Theodore Ushev, a Film Archeologist
Theodore Ushev is an archaeologist, and these are the words of nobody else than himself. Although his films might be labelled avant-garde or experimental, archaeological fits their true nature best: Ushev uses artefacts from the past to reconstruct the image of human failures and through these visions, to reflect on the contemporary society.
Born in 1968, Ushev (presently based in Canada) is a son of a Bulgarian artist who was in conflict with the communist regime. His father having to deal with the cruel ideological censorship, the tough situation influenced the son, who became very sensitive to the slightest signs of totalitarianism. No surprise that one of his strongest motifs refers to Russian communist history and the picture of a totalitarian society in general, also in the sense of today’s slavery of consumerism or dominion of industry (art & power trilogy Tower Bawher, Drux Flux, Gloria Victoria).
The themes are accompanied accordingly by the formal aspects. Talking about Russian propaganda, Ushev uses constructivist visuals, music by avant-garde composers of the early Soviet era, and montage approaches in Dziga Vertov style. To fully understand these works one should have insight into art, music, literature and philosophy, if not to miss a wide range of quotations and cross-genre meanings.
Despite the power of his society driven films, the most successful one so far is an intimate, almost inner portrayal of experimental Canadian filmmaker from the sixties – Arthur Lipsett. Lipsett tried to do the very same as Ushev tries: to picture the mass madness and the monstrous machinery controlling the society. But it is the brilliant skill in visualizing his personal tragedy, unstableness and anxiety leading to suicide that makes this movie extraordinary.
What connects all Ushev’s films is the drive of a revolutionist. Whether making a music video (Demoni) or a dark metaphorical vision (Nightingales in December), it is always a radical gesture that aims to knock on the middle-class shell.
Ivana Laučíková
Jonathan Hodgson, a Committed Filmmaker
His profile as a senior lecturer and programme leader of BA Animation at Middlesex University London really says it all. Jonathan Hodgson (UK, 1960) employs animation as a medium to present awkward subjects and has a marked preference for ethical and humanitarian issues. His work aims to raise understanding and stimulate debate.
Well, it does.
Jonathan Hodgson’s retrospective programme displays a superb development of inspired and committed films. His keen observations go to the heart of existence and unveil the fringes as well as the plainly inhuman and perverse sides of society.
Mild and sometimes almost casual, sometimes raw, but always full of compassion. The style of sketchy animation, simple lines and use of colour and the combination with live-action image and/or sound fits this wonderfully, and the often rather nervous movement is perfect. Whether it concerns the walk from home to work (Feeling My Way), schizophrenia (Camouflage) or climate change (The Age of Stupid).
Of old, Hodgson manages to focus his themes and techniques. For example, Dogs and Night Club are remarkably mature student films about, respectively, the relationship between a dog and its owner and their fundamentally different attitude to life, and the isolation of people on what should be a pleasant night out.
As regards the structure of his oeuvre, it is almost self-evident that the last titles are political documentaries he made for Amnesty International as part of a campaign against capital punishment of children and for The Guardian on hunger strikes in Guantánamo Bay.
The key work in the programme is The Man with the Beautiful Eyes, based on a poem by Charles Bukowski. Children always tell the truth, and it is disquieting. How much beauty can a man allow?
Anet ter Horst, Holland Animation Film Festival
Bonobostudio: Film Programme Presentation
Bonobostudio is an animation and experimental film production and distribution studio. Set up in 2008 as a hub of creativity, innovation and new film expression, it is recognized as one of the most intriguing and prolific producers of experimental and animated films. Apart from being a production studio, Bonobostudio is a proud distributor of superb short films raging from pure abstraction to conventional animation.
The programme presented by Bonobostudio at Animateka is an excellent platform to explore various techniques and authors who work or used to work for the studio. Produced by Bonobostudio, all the films were made by outstanding animators, filmmakers, and artists over the past three years. All of them have been screened at Animateka before, and this is now a great opportunity to see the films back to back and get a feel for the diverse approaches of the Zagreb-based Bonobostudio to contemporary experimental animation.
Captivating children and older audiences alike, In the Beginning of Time, a film debut by Božidar Trkulj, is a charming 10-minute stop-motion animation about a mythical demon from the old days, awarded at Anibar and Kratkofil Plus festivals. Flower of Battle, a film by Simon Bogojević Narath, was inspired by motifs from political literature dominated by odd characters: an Illusionist, a Civil Entity, a Wooden Puppet, and quiet, but dangerous Swordsmen. Acknowledgements for this lavish political allegory include an award at Animateka 2011.
In his film diary Archeo 29, Vladislav Knežević shows the final seconds before the eruption of a global crisis, the silence before the 1929 explosion. Exploring pressing issues, the film has been screened at various film festivals, including Jihlava and Lille.
