Analogon: Of a World Already Animated

Abstract

Films, and perhaps especially animated films, are ways of thinking. In their own ways, and beyond any intention of human filmmakers, films think. Animations think especially hard about movement, time and, unsurprisingly, animation: what motivates something to move. In their remarkably different ways, Muto (2007–2008) and Der Lauf der Dinge (1987) undertake a radical thinking-through of change, respectively as mutation and its constituents, and the capacities of film generally and animation specifically to unhinge and re-articulate classifications of human, environmental and technological life. Muto is a 7-minute graphic by Italian street artist Blu filmed in stop-motion on location in Buenos Aires as the artist and his team paint, erase and redraw a series of evolving figures on the walls of the city. Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go) is a 30-minute film by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss which documents in a series of long takes (with carefully concealed edits) a series of home-made devices which variously decompose, fall, crash and burn to produce a chain reaction of events.