Animating Film Theory - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 082235652X ISBN 13: 9780822356523

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2014

Synopsis

Animating Film Theory provides an enriched understanding of the relationship between two of the most unwieldy and unstable organizing concepts in cinema and media studies: animation and film theory. For the most part, animation has been excluded from the purview of film theory. The contributors to this collection consider the reasons for this marginalization while also bringing attention to key historical contributions across a wide range of animation practices, geographic and linguistic terrains, and historical periods. They delve deep into questions of how animation might best be understood, as well as how it relates to concepts such as the still, the moving image, the frame, animism, and utopia. The contributors take on the kinds of theoretical questions that have remained underexplored because, as Karen Beckman argues, scholars of cinema and media studies have allowed themselves to be constrained by too narrow a sense of what cinema is. This collection reanimates and expands film studies by taking the concept of animation seriously.

Contributors. Karen Beckman, Suzanne Buchan, Scott Bukatman, Alan Cholodenko, Yuriko Furuhata, Alexander R. Galloway, Oliver Gaycken, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Tom Gunning, Andrew R. Johnston, Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, Gertrud Koch, Thomas LaMarre, Christopher P. Lehman, Esther Leslie, John MacKay, Mihaela Mihailova, Marc Steinberg, Tess Takahashi
 

About this title

About the Author

Karen Redrobe (formerly Beckman) is the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor of Cinema and Modern Media in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis and Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism and coeditor (with Jean Ma) of Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, all also published by Duke University Press.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Animating Film Theory

By Karen Beckman

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5652-3

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix, 
Animating Film Theory: An Introduction · KAREN BECKMAN, 1, 
Part I: Time and Space, 
1 : : Animation and History · ESTHER LESLIE, 25, 
2 : : Animating the Instant: The Secret Symmetry between Animation and Photography · TOM GUNNING, 37, 
3 : : Polygraphic Photography and the Origins of 3-D Animation · ALEXANDER R. GALLOWAY, 54, 
4 : : "A Living, Developing Egg Is Present before You": Animation, Scientific Visualization, Modeling · OLIVER GAYCKEN, 68, 
Part II: Cinema and Animation, 
5 : : André Martin, Inventor of Animation Cinema: Prolegomena for a History of Terms · HERVÉ JOUBERT-LAURENCIN; TRANSLATED BY LUCY SWANSON, 85, 
6 : : "First Principles" of Animation · ALAN CHOLODENKO, 98, 
7 : : Animation, in Theory · SUZANNE BUCHAN, 111, 
Part III: The Experiment, 
8 : : Film as Experiment in Animation: Are Films Experiments on Human Beings? · GERTRUD KOCH; TRANSLATED BY DANIEL HENDRICKSON, 131, 
9 : : Frame Shot: Vertov's Ideologies of Animation · MIHAELA MIHAILOVA AND JOHN MACKAY, 145, 
10 : : Signatures of Motion: Len Lye's Scratch Films and the Energy of the Line · ANDREW R. JOHNSTON, 167, 
11 : : Animating Copies: Japanese Graphic Design, the Xerox Machine, and Walter Benjamin · YURIKO FURUHATA, 181, 
12 : : Framing the Postmodern: The Rhetoric of Animated Form in Experimental Identity-Politics Documentary Video in the 1980s and 1990s · TESS TAKAHASHI, 201, 
Part IV: Animation and the World, 
13 : : Cartoon Film Theory: Imamura Taihei on Animation, Documentary, and Photography · THOMAS LAMARRE, 221, 
14 : : African American Representation through the Combination of Live Action and Animation · CHRISTOPHER P. LEHMAN, 252, 
15 : : Animating Uncommon Life: U.S. Military Malaria Films (1942–1945) and the Pacific Theater · BISHNUPRIYA GHOSH, 264, 
16 : : Realism in the Animation Media Environment: Animation Theory from Japan · MARC STEINBERG, 287, 
17 : : Some Observations Pertaining to Cartoon Physics; or, The Cartoon Cat in the Machine · SCOTT BUKATMAN, 301, 
Bibliography, 317, 
Contributors, 337, 
Index, 343, 

