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| SIGNE BAUMANE. BODY AND THE CARNIVALESQUE Viktors Freibergs | |
 Signe Baumane. The Beat of Sex. 2007 | |
| There is a view that animation is the only genuinely consistent film form (naturally there are exceptions, as in any area) because the author of the film creates the entire narrative universe without borrowing images from the so-called actual reality, there is nothing in the visual narrative that would not have been created by the author of the film. While in a feature film, as Pasolini has once stated it, the film maker creates this or her arsenal of means of expression by borrowing the images from the surrounding world and creating from them his specific film language. While in the animation films the author (at least seemingly) completely controls the characters to the extent of his own capacity and desire, in feature film there are more contingent elements than in an animation film - each actor and actress have their own personality and will-power while the animation characters (as might seem obvious) have no manifestations of their will. Yet one should not exaggerate the freedom of the author - as once stated by the English writer John Fowles, the characters of the novels at some point start living an independent life and would not obey the author's will. Whatever the case, any work of art, animation included, is that space of existence within which the greatest freedom of self-expression is possible, and Signe Baumane makes use of this opportunity to a full scope.
For more than 12 years she has been living in New York, and in 1999 she was granted the status of "extraordinary ability alien". The "alien" is quite suitable word here because ironically Signe Baumane's expressive, very individual and consistent narrative style is quite uniquely different from any other Latvian animation artist although the question whether Signe is to be regarded as a follower of American animation tradition or a "genuine" Latvian animation artist is irrelevant since any categorization in particular today, based on the ethnic principle (except, of course the ethnic culture itself) is quite problematic under conditions of cultural globalization. Signe has a degree in philosophy (she has graduated from Moscow University). And as a philosopher she wants "to explore symbolic representations in the story what it is really about". The greatest interpretative mistake is to perceive a visual narrative as a mere replica of reality (again that mysterious word) ignoring the metaphorical and symbolic implications. The same refers to the animation films, although the animator can much easier manipulate with the similarity of the images to their prototypes - a human face can be turned into a grotesque representation, the proportions among the images may be deliberately distorted, like, for instance, in Signe Baumane's film "The Witch": the witch is tiny but the cow is of enormous size and its heaps of dung are of the size of hills. While in "Little Shoes" the girl whose sole dream is to marry "prince charming" although in Signe's interpretation he is far from handsome, and this allows her to ironize about fairy-tale archetypes, the Prince is a visually grotesques image, as the whole film. The girl has a bulb in her forehead that switches on in the fairly rare moments of her revelations - she becomes enlightened. Such autonomy of the verbal and the visual text creates irony that increases metaphoricity and symbolism of the visual images. Coming back to relationship between the visual narrative and reality, the spectators of Signe Baumane's films should be aware of a danger of falling into another kind of trap - since sex is one of the dominant themes in her works (in Dzintra Geka's film Signe says with an obvious degree of self-irony that she thinks about sex all the time, and as she states - what can she do that her brain is possibly so close to her genitalia), a more sensitive spectator may not be able to negotiate the barrier of the corporeal, sometimes provocatively physiological images, yet films are not made for sensitive spectators but are watched out of desire to find enjoyment, like sex film is one of the ways of achieving a sense of satisfaction (in a different form, naturally). It is difficult to imagine that there might be many people who do not wish to get satisfaction but to live only by suffering and self-sacrifice. Signe herself has said that sex means communication, relaxation; that is a body language component, a means of creating a bond (although sometimes only a short-term one) between two beings. The leading themes in Signe's films are sex, death, delight, love, corporeality of existence and so on. One of the most fascinating elements of her work is the use of colour patterns and their expressivity that paradoxically makes it possible to empathise with the images that are completely non-mimetic. If the film creates its own specific and almost sensual atmosphere enabling the spectator to re-experience the sensations put into it (a kind of visual imagism) it is clearly a mark of excellence and achievement. For instance in her film "The Vet" (after watching it one might experience temporary desire to become a vegetarian) there is a recurrent scene when at night the vet comes out of his house of pale sandy colour enveloped in carmine, violet and other colour sky and trees, because of the