Dimensions of Dialogue
The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer
A homage with a doll's head
The Quay brothers met Švankmajer's films in 1983 and made a short in his honour the next year, with his name in the title.
Stop-motion
Animation made by photographing objects or images one frame at a time, moving them a little between shots.
Stop-motion is best known for puppets and models, from King Kong to the films of Jan Švankmajer and the Quay brothers. In experimental film it often means rephotographing real spaces and photographs to make movement no ordinary camera could manage.
Takashi Ito builds his films from hundreds of still photographs, rephotographed under strict rules. In Spacy the camera seems to plunge endlessly through a gymnasium. In Ghost, long night exposures leave light hanging in the air.
Films to start with
In the order they were made. Runtimes are approximate.
Spacy
Seven hundred photographs of a school gymnasium, rephotographed frame by frame. The camera seems to plunge endlessly through the hall and into pictures of itself.
Still from Dimensions of Dialogue to come. Dimensions of Dialogue
Three dialogues: heads built from food and tools in the manner of Arcimboldo chew each other into identical paste, two clay lovers melt together and then fight, and two clay heads push out mismatched objects from their tongues. It won the Golden Bear for best short film at Berlin in 1983.
Still from Ghost to come. Ghost
Shot frame by frame at night, with long exposures, in the company dormitory where Ito lived. Glowing images hang in the air.
Still from The Grand Bizarre to come. The Grand Bizarre
Mack spent five years filming patterned fabrics in fifteen countries, frame by frame on a 16mm Bolex, until the cloth seems to dance. She cut it to pop songs she mostly wrote and recorded herself.
Where it led
Lines from these films into work you may already know.
Nearby
Movements, forms and techniques that share filmmakers or methods with this one.
Pixilation
Stop-motion animation with people instead of puppets: actors hold still for each frame, so they can glide, float and slide without moving their feet.
Structural film
Films whose shape is the subject: a single zoom, a rule, a rhythm of frames, set up in advance and followed through.
Surrealism
The movement launched in Paris in 1924 to free the unconscious, whose artists saw in film a machine for dreams.
Visual music
Moving abstraction composed like music, with shape, colour and rhythm in place of melody and harmony.
Experimental animation
Animation that breaks from the cartoon: new materials, new techniques, or subjects animation isn't supposed to touch.