Cameras Take Five
Canada on screen: TIFF essential 150 films;
In an extraordinarily restless and productive 40-year career as an independent filmmaker, Montreal native Steven Woloshen has extended and advanced the legacy of direct animation pioneers such as Len Lye and Norman McLaren with his remarkable body of “cameraless” animations — that is, animation etched directly on to the film surface using inks, scratching, overlays and other treatments.
Music has often been a starting point for Woloshen’s work, and he has drawn on a wide range of sources, some of them fairly obscure. For Cameras Take Five, however, he chose a familiar and beloved jazz classic: Dave Brubeck’s recording of Paul Desmond’s “Take Five,” so named because it is composed in the uncommon 5/4 time. If, as Paul Klee put it, “a line is a dot that went for a walk,” in Cameras Take Five Woloshen takes two lines for a dance across the plane of the movie screen, where they come together, break apart, multiply, merge, and divide again. Woloshen’s handmade original, drawn on clear film, is used as the negative, so that the original tones and colours are reversed when the film is printed and then projected in the widescreen CinemaScope format.
In many respects this concise, elegant and joyful film marks the culmination of Woloshen’s work in “pure” cameraless animation. The birth of Woloshen’s children in the mid-2000s seems to have coincided with the artist’s turn toward what have been, at times, markedly less accessible films, though ones that nevertheless exhibit a searching intelligence and a willingness to experiment. The 2001 film The Babble on Palms, which combines found footage from a commercial film shoot with Woloshen’s direct animation, signalled this shift, and in recent years he has further broadened his range of methods to include microscopic imagery and other experimental and conceptual approaches.
