A
Film Archive
A wooden chair rejects a man who wants to sit down on it and starts to move with a will of its own. After the first consternation, the man’s ambition is kindled and the two begin a bizarre dance which ends in mutual consent.
“A Chairy Tale” developed the pixilation technique with which McLaren had already experimented in his surprise hit “Neighbours” further. He created alternative versions of the text editions that were also published by the NFB for this extraordinary dance film. The music was the contribution of a then largely unknown Indian musician: Ravi Shankar.
---Annegret Richter
“A Chairy Tale” developed the pixilation technique with which McLaren had already experimented in his surprise hit “Neighbours” further. He created alternative versions of the text editions that were also published by the NFB for this extraordinary dance film. The music was the contribution of a then largely unknown Indian musician: Ravi Shankar.
---Annegret Richter
A Girl Named Elastika
Guillaume Blanchet
Elastika is not like any other girl, because she is made of elastics. And because her universe is made of cork. Her journey is also one of a kind, as she jumps from one building to another, crosses an ocean, or travels to space by holding on to a firework rocket.
A Girl Named Elastika
Animated Film
Canada
2012
3 minutes
subtitles:
French
Elastika is not like any other girl, because she is made of elastics. And because her universe is made of cork. Her journey is also one of a kind, as she jumps from one building to another, crosses an ocean, or travels to space by holding on to a firework rocket.
A Journal of Insomnia
The world of insomnia as an interactive self-experience. Personal stories and staged encounters form a psychological profile of Western society. Intimate, but also disturbing.
Credits
Hugues Sweeney
What is it, what keeps us up at night? The interactive documentary looks into this question inviting users to immerse in the universe of insomnia – a phenomenon that is linked to stress and anxiety and affects one in three people in our contemporary society. Moving beyond the narrative boundaries of the documentary form, “A Journal of Insomnia” collects personal stories of insomnia via video, text and drawings and creates a collaborative experience of affected people from across the world. The revealing testimony of four insomniacs in particular offers an intimate experience of a distressing condition that is usually experienced in solitude.
Blackout
Animadoc
Canada
2013
4 minutes
subtitles:
No
A short animated documentary film in which several storytellers share their experiences of the Northeast blackout of 2003, which affected much of Ontario, and seven U.S. states. The unexpected effects on the community highlight the best of our humanity under adverse conditions.
Blinkity Blank
Normen McLaren
Audiences can expect a firework of colours and sounds in this film, arguably the most important work of Norman McLaren’s career. Its motifs, scratched and drawn directly on the film, and the decision to intersperse them with blank frames make it a brilliant experiment on the human eye’s abilities of perception ...
Audiences can expect a firework of colours and sounds in this film, arguably the most important work of Norman McLaren’s career. Its motifs, scratched and drawn directly on the film, and the decision to intersperse them with blank frames make it a brilliant experiment on the human eye’s abilities of perception. McLaren’s best-known quote is based on this concept: “Animation is not the art of drawings-that-move, but rather the art of movements that are drawn. What happens between each frame is more important than what happens on each frame.”
---Annegret Richter
---Annegret Richter
Canon
Normen McLaren, Grant Munro
The combination of image and sound was a vital part of McLaren’s work. In addition to his experiments with soundtracks he drew upon he created a few films like “Canon”, in which he tried to visualise theoretical concepts, in the 1960s ...
Credits
Normen McLaren, Grant Munro
Eldon Rathburn
Robert Humble
J. Gillissie
Ron Alexander
The combination of image and sound was a vital part of McLaren’s work. In addition to his experiments with soundtracks he drew upon he created a few films like “Canon”, in which he tried to visualise theoretical concepts, in the 1960s. Here he uses rhythmic animation and live action to demonstrate, in collaboration with Grant Munro, how a canon works. Toy blocks, stick figures and real humans serve as visual aids that move to a strict rhythm to form, by means of additional animation, a brilliant and original demonstration of the different types of canons.
---Annegret Richter
---Annegret Richter
In the spirit of discovery that pervaded the 1960s, this animated documentary explores the endless spaces of the micro- and macrocosm in only eight minutes, from the universe to the smallest unit of our body. It starts with a boy who rows across a lake with his dog. The imaginary camera first “zooms” away from him and then into his body. The film was one of seven short NFB animations bought by the US broadcaster ABC in 1971 for its children’s show “Curiosity Shop”.
---Annegret Richter
---Annegret Richter
Cosmos Will Save the World
Patrick Lapierre
A barren field somewhere in Russia. This is where she spent her childhood. The woman is haunted by the ghosts of a long-gone age reminding her of ...
Cosmos Will Save the World
A barren field somewhere in Russia. This is where she spent her childhood. The woman is haunted by the ghosts of a long-gone age reminding her of once significant words and steps – too big for the little girl she once was and her grandmother.
Die Gelübde meines Bruders
Stephanie Weimar
A young man who wants to lead a life of celibacy and poverty at a monastery – and his lesbian sister who asks questions: about the church, sexuality, and religion. An unexpected lesson in tolerance.
