Fifty years of animated films. Twenty shorts. One unmistakable vision. The Swiss master has collected prizes at Cannes, Annecy, Zagreb, Hiroshima, Stuttgart, Ottawa and Espinho, two Swiss Film Awards, and a Special Lifetime Achievement Award from Annecy in 2017. Two of his films rank among the hundred most influential animated films in history. His style is richly pictorial, almost baroque: spiral movements, gestural colour and music as the dominant force. He structures entire films around single pieces of classical music. His cinema circles around vanity, emptiness, celebration giving way to death: the futility of existence rendered in extraordinary colour and movement.
At Kinomural he’s showing Jeu, a film about the frenetic pace of modern life, set to the scherzo of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2: relentless, playful, dizzying. Images unfold into one another like Russian dolls, figurative elements revealing new figurative elements, with no overt narrative thread to hold onto. You don’t follow a story. You follow the movement, and the movement takes you somewhere. Co-produced with the National Film Board of Canada, the film won 12 international awards, including the Silver Dove at DOK Leipzig, best experimental animation at the Ottawa International Animation Festival and a Special Jury Prize at Hiroshima.
