Archives & Animators; Technology & Totem Poles

I recently attended ‘The Animator’, a conference held this June in Toronto at Corus Entertainment and Sheridan College, which threw up some interesting recurring themes and motifs across the various keynotes, panel presentations and screenings (as will be the case in any good conference) and I thought I'd take the opportunity of this post to reflect on some of these ideas. Don't expect anything tremendously conclusive, however. The event was a convergence point between several institutions and events at once; the aforementioned Sheridan College and Corus Entertainment, TAAFI (the Toronto Animation Arts Festival International), the centenary of Norman McLaren (the National Film Board of Canada’s most important animation figure) and the Society for Animation Studies’ annual conference.

As a child of the VHS generation I have no problem admitting to a collector mentality. Although many of the students I teach (and one or two people my own age) experience film and animation almost exclusively through streaming or downloading, I just can't help feeling a desperate desire to own something if I really like it or find it interesting. Just having access to it through the internet isn't enough – I can even be struck by a kind of OCD ‘collector anxiety’ if I find something that, for one reason or other, I just can’t own in some way. I actually avoid watching some online material through fear that I’ll like it, but be unable to buy it. And so one of the themes that ran through the conference, the loss and/or preservation of material, struck a definite chord for me. The inimitable Paul Wells discussed the sheer amount of production material that animation studios/companies simply throw out or destroy as a result of space limitations. This includes preproduction sketches, character concept art, storyboards and even maquettes and sets in stop-motion productions. Wells and his colleagues have taken it upon themselves – within the UK at least – to gather up and preserve as much of this material as possible.

The theme of preservation continued through to the end of the conference, where we were lucky enough to be shown the ‘pre-world premier’ screening of Norman McLaren's stereoscopic films. The films were highly impressive works of early 3D animation but, amazingly, the images were hand drawn and, as with many McLaren works, actually drawn directly on to the celluloid. How one sits down in 1951 and works out how to draw lines on a tiny cel the size of a postage stamp and make them three-dimensional in projection is beyond me. These short animations had long since slipped into obscurity and were even feared lost altogether, but thanks to the wonders of digital media, the restoration and preservation of this incredible material was possible.

Despite the ability of digital technology to rescue these films, another tendency that ran through the conference was a trepidation about just what gets lost in the new digital world. Vera Brosgol, a very lovely storyboard artist for Laika, stores her material (sketches and complete storyboards) digitally but admitted that much of the work that she produced for Coraline had drifted into obscurity, because she needed the room on her hard drive. While on the one hand, this seems exactly the same situation as with the physical materials that companies feel they must throw out for the sake of space, the difference is that there is no digital equivalent of Paul Wells to turn up and take it away to a safe haven. Digital material, once deleted, stays deleted.

Another, slightly more aggressive, attitude towards digital – and the changes it brings – also became apparent through the conference. Although there were several borderline vitriolic opinions expressed, most relevant for this discussion were the thoughts on how digital impacts upon storyboards and another similar art-form, the comic. David Sweeney argued that the problem with a digital comic is that the defining quality of sequential art (the fact that the images co-exist on the page and don't simply replace one another in a continuous stream), is lost in the process of adapting them into the partially-animated Motion Comic format. Chris Pallant mentioned a similar development in the way in which storyboards are used within the production process. While in the days of paper storyboards, the images were posted up on the wall and could be rearranged as story meeting progressed and, most importantly, seen at the same time, allowing for a better understanding of story flow. But now, at some studios at least, the storyboard has become an entirely digital process. Images are drawn directly into the computer by hand and then discussed one at a time, eliminating the dynamic flow between the images that the analogue process allows.

Thus, on one hand the risk of material taking up too much room and being destroyed or discarded is greatly reduced through the digital production process, yet at the same time, the way in which this material is used in production becomes altered and the risk of art being deleted forever is increased.

Listening to Vera Brosgol and speak and show us some of her artwork also heightened my collector anxiety. The material that we were shown (both her own and that of others) was fascinating but, even in the era of DVD and Blu-Ray extras, would mostly sit in obscurity seen only by a very tiny minority. One of my (many) fascinations with animation as a medium is the fact that – moreso than live-action film – every piece of work produced during the production process can be seen as a work of art in its own right. Every character concept, used and unused, each storyboard page, each colour chart, every piece of background art, not to mention the huge amount of hand-drawings, maquettes, real and virtual models and armatures, etc., that actually produce the moving character on screen can all be regarded as works with their own artistic merit (as far as I'm concerned). And for me, the tragedy is that you can't own this stuff! Even when 'Making of' featurettes on DVDs or 'Art of' books can give you a lot of material, it is impossible to get it all.

