Contemporary Stop Motion Animation and the Uncanny
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ANGLIA RUSKIN UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF ARTS, LAW AND SOCIAL SCIENCES DARKNESS VISIBLE: CONTEMPORARY STOP MOTION ANIMATION AND THE UNCANNY DERRIN CRAWTE A thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Anglia Ruskin University for the degree of PhD English and Media Submitted: January 2017 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisors Tina Kendall and Jeannette Baxter who have provided unceasing amounts of support, even during the darkest days of the writing up process. They provided intelligent, insightful comment, guidance towards helpful resources and references, and a huge amount of patience and understanding. Their help with shaping the final form of this thesis is hard to quantify in words. Special thanks also go to the members of staff and fellow students at ARU who have either answered difficult questions when I asked them, or read fragments of the research and supplied useful feedback. I should also mention Sarah Barrow, who started me on this road when she was a lecturer at Anglia Ruskin and I was thinking, possibly, of pursuing a PhD. I am fortunate enough to have a wide network of family and friends who deserve mention here. They include my parents, sister and nephew, without whose support and encouragement this research would not have been possible. Thank you to Emma, Owen, Jo S. and Johanna L., Frank, James, Claire, Paul, Helen, Charlotte, Mark and many others for their positive words. They were always appreciated. i ANGLIA RUSKIN UNIVERSITY ABSTRACT FACULTY OF ARTS, LAW AND SOCIAL SCIENCES DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DARKNESS VISIBLE: CONTEMPORARY STOP MOTION ANIMATION AND THE UNCANNY DERRIN CRAWTE January 2017 This thesis seeks to demonstrate that the uncanny and stop motion animation enjoy a special relationship, one characterised by a sense of darkness becoming visible. A range of scholars, including Barbara Creed, Tom Gunning, and Laura Mulvey, have recognised that film is capable of embodying the dark fears and concerns related to the collapsing of boundaries and merging of oppositions that are characteristic of the uncanny. Stop motion, this research argues, is a form that is written through with uncanniness. Stop motion animation is especially capable of conveying an experience of the uncanny because of the technical processes through which an impression of movement and life is created from stillness, inertia and death. The thesis explores its claims through in-depth investigation of Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay on the uncanny, and a range of critical and literary texts and intertexts - including the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Stanislaw Lem, John Milton and Georges Bataille - which engage with different aspects of the uncanny, the death drive, and the human psyche. In tandem with these thinkers, the thesis investigates the work of filmmakers who have shown a willingness to fully engage with the darkness inherent in stop motion, and with the phenomenon of the uncanny, including Shinya Tsukamoto, Jan Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers. Collectively, this thesis argues, these writers, thinkers, and visual artists articulate a common interest in the darkness that characterises both the uncanny and stop motion: a predilection for rendering darkness visible. ii Contents Introduction: Opening the Door.................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Welcome to Darkness.............................................................................................27 Chapter 2: Eruption & Irruption – Stop Motion in the Films of Shinya Tsukamoto...............59 Chapter 3: A House & Its (Mal)Contents – Stop Motion in the Films of Jan Švankmajer (Part 1) ..........................................................................................................98 Chapter 4: Unquiet Biology – Stop Motion in the Films of Jan Švankmajer (Part 2) ........................................................................................................130 Chapter 5: Solitude, Darkness & the Living Dead – Stop Motion in the Films of the Quay Brothers........................................................................................................................161 Coda: Straining to be Contained............................................................................................198 Conclusion: When Stop Meets Motion..................................................................................213 Bibliography...........................................................................................................................224 Filmography...........................................................................................................................235 iii Copyright Attention is drawn to the fact that copyright of this thesis rests with Anglia Ruskin University for one year and thereafter with Derrin Crawte. This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is bound by copyright. This work may: (i) be made available for consultation within Anglia Ruskin University Library, or (ii) be lent to other libraries for the purpose of consultation or may be photocopied for such purposes (iii) be made available in Anglia Ruskin University’s repository and made available on open access worldwide for non-commercial educational purposes, for an indefinite period. iv Introduction: Opening the Door To make the invisible visible is uncanny (de Man 1986, p.49). Stop-motion has always lent itself to the dark side (The Guardian, 2016). This thesis is an interdisciplinary study of the relationship between the phenomenon known as ‘the uncanny’, the form of film animation commonly referred to as ‘stop motion’, and the unsettling darkness they both traverse. It is about the collapse of borders, a blurring between supposed opposites and troubling visions of fears long repressed becoming manifest. It is concerned with the return of the familiar in unfamiliar form, and obscure corners of the human psyche rediscovered, enclaves where primal and pre-adult anxieties and urges concerning mortality and the drive towards death reside. To make such darkness visible is profoundly uncanny, as Paul de Man observes in his book The Resistance to Theory. De Man echoes the words of Sigmund Freud from his 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny’, where he writes that das Unheimliche, ‘the unhomely’ – or uncanny, when translated from the original German into English – ‘is in some way a species of the familiar (das Heimliche, “the homely”)’ (2003, p.134), particularly where it is concerned with ‘the notion of the hidden and the dangerous’ and how it ‘has come into the open’ (2003, pp. 132 & 134). Freud describes the ‘fear and dread’ that are symptomatic of the uncanny experience, and marks it out from other categories in the ‘field of the frightening’ by explaining that it ‘goes back to what was once known and had long been familiar’ (2003, pp. 123 & 124). He later adds that ‘the acme of the uncanny is represented by anything to do with death’ (2003, p.148). 1 The uncanny occupies a liminal space at the threshold of perception. As a phenomenon associated with the unlocking of a particular set of repressed fears, exploration of its domain could perhaps best be symbolised by the opening of a door, and the sudden exposure to darkness, disorientation, and uncertainty that occurs as a result. The validity of the metaphor is demonstrated by Freud himself at the very end of his notes for ‘The Uncanny’. He recounts an incident from his own past of a train journey, in which a door ‘swung open’ to reveal what he thought was a stranger, entering his compartment (2003, p.162). ‘I jumped up to put him right’, he recalls ‘but soon realized to my astonishment that the intruder was my own image, reflected in the mirror on the connecting door’ (2003, p.162). Freud questions whether his reaction to this particular example of a door opening is ‘perhaps a vestige of the archaic reaction to the “double” as something uncanny’ (2003, p.162). The opening door becomes a portal through which a past fear comes back to haunt him, in the shape of the uncanny. The image of the door, and the incident that sticks in Freud’s memory, are representative of how this particular species of the frightening creeps back in to consciousness through the cracks and fissures in the civilised veneer of the psyche, to discomfiting, disturbing effect. What follows is a study that looks in more detail at what becomes visible in the darkness when the metaphorical ‘door’ is opened and the hidden fears associated with the uncanny are laid bare. The thesis examines the forms taken by the uncanny in greater depth, primarily through the prism of Freud’s original essay on the topic, which is the template for much of the academic work written about the uncanny. It does so by focusing on a medium that, this thesis argues, is ideally suited to present uncanniness visually. Stop motion animation can be taken to resemble the uncanny in many respects, as an art form that defies boundaries and resists definition. Whilst its subjects appear imbued with the spark of the kinetic and a semblance of life, stop motion simultaneously embodies the spectre of inertia, lifelessness and death. It is both stop and motion, in the instant. As such it epitomises the return of those 2 fears of mortality, death and darkness that are repressed, and which re-emerge in uncertain, uncanny forms. Existing scholarship has noted an affinity between stop motion animation and the uncanny (Bendazzi, 1994; Brown, 2010; Halberstam,