La poupée de cire, la poupée de son - A Short History about Animation Film

With films by: Martha Colburn, Nathalie Djurberg, Pia Maria Martin, Jon Pylypchuk. The interest in the puppet – be it motivated by questions concerning the construction of the body with respect to gene technology or by current TV war pictures – and its implementation in contemporary art persistently increased since the 1990s and continues so to this day. Art theoretician Hal Forster regards the use of the puppet in an artistic context as a resurrection or “recurrence of the repressed” – a return to the trauma of the World Wars or the knowledge emanating from the psychoanalysis of the 1920s such as the constitution of the subject or the death drive. The animation of puppets, that is to say the filmic staging of synthetic bodies is the object of this project. Animated films are amongst others films in which drawings or objects come “alive” by constructing movement through single frame recording of the drawings and objects. The story of these animated films begins in the 1950s with representatives of Soviet puppet films such as Jirí Trnka and Yuri Norstein reaching up to the present where this art film still exists in various forms – the project traces the development from the beginning to the present day. Curated by Raphael Gygax.