Every Thursday, Chris Robinson takes a look at films from animation’s past. This week screens Virgil Widrich's trippy 2003 tribute to Hollywood, Fast Film.
'Fast Film' by Virgil Widrich
Virgil Widrich’s Fast Film (2003) is composed of more than 65,000 paper printouts of individual images from over 400 live action films. Widrich and his team took the paper printouts and folded them into a variety of objects including train cars, planes (e.g. a photograph of John Wayne as a fighter pilot is folded into a paper airplane), landscapes, and a clever little 'wheel of fortune' torture device that mix and matches heads with body parts (the best one features the head of James Woods with a body comprised solely of a hand flicking a lighter.
Fast Film is more than just another one of tech-fetish films. The technology is certainly fascinating in itself, but its uniqueness and complexity also injects the narrative/plot/story with a medley of critical readings. Each screening undresses a new identity. You can follow the paint by numbers plot, enjoy the film as a tour of film history, or dive in a little deeper and explore the film as a clever little self-reflexive text that ferociously criticizes the sweeping sameness of Hollywood cinema (The fact that 400 films and an assortment of interchangeable actors can all be compressed with relative ease and believability into a single short film says a lot about the shortcomings of classical narrative cinema). Or maybe Fast Film is about the future of animation. Is Fast Film, animation's resistance against the fear of digital domination? Does Fast Film assimilate photorealistic images and digital technologies into an animation world? Or is animation the medium being devoured once and for all?
Whatever your take, Fast Film is a clever, cool, happy-go-schizoid cross between Marv Newland's Anijam, George Griffin's Viewmaster, Frank Mouris' Frank Film, That's Entertainment 1, 2 and 3, Film Studies 101, Walter Benjamin, and my cousin, Marvin; a rare piece of animation that transgresses the often hoarding and myopic borders of animation’s hermits.
A well-known figure in the world of independent animation, writer, author & curator Chris Robinson is the Artistic Director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival.
