The Timeliness of Anachronistic Forms: On Daniel Sousa's Fable

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Elizabeth Walden is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island. Her work is dedicated to inter and anti-disciplinary forms of inquiry and teaching in the Humanities. Her writing on issues in cinema, visual arts and culture is concerned with identifying and furthering the socially promising dimensions of emerging cultural forms.

Notes

1. For further information about Daniel Sousa's work and to see clips of work in progress visit <danielsousa.com> or <handcrankedfilm.com>.

2. While Sousa's animation is hand-drawn and painted, he does not eschew digital technology. Like most animators working these days, he uses digital technologies as needed. Here are notes on Fable from his website: “Most of the rough animation was prepared in Flash with the corresponding color fill layers. The drawings were then printed, traced and cleaned up on paper to achieve a more organic quality. They were then rescanned and composited in After Effects. Some of the drawings were etched on acetate and rubbed with ink. The backgrounds were a combination of paintings, collages and photos. The animation was rendered in HD and then transferred to 35 mm.”

3. Tom Gunning locates the beginning of the importance of the concept of index for film theory in Peter Wollen's article “The Semiology of the Cinema” in which he articulates a relationship between the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce and Andre Bazin's views of cinematic realism (2007, 31). For Pierce, “the index is a sign that functions through an actual existential connection to its referent” (Gunning 2007, 30). So as Manovich suggests a footprint is an often cited example as are “the bullet hole, the sundial, the weathervane and photographs—all signs based on the direct physical connection between the sign and its referent—the action of the foot, impact of the bullet, the movement of the sun, the direction of the wind or the light bouncing from an object” (Gunning 2007, 30).

4. In terms of scope this essay holds in tension two goals. I wish to do justice to Sousa's film by offering a concrete and detailed reading of its specific features and its general significance. But by emphasizing the cultural and aesthetic context within which his work appears, I also offer Sousa as an exemplary case of a much broader phenomenon in which traditional and hand-made techniques, do-it-yourself aesthetics and outsider art are flourishing as the dominance of modernism and post-modernism fade.

5. As I write this article, experimental theater director Robert Wilson's “Fables de la Fontaine” have just opened at Lincoln Center in New York. The headline of its review reads “On the surface, the moral. Beneath that, the blood.” And reviewer Ben Brantley writes; “these are not La Fontaine's Fables as you studied them in introductory French literature, fluidly assembled verses with tidy morals and sharp bite; these are the fables as life itself, and you may never have another chance to see just how scary they are” (2007, B1).

6. Donna Haraway in her widely anthologized “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” cites the breakdown of the boundary between human and animal as one which makes her “political fictional” analysis possible: “The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human an animal is transgressed” (1985, 193).

7. This “recrudescence” of drawing can be mapped in recent publications like Vitamin D (2005), Drawing Now: Eight Propositions (2002) and Drawing from the Modern (2005). Full citations are in the works cited section below.

8. And see note #2 above. Animators working in traditional techniques commonly avail themselves of digital technologies.