Why I Make Analogue Films in a Digital Age: Hidden Depths of Material Meaning

Stop-motion animation can amplify the meaning of the everyday. It can transform everyday objects and materials into ‘living’ beings that possess “an existential status endowed with agency … [and] emotional freight that cannot be dismissed” (Moxey, 2008:131) added to this emotional freight “The material of the clay points to the material body, but it is a body that remains partially cloaked in uncanny stillness.” (Batkin, 2017: 72) The materials used to create the puppets can also help find meaning through the material's cultural associations and heritage. For example, “wax figures, which embody the blurring of boundaries characterising modernism and, even more so, postmodernism, namely those between self/other, subject/object, human being/inanimate form, living body/courpse, life death, male female, solid/liquid, dynamic static cinema photography, madness/sanity, fiction/history, authentic/fake original/copy interior/ exterior.” ​(Bloom, 2003 xi)​ Influenced by the works of Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay, my latest award-winning film, Potter’s Mirror (2024), explores through practice the cultural freight of the individual materials used, from re-animated bodies to the objects that decorate the set. Whilst the film predominantly investigates the relationship of the uncanny to animation, this presentation will focus on the other aspects of directorial decision-making. As a filmmaker, these objects and materials are chosen for their hidden layers of meaning. For example, the stones that, whilst ‘cold’ objects, carry a narrative of time and place with them, or the scientific objects that hold echoes of Enlightenment thought and colonial power. They may be hidden from themselves; however, they reveal to us through the presentation in film a weight of meaning for the viewer.