L'homme sans ombre

This weekend, I discovered the animated films of Georges Schwizgebel and was very, very impressed. First, they look nothing like other animation--the style is truly unique. Second, his painting on glass technique has allowed him to make short films that look like living and moving paintings. Instead of the traditional narratives found in cartoons, his work is more like something that should be exhibited in an art museum and no attempt is made to make the paintings commercially oriented. Instead, each film is accompanied with great music and the paintings move in perfect harmony with the sound.

In this case, it's the story of a man who loses his shadow and then travels the world--and I assume this is in order to make up for this loss. Fortunately by the end of the film he finds his niche--a place where not having a shadow is of a great advantage.

Beautiful from start to finish, this is a delight.

Expressionism and Surrealism are most typical conceits for artistic film, but this one seems more Impressionistic. It starts with a light revolving around a cube and the shadows that are created from it, and then it leads into a story that seems to be about a man who sells his soul (shadow) to the devil for money and women, but then finds out that both are useless since nobody trusts him or likes him because he doesn't have a shadow, so he hunts for it to get it back.

Beyond just dealing with shadows as a subject, it focuses on exploring shadows artistically. As a whole, the work is dizzying and hard to grasp as not only is the light constantly changing but the viewpoint is changing at the same time, almost like we're some sort of God-like omniscient figure that is playing the spin-until-you-fall game.

However, it provides excellent ways of creative transitions, where space and time are not just transcended by movement, cuts, and dissolves, but by perspective. Oftentimes we zoom in to a shadow walking away, only to zoom out from it again and, though it hasn't really changed, it's now heading the opposite direction and in a new environment.

It's certainly very amazing, though dizzying.

--PolarisDiB

The Man without a Shadow is a retake on a 19th century German novella written by a French expatriate Adelbert von Chamisso and fits well with some other Faustian novels that we still considered classics, even though they were written later on: Goethe's Faust and Wilde's the Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wild. The theme of our identity and soul being for sale in exchange of something permeates the three.

This animated film presents the whole story with some final modifications, and brings it to a more modern time, not the present, but perhaps the 1950s.

This is a story about the repercussions of selling yourself for the riches, of the dark side of betraying yourself, how redemption is always at hand, in your hands.

The animation design is very artistic, painterly and with a great influence of De Chirico: the same bold flat colors, the same long shadows, ample spaces, Renaissance-like buildings, endless arcades, and so on. However, the characters aren't as indebted to the Italian painter. Despite this being a very modern short, the animation feels chunky and stiff regarding the movement, with still images sustained for too long and poor character movement in general. To me, the best animated scenes are the square-interlinked animation that precedes the initial title credits and the very organic succession of landscapes of the last part of the film.

I thought that the rhythm of the film was not good. There are unnecessary elements that slow the film at the beginning, like the main character's opening walk, while other bits that needed more time to be developed are hurried up unnecessarily.

Not my cup of tea, but a good short overall.

A groovy tango-soundtrack propels a striking feature following a man who sells his shadow to the devil.

The art feels familiar yet unique, as we follow silhouetted figures around a vaguely malevolent-feeling townscape - impossible to locate in terms of time or place.

This geopgraphical abstraction and sense of individual loss (of the guy wondering around with no shadow) achieves an otherworldliness and isolation that made me think of "The Trial", though that's just my interpretation, and possibly it's the wrong one cause overall there's none of Kafka's absurdity/bleakness; instead a sense of magic and exoticism.