CHAPTER 1

Animation and History

ESTHER LESLIE

Animation's Ahistory

Does animation have a history? Does it evolve as would any other medium that is born and grows up, all the while refining and developing its techniques? This appears to be how film developed. Film moved from the front-on static-camera view to the dollying and swooping camera eye; from black-and-white, through hand tinting, to color; from silent to noisy; and from 2-D to 3-D, while developing editing techniques and honing its acting styles. Then came the day, quite recently, when film merged, through CGI, with animation. This thing that was called film, and still is, evolves from simplicity to complexity, blaring out a narrative of progress, at least in the commercial realm. Each new film is to be bigger, better, more immersive, more expensive, more profitable, and more "life-like" (if not more realistic) than the last. The latest gambits are 3-D and HD, though they are also part of the increasing entwinement of film and animation via the digital. In its quest to be ever more real, film mobilizes the irreal arts of animation. Does animation proceed through time and technique in the same progressive way, rarely looking back? Can one tell for sure when any one animation was made? Can one date a single animation by its technique, its ideas, its structure, the quality of its coloration or film stock? Of course, it is possible to perceive celluloid's deterioration and posit oldness. Of course, the coloration or absence of color may give a clue. The technical properties of the strip along with the music and the ideas may well indicate the date when it was made. But animation is not as clear-cut as film, because in film the passing fads of a world out there impress themselves upon the medium more definitely through a technical and a social reaction. Every detail, the fashions, the hairstyles, the makeup (even if the film purports to be a historical one), the attitudes, the quality of color, the pace of the editing, the rhythms of the soundtrack, the clarity of the image, the shape of the bodily gestures, all this bears a date stamp. Film, in general, bears a rigidly progressive relationship toward both social and technical developments (though now part of that technical development has absorbed into itself the technical capacities of computer-generated animation). Film reflects its age into itself. But animation does not, or not quite so straightforwardly. It would be barely possible to place in any chronological order, in some line of responsible historical development, the myriad flimsy fragments that make up animation's legacy, for these fragments, by their very (different) nature, are so detached, reattached, and misattached from and to the world outside of them that they pose only questions, riddles, essays. Animation makes many starts. It makes many false starts. Animation starts and stops, by nature. It combines and cuts and undercuts, and reconstructs and constructs, tricks and reveals the trick and perhaps all at once. Film may do this too, but it tends to obscure the traces of the work upon it. In the mid-1930s Walter Benjamin described the output: "The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice."

Animation is too obviously manifold to set out upon a single line of development. It begins with shadow play or with thumb cinemas, with zoetropes or magic lanterns, with lightning sketches or cel animation, with hidden wheels and pulleys or with stop-motion photography. It starts and stops in many places. It is at one and the same time a beginning and a culmination. To accept a thought such as this could explain the never-flagging bounciness of Walter Ruttmann's cavorting shapes of the early 1920s. Or it could allow an understanding of why Disney's feature cartoons are reissued periodically, not as historical items but as entities to occupy the present, even if nowadays morphed into 3-D. The banal way to put this is stated by Alan Bergman, the president of the Walt Disney Studios, in a press release: "Great stories and great characters are timeless, and at Disney we're fortunate to have a treasure trove of both." In wayward terms, the sentiment taps into something of the otherworldly character of animation, which makes it truly ahistorical in relation to our world.

But this is not to say that animation always exchanges its relation to its moment for an arrival in ours. Its moment of making marks itself on the animation too, but perhaps more covertly than film's historical moment does. What does Ruttmann's outburst against Lotte Reiniger and her silhouette animation suggest about animation's particular hold on its moment of making? Reiniger animated cutouts, black delicacies set in flat fairy-tale worlds of filigreed detail. Ruttmann was a collaborator on what is now labeled the oldest surviving feature-length animation. Reiniger's fairy tale, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, was released in 1926. Ruttmann sat assembled with the other animators for the first time to watch the marked copy and is reported to have exclaimed, "What has this to do with 1923?" What did the dancing shadows, trapped in a flat world of genies and demons, caught only with sidelong glances, have to do with the spectacular collapse of the German economy in the epoch of hyperinflation? This was a time when, as Benjamin notes, "for this nation [Germany], a period of just seven years separates the introduction of the calculation with half-pfennigs (by the postal authorities in 1916) from the validity of the ten thousand mark note as the smallest currency unit in use (1923)." But Ruttmann was wrong to think that the fairy-tale film was simply at variance to the economic devastations of the epoch and only a frivolous play of paper and light. In any case, paper in those charged years of billion-mark banknotes and financial ruin was far from a frivolous topic. Perhaps indeed this animation had everything to do with the crisis years, re-presenting, in graphic form, a fading out of all life's color, a distancing from the graspable three-dimensionality of reality, the world or life as bare, a shadow of its former self. Perhaps Reiniger's animation steps toward satisfying the needs of a new audience—composed of those who Georg Simmel had earlier termed the "blasé" type of industrialized modernity, for whom overstimulation promotes a withdrawal from the distinctions between things—in order to favor that which is homogenous. Perhaps this withdrawal anticipates what Herbert Marcuse would later call the "One Dimensional Man." Arguably, Reiniger's animation dramatizes a local, historical alienation of life through mobilization of its shadow forms by unseen hands and unseen technologies. Except, sometimes, the scissors make their appearance—and they reveal the whole confection to be a dance of light and paper and agile hands. Snip snip: the film is made of cuts. The film presents, through another nature, a sidelong reflection on ours.