Of course, arguably, you could have access to it all, if a digital archive of it all were to be made. I was happy to find (albeit in low-quality) Vera Brosgol's graduation short Snow-bo on youtube, as well as many other graduate films from Toronto's Sheridan College and the world-famous Disney-founded CalArts. The earliest work of people like Tim Burton or Chris Sanders is available to see online even if it is nearly impossible to find a physical copy. This is the benefit of digital media like the internet, and I have to grudgingly admit the superiority of the internet to physical artefacts like discs and books; the sheer amount of material that one can find – if one knows where to look.

Most academic work focuses its energy on analysing and unpacking 'professional' work. Film and Animation Studies are concerned with texts that are available to most people, not least of all because your brilliant insights into a particular film will be lost on everyone if you're the only person who has seen the film in question. But does this mean that the vast mountain of work produced by amateurs and students – a lot of which is accessible to all – shouldn't be studied? If I want to tell my students about the importance of metamorphosis to animation, do I have to limit my examples to the Fleischer Brothers' masterpieces, or can I demonstrate the exact same principles by showing some of the brilliant student work that was screened for us at Sheridan College? On one level, the answer to the question is: stick with the Fleischers. Partly, this is because it is very easy for me to find many articles on the Fleischer cartoons that I can support my claims with.

Academia is, of course, a reliant activity – doubly so for Film and Animation Studies. We have to draw upon the insights of other academics in order to ground our own thoughts, but we also require artists to produce work in order for us to have anything to talk about. Paul Wells (who gets in everywhere) also suggested that the relationship between theory and practice in animation studies was one of dismissiveness and superiority. While theory regards itself as an intellectual pursuit, it also regards the actual practice of animation making as somehow a lesser activity, something that doesn't require the same kind of critical thinking or evaluative understanding. This, Wells says, is nonsense. The act of creativity is by its very nature one of self-reflexive consideration, of critical evaluation of its own processes. Theory needs to better understand its relationship to, and evaluation of, the practical processes of animation. Another reason my hands are tied in showing the Sheridan students' work is because, unless the student has uploaded their work online and (even more importantly) I can remember the student's name, how will I access the material to show my own students?

'Professionalism' functions a little like a gatekeeper – if a work has been produced by a studio, we can at least assume confidently that the work will possess certain levels of competence and artistic merit (when looking at the craft of animation, I mean – the finished film might be pretty bad). And work produced professionally is more likely to exist as a ‘product’ that can be owned. Work produced by an individual in their bedroom or as part of an educational institution does not come with the same kind of guarantees. How do we as consumers (not just academics but anyone interested in animation) trawl through the average and forgettable in order to reach the gold that some artists are able to produce? At the moment, there is no particularly workable answer. There is no online system that allows for the hierarchical arrangement of students' work. You cannot type 'best cartoons to come out of Sheridan' into youtube and hope for a legitimate result. And so it seems unlikely that any animation scholar will write a piece analysing any of the great pieces of animation that I saw while in Toronto.

On the final day of the conference I had the good fortune to begin talking with a group of the conference volunteers, who were all animation students at Sheridan. Although there were several more panels during the course of the day, I ended up missing them in favour of spending time with these Animators of Tomorrow. I was struck even more so than before at the sheer amount of creativity and material that these animators produced all of the time, from sketches, to paintings, from character design to full animation. My collector anxiety went into meltdown as we toured the College and saw all of the material produced by students of all ages and stages of development. Though I did take a couple of (poor quality) photos, the fact is that I saw many, many images that were beautiful and I'm absolutely certain I will never see again. Not just because I can't own them, but because I also have no method of accessing it online even if it is up on deviantart or youtube. The tragic ephemeral nature of animation is that 95% of the art that goes into it disappears, if not deleted forever, and then gets lost in the vast ocean of amateur material on the internet.

