Chiaroscuro (literally ‘lightdark’) is a compositional technique used in many arts, mainly in painting and printmaking, both of which are often used in animation film. Animators have almost the entire range of artistic media at their disposal to make their films – from oil paint, charcoal, watercolour, to pastels, etching and more – some animation films are truly ‘art that moves’. The films in this programme bring together some of the most dramatic and technically diverse uses of chiaroscuro in animation, from painting and pinscreen to rotoscope, puppet animation and digital collage. Some are more ‘scuro’ than ‘chiaro’, others introduce colour to an otherwise black and white palette.
Originating in 16th century Renaissance painting, in common parlance chiaroscuro has come to mean an emotional, often sombre mood evoked by an image using shadows and light. But shadows have long figured in artistic representation, and his Natural History, Pliny suggested that painting began thousands of years ago with tracing an outline around a human’s shadow.
Painting has depicted many variations on shadows and there is a permeable border between shadows and a chiaroscuro effect. The relationship between painting and photography has ensured a continuation of these explorations, and despite the discovery of photographic realism – the chemical-material base of film – some artists (and filmmakers) were able to circumvent photographic representations of reality.
Considering the shadow, some famous examples of art using shadows are of human shadows on a surface (Alfred Stieglitz’s 1916 Shadows on a Lake, André Kertész’ 1927 Self-portrait), or Christian Boltanksi’s 1986 Shadows installation. Humdrum, from Peter Peake, is film that animates shadows (!) and like the prisoners in Plato’s simile of the cave, we fall into the make-believe that the shadows are the things themselves. But in Humdrum, it is not just us believing the shadows are meaningful images, alive – the shadows themselves do, and play a game that puts their own existence in question.
A film that uses actual shadows to create its chiaroscuro imagery, albeit in a different way, is Night on Bald Mountain is made using the pinscreen technique invented by Russian animator Alexandre Alexeïeff and Claire Parker. A vertical screen over 500,000 pins that can be pushed forward and back is lit from the side and creates different gradations of shadows, depending on how far out the pins extrude. The 12,000 images for this film were created purely by light and its obstruction by the pins, using the exceptional power of the shadow to create subtle gradations of grey between white and black.
Like Alexeïeff and Parker’s technique, any film, both in shooting and in projection, is reliant on variations in light intensity. A blank reel of film would be a blank, white screen: it is the shadows, occlusions, differing levels of opacity of the exposed emulsion on the film stock that keeps the light harnessed. The different sizes, shapes and density of the grain of the film’s exposed area create the minuscule, varying patterns of darkness that result in the images we see the images on screen. A way of seeing this for yourself, although it has more analogy with digital pixels, is to look at a printed image in a newspaper with a magnifying glass – although not the same technology or chemical process, the dots of printing are similar to the grain of the film. The less dense, the more light from the white newspaper is
let through.
The technique used in Petra Freeman’s The Mill is also entirely reliant on light, this time using colour, and familiar from Caravaggio and Dutch masters like Vermeer and Rembrandt. Freeman used oil paint on glass, the gradation of tone and shadow regulated by translucent layers of paint on the glass. The light that shines through it from below that varies depending on the thickness of the paint. A coloured chiaroscuro, Freeman creates an dream-like magical atmosphere that shifts between a small girl’s real world and her fantasy. Gabriela Gruber’s painted Come on Strange incorporates chiaroscuro techniques and colour with a dramatic painterly style married to a rhythmic score, together evoking mythology and sensual experience. A Caliban-like figure conjures the black forms of bulls, cats and birds on a surface that looks like an artist’s workplace. The beasts are set free into a dark space containing three vertical screens, and again come to life on the flat panels. Gruber’s highly sophisticated painting techniques bring chiaroscuro to life on screen in a singular and unforgettable experience of painting that moves.
The shadow in painting is optional and it adds an additional believability factor to the representation and genuineness of a scene, especially if it is to represent something from the natural world.
In live-action film and photography, a lit object will cast a shadow, depending on the light source. It doesn’t necessarily appear in the frame, but it is there. Chiaroscuro lighting in live-action film was perfected in the Film Noir genre, a lighting style that inspired others after it including the horror film’s reliance on lighting (or the lack of it) to create suspense and surprise. Outer Space uses footage from Sidney J. Furie’s 1981 horror film The Entity (featuring Barbara Hershey). Over time, the image gradually degrades and mutates, as Tscherkassky assaults the frame with an array of manipulating techniques.