Perhaps it is also true that the animation had nothing specifically to do with 1923. Animation, the one by Reiniger, just like countless others, always asks the viewer to take a leap out of now, out of physics, out of time, out of this world, in short, a leap of faith, to don the seven-league boots of folklore and replace the substance with the silhouette, the shadow. Animation is not a depiction of a recognizable world. The mission of animation is often to tarry with the shadow side, the "night side of nature," that obscured realm in which all unexplained and magical, illogical events occur. Animation goes, in all its superficiality, deeply into the substance of being, the hidden realms, the crevices beneath usual exposure, the constructions and reconstructions. Animation as the visualization of the shadow side is also an allegory of filmic actuality, albeit a truth that film most usually works to obscure. For film, the secret must be maintained: film asks viewers to believe in those shadows cavorting in two dimensions on the flat screen in the "kingdom of shadows," who all too often seem to live for us. Film is the unknowing suspension of disbelief in stand-ins, doppelgangers, avatars, things that only pretend to be real, full-blooded, breathing, but are in fact chemical confections, celluloid compositions. Which is also to say, film is and has always been just a subset of animation—in contrast to how critics presented the relation—if animation is understood to be the inputting of life, or the inputting of the illusion of life, into that which is flat or inert or a model or an image. Reiniger, intentionally or not, made an emblem of this spectacularity, in a cine-world that was also incidentally—with the victories of the culture industry—flattening out into platitudes, façades, surfaces, and flimsiness. In giving the shadows delicate life, she made a virtue of film's flimsy flattening, decried its dull mimetics, and opened it, through animation, onto fantastic speculation and the possibility of revelation.

Telling Fairy Tales

In "Better Castles in the Sky," an essay from 1959 in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, Ernst Bloch wrote of how clouds are a "fairy tale qualit[y] of nature." They are, so think children, "distant mountains," entities in "a towering and wonderful foreign land above our heads," a Switzerland in the sky. The cloud is not only a "castle or ice-mountain to the fairy tale gaze." It is also an "island in the sea of heaven or a ship, and the blue skies on which it sails resemble the ocean." In the child's mind, the fluffy clouds turn into solid mountains. The airy blue sky is imagination's watery sea. The heavens are like a mirror, reflecting the Earth's inversion. All this transformation is a fundamentally animational principle. And so, if down below on earth is the world of body and action, then up there above is the world of mind, thought, imagination, and other histories, including better ones. Clouds are the fuzzy matter of utopian speculation for Bloch. They are moving screens onto which can be projected a revolutionary "not yet," the contents of an unbounded "anticipatory consciousness." This anticipatory consciousness as cloud is the antithesis of the clouds that Leni Riefenstahl allows to frame Hitler in Triumph of the Will (1935). These filmic clouds are the backdrop for one who is to be seen as a new god come down to earth from his airplane. The nebulous clouds of blue-sky thinking are also unlike the swastika-shaped clouds of Nutzi Land, projected by Disney in Der Fuehrer's Face (1942). But these Nutzi clouds, in their twisting of nature into political form, do illustrate an astute recognition that even, or especially, nature is not immune from the fascist colonizing impulse. The cloudscape, castles and mountains in the sky, the crystals of ice that make up those clouds—these are the indistinct, magical, fuzzy places of waiting and longing. For Bloch, the vague awareness of a liberated life that blurrily takes shape in our daydreams is a stimulus for the real-world political action that seeks to fix the wishes. In his revolutionary eschatology, the clouds themselves are to be brought back down to earth. Our new, improved selves, lives, and political arrangements will roll in from the clouds and lodge on our ground—and not as Hitler's airplane does, as spectacle. Animation is the medium that allows for a dramatization of a skirmish with nature. This skirmish is not the fascistic one of subjugation. It is rather a wrestling with what is natural about nature, and what is historical, which is to say, changeable, about it. In the cartoon world, people, buildings, cars, and other inanimate objects swell suddenly, or run away, talk and leap, fly and fall without pain. Cartoons and trick films produced to entertain the city hoards were experimental and crazy from the start, using cinematic tricks and visual gags that defied logic. It was all these aspects of transformation, transmutation, alogicality, antiphysics, and nonrealism that appealed to the many intellectuals and artists—Dadaists and revolutionaries in Europe foremost among them—who fell in love with cartoon product and the outputs of American popular modernity in the first half of the twentieth century. Early comic strips and young animation processes broke open the self-understanding of the image, fracturing it into absurdism. In the cartoon world, all the laws of physics are defied or mocked. Even physics—the science of physical experience in the world—is made provisional. In animated nature, technology and magic are one.