Probably the most memorable of these Sheridan students was Coco Cheung, not least of all because she spent the final day, for no discernible reason, dressed as a totem pole. I spent much of my time with her, discussing her desire to make character maquettes for stop-motion animation (and being told, in no uncertain terms, that having a PhD does not make me a “real” doctor), and it is from her I will take the totem pole analogy that will form my conclusion. Or, more accurately, my “conclusion”.

Coco Cheung (by Coco Cheung) flying through the internet on her totem pole trainers

Academia functions as the top figure on a totem pole; not only does this nicely reflect the ‘ivory tower’ mentality that we all slip into at some time or another, but it also demonstrates the reliance that we have on the work of others. Below academia sits the professional finished products – shorts and feature films by Dreamworks, Laika, Disney and so on – that are our bread and butter, without which we would just fall down to the ground. Below this is the development and production materials; the concept art, storyboards, maquettes and cels, which exist as distinct artworks from the films that they ultimately produce. Below this is the personal or amateur work of individuals within the animation institution (both the business and education sectors) – here we find Brosgol’s Snow-bo, the caricatures produced by Disney animators during slow days, the maquettes and sketches that we glimpsed while touring Sheridan. While in a perfect world we would be able to see all of this totem pole and appreciate each of its figures on their own merits and in relation to one another, at this exact moment in time it has sunk down into the mud, almost to the halfway point. Academia and professionally produced animation are still sitting pretty without much problem, but the production materials are slowly sinking out of sight, only glimpsed in DVD extras, and the personal material has completely vanished below. The internet has led to the creation of small tunnels, allowing access to tiny portions of this bottom figure, but the mud keeps obscuring our view (yes, the mud is an analogy for all of the mediocre amateur animation on the web – sorry). What we need is a serious excavation project – something akin to Wells’ efforts on a global scale – that can reveal the entirety of the totem pole for all to see. If the majority of audiences are only interested in the second figure down, so be it, but we should have the option to explore the bottom figures and – maybe one day – create a link between the top and foundational figures, between academia and the personal material produced by highly talented individuals.

For the interested, here are some links to the work of the students that I met:

Coco 'the Human Totem Pole' Cheung: http://cy1115.blogspot.co.uk/ 

Her sister Crystal Cheung: http://liyuconberma.deviantart.com/ 

Arthur Lim Banes: http://arthurbanes.tumblr.com/ 

Anna Starkova: http://annathegallant.blogspot.ca/ 

And to cover all of those whom I met but didn't retain their names, here's the general link to Sheridan College's students: http://sheridananimation.blogspot.co.uk/2007/09/links-to-student-work.html 

                                                                                                          - P.S.

Luis Bunuel: Playing God

This is the first of three posts exploring the extremes of Luis Bunuel’s authorship, claiming that he takes control over the film world to the point of personal manipulation and casts himself in the role of God in the diegesis of his cinema. It was originally written as an undergraduate essay and so is perhaps a little grandiose in its claims...

I. GENESIS

According to Auteur Theory, the form and content of a film should be regarded as predominantly originating from the director. Though film production is of course a collaborative process, and a myriad of contributions from various parties is obvious, it is the director who has the final say in how these contributions may be cohered and therefore is responsible for the ultimate result. However, the theory goes beyond simply final say; the director – if he is to be truly considered an Auteur, the author of the film – must also bring a personal touch to it. A director such as Ron Howard, though clearly gifted at the craft of filmmaking, cannot be considered an Auteur as he is essentially invisible. On the other hand, we are never allowed to forget that Quentin Tarantino is man behind the camera in his films. Along with other famous examples, such as Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Bunuel stands as a prime example of Auteurism at work.

Bunuel’s cinema is peppered with his own private obsessions and preoccupations, each film developing on the themes and issues of the last, each one another chapter in the ongoing Book of Bunuel. Yet with Bunuel, perhaps uniquely, this can be taken to an even further extreme. His films do not just bear the mark of their director, their director actively moulds them. He aggressively takes part in their unfolding stories, interfering with the diegesis and ‘playing God’ with the lives of his characters, often placing them in situations that they would not normally be without his manipulation.

