means that each of them is just a technical strategy supported by its own specialists and as one became dominant, the other turned out to be marginal. But what if we could ascertain a specific ontology for animation within technology that would explain how its marginality is rooted to its essence at least in one of its forms?
In this paper I will try to argue that, by overwhelming the cinematic technical standard workings with their hand, authors exposed its functional scheme to contingency, thus opening the production process to new, unpredictable expressive and communicative possibilities. I will attempt to explain how this corresponds to a renewed way of comprehending technology by, simultaneously, revealing the human reality it contains and physiologically incorporating it.
Special attention is given to authors such as Norman McLaren, Len Lye, and Pierre Hébert.
Read more… »
In an article on text theory, Roland Barthes wrote: “Every text is intertext; it holds other texts within, at various levels, in irregularly recognizable shapes: those of the preceding culture as well as those of the surrounding culture; every text is new with interwoven past quotations”1. A text, a film, or an animated film is built and framed with a mosaic of quotations that work together into an original feature. It absorbs, transforms, and makes its own textform.
These quotations may be considered as references, whether they be textual, filmic, and/or cultural. However, references may limit their meanings to comments within, and aside of, a discourse, whereas intertext implies that such elements are integrated into the diegesis. A reference is intertext when it actually takes part in the plot, and conveys a meaning of its own. As we shall see, Les Triplettes de Belleville abides by such a narrative approach. As a Frenchman, I am aware that many elements in the film cannot be appreciated and assessed similarly by those unfamiliar with French culture. This paper offers non-French audience clues to the intertext of the film, including universal themes that reach across cultures.
Read more… »