Stories, histories, History: never will I pretend not to need them, rely on them, nor require them. Who would dare deny and ignore the vital value of History, or the sense of History? So obviously, this never will be the point of this post. Neither are the various semantic differences, between the three above-mentioned terms, the issue. I am only using these words after my SAS friends and former bloggers.
I would like to complement their thoughts on the subject with a couple of notions:
Last century, I came across this Californian mural in a backstreet just behind the throb of Venice Beach, the one-way road-sign as an ironic comment on the forward thrust of the neo-Botticellian beauty. “Do not enter”: words explicit the order, of the road-sign, that shall not be breached: they contradict evidence, as both History and myth are always already entered. Myth! “History is Myth”, she claims, clad in 1990’s fashionable clothes that are so politically decent, and no match to the natural appearance of the original goddess… But this is not the place to comment upon what this mural might suggest about Culture and Society.
Rather, the reversal of the truism – one would perhaps expect to read something like “myths belong to History” – is striking, and imposes reflection on the power of historical references upon our thoughts, behaviours, creativity, spontaneity. If History is Myth, it is somehow single voiced, as Barthes suggests when he writes: “Mythical speech is made of a material which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for communication”. That is to say, one may assert it becomes a tool to enforce one given message…
A couple of years ago, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie delivered a cogent speech about the danger of a single story (easy to listen to on TedTalks). Let me quote her: “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”
Diversity is what we need, including a variety of points of view, from which one would have the chance to forge one’s own opinion, culture, knowledge. There is not ONE Book, except in places that deny freedom of expression and belief. This is true in politics, in religion. It is also true in culture. So too in animation studies… (which, incidentally, also accords with Timo’s comment when he reminds us that there exist “non-English-language films…”)
Animationstudies 2.0? 2.0… Wouldn’t that entail that one yearns for something new, afresh? Let us be utopian, if not provokingly libertarian: something freed from the weight and format of History? That, in its own way, the mural did suggest some time ago. More prosaically, shouldn’t we foster imagination and creativity as THE glaring priority? Or to give up, be even more prosaic, and gloomily stare at, abide by, the constraints of the job market, the power of professional networks, the vanity of academia.
Did every pioneer of animation have to go to university?! As a very new art form, should animation bask in some generally accepted, formatted, official version of History? The key point may be less in teaching animation than in learning and experimenting animation. Should the learner be provided some selected content? (But on which grounds, one individual’s / the system’s?)
Or rather, should we nurture the learner’s appetite for their own cultural awareness, artistic fondness, critical minds – and, who knows, their own creativity? Animationstudies 2.0, as: looking ahead? I do not hold the answer. Animation is first and foremost animated, “animating and reanimating” (to quote Cholodenko), I mean alive and metamorphic.
Or else: “Animation studies” (1.0) historically focused mainly on “animation stories”, somehow on occasions mirroring the syndrome of “the single story”. Maybe Animationstudies 2.0 is to – no, never replace completely that “single story”, but – just even better promote a fecund variety of (critical / theoretical / comparative / aesthetic…) studies in / stories about animation. Doing so, every participant, through their films, books, speeches, enthusiasm, in their own way would fairly be part of what Derrida describes as “the trace”, that is: what remains from the past, already showing the imprint of its connection to the future (animation).
Pierre Floquet teaches English, and is associate professor at IPB, Universite de Bordeaux. His 1996 PhD thesis dealt with linguistics applied to cinema, focusing on Tex Avery’s cartoons. Since then, he has organized several Avery retrospectives and conferences, and been a juror at animation festivals. He has widened his interests to live-action cinema, participating in books and journals both in France and abroad.
You say everything so nicely Pierre. I was discussing this today with my colleagues, this issue of the disappearance of experimentation. The issue of the disappearance of cultivation of the arts, of programs that fostered an array of outputs that existed merely because they could, because it made the whole more whole. Now, it’s about about projects that create jobs in industry, about commodity and commercial viability. Art and experimentation seem to be dropping away, because they cannot be economically rationalized. It reduces story, history. Reganomics started something that is finding an ugly cultural terminus – as much as economics lecturers teach rationalism and then have their positions rationalized, we in animation now teach safe, singular workflows and reinforce the homogenous expectations of the market. It’s going to push many of us out of relevance in practice and in education. It is a fault of a cultural narrowing of what is accepted, highlighted and distributed in media arts and entertainment. It is the exclusivity of the festival circuit, where experimentation is most abundant, and the low ‘sale-ability’ of experimental animation, which has a limited post-festival market. We have to find the links between history and the now – and more explicitly interrogate how experimentation informs practice.