In Bunuel’s first two films – in collaboration with Salvador Dali – Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or, we can find examples of this god-like control over his cinematic kingdom. The first film, less a debut than a cinematic Big Bang, is an act of creation of something completely new out of the ashes of the old. Playing with the cinematic conventions of Classical Hollywood, which place great emphasis on continuity, Un Chien Andalou offers us up an alternative – a totally cinematic universe dictated by the whims of medium and artist than by the replication of the real world that we know. Opening with the cliché ‘Once Upon A Time...’, the audience is lulled into a false sense of familiarity which is soon replaced by a sense of apprehension as it is followed by a shot of Bunuel himself sharpening a razor blade.

The sinister quality of the action aside, the significance of Bunuel appearing within the opening few seconds of his first film is huge. Much more than simply a Hitchcockian device of humorous self-insertion designed to create a personality cult of the director, Bunuel’s appearance and subsequent action is the act of creation itself. In the beginning was God, and then He created the world. As the director moves over to a seated lady and opens her eye with thumb and forefinger, the camera cuts into an extreme close-up of an eye, just as it is sliced open by the razor. Here, we are being allowed to witness the act of creation, to see God use His phallic implement of the razor to slice open the eyes of the audience and allow his own distinctive world of cinematic possibility to come pouring out onto the screen.

Un Chien Andalou is much written about, but often it appears with the wrong frame of mind. Gwynne Edwards tries to analyse the film in great detail but is unable to let go of the traditional filmic conventions and presentations and thus almost tries to justify the film as a ‘normal’ story being told unusually. He discusses the characters’ “inner workings of mind exteriorised”[1] and refers to the appearance of the strict doppelganger as “though the thoughts of the young man are regressing in time”[2] – implying that the double is only present as a symbolic expression of the mind of the original.

This interpretation is too narrow for a film such as Un Chien Andalou or L’Age d’Or as it assumes that only the cinematic presentation of ideas is revolutionary, not the filmic reality in which these ideas occur. We must view the film and accept what is shown to us at face value, to see it as an entirely new kind of cinema, not simply the old cinema dressed up in new techniques. On the BFI DVD of the films, Robert Short states in the commentary that the film “substitutes alternative patterns of ordering for the conventional ones that it subverts”[3] – but this is more than simply editing or narrative patterns, it is the pattern of reality as shaped by the cinema. We should study and understand these films in the context of these new patterns and new diegetic worlds that they create.

Indeed, it is not just that Bunuel creates these cinematic universes, but that he has an active part in their development, controlling and manipulating events as he sees fit rather than allowing diegetic events to unfold as they would have without him. In Un Chien Andalou the central figure finds himself in two places at the same time. While Edwards considers the second to be a symbolic doppelganger, we can instead take him as a literal doubling-up of one character; time and space are rearranged and reconstituted to suit Bunuel’s will. Likewise, in the opening of L’Age d’Or we find a group of Bishops sat praying on a rocky out-crop by the shore. Later in the film, a large crowd of people in modern dress moor their boats and head to the spot where the Bishops – identified as ‘the Majorcans’ – are now just skeletons sat upright in their praying positions. The crowd offers their respect and then lays a commemorative stone, reading ‘1930 AD. This stone, on the site where the Majorcans died marks the founding of the city of Imperial Rome’. We then cut to an aerial shot of Rome in all of its glory.

Temporally, these events are impossible to understand in logical cause-and-effect terms and there is little to support reading the events as being an expression of some subjective or symbolic state. The centre of the Catholic Church is founded upon the final resting spot of a group of Catholic Bishops – and this does not occur until as late as 1930, meaning that the apparent ellipses between the commemorative stone and ‘modern Rome’ in fact covers no time at all (indeed, one character is frogmarched off away from the site of the skeletons and led through the streets of the city). The foundation of Rome exists simultaneously as a past, present and future event. This destabilisation of the establishment of the Catholic religion is both a satirical comment being made by Bunuel outside of the diegesis, but also figures to ingrain him as a component within the diegesis; Bunuel-as-God exists in the story-world and this strange ouroborous-like faith that ‘begins once it has already existed’ functions as an appropriate form of worship for such a roguish deity.

