Animation, Collage, and the Afterlife of Images: Found Footage in/as Animation

Speaker: Yomi Braester (University of Washington in Seattle)

Time: 9:30-10:30am on May 10 (Wed, Hong Kong time)

Format: Zoom

Abstract:

In this essay I explore the porous boundaries between animation, found footage, and collage, and argue that these seemingly separate genres of the moving image coalesce, under certain circumstances, to form a cohesive discourse on the afterlife of images. In their more self-reflective moments, these genres show how they rely on an assemblage of individual frames, displacing images, so to speak elongating their shadows in time. The post-mortem reassembly of disjointed images may serve as a commentary on the need for medial and historical readjustment and relocation. I look at works as disparate as Recycled (Lei Lei, 2012) The Day of Perpetual Night (Yang Yongliang, 2012), Self-Surveillance (Ai Weiwei, 2012), Same Old, Brand New (Cao Fei, 2015), and Dragonfly Eyes (Xu Bing, 2017).

Bio:

Yomi Braester is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, as well as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Beijing Film Academy. He is also the co-editor of Journal of Chinese Cinemas. Among his books are Witness Against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China (2003) and Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract (2010), which won the Joseph Levenson Book Prize. Among his current book projects is Cinephilia Besieged: Viewing Communities and the Ethics of the Image in the People’s Republic of China, which is supported by a Guggenheim fellowship.