For this analysis I will be comparing and contrasting some of the themes and motifs present in two pieces of animation, Director Peter Folds' A Short Vision and Stan VanDerBeek's Science Friction. Though the two short films differ greatly in terms of form, genre and the way in which they use visual language, there is some thematic crossover and interesting parallels to be made.
Aesthetically, while radically different they both retain prominent 1950s iconography, which is integral to the intended reading of both films. Fold's film plays with genre in order to subvert audience expectations, presenting us in the opening few minutes with what seems like your standard storybook setup, complete with a voice-over narration that wouldn't seem out of place in an episode of Jackanory. The director uses an inclusive visual aesthetic in order to communicate his message to a mass audience, foreshadowing the horrors of a potential nuclear war by staging it in the context of children's storybook.
VanDerBeek's film takes a different approach and is of another genre entirely, instead taking the form of an surrealist experimental cut-out animation with a deep ideologically charged subtext satirising the political climate of 1950s. Cold War escalation and the space race is depicted in VanDerBeek's film as a sort of, to put it in the crudest possible terms, international 'dick-measuring contest.' Phallic parallels can be drawn between the use of large skyscrapers and space rockets as measurements of power.
VanDerBeek draws parallels between the power-politics of the Cold War and attitudes towards gender in the 1950s (a time with a very male-dominated society) and perceived insecurities with masculinity. Though imagery is intentionally suggestive rather than concrete a lot of what I have taken away from viewing this film can be taken as my interpretation and not necessarily what the author intended. Nevertheless, from the opening few minutes of Science Friction VanDerBeek seems to equate the power plays between east and west to a strongman contest, where two countries are flexing at each other from afar, fueling each other's insecurities over their capability leading to an arms/space race. In a way this is played for laughs, but it serves as a perfect allergory for the mindset of the US and USSR during the height of cold war tensions.
A Short Vision also effectively plays upon the attitudes of the time, mainly the social paranoia of Americans in the 1950s. The audience is not explicitly told what the shape in the sky is at the beginning which plays upon the social and political uncertainties of the times. The intonation of the voice-over narration in A Short Vision seems catered to a younger audience, but the language used by the narrator at the beginning to describe the shape in the sky sets an unsettling tone, describing it as seeming 'small at first', but also 'big', as 'powerful' but 'noiseless'. These contradictory descriptives effectively create unease in the viewer and establish the dogma for the rest of the short film.
Everything seems designed as a contradiction. While the film is aesthetically pleasing to the eye and accessible for all ages, with the cut-out animation, storybook visuals and animal characters, yet the subject matter depicted is genuinely horrifying and graphic, disarming us to catch us off guard. By juxtaposing what is conventionally a universally accessible genre in visual language with shockingly graphic subject matter to get a point across, the audience is more likely to take away the message as intended by the director.
A Short Vision is a success. The film was shown on The Ed Sullivan Show back in 1956 and gained mass-media attention for it's shocking depiction of Nuclear Weapons being used on civilian populations just over a decade after the United States dropped the A-Bomb on cities in Japan, killing upwards of 250,000 civilians. Peter Fold's graphic depiction of a nuclear attack stood in stark contrast to the rest of the media's depiction at the time. In the 1950s the incredibly Conservative mass media was fiercely unquestioning of the sanitized narrative regarding the nuclear arms race being put forth by the elites running America, which is part of the reason it is so effective. The film uses a wide repertoire of visual language to subvert commonly accepted societial assumptions regarding the effects of nuclear weapons, making it both subversive and easily accessible for mass audience consumption.
VanDerBeek's film, while effectively communicating it's message to those literate in more abstract forms of visual language, fails to ignite meaningful conversation in it's audience compared to Folds' work, due to it's deliberately obtuse nature. But this is to be expected as both films were created with completely different audiences in mind. Folds' with the prime-time television audience in mind and VanDerBeek with the art world at the forefront of his.
No comments:
Post a Comment