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A Fourfold Cosmic Fling
Connection inevitably had to be a key theme of some of the short animations in this year's Manipulate, with social distancing reinforcing our need to reach out to others, however possible, during these challenging days of lockdown over the last two years. Here are two films which explore the rituals and methods of how we interact with others.
Co-written with Ali Scher, American director Jonathan Langager's Cosmic Fling manages to strike the right balance between melancholy and hope. It focuses on Stan, a lonely garbage man living on an asteroid, who one day sees a vision, Beatrice, a beautiful drifting astronaut stuck on a comet. He is immediately besotted. But how can he get her into his romantic orbit?
With time and patience, he starts to formulate a plan. Phillip Huber, who was a puppeteer on Being John Malkovich, became a mentor to Langager, and the result is a combination of special effects and live action filming that is both visually striking, and a simple,touching love story. It may have a touch of sci-fi, but its roots are surely in the silent movies, as the two actors, Josh Fadem and Caitlin McGee, possess the kind of soulful facial expressions and old-fashioned charm associated with Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard. It's a hard heart indeed that isn't moved by this lovely film.
There are more spiritual matters in Canadian artist Alisi Telengut's stunning and profound film The Fourfold. Telengut, who applies paint to every single shot as she films, uses Tengrism as her focal point here, the ancient shamanistic beliefs of the Mongolian and Turkic people, concerned with harnessing the natural elements of the planet. She believes in preserving such forms of ancient traditions passed down by her family, in order to reconnect.
Her beautiful paintings make the work shimmer and pulse.
The film features animistic rituals connected to the Tengri (the sky gods) such as milk libations to bless and protect the land, and it is both testament to earthly resilience, and stark warning of the folly of human greed, in the time of increasing climate change crisis.
Lorna Irvine
