We remain obsessed with dolls– as children, we’d learnt to create for ourselves plastic avatars of our play objects, and now, as adults, we remain trapped in this transference of self and the imagining of scenarios, albeit in a more subtle and subconscious form. Our innate desire to play god by exerting control over self-replicas, which had been so apparent in our childhood, is now forced to manifest itself through other means besides playing with plastic. We turn to the most malleable form of art: film.
Film has become our stage, our new avatar. It is our way of seeking liberation from the present, through both the role of filmmaker and of spectator. A filmmaker, by creating a new reality in film, has established himself as god, or a creator of truth, thereby also creating for us a stage on which we can imagine ourselves occupying via the actors on screen. For the duration of the film, we may briefly forget our own selves and revel in the illusionary power obtained through the observation of a contained, controlled world. Although this experience is applicable for all genres of film, stop-motion film is particularly well-suited in depicting this stage-spectator relationship.
The stop-motion genre is becoming increasingly abandoned, but two Surrealist films, Jabberwocky by Jan Svankmajer and Street of Crocodiles by the Quay brothers, successfully tapped into its potential. Stop-motion reveals its power through its direct and quite literal replacement of people with dolls and objects, all photographed in movement through the real world. There is no greater embodiment of a film acting as a stage upon which we can insert ourselves; the movements that we see are simultaneously real (because, despite their fantastical motions, they are still taking place in the real world, the source of its movements simply hidden in the ellipses of the film) while overtly illusionary (because the actions themselves, i.e. a still object coming to life and dancing, are undeniably impossible). It is this paradoxical juxtaposition of the real and the illusion that grants stop-motion an even greater power: despite the spectator’s constant awareness of its impossibility, the illusion still retains a degree of possibility, because its movements are so directly fixed in the real world.
Both Svankmajer and the Quay brothers carefully create their world using everyday objects, and in doing so, construct a type of reality that is synchronously familiar and new. When watching their films, we are instantly familiar with the plastic doll heads, the classic wooden chair, the ordinary metal screw, the lightbulb– it is a new reality pieced together with fragments of our own, thereby reading as a rearrangement, rather than an entirely alien atmosphere, like those created via CGI in Marvel superhero movies. This is the primary way in which the film becomes a more immersive stage, by creating a setting that is strongly felt as a replica of our own, rather than a complete departure. It is the imminently real turned into a tangible unreal. To add on to the effect, the objects themselves are antiquated and gritty, as though pervaded with both the refuse of life and its sentimentality. They are not just objects but relics fingerprinted with the presence of an external world, our own.
Just as they attempt to close the boundary between our world and theirs, the filmmakers also attempt to erase the dichotomy between the real and the absurd, between life and death. Particularly in Jabberwocky, all extremities coexist in the sudden perversion of the childlike, as a cannibalistic doll daintily devours plastic body parts or is torn apart as smaller dolls scramble out of its body. Akin to the traditional Grimm’s fairy tales, there is a natural blending of children- storytelling and the grotesque; the cannibalistic, brute dolls are an embodiment of death merged with life, further highlighted by added scenes of fresh fruit giving way to worms and of a folding knife, when closed on itself, paradoxically stabs itself and gushes blood.
Through Svankmajer’s and the Quay brothers’ ingenious use of stop motion, we find a caricature of both ourselves and our lives. The absurdity of juxtaposed life and death, of dolls rent apart to reveal gore, and of underworlds composed of human artifacts, is felt keenly as a subconscious stage for us to enter and as a replica reality directly born from our own. In the substitution of human actors with doll characters, the films rekindle our inherent affinity for playing god, and through it, hint at an even greater truth. Heinrich von Kleist once wrote on marionettes, insisting that, because they are not bound to the earth like we are, they exceed the grace of any human being, and that only through the self-consciousness of our own limitations, we can achieve a degree of that grace. Svankmajer and the Quay brothers give us the liberation that we need from our human limitations, by instilling in us the constant self-consciousness of their films' illusion, while simultaneously allowing for us to enter the illusion, to play on the stage as spectator-dolls.
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