Film and Photogravure

By animating objects I intend to acknowledge that they have a past and a present as living artifacts within contemporary society. When an animated artifact is juxtaposed with a living person through a filmic medium the effect is more pronounced. They are leveled, each becoming an image representing life, not life itself. The opposite is possible as well; the living and the object can be leveled through their immobility. An example of this can be seen in the photogravure. As the film medium levels living people with the inorganic through movement, the process of etching a photographic representation of life into a plate of copper levels them through a static material object.

Some quotes from “A Treatise on Tailors Dummies”, from Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles-

“Demiurge, that great master and artist, made matter invisible, made it disappear under the surface of life. We, on the contrary, love its creaking, its resistance, its clumsiness. We like to see behind each gesture, behind each move, its inertia, its heavy effort, its bearlike awkwardness . . . We wish to create man a second time– in the shape and semblance of a tailors dummy.”

“Who dares to think that you can play with matter, that you can shape it for a joke, that the joke will not be built in, will not eat into it like fate, like destiny? . . . You give a head of canvas and oakum an expression of anger and leave it with it, with the convulsion, the tension enclosed once and for all, with a blind fury for which there is no outlet . . .”

Some quotes from “The Poetics of Space” by Gaston Bachelard

“And so, beyond all the positive values of protection, the house we were born in becomes imbued with dream values which remain after the house is gone. Centers of boredom, centers of solitude, centers of daydream group together to constitute the oneiric house which is more lasting than the scattered memories of our birthplace.”

“As for the cellar, we shall no doubt find uses for it. It will be rationalized and its conveniences enumerated. But it is first and foremost the dark entity of the house, the one that partakes of subterranean forces. When we dream there, we are in harmony with the irrationality of the depths.”