A Moving Subject

Giannalberto Bendazzi

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367566890
• eBook ISBN: 9781000206708
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

Description:

A Moving Subject offers a collection of essays from around the world. From Italy to the Middle East, from an analysis of A Night on Bald Mountain to African cinema animation, these essays help to paint the world of animation in a comprehensive and international manner. Handpicked by renowned animation historian and researcher Giannalberto Bendazzi, this book offers a look at the global foundations of animation from disparate regions, peoples and methods, and helps to demonstrate animation as a unifying factor of the human race.

Key Features:

• A fresh perspective on animation from a global lens
• A new look into traditional animation produced from around the world
• Essays that reflect on the nature of colour, animation and light

Author:

A former professor at the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore and the Università degli Studi of Milan, Italian-born Giannalberto Bendazzi has thoroughly investigated the history of animation for more than forty years. A founding member of the Society for Animation Studies, he has authored or edited various classics in various languages and has lectured extensively on every continent. He received an honorary doctorate from Lisbon University in 2019.

CHAPTER 1

The Italians Who Invented the ­Drawn-on-Film Technique^*

THE BROTHERS ARNALDO GINANNI Corradini (1890–1982) and Bruno Ginanni Corradini (1892–1976) were born in Ravenna, Italy, into an aristocratic (they were earls) and educated family. At a very early age, they started cultivating poetry, writing, and painting. They also took an active role in the debate between “Tradition” and “Modernism” that agitated the realms of literature, art, and music in Italy, from the turn of the century until the outbreak of World War I. Arnaldo mainly involved himself with painting, while Bruno focused more on literature.

* Originally published in Animation Journal, Tustin, California, Spring 1996. Updated version.

After 1914, the brothers joined the Futurist movement, where they used pseudonyms, Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra, to distinguish their separate identities. For convenience we will refer to them by their pseudonyms in this chapter, even though some statements were actually published under their true names.

Fascinated by the possible correspondence between sound and colour, in about 1909 the brothers created a “chromatic piano” whose keys corresponded to a parallel number of coloured light bulbs. Subsequently they carried out several experiments with what we now call direct painting on film, abstract cinema, or coloured abstract animation.

At first, they made a number of tests, including removing the projection shutter and projecting alternating frames of different colours to get an optical mixture of another colour. They then composed four films by painting directly on the surface of clear film strips to explore four different aspects of synaesthesia or correspondences between the arts. Lacking exact titles, the films can be called a “Thematic Development of a Harmony of Colours” based on a divisionist painting by Segantini (it was eighty metres long, or ten minutes running time); a “Study of Effects between Four Colours, Two Complementary Pairs”; a “Translation and Adaptation of Mendelssohn’s Spring Song Intertwined with a Theme from a Chopin Waltz”; and a “Translation of Mallarmé’s Poem ‘Flowers’ into Colours”.¹ The longest of these films was more than 200 metres – around twelve minutes in projection. They subsequently “sketched” three more experiments on film strips (it is not clear whether they fully completed the films in a rough form or just made sample frames like a storyboard).

These three works explored abstract visual phenomena. One begins with a pure green screen, then a tiny red star appears in the middle, grows until the screen is all red, and then green spots burst out and reclaim the whole screen, making it all green again “for a whole minute”. The second work develops a white and a yellow line moving over a solid blue background. The third shows seven cubes, each a colour of the rainbow, moving, layering, and warping against a black background. The last two films, again about eleven minutes in length, bear formal titles. The Rainbow is a “symphony” in which the spectrum of colours “throb”, “bubble”, “drown”, and “explode” against a grey background. In The Dance, the dominant colours crimson, violet, and yellow continuously separate, unite, and “whirl upwards as the most agile pirouettes of spinning tops”.

Scholars have often doubted the existence of these six (or maybe nine) films, especially because up to the present (and very likely forever) actual prints of the films have never been found. The only original source we can relate to is a chapter in a volume called L’esilio di D’Annunzio e il “San Sebastiano” (D’Annunzio’s Exile and the “Saint Sebastian”) edited by Bruno Corra and Emilio Settimelli and published in 1912 in Bologna by Libreria L. Beltrami. I will try to prove that this source is totally reliable, and thus that these films really existed, with all the theoretical and historical ramifications that this implies.

