“Men of good fortune often cause empires to fall,
While men of poor beginnings often can’t do anything at all“
Lou Reed: ‘Men Of Good Fortune’
“Black is black, I want my baby back
Grey is grey, since she went away“
George EliGene Pitney: ‘Black Is Black’
Meh…. Gene Pitney maybe not so much. And in fact it was a myth that Pitney actually sang this anyway, it was recorded by Los Bravos whose lead singer just sounded so much like Pitney that everybody assumed it was him.
But if black IS black how dark can it get? Try VANTA black!
“The original Vantablack coating was grown from a chemical vapour deposition process (CVD) and is claimed to be the ‘world’s darkest material’ absorbing up to 99.965% of visible light measured perpendicular to the material. The coatings are unique in that they are super-black and retain uniform light absorption from almost all viewing angles.” Thanks Wikipedia – you nailed it again. Translation…. light goes in, nothing comes out. Humans don’t see what’s there (that would be radar), we receive light that reflects off things and then translate that into an understanding of what’s there. Thus, no light reflecting back to us means we can’t see ‘it’ even though it’s right in front of us. Black is black – THAT is ‘Into The Dark’
Any life, any situation, any endeavour can ‘turn on a dime’, as our American friends are sometimes inclined to say (they’re probably experiencing a bit of an uptick in that sentiment in recent weeks). There is an all-too-common human propensity to seek out and construct options that reflect the darker end of the spectrum. Perhaps it represents an evolutionary trait that prioritises those that are able to quickly imagine and react to the worst possible outcome in any given situation.
Then there is just the ‘dark heart’ – the soul that prospers in the bleak and gloomy spaces that occupy the gaps in our world. And, for better or for worse, artists are supremely qualified to find, describe and amplify those darkened hues. Musicians and songwriters have long been marshalling these dark angels whether for entertainment or therapy. Those of a certain age need only hear the word ‘Nirvana’ to instantly conjure up an almost primeval sense of spiritual render. How many paintings and poems have travelled the same darkened paths, crossing bridges of no return as they did so.
“Why is Nirvana considered one of greatest rock acts of all time? All I get from them is angry liberal vitriol energy and bitter repetition over low fi tuning. Am I not getting it?” questioned one searcher on one of a million blogs. “You just answered your own question” was the almost instant retort, stating the obvious but not inclined to burning too much time digging any deeper into the emotional tarpit that eventually drew in so many of the roaming emotions that fuelled the perpetual motion machine that fed the furnaces that maintained the bleak heat in the centre of their music.
You didn’t have to be pounding post-punk rockers to chase the vibe either. Most people write off the ultra-pop tuning and super-saccharine arrangements of The Carpenters without really listening to the lyrics….. “I’ll say goodbye to love; No one ever cared if I should live or die” zinged out of the radio sweet, clean and clear, its devastating cri-de-coeur hiding in plain sight. The ultimate exit doors for Karen and Kurt – separated by more than just a generation – weren’t ultimately that different.
Poets and writers have, of course, revelled in the grim celebration of humanity’s dark heart. And the ones that took it seriously tended to take it very seriously. Shakespeare tried to measure the rottenness in the state of Denmark and couldn’t find the bottom. Conrad gave us – simply, and in the end – “the horror…. the horror”. Brando – lost in his own personal downward spiralling apex of misery and madness – turned those two words into a single image that will stand as the truest depictor of ‘the horror’ for a long, long time.
That jovial joker and juggler of words, the Marquise de Sade, gifted us a novel of such wretched infamy (“120 Days Of Sodom”) that even he described as “the most impure tale ever written”. Of course, he spent most of his life locked up in jails and asylums so that would colour anybody’s world view. His legacy in the vernacular of even our day lives on, held tight as the inspiration for the word ‘sadism’.
William Burroughs, arguably the most notorious of the Beat writers, lived decades in exile away from the United States and Mexico. He didn’t particularly enjoy North America anyway, found it easier to procure and use drugs in his various European and North African redoubts but also had some concerns about the lingering consequences of having accidentally (or perhaps more accurately, unintentionally) killing his wife while practicing his William Tell chops with a small drinking glass and a really big handgun. Bill was out checking his parking meter when they were handing out the ‘normal’ so he kicked off life a fair ways down the dark alley anyway, but 20 years on the lam did nothing to reel him in. At a certain point he became obsessed with the ‘cut-up’ writing method: essentially taking scissors to existing texts and then rearranging the clippings in random order to generate a whole new passage. In and of itself this isn’t about chasing the dark. David Bowie used the technique to great effect, most commonly in the lyrics to “Jean Genie”. But Burroughs swung for fences, getting to a point where he believed people’s very souls needed ‘cutting up’ and in doing so would ultimately reveal which shadowy cabal they were unwitting agents for. This approach to nurturing friendships saw him – unsurprisingly – becoming increasingly isolated which in turn saw him doubling down on this approach to soul searching. Some of those nights must have been almost uniquely desolate. And yet…. and yet…. the trilogy of ‘novels’ he wrote using this technique (“The Soft Machine” [1961], “The Ticket That Exploded” [1962] and “Nova Express” [1964] – collectively known as the ‘Nova Trilogy’) communicate a kind of literary ‘Rorschach’ sense and sensibility if – like the ink blobs – you stare at them long enough. He might have been onto something after all but he had to go really deep to nail it.