Of course it is true that these first two films were – technically – in collaboration with Salvador Dali. I say ‘technically’ as it is generally accepted that Dali had little to do with L’Age d’Or beyond a few striking images that he would later resurrect in his own surrealist paintings. Can Auteurism, in particular the extreme variant that I am proposing here, accommodate collaboration? Can Bunuel really be the omnipotent manipulative God of the diegesis if we cannot pinpoint exactly which moment was Bunuel’s idea and what was Dali’s? My ‘get-out’ clause is a simple one: Bunuel’s auteurism shifted from polytheism to monotheism during the making of L’Age d’Or. While the world of Un Chien Andalou is in equal part the product of Bunuel and Dali’s collective imagination, when they began to fall out during the production of L’Age d’Or Bunuel essentially triggered Ragnarok – a war between the gods – and ousted Dali from the pantheon. The diegesis of the latter film still displays hallmarks of its co-creator Dali, but the control of its places, people and events belongs squarely to Bunuel.

The next post will turn its attention to the films that Bunuel made in Mexico – in particular Nazarin and The Exterminating Angel – to demonstrate how the director manipulated the events of his films in a fashion that drew attention to his role as omnipotent God. 

                                                                                                  - P. S.

---

[1] Edwards, Gwynne – The Discreet Art Of Luis Bunuel, Marion Boyars, 1982, p. 70

[2] Edwards, 1982, p. 52

[3] Short, 2004

Essay Advice For Undergraduates

This advice is aimed at students just beginning their undergraduate degrees in Film Studies. Though many of the points might seem rather obvious, these have been the most common issues that I’ve come across having marked many undergrad essays over the last few years. The advice is designed purely as that; this is in no way a guaranteed recipe for academic success, but rather a few comments based upon the recurring problems I see in the work I mark, and more or less how I approached this kind of work when I was an undergrad (and, all things considered, I did alright). I'm going to use an example essay question entitled ‘Describe Some Of The Functions Of Editing In The Films Of Jan Svankmajer’. I’ve done this in the hope that there isn’t a real essay question out there that I'm going to be giving answers away to. If you don’t know who Jan Svankmajer is, don’t worry, I'm only going to refer to this fictional essay question as demonstration.

Structuring

Let’s assume you have an essay of 2500 words. My personal advice is to be simplistic and anal about breaking it down into even chunks. Let’s say 500 words can form both your introduction and conclusion (in themselves, they are basically summaries that read along the lines of ‘this is what I'm going to look at and why it’s important’ and ‘this is what I have looked at, and it proves my point nicely’). This leaves you 2000 words to break down into 4 points. Some essay word counts will be shorter, some will be longer – but the key here is to try and divide the essay into a few points (generally 3 to 5 is enough) of more or less equal length. You don’t need to be so rigid when you actually write it –some points will warrant more words, others less. It’s a guide to make sure you don’t fall too short of the word count or go massively over. I can assure you in no uncertain terms that, even if you say you’ve written the correct word count, we can tell by looking if it’s not (we have some 30 other essays on our desk that we can compare yours with, after all).

Try to think about each of your points as a sub-question and take 500 words to try and answer it. This way, all your points have a purpose in the overall argument. In our Svankmajer example, for instance, we could structure it in one of two ways; either by looking at four films and discussing the editing in each, or by looking at different approaches to editing exploring how his films fit into these categories. I'm going to go with the latter. So my first section will look at continuity editing, perhaps asking something along the lines of ‘does Svankmajer use much continuity editing in his films, and if so, to what end?’ The sub-questions don’t need to be ground-breaking, they’re purely for you to help you focus your attention; you won’t keep them in the text of the finished essay. So, I will then identify moments of continuity editing in his films and discuss the relevance – for instance, Picnic With Weissman uses establishing shots in order to link the otherwise disparate events going on. This creates a sense of unity between the different areas of action even though they rarely overlap with each other directly. I might then look at the possible influence of Soviet Montage on the films’ editing (Svanmajer made films in Communist Czechoslovakia so the influence is quite probable). I can then discuss moments when two images are edited together to create particular mental association that are unrelated to the spatio-temporal unity of continuity editing. I might then talk about the rhythm of Svankmajer’s editing, its relationship to the music score, or maybe the fact that as stop-motion animation, his films are edited on a micro-level of the frame-by-frame process. The actual specifics are unimportant. What is important is that each point builds upon the last, that I don’t simply repeat myself as I work through these different editing modes.

