【搬运】斯蒂芬·布鲁默评《惊奇巨人》
#1 - 2024-2-10 01:40
Blackwell (不解释 你懂的)
以下文本来源于：https://www.patreon.com/posts/art-trash-man-96507968
Yvonne Andersen is a gallerist and artist and a visionary educator. With her husband, the poet Dominic Falcone, she co-founded an important modern art gallery, the Sun Gallery, in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1955. By the end of the 1950s, Andersen had bought a 16mm camera and began to make films, eventually settling on cutting up and animating her drawings. While the couple raised their own young children, Andersen began to host art-making gatherings of neighbourhood kids, which she called the Yellow Ball Workshop. The Yellow Ball Workshop came to make children-led animated films, building from the unrestrained imagination of children as they worked in a broad variety of media: flip-books, cel animation, paper cut-outs, direct animation, stop-motion. Andersen later published two books, Let’s Make a Film and Teaching Film Animation to Children, remarkable inscriptions of her pedagogical method.
The Amazing Colossal Man was the first film made by the children of the Yellow Ball Workshop: it is the product of twelve child animators, working in papier-mâché stop motion animation. It mimics science-fiction fantasies: an invading alien monster rampages through the Wonderland amusement park, chasing people before climbing a rollercoaster, where the military shoot and kill it. Here we see the expressionistic figuration of their boxy, doll-like human characters, hair that’s painted on or made of pencil shavings. Figurative expressionism comes naturally to children. Like the severed connection between intention and the will of the hand in the automatic drawings of André Masson, the child’s mimesis is inevitably messy, perhaps closer to perception and memory than the objective, exacting mimesis of realism. At this stage of arrest, they are capable of magnificent insights by emotional projection: these figures, including the Colossal Man, are symbolic and allegorical.
The story follows on the terror of the towering monster, that subgenre of science fiction that had been advanced into the public imagination beginning with H.G. Wells’s The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth, later reprised with Godzilla and Attack of the 50’ Woman among others. The form is at its most spectacular in these collisions of two-dimensional backdrops and three-dimensional figures: the landscape is built in flat comprehension of the world at large, naive buildings topped with naive billboards, figures moving about before them like the whole world was a shoebox diorama. The diorama proscenium gives way briefly, when the Colossal Man turns a corner and the buildings part, a deeply imaginative violation of the spatial logic of the film.
The line between imitation and parody is thin. Tropes guide the second act of the film, as when the military gets involved—complete with scientific explanation—and the monster takes its final stand, climbing a rollercoaster to no apparent intention. There it is shot and killed by the military, clouds of gunfire animated around it as the scrambling soldiers mount an offensive. The soldiers have better proportional definition than the other figures, suggesting they are manufactured toy soldiers, although they are also painted expressionistically, their lips exaggerated with red paint.
In this climax, the film also draws from the maturity—and morbidity—of a child’s humour: in an ironic reprisal, the aliens, from their distant planet, launch a fleet of rockets to bomb the earth. Hipper than a happy ending, the children of the Yellow Ball Workshop offer that violence begets violence, that the obstacle before us may suggest a greater obstacle beyond us. Whether they knew it, were simply following their natural impulses, or were following the template of ironic consequences found in so much popular culture, they have made a film that fits into the anti-war currents of its immediate contemporaries, films like Dr. Strangelove and Very Nice, Very Nice, where the blooming atomic blast comes from within. The Cold War mentality that so infected science-fiction of the era often recognized the futility of mutually assured destruction, the idea that having the potential for violent reprisal was a deterrent in itself. Many of these child animators would have been shaped by experiences like the nuclear threat of the Bay of Pigs. Death could be just over the horizon. How else to carry on but to play and to laugh?
Yvonne Andersen is a gallerist and artist and a visionary educator. With her husband, the poet Dominic Falcone, she co-founded an important modern art gallery, the Sun Gallery, in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1955. By the end of the 1950s, Andersen had bought a 16mm camera and began to make films, eventually settling on cutting up and animating her drawings. While the couple raised their own young children, Andersen began to host art-making gatherings of neighbourhood kids, which she called the Yellow Ball Workshop. The Yellow Ball Workshop came to make children-led animated films, building from the unrestrained imagination of children as they worked in a broad variety of media: flip-books, cel animation, paper cut-outs, direct animation, stop-motion. Andersen later published two books, Let’s Make a Film and Teaching Film Animation to Children, remarkable inscriptions of her pedagogical method.
The Amazing Colossal Man was the first film made by the children of the Yellow Ball Workshop: it is the product of twelve child animators, working in papier-mâché stop motion animation. It mimics science-fiction fantasies: an invading alien monster rampages through the Wonderland amusement park, chasing people before climbing a rollercoaster, where the military shoot and kill it. Here we see the expressionistic figuration of their boxy, doll-like human characters, hair that’s painted on or made of pencil shavings. Figurative expressionism comes naturally to children. Like the severed connection between intention and the will of the hand in the automatic drawings of André Masson, the child’s mimesis is inevitably messy, perhaps closer to perception and memory than the objective, exacting mimesis of realism. At this stage of arrest, they are capable of magnificent insights by emotional projection: these figures, including the Colossal Man, are symbolic and allegorical.
The story follows on the terror of the towering monster, that subgenre of science fiction that had been advanced into the public imagination beginning with H.G. Wells’s The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth, later reprised with Godzilla and Attack of the 50’ Woman among others. The form is at its most spectacular in these collisions of two-dimensional backdrops and three-dimensional figures: the landscape is built in flat comprehension of the world at large, naive buildings topped with naive billboards, figures moving about before them like the whole world was a shoebox diorama. The diorama proscenium gives way briefly, when the Colossal Man turns a corner and the buildings part, a deeply imaginative violation of the spatial logic of the film.
The line between imitation and parody is thin. Tropes guide the second act of the film, as when the military gets involved—complete with scientific explanation—and the monster takes its final stand, climbing a rollercoaster to no apparent intention. There it is shot and killed by the military, clouds of gunfire animated around it as the scrambling soldiers mount an offensive. The soldiers have better proportional definition than the other figures, suggesting they are manufactured toy soldiers, although they are also painted expressionistically, their lips exaggerated with red paint.
In this climax, the film also draws from the maturity—and morbidity—of a child’s humour: in an ironic reprisal, the aliens, from their distant planet, launch a fleet of rockets to bomb the earth. Hipper than a happy ending, the children of the Yellow Ball Workshop offer that violence begets violence, that the obstacle before us may suggest a greater obstacle beyond us. Whether they knew it, were simply following their natural impulses, or were following the template of ironic consequences found in so much popular culture, they have made a film that fits into the anti-war currents of its immediate contemporaries, films like Dr. Strangelove and Very Nice, Very Nice, where the blooming atomic blast comes from within. The Cold War mentality that so infected science-fiction of the era often recognized the futility of mutually assured destruction, the idea that having the potential for violent reprisal was a deterrent in itself. Many of these child animators would have been shaped by experiences like the nuclear threat of the Bay of Pigs. Death could be just over the horizon. How else to carry on but to play and to laugh?
The Amazing Colossal Man