Animating Principles: The Movie

Sometimes, even the agenda has an agenda.

Set in an experimental art space in the desert, this boardroom melodrama tracks infestations of the bureaucratic within the tenuous infrastructure of the poetic. With reverence for thirty years of collective organising at Watch This Space, we witness a meeting of wonky proportions.

Starring Tam Hanson, Russel Goldflam, Seraphina Newberry, Betty Sweetlove, Harry Hayes and Jorgen Doyle
Written by Gabriel Curtin, Charlie Freedman & Beth Sometimes
Cinematography by Jonothan Daw
Sound design by Vito Lucarelli
Puppets by Leonie Brialey, Sia Cox, Beth Sometimes & Dan Murphy
Edited by Charlie Freedman & Garden Reflexxx
Directed by Charlie Freedman & Beth Sometimes
21 mins

Animating Principles will be proudly screened alongside two other short experimental films – Itchy IOUs by Liang Luscombe and Wantee by Laure Prouvost. Each of these works ask questions about value, constructing fantastical realities using the ingredients of our own. The entities in these works negotiate incessantly shifting terrain, whether it is being dug down into, hoisted on ones back, or eaten away at surreptitiously. Through “absurd characters in plausible predicaments” as Amber Esseiva describes them in the context of Liang’s work, we recognise ourselves as plausible characters in absurd predicaments.

ITCHY IOUs

Directed and Produced by Liang Luscombe 2020
Shot entirely within brightly-coloured constructed sets, this new surreal situational comedy follows two women, Fran and Sol, as they struggle with the twisted world of personal debt.
Dedicated to David Graeber
22 mins

Liang Luscombe’s practice encompasses painting, sculpture, and moving image that engage in a process of generative questioning of how images and film affect audiences. She received her MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University, USA. She has been included in screenings at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Artists Space, NYC; The Capitol, Melbourne; Table, Chicago; The Sunview Luncheonette NYC; ACMI, Melbourne; Composite, Melbourne; and the 51st Athens International Film + Video Festival. Liang is a current PHD candidate at Monash University, researching the interpretations of Malay/Southeast Asian folkloric ghost of the pontianak via her puppetry and moving image practice.

WANTEE

by Laure Prouvost 2013
‘Wantee’ tells the narrative of Prouvost’s grandfather, a conceptual artist who was a friend of Kurt Schwitters, the exiled German artist. Prouvost’s grandfather, we are told, went missing while digging a tunnel to North Africa beneath his home in the lake district.
15 mins

Laure Prouvost – born in France and now living in Brussels - is a multi-disciplinary artist best known for her films and immersive large-scale multi-media installations, in which she plays with words and their meanings in non-linear ways. Using humour as entrapment, Prouvost’s work addresses miscommunication and how ideas become lost in translation. The artist combines existing and imagined personal memories with artistic and literary references in different mediums that dialogue with each other, such as film, sculpture, painting, tapestry, performance, and fragmentary tales. This combination creates sensual environments of unfamiliar worlds that absorb the spectator in a form of escapism.