Time for our second Stop-Motion Film Night. Roll up. Settle down with the popcorn, the pick ‘n’ mix or the pack of cold beers. Let the cinema curtains crank open in the dark.
The first Stop-Motion Film Night was a somewhat creepy affair, so for this second instalment I tried to find some light-hearted videos for your delectation. For the most part, I failed. Let’s face it, antique toys and taxidermied beasts lurching into animated life are always going to tingle the spine. But here’s a short film that raises a smile and leaves your vertebrae untickled.
Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland bring us to Jan Švankmajer, and at once the creepiness kicks in. The compiler of this video has set it to a track by Múm, a perfect choice to keep some of Švankmajer’s darkness at bay, but there’s nothing any accompaniment can do about the goggle-eyed bone monsters the white rabbit summons.
Let’s go back, way back. The grain of old film. The earnest faces of actors long passed. These things do more for my sense of wonder than all the sophistications of modern cinema. Something in the long focus and the time taken and the stiff playfulness. Below is Dreams of Toyland, stop-motion from over a hundred years ago. Bear with the serious boy in the tricorn as he and his mother labour through the introductory live action scene. Enjoy what follows and choose something slow and careful to listen to as you watch it. Josh T Pearson’s Country Dumb will see you through most of the film, and leave you quiet for the disturbing finale. Come the 3.30 mark, watch the shadows cast by the sun on the streets of toyland, a hint of the long hours devoted to the stop-motion.
To finish on the light-hearted note we started on, here’s Gulp by Sumo Science at Aardman, but not before some Ernest Hemingway to set the scene. This is the largest stop-motion ever, and come the end of the film there’s a link to a making of featurette. As well as giving you an even greater sense of the scale of the set, it will give you some sand sculpting tips you can put to good use next time you’re at the seaside.
Then he began to pity the great fish that he had hooked. He is wonderful and strange and who knows how old he is, he thought. Never have I had such a strong fish nor one who acted so strangely. Perhaps he is too wise to jump. He could ruin me by jumping or by a wild rush. But perhaps he has been hooked many times before and he knows that this is how he should make his fight. He cannot know it is only one man against him, nor that it is an old man. But what a great fish he is and what will he bring in the market if the flesh is good. He took the bait like a male and he pulls like a male and his fight has no panic in it. I wonder if he has plans or if he is just as desperate as I am?
His body was as smooth as a weathered pebble on the sea shore. He had very little complexion: he was not so much a white man as a grey one. He had a flat pair of buttocks and skin as hairless as that of his head.
He stood on the ridge between her viewpoint and the sun. His tall body was an eclipse and the light was a corona behind it. He spread his arms in a pose of dejected surrender.
Then, very gradually, he began to dissolve.
Like chalk washed into a blur by the rain, his outline began to distort, and almost imperceptibly he lost his form. One minute he was a man and the next he was a blurry grey silhouette. His skin became a coat of mist. The sun shining from behind him lit him up and edged him with its brilliance, wherein he stopped looking man-shaped and instead resembled a cloud formed by chance into the posture of a human being.
He broke up. His head caved in, becoming nothing more than a dented sphere of fog. His chest tore apart and the blue sky and bright sun shone through the place where his heart should have been. He disintegrated, every second less like a man and more like a cloud.
She appeared to be a slight and graceful person, handsomely dressed; and her hair was arranged like that of a young girl of good family. ‘O-jochu,’ he exclaimed, approaching her, ‘O-jochu, do not cry like that! … Tell me what the trouble is; and if there be any way to help you I shall be glad to help you.’ (He really meant what he said; for he was a very kind man.) But she continued to weep – hiding her face from him with one of her long sleeves … Then that O-jochu turned around, and dropped her sleeve, and stroked her face with her hand – and the man saw that she had no eyes or nose or mouth.’
