By Vítězslav Chovanec (Czech Republic)
Geometrical abstraction; Google Street View; photo collages; looping real action – contemporary experimental animation is far from DreamWorks or Disney. Dokufest 2014 paid tribute to Austrian short experimental movies in four blocks. 'Animation Experiments' hit the right spots with retrospectives of Tscherkassky, Mattuschka and new experiments from forthcoming generations. Some may have expected long, boring minutes with highly artificial expressions spoken in largely alien languages. In fact, it was the other way round. Audiences immediately responded positively to these film's humour, fresh ideas, inner musical rhythms and progressive, yet still understandable visual language.
The presence of short animation experiments at Dokufest raises some questions. Why Austrian experiments, why even animated experiments? Why do they need to be at a documentary film festival? The more common environment for this kind of cinema is in art galleries, maybe on art universities and unfortunately on the dusty shelves of national film archives (if they are lucky). As I can see now, the audience for these shorts is much wider than art gallery visitors. There were laughs in the cinema, swinging to the rhythm, tension, all before exhaustion, and then some respite and relief.
As such a programme demonstrates, Dokufest is not only a platform for documentary movies in the traditional sense, it is also a platform for thinking about and experiencing contemporary art. It places the experimental cinema in the context of documentary films, bringing new meanings to it and devlops new audiences for this genre. It also works the other way: documentary cinema is given renewed life as an art form worthy of galleries, festivals, even multiplex distribution, not only limited to television consumption.
Project Cancer, a Slovenian documenary in the Balkan Dox competition, is a shining example of such a feature, which takes it from cinema to art gallery. Damjan Kozole portrays Ulay, performer and body artist, his artistic collaboration with Marina Abramović and his life struggle with a serious illness. Archival footage of their performances merges the art of Ulay and the portrait itself to one artistic body. This makes the film an amphibian which can be successful and easily understandable in both galleries and film festivals, which is also true with the Austrian Experiments programme.
What makes this selection of Austrian experimental animations understandable is developing a narrative (Ink Eraser, Lezzieflick, The Streets of Invisibles, Walzerkönig) or linking with cultural references (Mystery Music, Raumzeithund, Stuck in a Groove). Only two shorts, Stroboscopic Noise and Zounk!, explored geometrical abstraction. While the simple movement of two lines becomes abstract with accelerated speed – almost imperceptible by the human eye at first glance – the second short is abstract from the very beginning, as director Billy Roisz is trying to visualise music made by Broken Heart Collector.
Nana Swiczinsky places style above story in Lezzieflick. She works with photographs and their texture to show live action lesbian porn without any action at all. By moving with pictures and blending them together, she gives the impression of movement. Editing is missing in this picture, as we enter every scene continuously, as the photo collage is always beating and changing itself.
The story is secondary also in Walzerkönig, which is a music video of one man band Lokoongruppe. A table desk full of office stuff lives its own life coordinated by the hands of an artist, who drinks coffee and occasionally moves things. The presence of the author making his art at the same time the art as the art is being shown to the public shifts the focus to method itself – this video is made by stop-motion animation. The same device is even more obvious in Stuck in a Groove, where Clemens Kogler explains his unique method in film credits. He uses 2 turntables, cameras, a videomixer and prints on cardboard, no computer technique at all, to show not really a film, but rather a visual performance.
Combination of animation and live action is some kind of convention in experimental films, no wonder we can see it in two other movies. Sunny Afternoon by Thomas Renoldner contains two different parts. The film starts with the director himself trying to sit on a chair, being shot from two different angles. Renoldner makes small loops of his movement and then repeats every single part of his move so many times that the action completely loses its sense. Comic moves of the artist create a parody of experimental cinema, which uses loops and repeating action as its most common and conventional devices. Renoldner criticises that there is also a mainstream trend even in avant-garde films.
Movement is a dominant element in Raumzeithund, where a dog is running sideways, but centralized in front of camera. Nikolaus Eckhard gives his tribute to Edward Muybridge's famous experiment with a running horse, passing in front of a row of cameras, which makes one picture after another. In his study of movement Eckhard went much deeper, as he gradually damages the movement of the dog by decomposition of linearity. In the beginning the dog can easily control its movement, but suddenly it seems somebody is moving by the dog unnaturally and we also feel sorry for the powerless animal.
But contemporary experimental cinema in Austria is not powerless at all. There is a well working funding system, which makes a solid production ground for the artists and helps to build a kind of “experimental industry”. There is a lot of ambivalence in this term, as the avant-garde movement used to be always outside the factory, comments critically social and media conventions. But industry implies conventions in its very origins. Artists needs this common production field to develop their work but they also need to fight against the industrialization of an art form. Strange situation, you might think, but an artist is not supposed to always be happy with cultural policy, it could be an endpoint of her or his creative energy.
This set of experimental short animations shows clearly that Austrian artists fight stagnation with multiple methods, styles, aesthetics, technology and techniques used in filmmaking. The only film with traditional animation in this line-up was Mystery Music. Black and white painting with simple figures indistinguishable from each other, which the author brings from his graphic novels. Nicolas Mahler uses music as a medium of (one-way)communication and (mis)understanding between musicians and listeners. That was not an issue with these experiments. This insight into the area, which is often overseen by festival media coverage, crosses borders of what we understand by animation, short films, Austrians and gallery art.
