Synopsis
A static camera observes a room as it slowly fills with thirty-six characters from different stages of life, as they move in loops through an absurd dance of social disconnection.
1981 Directed by Zbigniew Rybczyński
A static camera observes a room as it slowly fills with thirty-six characters from different stages of life, as they move in loops through an absurd dance of social disconnection.
Caught this at the Detroit Institute of Arts' animation exhibit. It's an eight-minute static shot of a furnished room that's gradually filled with dozens of different characters. They walk in, perform a simple action (e.g. retrieving a ball, nursing a baby, stealing a package), walk out 15 seconds later, then immediately begin the process again. It's a simple conceit that lends itself to well to rhythm and repetition, all set to a tango playing gently in the background.
The short's clever and quite subtly funny. None of the characters say anything, but the mere juxtaposition of, say, a middle-class family sitting down at the dinner table (over and over again) with a naked woman getting dressed, an athlete doing a…
"Thirty-six characters from different stages of life - representations of different times - interact in one room, moving in loops, observed by a static camera. I had to draw and paint about 16.000 cell-mattes, and make several hundred thousand exposures on an optical printer. It took a full seven months, sixteen hours per day, to make the piece. The miracle is that the negative got through the process with only minor damage, and I made less than one hundred mathematical mistakes out of several hundred thousand possibilities. In the final result, there are plenty of flaws: black lines are visible around humans, jitters caused by the instability of film material resulting from film perforation and elasticity of celluloid, changes of…
One of those rare shorts that still surprises me with each subsequent viewing. I love how the titular soundtrack piece never speeds up or intensifies, even as the stream of people shuffling in and out builds to a choreographed chaos that’s just a wonder to watch. If you liked this, check out Cycles, Copy Shop, or Hertzfeldt's The Meaning of Life.
1st Zbigniew Rybczyński
A small room? Lots of people milling around? Dirty feet on my floor? Repeated and unpleasant loud noises? No sense of privacy?
Incredible how Rybczyński managed to capture my own private nightmare in the space of eight minutes.
Written and directed by Zbigniew Rybczyński, Tango was the first Polish film to receive an Oscar when it won Best Animated Short Film at the 55th Academy Awards. The short 1981 film observes a ball entering a parlour where a bed, a table and a cupboard are located. Next, a boy crawls in through the same window as the ball entered. As he moves closer to retrieve the ball, he sets in motion numerous other people gradually joining the room where their series of individual actions are repeated persistently. It's an extraordinary short film that captures love, birth, family, age and death in the space of eight minutes. While there's no explicit message that serves as a common thread, it's guided impressively by many small labours of everyday life.
This is the sort of thing that seems at first as though its gimmick might start to wear thin before its running time is over, but it never does. If anything, the longer it goes on, the more engaging it is; the more rhythmic the actions become, until they supersede the titular tango itself in their own musicality.
Honestly, “Dude That Keeps Coming Back to Fall Off the Table” [unknown actor, 1981] is easily one of the most relatable film characters I’ve seen this year.
É tão interessante como prestamos mais atenção a determinadas figuras do que a outras, é quase um resumo da nossa vida, são poucas as pessoas que passam por ela a quem nos dedicamos.
Vimeo. ( vimeo.com/90339479 )
Like a silent slapstick joke without a punchline, which, as it turns out, is kinda horrifying!