Over the coming weeks, I will be writing about some films which I enjoyed at the festival Instants Vidéo in October 2023.
La Fontaine et la chute IV (Les Origines), a breathtaking five minute 3D animation by Philippe Hamelin and Julie Tremble, is inspired by ctenophores, the transparent, iridescent marine animals. The strange and beautiful spaces created by the artists also recall biological simulation videos; we might be on a trip through the brain, floating past firing neurons, or past pulsating blood cells in an artery. The film’s vertical format makes it feel as if you are in a lab beaker, or a test tube. A celebration of surfaces and textures, the skins of the various pulsating blobs look metallic, crystalline, or plastic. The camera floats serenely through the space, slowly turning and moving, revealing the overlapping blobs from new angles. The interplay of the semi-transparent creatures provides great visual interest, as does the distortion caused by watery, jellied refraction. A shifting sound texture of sustained tones and glissandi, by Bruno Pucella, complements the visual textures. The blobs, which extend themselves with probing tubes and gasping orifices, have a pronounced sexual quality as well, albeit abstractly.
In a final section, the entire 3D world we’ve been floating through is shown flattened onto the surface of a sphere, which floats and turns through a dark space, filled with luminous wisps. It is as if we have jumped to a higher dimension. It’s a breathtaking way of visualizing a sudden emergence into four-dimensional space. Hamelin and Tremble have taken inspiration from the endless variety of biological forms, and transformed some of these shapes and textures, with ingenious artistic skill, into an imaginary space which we’re invited to explore, as we use our own imaginations to jump into new, unexpected dimensions.
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