D’Annunzio’s Exile and the “Saint Sebastian” is a peculiar volume, and its description is necessary to understand the significance and the assumptions of the particular chapter we will scrutinise. In fact, it is not a book in the strictest sense, but rather a “monograph” in a magazine, which Corra and Settimelli published after their literary weekly A Defense of Art, published in Florence for the two previous years, had failed. Their intention was to proceed, through this new format, with their line of thought that had been interrupted.

They also wanted to start a series of volumes/magazines with the collaboration of the members of their original artistic coterie (see the introduction “What Is This Publication?” pp. 7–9).² The language employed in the volume is journalistic, colloquial, and, at times, like that of an open letter. Corra and Settimelli are not compiling closed essays, but rather passionately pursuing a dialogue with an ideal reader that they feel close to and involved with. In Bruno Corra’s chapter, “Chromatic Music”, he describes in minute detail the experiments that he carried out together with his brother Arnaldo. He offers a vast array of technical details, describing both successes and failures of the various tests. At the end, he also addresses himself directly to anyone interested in these experiments, inviting them to write to him, offering him the chance to give more details.

Is this source reliable?

If it is reliable, what exactly are the correct dates for the films that it mentions?

The answer to the first question must be positive. Corra’s essay presents the tone and language of a recent discovery, which he announces to friends and colleagues, inviting them all to follow this new and certain path. At one point in the essay, Corra even says where he keeps the films: in the drawer of the desk where he is writing. Furthermore, the text is supported by a variety of “technical” details that would be unknown except through direct, practical experience. Finally, he calls for other people to join in and share his experience – a call that no imposter would make, since they would run the risk of a competitor coming to inspect his studio and find out the truth – something particularly dangerous in the climate of personal and ideological conflicts such as existed at that time in Italy. Therefore, since Corra’s text appears reliable, the films must have existed.

We can only deduce from reasoning when the films were made. Bruno Corra literally tells us that the first four films were painted “From last June to October”. He then adds that the subsequent films were “done during the last few months”. The book bears the date of 1912, without mentioning the month of publication. Does Corra refer, then, to the summer/autumn/winter of 1911 (with the book being published in the first three months of 1912)? Or does he mean the summer/autumn of 1912, with the book being published in December 1912?

Other passages from different chapters let us know that the two authors finished writing and assembling their texts during a winter; e.g., on page 14 Corra says “it has been snowing for two days” and on page 26 Corra refers to “one of my love affairs of two months ago – it was warmer then, it was autumn”. At least a few weeks would have been necessary for publication in that era. Each lead line would have been “composed” (picked up with tweezers and placed into a form), the pages would have been printed once for proofs (which had to be corrected), and eventually the pages would have been printed, folded, sewn, and bound – all by hand. It seems unlikely, then, that all this work could have been accomplished in the last days of December 1912 (which also contain family Christmas festivities). Even stronger evidence appears in the chapter “The Future Great Writer” (pp. 125–156). In the chapter, Settimelli reviews books by “young” writers, recently published, 126 titles “listed from October 1910 to December 1911, according to the Bulletin of the National Library in Florence” (p. 127). Since these reviews were openly biased, pertaining to the current ideological debate, it seems reasonable to assume that the author would want to express his opinion about the latest titles, so that his arguments would be relevant and up to date. Therefore, L’esilio di D’Annunzio e il “San Sebastiano” must have been published soon after December 1911. Otherwise, had it been December 1912, Settimelli would have selected books from summer and autumn 1912.

A final clinching piece of evidence for an early 1912 publication date comes from the chapter on Gabriele D’Annunzio, in which Corra refers to “Song for Tripoli” as something very recent (p. 36). These ten poems, inspired by the Italian–Turkish war for the conquest of Libya, were published in the leading daily newspaper Corriere della Sera between October 1911 and January 1912.

