Ode to Seekers 2012
2016 · 9m · USA
Directed by Andrew Norman Wilson
Genres: animation, experimental
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
Three CGI entities — a mosquito, a syringe, and an oil derrick — navigate abandoned spaces, endlessly seeking an ambiguous resource by piercing a surface. Conceived during Wilson's treatment at Rockland Psychiatric Center.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A mosquito, a syringe, and an oil derrick as stand-ins for everything that pierces and drains, set to a Keatsian ode structure — conceived during the filmmaker's psychiatric hospitalization.
Andrew Norman Wilson structuring a CGI loop after Keats' Grecian Urn, with the syringe-mosquito-derrick as eternally seeking forms — it's the kind of conceptual film that justifies its own ambitions through formal rigor. That it emerged from his psychiatric hospitalization gives the infinity a specific gravity.
Structuring an infinite loop after Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' while drawing from the filmmaker's psychiatric hospitalization — that's a heavy conceptual stack for 8 minutes. Romantic-poetic form meeting CGI mosquitos and oil derricks is the rare formal experiment that earns its citation.
Festivals
- Gwangju Biennial 2016