Presenting the Lapp Connected Award to Pinball by Darko Vidačković, the Stuttgart festival jury said: The film impressively connects movement and mobility with the aspects of transportation and technology, showing the complex circumstances of our technological century. Pinball was also screened at DOK Leipzig, Encounters, Bradford, and London.
Made by Veljko Popović, Dove sei, amor mio is a little collage of an old lady’s daily routine, gradually revealing strange details of her life. The film has won a number of awards, including Special Jury Mention at the Sarajevo Film Festival, and has been screened at about eighty festivals worldwide as well as numerous TV channels.
Father is an animated documentary made in collaboration between three countries and five animators: Ivan Bogdanov, Moritz Mayerhofer, Asparuh Petrov, Veljko Popović, Rositsa Raleva and Dmitry Yagodin. All five stories try to make room for an impossible dialogue between a child and a father which, although it should, never happens. Father has received more than twenty awards, including the Golden Dove Award at DOK Leipzig, and an award at the Giffoni International Film Festival. In addition to TV channels such as Arte, the film has been screened at about a hundred festivals, including Annecy, Stuttgart, Hiroshima, Sao Paulo, London, and Clermont-Ferrand.
Vanja Andrijević
Dennis Tupicoff and the Big Themes of Life
Dennis Tupicoff (Australia) is a highly driven filmmaker practising a broad spectrum of animation, from fiction to documentary, from comedy to drama. He has a clearly identifiable and intense style with a determined line-work, contrasty saturated colour planes and dark shadows that immediately suggest an exhilarating climate and/or an exhilarating life. And a certain wistfulness. But also fairly monochrome wash drawings. Always provided with a strong soundtrack.
Chronologically, the retrospective programme runs from sharp satire of tasteless television (Dance of Death) via autobiographical, pleasant but also disquieting childhood memories (The Darra Dogs), to a heart-rending documentary about a mother who has lost her son (His Mother’s Voice). Followed by the youth reminiscences of a dying man (Into the Dark), and finally Chainsaw, an equally hilarious and fierce drama.
Intense and committed films, emotional experiences. Presenting big themes like life (love) and death (loss) – and cardinal sins. But also providing us with the necessary humour, reflection and consolation.
For His Mother’s Voice, Tupicoff used an existing audiotape of a radio interview with a woman whose 16-year-old son was shot recently. The monologue is played twice, with completely disparate animated images: the recollections in colour and the interview itself in monochrome grey. The strength of the film is the clarity with which the woman tells her story. Without adornment or drama, we hear a tear-filled voice and the abysmal grief of a mother who has lost her son and is forced to watch her other son being torn apart by sorrow.
And then there is Chainsaw. Some cheerful sort of instruction resounds about the use of a chainsaw. Next, the stories are interwoven of the couple Frank and Ava (Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner), the invincible Australian bull Chainsaw who dies after fifteen years, and the renowned bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguin. Love and lust, deceit, testosterone and death. And the chainsaw as a metaphor.
Anet ter Horst, Holland Animation Film Festival
Shit yeah, it’s Cool
Not sure if I’d call these my favourite films but they are films that continue to resonate with me for reasons both personal (Lipsett Diaries, We Lived in Grass), and deeply silly (Little Cow, Bimbo’s Initiation, Crazy Mixed-Up Pup).
I don’t believe in a god or afterlife. This is it. I don’t subscribe any particular meaning to life. It is what is (insert your favourite Kierkegaard or Sartre quote here). Me and you spend a lot of anguished moments in search of happiness, calm, stability, self. Why? Who says we’re meant to possess them? How the heck would we even recognize them without depression, tears and chaos? Increasingly, it feels like we’re being force fitted into them by our various institutions. Gone are the days when someone was just an accepted ‘character’ or ‘eccentric’ or ‘curmudgeon’. Those descriptions have been replaced by bipolar or borderline and deemed an illness of the mind. If children appear restless at school it’s not because they’re bored out of their skulls being forced to sit at a small desk in an overcrowded room for hours while some a boring adult talks about stuff that doesn’t interest them, no, it’s because the kid has a disorder that requires chemical correction.
We don’t seem to be having fun anymore. It’s like we’re taking all this urstuff seriously. Life should be nothing more or less than a buffet of experience samplers. There might be some dishes you spurn in favour of others and that’s okay. You’ll likely grow tired of it and try something else down the road. But even if you don’t, who cares? As long as you’re not doing anyone harm, who has any right to tell you that what you’re experiencing is right or wrong. As Philip Roth wrote in I Married a Communist:
“It’s all error… there’s only error. There’s the heart of the world. Nobody finds his life. That is life.”
I read that and can almost feel the hours, days and years of accumulated stress, anxiety and tension melt and trickle down my shoulders, back and ass onto the street and into the sewers where they belong.
So, hey, sit back, breathe and try a sample of my small animation buffet.
Chris Robinson