Thus, it seems most likely that Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra produced their first four films (“Segantini”, “Complementary Colours”, “Mendelssohn”, “Mallarmé”) between June and October 1911, and their last two films, The Rainbow and The Dance, would have been finished a few months later. The brothers painted all these films directly on celluloid film strips (after the emulsion had been removed) using a special ink/paint used to tint photographs and slides.

The most important ramifications to arise from our study of Corra’s text come from the dating of the films of Ginna and Corra.

We now know that an abstract cinema was born at almost the same time as abstract painting, since Wassily Kandinsky’s first experiments with abstracting landscapes began in his watercolours around 1910. Therefore, we must overturn what has been considered common knowledge: that abstract cinema had started (around 1921) as an imitation and derivation of abstract painting – that painting, the “higher” form of art, had opened the way and inspired the “lower” art of cinema. In fact, abstract cinema was born from its own roots independent of painting. It pursued and accomplished the aspiration for a synaesthesia between sound and colour that had been prefigured in the eighteenth century by the French scientist Father Louis-Bertrand Castel (who built an ocular harpsichord) and carried on by various artists and scholars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – perhaps the most famous example being the Russian composer Aleksandr Skriabin, whose “Prometheus” symphony, with colour projections written into the score, dates from 1910, the same year as Ginna and Corra’s experiments with the chromatic piano and probably their first film tests.³

It is also important to remark that in Ginna and Corra’s films we are dealing precisely with animation cinema, the same type that decades later would be produced by Len Lye and Norman McLaren. Corra tells us that he and his brother understood that the results could have been satisfying only if the film was divided into “bars”, that is, by considering and painting the effect of the movement frame by frame. Finally, it is worth quoting the passage in which Corra tells us that he has tried to

introduce into the sonata of colours something that could correspond to the accompaniment, which is so distinct in classical music. We prepared seven bulbs, each with one colour of the spectrum. By lighting one or the other according to piano, while the symphony was playing on the screen, we should have had the creation of colour environments. [italics in original Italian]

While this experiment failed on technological grounds, in that the ambient colours bled and mixed with the colours projected on the screen, this experiment still anticipates various genres of modern-day performances, beginning with Jordan Belson’s Vortex Concerts in the 1950s, and including “expanded cinema” and “light shows”.

In terms of the concrete history of cinema, or rather of animation, the experiments of Ginna and Corra had no genuine influence. Screenings of their films seem to have remained confined to their home, and perhaps the only spectators were the filmmakers themselves. Nor is there any evidence that later filmmakers such as Ruttmann, Lye, or McLaren knew about Corra’s article “Chromatic Music”. Therefore, it is still fair to say, once again, that the filmmaker who actually inaugurated the “genre” of film-directly- painted-on-filmstock was the New Zealand artist Len Lye, whose A Colour Box (1935) has been widely viewed, debated, and imitated (especially by Norman McLaren, to whom we owe the vast diffusion of this technique, still present and vibrating to this day). But we still must not underestimate the almost prophetic importance held by the experiments of the Ginanni Corradini brothers, as well as the technical and theoretical remarks expressed by Bruno Corra in his writings.

For closer study, the text of Corra’s 1912 chapter “Chromatic Music” is published in this book (see Chapter 2). It is interesting to note that in 1916 Ginna shot and edited the live-action experimental film Vita Futurista (Futurist Life), the only official film of the Futurist Movement. The “Chromatic Music” films were not his only cinematic achievement; however, Vita Futurist...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Italians Who Invented the ­Drawn-on-Film Technique
• Chapter 2 Chromatic Music by Bruno Ginanni Corradini (1912)
• Chapter 3 The First Italian Animated Feature Film and Its Producer Background: Angelo Bioletto
• Chapter 4 Defining Animation: A Proposal
• Chapter 5 African Cinema Animation
• Chapter 6 Alexandre Alexeieff: Poems of Light and Shadow
• Chapter 7 The First Reviews of A Night on Bald Mountain
• Chapter 8 Dreams of Alexeieff
• Chapter 9 Bruno Bozzetto: His Early Years
• Chapter 10 Address: Rossi, Mitteleuropa
• Chapter 11 The Egg of Cohl
• Index