“Once I avoided conventional narration and replaced it with real time I could put the images together in non sequitur impositions. This might be what you call ‘daily seeing.’ It might be similar to the visual and aural experience of ordinary daily life – collision of experiences – not necessarily chaotic.”
— Robert Breer
The film program we’re working on now, ‘Drawn to life’, is almost finished. I’m quite happy with it, especially since it gave me an opportunity to explore some realms of cinema I wasn’t very familiar with: the so-called “animation” film. What’s interesting about “animation”, for me – besides the fact that the concept itself is deeply imbedded in the roots of cinema – is that it transcends both fiction and documentary, especially in the light of new digital photographic technologies, which are more and more questioning the black box of live action. So, when we were asked to do someting about “animation” and “documentary”, we thought it could be interesting to explore how animation techniques can re-define or revitalise our daily seeing, the ways we percieve and experience the world we live in. One of the filmmakers I discovered while doing research is Stuart Hilton. He studied at the Royal College of Art, where the field of experimental animation is apparently blossoming (see also Jonathan Hodgson, amongst others). In many ways, he can be considered as a heir of Robert Breer, especially in the way he explores the border zone between the anecdotal and the abstract, between quotidian existence and more imaginative realms. Breer’s films, P. Adams Sitney once wrote, have the potential of transforming daily eyesight, making our visual world more alive. And that’s just what some of Hilton’s films do. Hilton has a way of animating his doodles and drawings and combining them with live action images, so that they connect “film projection and the glitches of hand-made work back to eyesight and to the physiology of daily seeing” (as Fred Camper once wrote about Breer’s ‘Fuji’). This effect is further enhanced by the soundtracks, which consist of musique concrète collages of found sounds and media snippets. The conjunctions of image and sound generate a kind of consciousness and emotional dynamics that remind me of Arthur Lipsett’s films. Pieces of sound and image worlds are arranged in an non-lineair way without losing the sense that there is a experiential structure holding them together which transcends the gaps between the pieces – all the more total for being fragmented.
Here’s some of Hilton’s stuff. There’s more on his YouTube page.
Argument In A Superstore (1992)
Save Me (1994)
Six Weeks In June (1998)