But animation is often at its most potent when examining the sinister inner world of untethered human impulse, or the dark singular visions of a darkly creative mind.
It is a medium that is so often used to simultaneously soften the blow and double the punch. Indeed, some animators treat their craft as a kind of creative poultice; a savage form of therapeutic release drawing out all manner of inner demons and sharing a visceral willingness to marshal the artform’s unique properties to explore the furthest imaginings of what can be done to a human mind or body, often in ways impossible to portray in any other artform.
This is abundantly evident in the opening film of this programme “Playing God” by Italian stop motion duo Matteo Burani and Arianna Gheller. Co-founders of the renowned Studio Croma “Playing God” takes us straight into the middle of one of the darkest of all human nightmares – our latent capacity to make or form life – and to experience it going horribly wrong. Hard won evidence has long suggested this is a field of endeavour we should think long and hard about before engaging in. Burani and Gheller’s film doesn’t stray into a specific linear narrative pathway to depict any one particular experience or experiment but instead plunges its hands (sometimes literally) into the more primitive notion of the flesh and viscera of the human form, suggesting that purposeful interference in that most magical of all sciences is a step into an irreversible dystopia. It is more gore metaphor rather than cautionary tale – and it takes some shaking off after the credits have rolled.
“Duck” by Mic Graves and Tony Hull is pretty much the complete opposite. This programme is its natural home. It starts in the dark, it plays out entirely in the dark and after its ultimate crescendo what’s left disappears into the dark. Playing on some gruesome intersection between “be careful what you wish for” and “nothing is what it seems” this is a jet-black scare ride through a serious misadventure one stormy night in a forest maybe not that far from you. Fair to say it is a good way away from the kind of work Graves in particular is best known for, particularly writing and directing “The World Of Gumball” and co-creating “Elliott From Earth” for Cartoon Network. Try and keep that in mind as you watch this indie passion project. And next time……order the chicken!
Indeed, forests are built for ‘the dark’. Estonian animator Andres Tenusaar’s latest film “Little Other” is also set in a cold, wintery wood. The sinister triumph in the centre of “Little Other” is the way it transfers its thick patina of sinister infinity from the forest night into the heart of the tiniest of all worlds and the two emerging little characters locked in their own battle for life or a quietly ferocious supremacy of sorts. Tenusaar’s incredibly clever use of ‘bait-n-switch’ environment design turns the creepiness up to 11 and the astonishing soundtrack takes it from there. This is a work in which every single component part of the filmmaking creation and production process has been pushed to the very limit to corral an almost smothering whole effect.
The dark pageantry of cinematic horror tropes continues apace. In “Dolores” by Cecilia Andalón Delgadillo it manifests – at least at first – in the form of swarms of birds and acres of cornfields. This is code for the impending arrival of fear, terror and the inevitability of a chase. And so it proves to be. Dolores quickly finds herself in a world that could really only come about and ‘function’ within the realm of animated thinking. The spectre of impossible, inexplicable character disintegration and reformation stalks Dolores’ journey and confounds her spirit. The way in which the very foundational attributes of stop motion character manufacture are woven into the fabric not just of the visuality of the story but of the very psyche that drives it is the gift that keeps on giving here and brings a ‘wholeness’ to this misadventure that no other storytelling medium has a hope of mustering.
The programme closes with a visual tour-de-force. “Drizzle In Johnson” by Ivan Li chases a scabrously bizarre photo-real vibe. In part this is to reinforce a rapidly deepening sense that it’s real human beings at the centre of the film; not ones with special powers or driven by myths of animated construction but just dangerous, frightening people living dangerous, frightening lives. For all of that, once the film comes up to speed the aura of menace that increasingly permeates it comes at us in an ever-fluid stream of psychedelic mystopian plasma. And THEN it gets weird. This is what makes the inevitable breakdown all the more horrifying and electrically hellish. It is an ‘impossible-to-unscramble’ omelette of the real, the unreal, the freakish and the post-comprehensible all fighting for their moments (for their very survival as story elements) on the screen before our very eyes and it rolls at us with something that feels akin to triple real time. This, truly, is animation in its widest arrays unleashed before our very eyes and it was pretty hard to imagine a film to follow it so instead of trying to do that we loaded it into the programme last and this is what we plan to send you out into the night with freshest in your mind.
You’re welcome.
Malcolm Turner
International Competition 5: Into the Dark screens at The Garden Cinema Mon 25 Nov and online from the same date (available for 48 hours)
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