23 Oct ’19

For this project I looked into animators that do abstract art and found out about an interesting spectrum of live-action films to abstract animated films that places films according to its nature of being either mimesis or abstraction or in between.

So, the book mentioned about the film ‘Circles’ or ‘Kriese’ from Oskar Fischinger as a sample of much abstraction so I looked into it. The film is very short yet it’s engaging to watch by the synchronised movement between the circles and the music. There are various techniques used including the movement in different direction, the vibration of the shapes or the change in colours.

I’m also curious about other kind of less abstraction films so I used the chart from Maureen Furniss above to find out about Hen Hop by Norman McLaren produced in 1942. It’s interesting to see the middle between abstraction and mimesis, how the film benefits from both of its merit, by making it relatable using elements of the chickens but also opened a space for us to imagine with curiosity and excitement as well.

There is also a very interesting chapter from the book above about ‘Considering form in abstract animation’. It introduced me to this film called The Critic which is directed by Ernest Pintoff in 1963. It shows an abstract animation with also a sound of an old man watching the film trying to come up with his own interpretation of what he sees. This concept is in align with my own exploration into how we make meaning of the visuals.

The book also referred to Wassily Kandinsky that the artist also observed about the spectator of the art is more than ready to look for ‘a meaning in a picture’ that the spectator cannot help setting himself apart from the picture to let it speak for itself.

The chapter also discussed about the nature of ‘abstract animation’ in how it doesn’t have a character to identify, or that the viewer might be left with no ‘complete’ understanding of its meaning as he or she would with a close narrative animation. It also talks about how the pleasure in watching an abstraction animation comes as an ‘open text’ rather than ‘close text’ and it requires and challenges the viewer to participate in creating the meaning. This in turn could expand the viewer’s ability to see, experience and comprehend things in day-to-day life.

For my film, it has both close narrative and abstract structure since there are a part where there are formation of characters with continuous actions but still, the forms resemble no obvious reality. Also, the surrealistic transformation and the transportation into different universes within the film, although with some recognisable elements such as a banana, artwork frames or the moon surface which come only as hints, made it somewhat abstract but not in total.

This also made me question how one create a ‘true abstract’ film? I feel it’s really conflicting since we might have ‘some intention’ in the creating to begin with, but how to create an animation in a way that is not in forward-moving cause-and-effect narrative? Then it has to go completely mess? Maybe I need to let go of any intended message at all in order to create an absolute or even almost abstract film.