Synopsis
An animated film made from approximately 1700 laser printed photo(collage)s, manipulated by hand.
2017 Directed by Anna Malina Zemlianski
An animated film made from approximately 1700 laser printed photo(collage)s, manipulated by hand.
some early impressions:
if we consider the current stage of image reproduction in its late digital form, Malina's work seems to engage in a very interesting investigation – one that finds itself in the threshold between the depiction of materiality and the materiality of depiction.
The printed frames of The Extinct Suite invite us to deal with both the language of cinematic animation and the so-called "live action" grammatics, after all, the fluidity of movements is made visible through this irregular stop-motion-like technique at the same time we're presented some physical printed photographs of a "real" person (at least if we consider the original silhouette from which the visual effects were then carved out of the photographic material).
The human…
The protean quality of cinema and photography; if these mediums represent us abstracted then these abstractions prove far more malleable than their real-life counterparts; this, in turn, opens up the possibility that our abstractions may, through their transformative nature, prove able to represent a purer truth than our own solid flesh, something already abstracted by our own fallible human perception.
There is an idea director Alfonso Cuaron has consistently explored throughout his filmography; the balance between character and social context, to the point wherein the two become symbiotic. But what if this symbiosis is literalized? What if the representative shapes that drive photographed may take on the properties of their context, wholly indistinguishable? Is that not the state of being,…
i am such a layman in general but you needn't to be a specialist to recognize that this film is so good.
i don't think there's a way for me to explain how i felt during this. like somebody just swimmed through my veins and got everything out. thank you for this beautiful piece of art.
with this gaze you are now plunging into all my parts.
We appear and disappear, like time, impermanent yet everlasting, manipulating our space, becoming one within our surroundings, in the darkness there is light and in the light there is life.
Prepossessingly crepuscular and tranquilly disquieting, The Extinct Suite is an atmopherically shadowy mood piece that instills a sense of desolation in its brief runtime. With a form that manipulates the very medium itself in a reality-warping way, Zemlianski's short reminded me of something from Tscherkassky such as Dream Work or Outer Space, only far more mellow and melancholic as opposed to mean and malevolent. Not necessarily worse as a result, this distinctive disposition coupled with an arresting aesthetic approach makes The Extinct Suite a unique work onto itself.