ABSTRACT
By way of short, experimental, ‘ante-narrative’ animated films, this inquiry borrows David Boje’s notion of the ante-narrative and draws on a selection of films which in part employ repetition, duplication and reiteration as a narrative strategy. Considering examples that emerged towards the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, the author examines short films that are structurally episodic and circulative where the narrative appears to resist rather than service the forward momentum of each story. These films have also been selected for their common preoccupation with time and its place in the production of narrative meaning. Beginning with an assessment of Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the time-image, with particular emphasis on the interval, the author focuses on the dissociative effect produced by an irrational serialism. Here we discover narratives which leap across seemingly unbridgeable layers of time expressing a discontinuity that divides into separate ‘presents’. These ‘presents’ relate to one another but elude homogeneity to create a fragmented diegetic space. It concludes that the processing and expression of time in these films function not only as a narrative device, but also as self-reflective ‘play’, and as a means of expressing an ontological position.
