SHORT FILMS What is the purpose of short films? Can a case be made for them or are they merely exercises and stepping stones to feature work? Making short films seems to have no obvious reward. Russian animator Yuri Norstein recently toured several American cities, Seattle among them. He equates his current unfinished animation, on hold for 15 years with the dry-up of Soviet funding in 1984, with poetry. With some conviction he said, “There is no one in the West who would fund my work.” Where is the place for animation that is personal and expressive: animation that seeks to break the stereotypes and formulaic constraints of dominant culture? Norman McLaren provided one of the best known definitions for animation: • Animation is not the art of DRAWINGS-that-move but the art of MOVEMENTS-that-are-drawn. • What happens between each frame is much more important than what exists on each frame. • Animation is therefore the art of manipulating the invisible interstices that lie between frames. If art is a fabrication designed to give us a reflection of ourselves, what of film and video, cascading at 24 or 30 frames per second, that pours into our limbic system - the ancient brain, the center for feeling and memory? Creating work of imaginative reality that is crafted frame by frame calls for a close focus, a heightened awareness of gesture, facial expression, and still moments. In his book The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram writes about the shaman’s ability to slip out of perceptual boundaries. Perhaps the artist, like Abram’s magician, possesses “a heightened receptivity to the meaningful solicitations, songs, cries, gestures of the larger more than human field.” On the other hand, perhaps the animator is really just a recluse, a person able to weather the long hours alone. Only in the last two years have I been able to see my work-in-progress play in ‘real time’ before it was completed. What continues to propel me is this inner vision, the little movie screen where ideas play, where beauty and horror inhabit the same moment, where joy springs from a line. This kind of animation is not a part of the entertainment industry. It’s not shipped overseas for inbetweens and inking. Money is not the justification for my art. What I’m interested in now is taking the same tools that spin an industry logo and using them in the process of remaking the personal. Art is always fabrication. Moving image arts work in time and, like writing, it is not what happens but how it is told that evokes a greater truth. Within the animated short, as within the precision of poetry, lie moments of core intensity, opportunities to refigure our forms and expand the territory of being human. Rose Bond, November 2000 PRINT-FRIENDLY VERSION

www.rosebond.com