ABSTRACT
Direct animation’s emphasis on artisanal processes and homemade qualities is reinforced by textual support that exploits the artist’s retreat from not only digital techniques but the traditional mechanical technologies of filmmaking, such as professional chemical processing labs, lenses and even the camera. In turn, much of this writing celebrates the turn toward film as hand-made object. Filmmaker Sandra Gibson’s process is described in terms of its intricacy and craft. As programmer writes, Gibson’s films are comprised of ‘painted, scratched upon and braided strips of film-surfaces meticulously and recklessly worked-upon, until blistering and flowering with the maker’s material mark, further reworked and rephotographed through optical-printing’. The implication of the filmmaker’s bodily contact with the image emerges as the most important point of reference in its guarantee of authenticity and claims for auratic presence in contemporary avant-garde filmmaking.
