The Shudder Flies Away with Open Arms, Farewell is an eight minute animated work of “visual music,” a collaboration between animator Celia Eid and composer Sébastien Béranger. The film is an abstract visual study, with visual compositions made up of a limited palette of hand-drawn animated elements: blue circles and lozenges, white lines and dots, yellow quadrilaterals. The compositions are constantly varied by rearranging these simple elements, over a backdrop of photos of stones with black markings. There is a constant interplay between the animated elements and the background photos, as the dots and lines pass in and out of alignment with the markings on the stones.
These images are tightly integrated with the musical score, electronic soundscapes of bleeps, ticks and percussive white noise. The music has an irregular, unpredictable, and energetic rhythmic texture, like a field of excitable creatures, jumping and flying around erratically. The visual and musical rhythms reinforce one another, heightening the kinetic impact.
The film is divided into short sections, named after parts of the film’s title. In the second part, flies away, the background photos are in constant lateral motion, giving an overall feeling that everything is in flight. The music is smoother as well, with long, suspended tones. In with open arms, both music and images have a regular, metered pulse. The circles and lines accumulate as they move, building denser, richer structures. The last section, Farewell, is set to a haunting, glassy-textured melody. We see a floating blue circle which is reminiscent of a star or moon over an alien landscape; it seems to emit a pale light as it floats.
This short, well-crafted example of visual music stimulates the eye, the ear, and the heart in equal measure, as it deftly evokes a series of moods and textures.
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