Mécanomagie
A landscape ist altered. Everything in it is subjected to another rhythm, everything moves too fast, changes at high speed. A person of a kind appears in this landscape. The figure doesn´t move at all, but is bodily moved as a whole. An almost hovering, gliding movement, achieved without the expenditure of energy, leads along roads, through woods and villages. Together, nature and the figure develop their joint and related otherness to a form of parallel world. The film shows us this "magical" world. For the normal people in the film this world is invisible - it is simply too fast - as a key scene demonstrates. One feels it everywhere, but its rhythm overtaxes normal perception, it cannot be experienced. Nevertheless it appears that the unmoving mover, on his way to abnormal events, stands in some relation to things which happen to some people and objects in normal world. Soil which transformed into letters of the alphabet, letters into beetles. Stones with organic inner life, children or words that grow from the soil... It is as if the invisible world has an understanding with this world, the hyperreal forces its way into the common. The movement as deviation causes change. It surrealises the banal, and makes the commonplace eerie. The film maintains a relationship to both worlds, allows a double vision. Its seductive power lies primarily in the ambiguity of what it makes possible - its deviant shooting process - and what is possible outside of that. (Marc Ries) A landscape in which everything moves is afflicted with a figure which is, in itself static, but which moves - a person who has become a machine? In Mécanomagie both the borders of perception and (natural) laws are infringed so that something new may emerge: nature as a boundless state of intoxication! (Peter Illetschko) Mécanomagie describes the ancient circle of sowing, growing and harvesting; a universe composed of religion, rituals and the mysterious powers of nature. The film invades the collective conscious of a landscape: the Ardennes in the northern part of Luxembourg. Simultaneously, the film tells us about the Jitzerten, humanoid beings zigzaging over trails and roads without being noticed by the indigenous inhabitants. Mécanomagie employs the techniques of stop-motion; it is a film about the encounter of time and space, about the expansion of perception and its deception. The surreal effects of pixillation create their own world, hallucinating as a strange dream… (Synopsis) Mécanomagie takes a stylish, performative path through the landscape of the Ardennes in northern Luxembourg. "Live action" pixilated animation evokes a grounded paisant consciousness of "natural forces" and folkloric myths of the humanoid Jitzerten that pass unnoticed across the country. Along the way, imaginative constructions reveal such marvel as the anthropomorphic nature of rocks, children born of soil and mysterious bloody book of beetles. The film´s success is in its elegant blending of magical neo-surrealist otherworldliness with a fundamental earth-boundedness. (Stephen Ball, International Melbourne Film Festival 1997) --> www.badyminck.com
Mécanomagie
1996
Luxembourg, Austria
15 min