“MY NAME IS DANNY”

Abstract

This paper offers a close reading of PAW Media animation My Name is Danny. Drawing across a growing body of recent Central and Western Desert experimental cinema, this paper asks what is at stake in the turn to animation. Rather than escapism or otherworldly fabrications which have little to do with lived experience of the “real,” animation in this context has potent everyday exigencies and politics. The capacity for bringing to life literally – animate – is here linked to the primacy of a sentient landscape; an object world already alive and enlivened with motion, movement, sensation. The question for contemporary filmmaking (as indeed, for other forms of remote experimental Indigenous art) is how to engage country and its viscera today. How to keep country/Ancestor/story alive literally through sentient forms of affective exchange; a project which animation, as this paper will explore, uniquely provides. Drawing on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, as well as the animation theory of Cholodenko, Lemarre and others, this paper argues for a radical reconsideration of animation not as incompatible with tradition but in fact as facilitating traditional ontologies of affect and sensation in a national context of remote Aboriginal Australia “under occupation.”

Keywords:

• claymation animation
• Indigenous art
• phenomenology of aesthetics
• affect and sensation
• PAW Media

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This paper is indebted to the animators, artists and community members of PAW Media and Communications, specifically, Susan Locke, Jason Japaljarri Woods, Simon Frazer, Elizabeth Katakirinja, David Slowo and Jeff Bruer, who have generously supported Same but Different: Experimentation and Innovation in Desert Arts I (2012) and II (2013), an initiative of public-platform symposia and screenings that I co-established in collaboration with Desart Inc. and with Dr Lisa Stefanoff (see Biddle and Stefanoff). My Name is Danny toured nationally and internationally in 2013 and 2014 in a select suite of new short works of cinema, in a co-curated program entitled Desert Animations, as part of Same but Different. See <http://www.niea.unsw.edu.au/events/screening-desert-animations> (accessed Jan. 2015). I would like to acknowledge co-curator Lisa Stefanoff for facilitating this initiative and for ongoing discussion on animation specifically.

2 For so-called minor aesthetics and minor affects see the “zany” and “cute” in Ngai; “shame” in Kosofsky Sedgwick and Frank; Biddle (“Shame”); Probyn; “optimism” in Berlant; and minoritarian aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari; Bennett.

3 This is Jill Bennett's point, regarding the work of video artist Michael Moore.