[Frameworks] animation

[Bernard Roddy]

Eric Thiese is prepared to read about cartoons. That wasn't what attracted
me to animation. Although I enjoyed making line drawings in order to shoot
them in series, of exploring timing tests, and of implementing cut-out as a
visual means of theoriing about other things, it was Fischinger and McLaren
(and the '70s text entitled Experimental Animation by Cecile Starr and
Robert Russet) that raised the possibility of discovering something other
than cartoons to call animation - something that could be sustained in
dialogue with an "avant-garde" history (Man Ray, etc.) and take on a
lab-like quality for "experiment" in film (where the accident of chemical
reaction also seemed to belong).

When I think about it today, however, I think of "animation" as an
expression of a conception of time that is contested in Deleuze, who relies
on Bergson to cast in question this spatialization of time (in the film
strip, in a series of spatial locations). Film theory (separated from
digital or video technologies, and thus conceived effectively as "film
strip" theory, or Bolex-operation theory) is not ignored in Deleuze. In the
first pages of Cinema 1 there is reference to Muybridge and the analysis of
human or animal locomotion. But Deleuze joins Bergson in thinking that
movement is not strung out in space, that it cannot be divided but is whole
and complete at the point when it occurs.

I have recently found that it is Deleuze who best incorporates both this
early cinema (which he identifies with an early conception of time) and an
appreciation of "art house" narrative (that history of cinema we find in
Godard or Bazin, what is essentially photographic, a question of
performance, shot, location, edit). A film strip conception of the cinema
will limit itself to a philosophical question orientation on time that
leave you without any means for talking about cinema's power (in Antonioni,
for example).

And then there are the scripts clearly written with introductory philosophy
text in mind (science fiction of one kind or another), but that involve
profound compromise at the level of production, where directors hold sway,
a great deal is taken for granted (and enforced), where markets and money
decide so much. But if you were never going to be making work yourself, if
it will be theory or education in some broader sense that you will be
advancing, then the studio ethos can be sacrificed to reader of images and
the writer of theory or argument.

So, although the experience of movement has been among the interests in
"theory," one still faces the relevance of film-strip theory for the
remaining issues one might one to think about.

Bernie
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