"Watch Me Move" in the "Radio Engineering" pavilion at VDNKh

Exhibition animation

Photo: Elena Gorbacheva, Kommersant / buy photo

The project of the London art center Barbican was first shown in 2011, traveled to several European and Eastern countries and was finally localized in Moscow. The brief but stunning history of world animation hypnotized VALENTIN DYAKONOV.

In order not to beat around the bush, let's say the main thing: “Watch Me Move” is the exhibition of the year, and not only because there is a month and a half left until the end of 2015. It’s just that, to put it mildly, we are not spoiled by such entertainment. This is an exhibition about cartoons, directly affecting the history of cinema in general. This is an entertaining event, spectacular in architecture and drama, which absorbs you completely and will force you to return - and not only because sitting through several hours of interesting animation at a time is beyond the power of even the most infantile adult. This is an exhibition that will be of interest to both the older generation and children (however, accompanying people should be careful about the markings on the explanations - some things here are only for those over 18). Finally, this is a very smart exhibition with an ideal balance of purely entertaining moments and experimental research, and curator Greg Hilty treats the former without snobbery, and the latter is able to truly captivate those who are far from the avant-garde in all its manifestations.

"Watch Me Move" is the title sequence of Windsor McCay's silent film Little Nemo (1911). From this title, a caricatured figure of a native begins to move in front of the film’s characters, who are skeptical about the possibilities of animation, for which today the West would curse the creator of “Little Nemo.” The film itself is placed in the section of early animation, where, in addition to films from the Lumière brothers studio, there is, for example, “Parade of Shadows” by the famous contemporary artist William Kentridge, who thoughtfully works with the history and aesthetics of cinema. There is, on the other hand, “Falling Cat” by Etienne-Jules Marais - 28 photographs glued together into a single video. A cat landing springily on a pillow looks strikingly modern, and you soon understand why: the structural basis of Mare’s film is the same as the GIFs that young people populate their social media accounts with. These kinds of epiphanies and juxtapositions are not uncommon at all on Watch Me Move. This is not a linear story of how it all began and how it ended, but a full-scale exploration of all possible roles and types of animation.

The exhibition is divided into several thematic sections. Most of the physical space is allocated to “Heroes” and “Supermen”. Here, in excerpts, characters from a variety of studios are collected with an emphasis on serialization and recognition. The gallery of "Heroes" is unusually wide - from Betty Boop, a caricature of a 1930s party girl, to the Flintstones family and a little-known petty crook in Russia from "Gop-Stop" - an early film by Peter Lord, one of the creators of the Aardvark studio ("Wallace and Gromit" ). In the “Supermen” section, American comic book heroes coexist on the same screen with much creepier comrades from Japanese anime - for example, the ultra-bloody “Akira” (the organizers of the exhibition, fortunately, omitted the most delicious moments). In “Ideas,” which introduces the viewer to fresh experiments in the field of animation, the greatest delight is caused by the installation of the British studio Igloo “SwanQuake: Home” (2007). We enter a cramped room with bare walls, sit down at a screen with three buttons and begin an aimless journey through the back streets of London's East End, from time to time bumping into the ghost of a girl in combat uniform dancing a step from Swan Lake: the title of the work is a combination of English titles of Tchaikovsky's ballet ("Swan Lake") and the popular computer game Quake. Domestic animation is represented by Norstein alone and his “Tale of Tales” in the “Legends” section, where the busy cartoon sits next to the early Tim Burton and the aforementioned Aardvark studio. "Episodes" look the most radical: there are examples of political cinema that use 3D animation as a tool for criticizing American imperialism ("Serious Games" by Harun Farocki), melancholic minimalism from Francis Alus and, finally, "Games of Angels" by the Pole Walerian Borowczyk - a surreal cartoon about the military-industrial complex, metaphysics and sadomasochism (not necessarily in that order).

After an hour spent in the company of moving pictures, you stop believing that there are also static objects. The belief in flatness, which inspired the 20th century avant-garde artists to anti-literary experiments with the abstract and the concrete, seems like some kind of meaningless anachronism. On "Watch Me Move" it is obvious that we are not only looking, but also making cartoons out of every piece of the surrounding reality. True, this ecstatic feeling also has a side effect: the alleys of VDNKh after the exhibition seem dull and insipid, the people seem somehow unreanimated or something, at least turn back. It seems that Fyodor Sologub described something similar 100 years ago in the story “Shadows and Light” about a high school student who went crazy due to his passion for shadow theater. Probably, it is better for overly impressionable decadents not to go to the exhibition, but there are not many of them in Moscow: we could use a little shock therapy to bring our inner child back to life.

Full-length resuscitation