Watching Watchers Watch Us As We Watch Ourselves – Absurd AND Zany
Anatidaephobia
the irrational fear of being watched by one or more ducks
Believe it or believe it not (but believe it), this is actually a thing! It’s a pretty crazy thing but it’s a thing. For the most part though, if you’ve heard of this term before you will have heard it from one of two sources. Gary Larson is one of the best ‘soft-serve-absurdists’ there is and ever was. His deceptively simple little cartoons, collectively named ‘The Far Side’ were usually single panel one-liners and usually relied on an animal of some kind to pass a silly idea through, often filtering out the zaniest fibres on the way, leaving a small concentrated splattering of wisdom. Sometime in the 90’s, he scratched out a picture of a lone and lonely office worker sitting discombobulated at his desk, staring forward with a haunted gaze whilst across the street in the corner of one window of many in a skyscraper sat a tiny duck staring silently at our forlorn antihero. “Anatidaephobia – the irrational fear of being watched by one or more ducks” read the caption. The duck abides!
The other place you might have come across the term was in the Intro to Programme #2 …. just checking to see if you’ve been paying attention.
Watching, the act of knowingly (or potentially knowingly) you are being watched and the process of ensuring control over what you offer of yourself to those watching you is central to the way we live and the way we choose to present ourselves. We each have different tolerances for the curbs these rules theoretically impose on us and we all have different reactions to – and ways to process – what we see when we’re the ones doing the watching.
Speaking personally – and I don’t think I’m alone – there is an involuntarily absurdist edge to much of what gets rendered into our brains when we put ourselves through this process. Dealing with that is one of the keys to getting by in life: to surviving metaphorically or mentally.
We’re all watchers, we’re all being watched and we ‘watch’ ourselves to curate or self-monitor the relationship we have with the world around us. It’s probably the only way the world can really work but some of the ‘rules’ can be fairly arbitrary and in dispute. Some of them can be highly interpretable too, which can make life interesting. But generally we collectively bump along through the journey of life without knocking too much bark off and getting through our To Do lists.
The world inside us can be a different matter though. No fences in there, no moats, no book of happy manners or social etiquettes barring the rambling journey of ideas and impulses. Most of us have some sort of inner world rattling along in quiet unison with the hard-deck we’re trying to navigate on the outside. The last, best residues of our inner child often reside there, getting a bit of exercise every now and then…. moments, thoughts, ideas so simple that they are too complicated to explain, so quickly played out they defy capture and so pliably twisty they would prove impossible to explain in polite company.
Not saying animators are not polite but they are one crew that will be waaaaay more likely to ‘get it’ than pretty much any other. The idea you pitch to a funder for an animated film is a lot different than the idea you pitch to your boss to drive traffic to the webpage for the new vegan egg nog that’s hitting the shelves any day now.
These thundering goat rodeos of crazy, mixed up ideas flying through our minds in close formation are the stock-and-trade of many animators. In fact bringing some sort of form to them is actually their raison d’etre and, in many ways, animation is probably the only real way these jumbling, tumbling, rumbling ideas can see the light of day or the dark of a cinema near you…. a cinema just like the one we’re planning to show ‘From Absurd To Zany’ in. No idea is off limits, no reach is out of reach, there’s no corner that can’t be turned. When the boss down at Egg Nog Inc says “no idea is a bad idea”, they don’t really mean it, but for the animators of these films it’s merely the kick-off point, the lever on the catapult.
You might (or perhaps you might not) be surprised to hear that every day of the year is dedicated to something – and some of them are a little nutty; absurd or zany, if you will. There is, for example, Bobblehead Day (Jan 7), Gorilla Suit Day (Jan 31), Worship Of Tools Day (March 11), Talk Like William Shatner Day (March 22), Yellow Pig Day (July 17) and, a personal fav, Barbie-In-A-Blender Day which takes up a happy hour or two of my time every July 27. Oddly though, there does not seem to be an official Funky Tie Day.
But, friends, animation is here to help. Hunter Allen has stepped into the breach to get the ball rolling. In creating the truly zany Jazz Emu: Fun Kitai Furai Dei music video, one can sense a head of steam developing behind the ‘Funky Tie Friday’ concept that his film is built around. There is more live-action and puppetry in this film than we usually show in LIAF but the central wackiness of the film is simply too delicious to go past (in fact, we are kicking open the jams of this programme with it) and the animation in the latter stages is completely killa. In the cut-n-thrust centre of it is a character on an intergalactic mission but one of its pathways to domination on earth is to hack the corporate look. “Close your eyes and see the balance between formal and kooky” he burbles and then suddenly we’re in an office where ‘the look’ is everything. Compulsory funky ties for everybody – or else. The live-action component must have been one heck of a shoot! It’s not a bad idea (at the very least, it’s far from the worst idea), so vote for Funky Tie Friday folks – just not on July 27, I’m busy blending my dolls that day.