Description And Analysis

Undergraduate essays have a tendency to conflate these two concepts and it is important that you understand the difference between the two - and what their relationship is. Description is a necessary part of the process; you always need to be sure that whoever is reading the piece knows what specific sequence you are looking at. But description is only the ground floor. You describe all of the pertinent details that you need to in order to make sure that the reader is on the same page as you, but then you move on to analysing them. Your description of the framing of a sequence should be in service of analysing the purpose and function of the framing in the particular sequence (who’s in the frame, who isn’t, how does this steer our understanding of the shot?). But likewise, analysis doesn’t work without description. Many an essay has been written that leaps straight into analysis without providing any kind of context – the person marking the essay will most likely have seen the film you’re writing about, but they won’t know what moment you’re discussing unless you tell them.

Incorporating Other Peoples’ Work

First year degree students tend to slip into two camps when it comes to using references; either, you quickly find a bunch of quotes that agree with what you’re saying and stick them in, or, you intentionally set out to disprove or disagree with an existing position. While both of these approaches are perfectly valid in terms of the overall academic practice of essay/article writing, it’s not the best way to start out with your first few essays. The former approach can look simplistic and give the impression that all you’ve done is scour books for quotes, rather than actually reading anything. The latter is unadvised on the basis that, as an undergrad, you’re highly unlikely to be able to mount a particularly convincing argument – you end up looking arrogant if you criticise a well respected academic with a poorly conceived criticism. The best approach is to summarise and incorporate: read an article or chapter, make sure you’ve understood the position and argument of the piece, then put forward that argument in a succinct paragraph. This paragraph then becomes a linking point in your overall argument. For instance, we can look in the Peter Hames edited collection Dark Alchemy: The Films Of Jan Svankmajer and read articles by Michael O'Pray and Roger Cardinal. Summarise the gist of what each author is claiming and spend no more than a couple of sentences on each. Do they agree or disagree with each other in any significant way? Where does your own claim sit in relation to their ideas? The point here is to demonstrate that you get what they're saying, but don't spend any more time on them than necessary. The fear for most students is that this approach will get them in trouble with plagiarism. As long as you make it quite clear which ideas are yours and which ideas are taken from another source, then you shouldn’t have any problems.

An Essay Is Not A Review

Though it might pain many of you to accept it, the fact is that we really don’t care much about your opinion of a film. Unless the question is very specifically asking you to evaluate a film (which is rare), you should always avoid telling us what you personally thought about it. There are a great many platforms from which to voice your personal opinion about a film; from blogs, message boards, youtube videos, or just ranting with your mates down the pub. An academic essay, however, is not the place for it. Of course, the way you personally perceive a film will affect the way you approach the particular question, a certain degree of subjectivity is unavoidable. But what you need to make sure to avoid is the attitude of ‘I loved it, so it must be good’, or the more common and infinitely worse ‘I hated it, so it must be bad’.

What makes a film student different from a film fan or film critic is that you need to have a wide and varied appreciation of all modes of film; outside of your own comfort zone of the films you happen to enjoy watching. For many film students, this is the major learning curve of the degree. You are not being asked to evaluate a film, you are being asked to identify certain pertinent details about a film, extract them and interrogate them in order to enhance our understanding of the film. Indeed, you (or your parents, or the government on the understanding that you’ll pay them back) are paying a huge amount of money to come to University and study film; there’s precious little benefit in just coming and doing exactly what you’d do coming out of the cinema on a Saturday night. You can hate Citizen Kane with the fiery passion of Hell, which is perfectly fine from the point of view that every person is free to their personal preference. But a film like Citizen Kane doesn’t achieve its status by accident. People didn’t sit around a table, randomly pulling film titles out of a hat in order to decide which are the most important cinematic works. Even though you might hate it, as a film student, you need to be able to identify the film’s achievements – if you can’t see them, you’re probably taking the wrong degree.

Finally, it is important to always be clear on what the essay question is asking you to do. Our example here is a pretty straightforward and open one, but other questions can be quite specific in what they're after. If the question is 'How is Psycho a prime example of Classical Hollywood Storytelling?' don't spend your time talking about Hitchcock's other films or the avant garde film movement of the 1920s. Demonstrate your knowledge of Psycho and the narrative devices of the Classical Hollywood period. It might seem painfully obvious, but there are always students that just don't seem to pay any attention to what is being asked of them. Don't be one of them!

                                                                                                                                     - P. S.