Metamorphosis as a narrative strategy in selected South African animated films
Date
2009-10-15T10:39:59Z
Authors
Penn, Richard
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Abstract
Abstract
This study examines the notion as well as the use of metamorphosis in the animated
films of selected South African artists. The analysis demonstrates how metamorphosis,
as a narrative strategy, is wholly appropriate to South African animation artists whose
works engage with issues which tend to surface in a country in constant flux and in
which the word ‘transformation’ is part of its everyday vocabulary and collective
consciousness.
I bring together ideas around metamorphosis from various animation writers and link
these to an eclectic selection of writers in other fields. I examine W.J.T. Mitchell’s
writing on the multistable image as well as the work of neuroscientist, V.S.
Ramachandran in order to suggest a possible explanation for the hold that
metamorphosis has over its audience. I also included an alternative history of
animation via the transformative, Vaudeville performances of chapeaugraphy,
shadowgraphy and Quick-Change. In addition I differentiate between the digital morph
as exemplified in the music video to Michael Jackson’s Black or White (1991) and the
type of hand-drawn metamorphosis in the work of William Kentridge. The issue at stake
here is the ability of the morph to transgress arbitrary boundaries of categorisation
versus its tendency to obliterate otherness and inculcate sameness.
For my case studies I examine William Kentridge’s use of metamorphosis in his
Drawings for Projection and how metamorphosis is apparent not only in the
transformation of one object into another, but at the level of the medium itself. Here I
look at how his work is infused with metaphor through the palimpsetic traces left behind
by the incomplete erasures of his technique. As a loose framework around the
discussion of metaphor I look at the theories of Paul Ricoeur and the more poetic
writing of Cynthia Ozick.
In the on-going time lapse collaboration project Minutes by Mocke Lodewyk Jansen
van Veuren and Theresa Collins I examine how both the city and our experience of
time and space is transformed through time lapse animation and how this
transformation enables an analysis of spatial practice that can be utilized in future
urban renewal programmes.
In my own work, I am interested in exploring the theme of origins. I look at genetics and
cosmology as well as Deleuze’s theory of individuation and how they all seem to
incorporate a kind of ‘metastable state’ of infinite potential that is similar to Eisenstein’s
“plasmaticness”. As a visual idiom I use static ‘snow’ or ‘noise’ in animation, video work
and drawings; conceptually harnessing the idea that static contains residual radiation
left over from the birth of the universe. Static noise is the medium through which I
create portraits of my father and encounter my own ‘genetic‘ self-portrait. I also analyse
some of the work on physical actions by theatre theorist and director Jerzy Grotowski.
From Grotowski, I have begun to understand certain performative aspects around
gesture and the simultaneous portrait/self-portrait see-saw of my work.