expressivity of the colour combination the feeling is almost uplifting. While in "Love Story" and "The Threatened One" (visual interpretation of Borges' poem) the pulsating and vibrant colours contribute to the rhythm of the narrative and a sense of inconsistency. The bodily functions, ignoring hierarchies and taboos, sex and death, supremacy of the instinctual over the rational are a few elements of the so-called carnivalesque culture, and if we wish to place Signe Baumane's works within a certain tradition this is one of the most productive references. The most obvious example from Latvian folk culture are the folk-songs designated as "naughty songs", and it is possible that the generic name for several films by Signe Baumane "dirty ditties" is a reference to that. One of Signe's latest, even scandalous films is "Teat Beat of Sex" (a film that in the opening credits is designated as "explicitly educational" inadvertently creating associations with the phrase "strictly confidential" speaks about masturbation, sex and delight and so on). Another thematically close film is called "Natasha", a surreal story about an "affair" between a woman and a vacuum cleaner, but more importantly, about loneliness, desire for sex. But one of the substories in "Five Fucking Fables" is called "The Man Who Knew How to Talk to Flowers", in which a flower represents a feminine symbol, mouth, genitalia, similarly to the film "The Threatened One" in which a flower becomes a symbolic representation of male genitals, poeticizing the orgasmic feelings when the man meets his beloved. The small story about the man and flowers can also be interpreted as an ironic comment on exploitation of the female body, and watching Signe's works one might get preoccupied with the question about the differences between art and pornography: pornography never has implied meaning but it is always explicitly present in Signe's films, most often an ironic undertone that clearly cancels the question about presence of pornographic element. The above mentioned film "The Threatened One" enables one to identify certain similarities between poetic language (in Jakobson's terms) and the visual language, both in poetry and animation the words or the images possess connotatively metaphoric or symbolic significance, as Dylan Thomas claims, poetry (in the present case animation) is the most suitable mode of language use to represent those things that are impossible to verbalise directly - the world of desire and the unconscious. The impact of Borges upon Signe Baumane's works apparently goes beyond visualisation of one poem; images like labyrinth, mirror (not merely in their literal sense but also as principles of narrative structuring) might be some of the manifestation of this influence. For instance in "The Gold of the Tigers" the hypnotically slowly represented legend is full of metamorphosis - the stripes of the tigers turn into a maze, the tiger becomes the hunter, but the hunter performs the tiger's role, thus an image of implied labyrinth is created and the question is posed: who exists in whose dream - the hunter in the tiger's dream or the other way round. Two images often in Signe's films are not only separate and autonomous characters but become also each other's mirror. A similar principle is applied in the film "Little Shoes", in which the girl turns into a dragon (somewhat remote associations with "Beowulf") enabling the spectator to identify a number of references to fairy tales or legends. "Little Shoes" with its visual minimalism, stylistic consistency (a feature characterizing Signe's all films) is also a work that displays several interesting narrative principles and film language elements. The background of the whole film is literally made up of various wall-papers that have patterns reflecting the respective setting (for instance in the girl's room those are garden tools). Since the prince is willing to marry only a girl who has his "dream shoes", this can be interpreted as a reference both to a fairy-tale image (the glass shoe was an attribute of Cinderella's happy future), and as an implicit comment to fetishism. While such images as the Prince and the Dragon can be clearly perceived as demarcations of fairy-tale genre, the same can be said about the father's bequest and present to his daughter when he is on the death bead. Yet the story cannot be defined within boundaries of a single genre, which makes it even more captivating - lifting of the father from the well/mine after an accident in the mines cannot be inscribed within fairy-tale genre. One of the spatial images dominating in the film is a circular shape that represented through several specific images: the clock (signifier of passage of time, inevitability, fatality), the well (in this case as a symbol of death that in folklore may serve as a passage to the nether world) and the circling of crows at the moments of significant turning points in the narrative. Thus the film tells us a specific tale/story at the same time transcending the boundaries of the actual events it depicts gradually allocating to a certain visual image concrete connotative meaning. This is the process of formation of a specific film language whose identification serves as an essential tool for decoding the film to be able to see behind the iconic animated images their deeper meaning. | |
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