Switzerland
Please give us a brief summary of your work, including, if possible, a description of your creative process (e.g., how your creative ideas first appear and take shape).
I live in Geneva, not far from Annecy and its festival where early on I had the opportunity to see inventive short films that could not be found anywhere else. After a year at the School of Fine Arts and four years at the School of Decorative Arts in Geneva, I finished my training as a graphic designer, a trade that I practiced for five years in an advertising agency. Claude Luyet, Daniel Suter and I founded GDS Studio in 1970 with the intention of becoming independent directors of short animated films. I have been practicing this trade full time since the eighties. Like most people of my generation, I am self-taught because there was no animation school at that time. I always liked drawing and also mathematics, that’s probably why I chose to make animated films, as it allows me both to draw and to solve technical problems.
I am also very interested in the relationship between rhythm in music (tempo, number of beats per minute) and the rhythm of movements in the animation depending on the number 24 (frames per second), a number that divides in many ways. Movement is primordial in the cartoon. Among my sources of inspiration, it is often music that makes me want to make a film or develop a visual idea and sometimes to tell a story. In an ideal film there should be these three motives combined.
The ideas come while I’m working, and it’s difficult at the beginning, then a certain logic is established and, slowly, it is almost the film that indicates the procedure to follow. It is for this reason that I work alone and thus can have the freedom to more easily transform the film as I go along. I spend a lot of time developing line-tests, not just to test a movement but especially to have an overview of the film. In fact, all the editing of the film takes place at this stage, and then I start animating, making the drawings or, most often, paintings. So, the assembly is done before the drawings and shooting. Then there is no longer a lot of modification possible; the camera movements (drawn movements) or the metamorphoses must be planned in advance and form a whole that will become the film.
How would you define your animation practice in terms of its relation to fine art traditions, experimental animation or the (historical) avant-garde? Its relation to commercial industry?
I try to follow the logic of a dream, that is, avoiding interruptions, moving from one plane to another without cutting. My films are often a long (or short) planned sequence. One can define my films as animated painting that deals with poetry. I have not yet used dialogue in my films so as to not make the audience read subtitles and lose part of what happens in the image, and so that it remains a means of international communication.
Who/what are your strongest influences?
I very much admire Norman McLaren who searched in all directions and produced a considerable number of masterpieces, and I also love Jerzy Kucia’s films. I should also mention Walerian Borowczyk, Yoji Kuri, Yuri Norstein, Zbigniew Rybczynski and Caroline Leaf. Among recent artists, Igor Kovalyov is my favorite.
Why animation?
The animation short allows us to say a lot in a short time, and for my part I seek to make spectators’ imaginations work rather than to deliver a message to them.
Is material or media a particularly important component of your practice? How does it operate in your work?
I work in a traditional way with endangered material, and I need assistance for post-production because I have very poor computer skills.
Is there something you want to articulate with your work that can’t be expressed through conventional narrative means?
It seems to me that I use a very classic technique, the cartoon and what maybe is not conventional is that there are no ‘characters’ and sometimes ‘no story’. The aim is to express myself with drawing, movement and sound only. These are constraints that I like to fix while trying to overcome them. In addition to the relationship between image and music, I am particularly interested in metamorphoses, loops (cycles) and movements in space. I continue to be interested in these forms that were specific to the animated film before the arrival of the digital and all its possibilities.