Using superimpositions and multiple exposure, at times the images look as though they’ve been layered to the point of almost total darkness and other areas of the frame seem burned with light. The effect is perhaps best described by another translation of chiaroscuro – ‘clear/obscure’. Some oscillate between negative and positive, others are created by collage: although he uses live-action footage, Tscherkassky, like animators, works at the level of the individual frame, sometimes painstakingly dissecting the original image using a laser pen and recombining the parts with other frames. The effect of Tscherkassy’s film is overwhelming for some viewers, perhaps achieving a darkness considered by eighteenth century philosopher Edmund Burke as “one of the sources of the sublime”, the sublime being a combination of admiration and fear, even terror. This is in keeping with what Rhys Graham describes as “one of Tscherkassky’s primary concerns, which is to explore and expose the limits of the physical and intellectual mechanisms that constitute ‘film’”.
In the Quay Brothers’ puppet animation films, light and shadows are not created using painting or drawing – the sets and puppets are lit using similar lighting setups as in live-action film, and use focus pull, camera techniques, monochrome and black and white film create shadows and undefined lines They acknowledge some of their inspiration came from filmmakers like Robert Bresson or Alexandre Sokurov, singular for their evocation of sombre moods. Known for their signature style of painting with light —at the 1999 Dresden Animation Festival, the quays won the Grand Prize for animating
light — their Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies is an early example of their mastery of chiaroscuro lighting. The film takes place in two spaces, one bathed in brilliant, clear light in which a number of objects cavort and even a calligraphed, ornate black line is animated. The camera oscillates between here and the other shadowy space occupied by two enigmatic figures, one sitting and the other reclining, enveloped in a sombre mood.
Closely related to chiaroscuro is a painting technique that Leonardo da Vinci called ‘sfumato’: Italian for ‘vanished’, with connotations of the word for smoke (‘fumo’). His analysis of primary and secondary shadows — shadows on an object and shadows projected by an object and behind it — led him to understand the importance of the perspective of shadows in the depiction of three-dimensional representations. In practice, sfumato overlays translucent layers of colour to create perceptions of depth, volume and form. The breathless dynamic of Gianluigi Toccafondo’s The Criminal has a diaphanous feel similar to sfumato. His œuvre is a unique aesthetic based on the relationship between time and movement and body, space, shadow, light and colour. It shares a strong painterly quality with some of the other films.
The only pointedly digitally created work in the programme, Bill Domonkos’ amazing The Fine Art of Poisoning, is a lavish chiaroscuro that mixes a number of media. A montage of 2D and 3D animation, still photography and hand-drawn images, it is a marriage between silent era special effects master George Méliès and the digital age. Not only the film is ‘dark’: the story unravels an elegant netherworld of deceit, plotting and revenge. And watching the film it may become clear why Domonkos is a great admirer of the Quays’ work.
There are two films chosen for their exploitation of what Burke called “the power of black”. Agnieszka Kruczek’s Illusion is an experimental animation film that interprets the dark literary tone of a novel. The last film in the programme, The Velvet Cell, transports us into a chiaroscuro netherworld of an intimated violence reminiscent of Dante’s chasms of hell. Thomas Hicks mixes jerky rotoscoped live-action, spiky drawing and lots of solid dark masses to intimate a space that is both threatening and surprisingly beautiful. The figures in his film move sometimes in rhythm, sometimes in disaccord. Hicks’ unusual style evokes a ghostly image attributed to either Marcel Duchamp or Man Ray: Shadows of a Readymade (1918), and the rotoscoped imagery makes chiaroscuro images undetachable from the object and people it uses as its base.
Besides presenting some of the most exquisite examples of animated chiaroscuro in its classical, painterly definition, the programme also aims to show how animation and frame-by-frame filmmakers creatively use this style to create unforgettable imagery that transcends the single canvas and melds photography, painting, drawing with the moving image.
© Suzanne Buchan 2006
This article originally appeared in the festival catalogue.