The animated world is one in which nature is remolded, made different. Cartoons, modernized versions of folk and fairy tales, mobilize this nature in their presentation of overlively objects, or cows that turn into musical boxes, skirts that become parachutes when needed, or church steeples that crunch themselves up so that the crazy plane can avoid crashing into it with Mickey and Minnie Mouse on board. Animation reminds us of the life in other things that is like and unlike the life in us. Taken as a document of utopian thinking, animation shows a nature that is reformulated according to imagination and social prompts from a world that could one day and in some form become ours. This animated nature may assume any form and usually does in its presentation of hybrids of human and animal, coagulations of machineries and bodies, scenarios in which natural law is overturned or maliciously asserted. As the expressionist director Paul Wegener put it in 1916 in a lecture attended by Reiniger, the aim for "absolute cinema," an exploratory cinema beyond the subtheatrical version that threatened to dominate, was "a kind of cinema which would use nothing but moving surfaces, against which there would impinge events that would still participate in the natural world but transcend the lines and volumes of the natural." Animation appeared to fulfill this cultured wish.

Animation depicts a nature that is hybridized: speaking animals, flowers that blush, fruits that ripen in the blink of an eye, people who shrink and twist and deform and swell. Animation's nature does not obey the laws of physics. Rain may fall upward. The sun may smile. But sometimes it is also just nature—redrawn and conceptualized, but mediated, with just a heightened element of drama, a potential that borders on the animistic. A shorthand version of such a definition of animation claims that animation is, in the phrases coined by Benjamin to describe the reproduced and constructed worlds of photography and film, "eine andere Natur" (different nature), an other nature. Animation is "different nature" because its nature is of a different kind to the one we inhabit, and yet it is not distinct from it. Animation presents a parallel world. It presents a nature recognizable to us processed through concept, imagination, and technology. It is our nature returned back to us through mediations. Animated nature's otherness is, by and large, not one of absolute difference. Instead it is an alternativity. Animation's objects and images, drawn or modeled, are motile, flexible, open to possibility, and able to extend in any direction and undertake any action or none. Animation does not depict antinature, but "other nature," which might indeed be the noninstrumentalized nature that we would commune with, were we not so far along the route to ecological disaster. Animation's animistic approach to its objects awakens life and voice in stilled and silenced objects. It reinvents not only nature but our relationship with nature. It is therapeutic and utterly necessary. In "Experience and Poverty," from 1933, Benjamin indicates Mickey Mouse's ability to embody utopian aspiration for a technology-ravaged, yet technology-dependent, populace. The existence of Mickey Mouse is labeled by Benjamin a dream for today's people. Mickey Mouse's existence is full of miracles, and these miracles outdo technical wonders, and satirize them too. In Benjamin's view, Mickey Mouse enacts the wish for a harmonious reconciliation of technology and nature. The wish is born of an age in which technological change threatens to destabilize the existence of nature, including humans, and destroy all in spectacular acts of annihilation. But the compassionate union of technology and nature must be banished to the dreamtime world of comics and cinema, where machinery entertains and consoles humans, just as it dissects and recomposes images of humans, and the rest of the object and natural world. In the noncinematic world of industrial capitalism, technology and nature (in other words, machinery and humans) pursue different ends, are vectors of abuse and exploitation.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 082235652X
• ISBN 13: 9780822356523
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 376
• Editor: Redrobe Karen