When we propose to our students that we relish in and encourage experimentation, we need to guide some of those processes, and explain the benefits of the practice, and link it to potential outcomes with commercial potential, as well as to the histories, the potential of expanding histories in commercial art, conceptual art and animation technologies.The spark of experimentation walks hand-in-hand with the freedom to not only succeed – but to fail gloriously – in the act. This is lost in the modern education environment. There’s too much focus on quality output and process that follows prescribed methodologies. Everybody has to justify stuff. Looking back on some of animation’s many great contributors to experimentation and innovation, I doubt they all wrote up extensive proposals on exactly how and why they were working in a particular way – passion and experimentation need a bit of leeway. In every discipline this is the case.
Thanks Pierre for the post and Rachel for the comment. I’m currently researching Norman McLaren and love the fact that many of his films he re-visited later on when he had developed a new technique. He wanted to see what happened as much for the experiment of doing it than the finished product. That must have been a great luxury of time and circumstance!
I recently conducted an animation workshop, a fine art school which was designed to explore and celebrate unintended consequences in an animated outcome ( via a mechanism based on the surrealist game of the exquisite corpse). It re-ignited in me an interest in animation as a fine art practice. As a teacher of animation, I too, like many of my colleagues, have slipped into the comfy sense that animation pedagogy constitutes teaching a technological skillset to be learned parrot fashion as a binary process, perpetuated by the students’ need for answers and formulae, and driven in turn by their imperative to find work to pay off debt. A low risk strategy all round, promoting mediocrity and helping to cement animation into the ghetto that it dug for itself. The conventional lecturer’s retort, usually offered to the techy, process hungry student is also somewhat clichéd. We have been trying to tell them that ‘it’s all about the storytelling’, which, unfortunately, seems to replace one problem with another, and doesn’t really invite the students to engage with everything that’s magical with this medium, and the result is to close down other avenues of self expression and artistic practice. Of course, the storytelling discourse has been important to rebalance the scales between spectacle and narrative, which is often in danger of being weighted in favour of illustrative and technical tendencies of this visual and technically driven medium, but hasn’t it resulted in us throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Shouldn’t we be encouraging students to use animation as a means of visual exploration, expressing original thought, ideas and concepts which really speak to the world around them?
The beef of many an animation scholar has generally been located in the uneasy sibling relationship between live action cinema and animation – the sense that animation continues to be considered a poor relation, despite its ubiquity and its emergence as a dominant film production methodology via visual effects and fantasy cinema. My pre-occupation as a lecturer has been to combat the realist imperative in my students, resulting in my overuse of another mantra – ‘Why do something in animation that can be done better in live action?’ But it seems to me now that this is the wrong battle – both the field of live action and the field of contemporary art legitimise each other at the expense of animation.
If we consider a triangular connection between animation, live art and contemporary art, we can more easily think of connections between the latter 2 (not least in terms of the fertile discipline of video art, but also in terms of cross-fertilised projects such as 24 hour Psycho (Douglas Gordon, 1993) or The Clock (Christian Marclay, 2012), which, by using films as raw material, invites the gallery goer to view film as art.
No such luxury exists in animation – the Barbican exhibition Watch me Move (June- September 2011) was a homage to animation which failed ultimately to present animation as a serious artform precisely, one imagines, because it is too tempting to pull in crowds by presenting its contents as entertaining and family oriented. Hence the dubious layout which placed popular, well known and loved animated characters as the centre piece, and the stunning experimental artworks of the likes of Oscar Fischinger et al tucked away on an upper floor for those who could be bothered to climb the stairs.
The sense that animation as a medium is hoisted by its own metaphorical petard always returns to me when I work with students. The fact that they can do anything often means they do nothing, and their obsession with technique and technology scuppers their creativity.
So, for me, it is no longer about story – it’s about concept, spirit, humanity, which by all means may include story, but it will not be the be all and end all….
Dear Caroline,
I missed your comments when they were posted, been so very busy these past few years.
What you said deeply resonate in me, there’s been a real struggle for yours truly to come to terms with the domination of the field of animation by the story-telling “obligation/expectation” and the cartoony ogre.
Coming from “straight” painting and drawing (sudden deadly allergies forced me out of using natural media and this after decades of dedicated work), I have been at once amazed by the possibilities of the digital workflow (that made me discover and explore the time dimension) and extremely disappointed by what I discovered in animation, from really weak drawings to pseudo-abstraction, it (too) often looks as if our Art History legacy did not exist.
Pierre’s excellent paper nicely brings up the strange situation in which I feel we are trapped, we live (in) a world that to us is akin to a mystery/contradiction/dilemma/enigma and yet, we function as if “reality” were linear, constant, reliable, predictable and utterly known/understood.
“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.”
– Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum.
I try to examine “all that” in both my work (especially) and the few paper I write. You may be interested in one of my early written attempts, 6 articles I wrote for AWN many years ago, it’s the last time I tried to cover the full gamut, a foolish attempt if there is one: http://www.nondidjuti.net/animation/part_1.html
But reading Pierre’s post and your comments immediately made me remember some of the things I touched on then, hence my comments here.
Best,
Jean