Paul Fierlinger wrote:I find it all quite coceited; this documentary and his films. When He the Hen won the Grand Prix at Ottawa I made a point that evening of going around the party room asking every member of the jury what the film was about and what it said to them. Every jurist had the same answer; that they couldn't understand the story but that it didn't matter.
Unless the jury was biased, this shows that his film brought magic into their mind. Or, better yet, to their hearts. And if their hearts voted, there is no need to reason or to give it words of reason. Plus, the closing party is a bad choice of timing for addressing a jury who just now finally got rid of that exhausting duty of sitting through every possible screening of a multi-day festival!
hisko wrote:By the way.
Igor Kovaljov earns an award for modesty. Never met a guy that is so modest and down to the ground.
That's what I felt too. I had a drink with him also
Paul Fierlinger wrote:I don't believe the problem is in the length of a feature film compared to an animated short -- it's simply in the difference of the media
The problem is in the difference in length also. There's the art of short, and the art of long. It brings up considerable differences, even within a single medium - literature. Very rarely I find a short story moving me. And when it does, it is of different flavor to how a novel moves me. Length here acts as the grounds on which relationships develop - the relationship between you (audience) and the film. The content of the film will decide what flavor this relationship will have. But the length decides how much chance you have to live in that relationship. Ultimately, it is important in deepening your experience.
When we look at the film/animation teaming, many more factors come into play, because when we decide to animate, is because we believe that what we are about to say cannot be said in film in the same exactness. So the mission then becomes even harder, as we are pushed more into the realm of, well, inventing how we want to communicate. animation shares an attribute with video art: there are no rules of engagement. The call to be economical and pragmatic yields an animal that has no equivalent in any other field of arts. Hence, there so many failed attempts, or more correctly, uninteresting works. But when something works, it works beyond reasoning. It can be magic. It then becomes poetry. and in poetry you don't have to explain anything. Your favorite poem can be a poem that even when you read it 100 times, it can still nourish you. Because you find too many things in it, or because it is so beautiful, or because the metaphors are so inspiring... or because you can't just quite get it, but it leaves taste for more.
Paul Fierlinger wrote:Now I doubt Kovalyov has made anyone go through a string of deep emotions with his films, which are basically just unsolvable puzzles and leaving people trying to guess what it was all about -- at its best. Paintings do this well too.
Then give me unsolvable puzzles any day of the week. Saying "just" on his films is a bit lame. Personally, It puts me through emotions, deep enough to brings me back to his films again and again. They are candies. They are poems. They are something, that no other one makes. A piece is a puzzle only if you watch it like you are watching a puzzle. The motion art is the art of creating relationships between one image and the other in subsequence. Kovalyov is doing that well, and more: he touches the audience, like he touched that jury. If you really see his films as triumph of surface over substance, I think you have been looking at the wrong frames. Anyway, I never like being in the persuasion. It's only a matter of taste in the end. I just know that Kovalyov is up there with a select few, who touch and inspire and don't lose their voice, lightyears ahead of all the others.
