A mask-like figure stairs out into the unknown. Dead and lifeless. Viny tendrils crawl achingly into the frame, ready to ensnare. The crackling, scurrying footsteps of insects punctuate hollow mechanical music. Is this a tomb? Was that a death mask? Wait…the mask turns toward us! In the words of Dr. Frankenstein, "It’s Alive!"
I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed stop-motion animation this much. Bennett Cain’s Seed (Savannah College of Art and Design) is a stop-motion animated film on the level of the best work of the Brothers Quay (Street of Crocodiles). It presents an organic world hollowed out by mechanization, where if you step into it, you too might be transformed…to become a cog in a machine.
Seed is a purely visual experience. Cain doesn’t clutter up the narrative with explanatory dialogue or narration. He shows you what’s happening, rather than tells you. That’s the mark of a great filmmaker.
On a literal level the plot is easy to chart. A young man knocks on the door of a house. The inhabitants inside are already watching him through a surveillance camera. We don’t know why he’s come to this house, or why anybody would be watching him. He’s let in…and discovers a virtual chamber of horrors with denizens who seem to be human-machine hybrids, with machine components substituting for body parts. Despite being machines, these "people" occupy an organic space that seems to be decomposing all around them. Dishes clutter the floor covered in decaying food…or is it axel grease? One character even seems to have worms crawling out of his head in place of hair…or are they wires? Another figure seems to wind down only to be revived by having a battery inserted into his skull. And of course, a sinister "man behind the curtain" seems to control it all…
The idea of replacing body parts with mechanical components is particularly interesting, not only just for our contemporary sense of the horror genre but for understanding the history of cinema. Several hybrid characters in Seed have replaced their eyes with mechanical seeing apparatuses. They also spy on the young man through a surveillance camera, which could be seen as a mechanical eye. In the late 1920s Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov hailed cinema as the greatest art form because of its ability to change our way of seeing. He believed that the movie camera could become a mechanical eye (a.k.a. Kino-Eye) to jog us out of our accustomed ways of seeing and view the world with a new efficient, mechanized objectivity. Isn’t that what’s happening here in Seed? Not only do the hybrids themselves see the world through a mechanized lens, they want the young man, who we identify with, to share their perspective. That’s why he seems to become like them, part of the machine, at the end.
Bennett Cain’s use of stop-motion animation here is important too. What is stop-motion? It’s the process of painfully, meticulously photographing objects in various positions so that when cut together it will give the illusion of movement. In effect, stop-motion animates lifeless objects, making the lifeless appear alive. This happens narratively in Seed as well, when the "man behind the curtain" replaces one of the hybrid’s batteries, reviving him. Stop-motion is a mechanical way of making artificial objects seem real, exactly what the young man is confronted with, with these hybrid characters who seem alive but really aren’t.
Stop-motion can also be seen as a more specific form of what all cinema does. All films create the illusion of movement, of a life-like quality, by rapidly alternating 24 still frames per second. When these still photos are projected so quickly, it makes us believe that we’re watching a motion picture. What’s really happening is that a sense of dynamism is created from a succession of the static. Since still photography has often been paired with images of death, from 19th century death photos to 20th century war photography, we could also say that motion pictures are paired with life. But then again, the components of motion pictures are still photos. So, in cinema, a sense of the life-like comes out of a sense of death. Maybe this is why the mad scientist genre is so unique to film. From Frankenstein to The Re-Animator to Seed, the mad scientist genre always features characters who want to create life from death.
Seed is full of such moments, from the "man behind the curtain" reviving another character, to its inverse, when the living character, the young man, becomes part of the machine at the end. Seed considers the illusory nature of the life-like quality of film. It may be artificial, but for one brief moment, we think "It’s Alive!"
No comments:
Post a Comment