Die Gelübde meines Bruders
Documentary Film
Canada,
Germany
2013
88 minutes
subtitles:
English
Credits
Gregor and Stephanie are siblings who couldn’t be more different. She jets across the world, living with women. It’s not even worth her while to rent a flat because she is so committed to being on the road and getting away from the narrow confines of home. Her top priority is self-fulfilment. Her brother Gregor, on the other hand, looks for contemplation, steadiness and a vocation in this world. A monastery, in a nutshell. To understand his choice, Stephanie Weimar takes up the camera and accompanies him from his first instructions to the day he makes his final vows with the Steyler Missionaries in the monastery of St. Augustin. How can a person voluntarily submit to obedience, poverty, and chastity – and do without sex his whole life? Her perplexity and anger at a church that condemns homosexuality in the name of God, bans condoms, and bears part of the blame for Aids drive this film and determine its perspective. We share Gregor’s – whose decision is a radical one – doubts and reflections on this road to enlightenment. But it’s the director who learns what real tolerance means. Because the fact is that we are all seekers for meaning.
Cornelia Klauß
Cornelia Klauß
Free Fall
Arthur Lipsett
In “Free Fall”, Arthur Lipsett, the NFB’s “boy genius”, who inspired directors like Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas and Stan Brakhage, edited a fast-paced montage of modern stereotypes. Film footage, photos, animations accompanied by fragments of words and music ...
Credits
Tom Daly, Colin Low
Arthur Lipsett
Arthur Lipsett
Arthur Lipsett
Arthur Lipsett
In “Free Fall”, Arthur Lipsett, the NFB’s “boy genius”, who inspired directors like Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas and Stan Brakhage, edited a fast-paced montage of modern stereotypes. Film footage, photos, animations accompanied by fragments of words and music, live sounds of all kind grow into an associative maelstrom of images modelled on Dalí and surrealism. The mundane is juxtaposed with symbols charged with meaning, concrete faces with abstract figures, rapid movement with stagnation, the old with the new. The closing image is that of a cell from which everything grows. Lipsett himself said: “An attempt to express in filmic terms an intensive flow of life – a vision of a world in the throes of creativity – the transformation of physical phenomena into psychological ones – a visual bubbling of picture and sound operating to create a new continuity of experience – (…) strange shapes shine forth from the abyss of timelessness.”
---Grit Lemke
---Grit Lemke
Gloria Victoria
Theodore Ushev
“Gloria Victoria” unfolds on the still-smouldering rubble of a furious 20th century. Resembling a military march with bolero overtones, the music sweeps over imagery of combat fronts and massacres, ...
Gloria Victoria
Animated Film
Canada
2013
7 minutes
subtitles:
_without dialogue / subtitles
“Gloria Victoria” unfolds on the still-smouldering rubble of a furious 20th century. Resembling a military march with bolero overtones, the music sweeps over imagery of combat fronts and massacres, leading us from Dresden to Guernica, from the Spanish Civil War to “Star Wars”. It is at once a symphony that serves the war machine, that stirs the masses, and art that mourns the dead, voices its outrage and calls for peace.
A hen performs an exuberant and wild dance to Canadian country music. Sometimes it’s an egg, sometimes it has a leg missing and occasionally it falls apart. Norman McLaren had a fascination for chickens and eggs because he believed they lent themselves easily to simple drawings, so they became quite popular figures in his films. “It is not so important what is moving as how it moves.” Again, McLaren painted the animation directly on the film.
---Annegret Richter
---Annegret Richter
Hollow Land
Uri Kranot, Michelle Kranot
Solomon and Berta are two seekers who arrive – their treasured bathtub improbably in tow – in a land that promises respite from their many journeys. ...
Hollow Land
Animated Film
Canada,
Denmark,
France
2013
14 minutes
subtitles:
English
Solomon and Berta are two seekers who arrive – their treasured bathtub improbably in tow – in a land that promises respite from their many journeys. From the first optimistic moments after their arrival, to the final haunting scene at sea, the film captures the state of being displaced – whether by circumstance or by choice.
The photographic representation of a human cranium turns into an animated skull, its eyes become swastikas, while the enemy, personified by a Hitler-spy, learns important war secrets from its mouth. A drastic appeal and an intermediate stage on the filmmaker’s path from the concrete to abstraction.
---Grit Lemke
---Grit Lemke
Maple Syrup
Yoshino Aoki
A girl traveled with a lot of baggage from Canada into a new home. She opens her suitcase ...
A girl traveled with a lot of baggage from Canada into a new home. She opens her suitcase and finds something unexpected but very familiar.
While Mary and Jia Tsu are rehearsing the play “The Vagina Monologues”, which is about Asian women who were forced to become prostitutes for the armed forces in the 1930s and 40s, the two women discuss their intense feeling of grief and anger in order to be able to perform the play in the end.