The brand-new Linoleum Alternative Animation Festival promises to bring cutting-edge animated films to Moscow.
You wouldn't expect to find the idea of an "eternal orgasm" in a Disney cartoon anytime soon. So thank goodness we have the Linoleum Alternative Animation Festival, which opens Wednesday, to fill that void.
The brand-new festival will bring together animated creations by artists from around the world in four days of screenings. The works deal with a variety of topics, some profound, some abstract and others simply absurd.
"Our slogan is: contemporary art in the language of animation," Dmitry Sterlikov, one of the festival's organizers, said in an interview Tuesday. "We are trying to show rare and substantive works."
"They are very different from mainstream animation -- very different from 'Ice Age 2,'" he added with a laugh.
Most of the films, running from one to 30 minutes each, require some interpretation on the part of the viewer, although in most cases the message isn't so obscure that the audience is left bewildered.
One clip starts with a hazy erotic scene. Two beautiful women softly nibble each other's lips, their naked breasts brushing together. The picture glides from this seemingly endless sensuality to a bright cityscape, which we quickly realize is New York, and returns to yet another amorous scene. As the screen pans out, we see that the images of the women are projected onto the facades of skyscrapers, giving the impression that these "virtual whores" (as the film calls them in its opening titles) are the spirits of the phallic towers.
Then the film depicts a radical version of Sept. 11, 2001, which is at once disturbing and captivating; the violence makes you want to look away, while its intensity and artistic brilliance keeps your eyes locked on the screen. More intriguing is the question of the creators' meaning. They portray the buildings as the personifications of lewd acts, but by bestowing this human characteristic on these structures they awaken the viewer's sympathy for the attacked.
"There is a swamp out there," Sterlikov said, referring to the world of mainstream animation. "We want to disturb it, move it. We're doing what we can to create dialogue."
The festival kicks off Wednesday with an hour-long opening at Club Na Brestskoi, featuring a performance by the rap group 2HCompany and a preview video montage. Next come three days of screenings, covering a wide range of styles and themes. Each day includes three two-hour blocks at the Salyut movie theater, as well as nonstop screenings of other animation festivals from around the world, which run daily from 2 p.m. to 11 p.m. at Project_Fabrika.
On Thursday, the festival will center on contemporary Russian animation.
"They are mainly young professionals, students," Sterlikov said. "And they're not just animators, but artists who sometimes use animation, along with many other artistic techniques. As a result, their frames can be complex."
The lineup on Friday, Aug. 4, pays tribute to the medium's forebears, featuring the works of Norman McLaren, Len Lye, Zbigniew Rybczynski and others. The day will conclude with a seminar on Rybczynski's work, led by a student from the Kassel School of Art and Design in Germany.
The festival wraps up Aug. 5 with a program showcasing contemporary foreign animators, followed by a closing ceremony that focuses on the week's highlights.
"This will be unlike anything else," Sterlikov said. "We organized it in the way we understood it; we couldn't make it like any other [festival] because we haven't had experience with any others."
This lack of experience stems from youth: The festival's three main organizers are art students, none older than 22. But they see their youth as an advantage, allowing them to take a fresh look at animation.
"Some people accuse us of not being professionals, of trying to judge," Sterlikov said. "But we're not trying to judge. We're posing questions about animation."
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