I hadn’t come across sculptor John Frame’s animated work before so my thanks to John Burridge for the recommendation. Three Fragments of a Lost Tale is part of a larger project, The Tale of The Crippled Boy, which is described at Frame’s website. Being a collection of fragments, this film is necessarily mysterious although I seldom worry about that. One quality of animation I’ve always enjoyed is its ability to convey the disjunctions and strange atmospheres of dream states, something it often does more effectively than anything else.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Brothers Quay scarcities
• Achilles by Barry JC Purves
• The Torchbearer by Václav Svankmajer
It is precisely the ability to display dream states/sub-conscious surrealist-like fantasies/episodes that makes animation work so well in the 2010 docudrama ‘Howl’ rendering the Ginsberg poem, in part, in animated form.
PS: Happy May Day – may the disorganised, ununionised, post-fordist work force find its collective voices sooner rather than later!
And also this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSvJgRSiJSM
In the antipodes, May-Pole Day is in the shadows because of the seasons, but forgive me, l thought celebration of the May-Pole came later nearer to summer?
PS: the phallic ‘reading’ was an intriguing take.
There are many May festivities in Britain, not all of which involve poles. The poles are a common feature of May Day, however, since they (and Spring celebrations in general) allegedly go back to pagan fertility rites. May Day is also the time when the weather here has brightened enough to actually have some kind of outdoor celebration although there’s still a good chance you’d get rained on.
Thanks John for the cultural context – it reawakened dimly-lit alleyways of my mind and memories!
I was lucky enough to see the “Three Fragments” showing at the Huntington Library. I was also lucky enough to run into John at the Stanley Kubrick exhibition at LACMA yesterday. I was wearing my “Three Fragments” t-shirt, so he spotted me.
John is doing essential and mind-stretching work in the ephemeral places of surface and intersection.
Thanks for posting this!