Maybe I missed it, perhaps I’m out of the loop but I haven’t seen much from Nieto for a long time. A decade or more ago it was a strange and darkly hilarious torrent of pretty bizarre work, often featuring real animals as the stars in films full of twists, turns and the tricks of an astonishing animation magician. I could live to be 100 (which actually isn’t that far off) and I’ll never be able to un-see Carlitopolis. His new film simply titled Um rolls in like a barely guided psychotopian steamroller, flattening the earthy terrain of common sense before it and repaving it with layer upon layer of intense crazy grass. The intensity of the vision represented in the film is one thing, the visual delivery is that intensity multiplied by…. what… Pi? Nieto’s films were always rich bounties of the truly odd but they tended to have a simplicity around their technique. Um on the other hand, is going to be one of the most densely crafted 3D animations you will see in a long time.
Orrrrrr……. perhaps, until you watch No Vacancy by Colombian animator Miguel Rodrick. This is a film all about the mechanics of clandestine and remote watching as well as the uncertainties that roil up within the psyche when we know this is something we could be being subjected to at any time. “What a relief it would be to know the worst thing you’ll ever do you’ve already done” is one of the more memorable and evocative lines in the film as we are toured through the churning internal psychedelic topography of a hotel that houses more than guests and is full of one way mirrors, eye holes and time/space wormholes at every turn. This is a world in which everything can be seen, everybody can be a watcher and nothing is as it seems.
Jenny Jokela’s astonishing, visual-carnival of a film Elephant Dollhouse explores how the expectations of society shape us and how we are shaped by those expectations, even as they do not always coalesce with how we would rather live and behave.
“In an ideal world, everyone would have the freedom to live exactly as they choose,” she says in a Director’s statement. “But in reality, most people exist within a society where personal freedom is shaped—and often limited—by the needs and expectations of others. This tension between individual autonomy and societal influence creates a complex dynamic: we strive to control our environment while simultaneously being shaped and constrained by it”.
The sheer virtuosity of Jokela’s use of colour and the kind of saturated, eye-packing design is a sight to behold. It is impossible to take it all in: to see every moment in detail and grasp what is moving in every nook and cranny of the film. This is a filmmaker who arrived in the animation world with a distinct and intensely rich personal style – a style that is being developed in giant strides with each new release.
And the programme closes with a film that takes the sense of ‘the remote eye’ to another level, figuratively and literally. The crowdedness of modern western cities masks an often empty isolation that many of their inhabitants experience. This is especially so in the environments that contain the densest and tallest of dwellings. Looking at them reveals absolutely nothing about any of the people who live within them. Concrete, curtains and elevation conspire to ensure the secret lives of others go unseen. And yet, they are often heavily surveilled environments, bristling with the invisible tension this creates. The Right To Be Forgotten by Danish animator Tue Sanggaard puts a camera into every room of a subterranean world, taking us into the little places each inhabitant occupies, each living their own lives, each independent of and unconnected to any of the others, even those who are only separated by a floor and a ceiling.
There is something simultaneously unsettling and compelling about this panorama of alternating realities that methodically slides past us in Sangaard’s film – which to some extent is the purpose that underpins it.
“I wished to create something that simultaneously draws you in and repulses you,” says Sangaard. “In this film I try to capture the experience of being an involuntary participant in a deeply sick society. The engulfing frustration of feeling like a powerless observer of horrific injustices committed in the name of our freedom”.
It is a film with a relatively complex technical structure. Rather than animate from self-designed 3D animation rigs, Sagaard elected to wrangle together hundreds of still photographs of real people and construct his digital models from that raw material. Even the scenarios that each of these characters find themselves trapped within are crafted from conversations Sagaard had with people at dinner parties, on-line gaming sites and the like.
It has always been true that we live in a changing world but this feels like a REALLY changing world. When the pace increases it challenges, even threatens, our capacity to adapt which is, when all is said and done, humankind’s greatest party trick. Nothing can change the rhythm of the world we live in although understanding it seems like a pretty important aspiration. But the question is how best to do that? Words and the power of language are critical in this endeavour but language is neither universal, comprehensive nor even that evocative a chronicler of the magnitude of our times
That’s why we have artists!.
Malcolm Turner
International Competition Programme 3: From Absurd to Zany screens at the Garden Cinema Sun 30 Nov and online from the same date (available for 48 hours)
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