The only interesting thing about a monster is its humanity. When, in the back of a book of a thousand imaginary beings, I came upon a Japanese print labelled Noppera-bo, I was at once struck by its sense of sadness. It seemed like it carried a weight too heavy for a creature so small and shapeless. This noppera-bo was a strange, sagging creature with an arrangement of wrinkles in place of a face. I started reading what I could about it: that it was a ghost found weeping or in great distress. When comforted, it would turn to face the comforter then wipe a hand across its face. With that motion its features would smudge away: eyes, nose and lips smoothing out into a face as plain as eggshell.
I loved this story but it didn’t seem to fit the wrinkled fellow in my print. Turns out that little guy is a nuppeppo, a different kind of ghost entirely, whom the compilers of my book had confused with the noppera-bo. There’s not a lot to be said about the nuppeppo, except that he smells of fetid meat and to eat him grants immortality. But I don’t think the world needs the sort of people who’d cook nuppeppos to live forever.
But what of the noppera-bo? Facelessness is a powerful idea. We’re hard-wired to hone in on human faces and pick them out in the most unlikely of places. There was a spot in 2011′s Royal Institute Christmas lectures in which Bruce Hood showed an eleven week old baby one abstract pattern and one pattern that resembled a human face. Immediately the baby attuned himself to the face (you can watch it here – fascinating from start to finish but the bit I mentioned starts at 7.20). Likewise we often imagine faces in clouds, bark or the burned surfaces of our toast. Since we’re so hyper-sensitive to the pattern of a human face, it follows that we’re unnerved on some deep-seated level if we focus on the place where a face should be and find it wiped away – find nothing there at all.
When I was a kid, my art hero was Francis Bacon. My noppera-bo pastel drawings at the top of this post are basically a rip-off of his style. Throughout his career, Bacon obscured, smudged and obliterated the faces of his subjects. In his Man in Blue series he painted anonymous businessmen whose eroded features contrasted unnervingly with the crisp precision of their suits. I think of them each in one of two ways, either as down-trodden workers with their identities sapped away, or as terrifying bureaucrats whose humanity has melted from them along with their faces. Therein lies the paradox of facelessness. When we use the word in general parlance we either talk about string-pulling elites in shadowy boardrooms or the voiceless masses forced into anonymity by poverty or oppressive systems. Certain sections of our society become vocally perturbed by balaclavas, hoodies, burqas, and so on, because they all prompt our gut fear of facelessness, of noppera-bos. But of course the weirdly beautiful thing about being human is that we’re often at our best when we act in contradiction of our animal impulses. When the noppera-bo is come upon weeping, are its tears really a trick to lure the unwary, or are they the genuine despair of a person made faceless in the powerless sense?
Just as we can be unnerved by facelessness, we can be moved by it. If the men and women who this old B-movie takes for its inspiration evoke any kind of horror it’s the horror of their fate. The plaster casts of Mount Vesuvius’ incinerated victims still speak their horror, some one thousand nine hundred and thirty three years since their mummification in ash. Their faces are barely more detailed than that of the noppera-bo. Anonymous victims, but it takes only an inflexion in plaster for them to haunt us still.
In Hayao Miyazaki’s 2001 maserpiece Spirited Away, a girl becomes lost in a world of monsters, many of them faceless or masked. She’s imprisoned in a bewitched bath-house by a sorceress who steals her name. But our heroine, Chihiro, learns much about herself by having her identity stripped from her. One of the ghosts in the film is called No-Face, a shapeless figure of black wearing an egg-shell smooth mask. No-Face is introduced as a frightening monster, munching on the hotel staff, but come the latter stages of the film it has befriended Chihiro and become a lonely, reflective figure.
Spirited Away is all about stolen identities. Until she recaptures her name from the sorceress, Chihiro cannot know who she was before coming to the bath-house. She’s in a nightmarish predicament, but here’s the catch. It’s through losing her identity that she learns about herself. Perhaps facelessness can mean a liberation?
As well as being hard-wired to fear facelessness, we’re also equipped with astonishing powers of face recognition and empathy. Our instinctive empathy enables us to feel some part of what another person’s face is expressing, even if that face is incomplete or only partially human. Hence our ability to cry at cartoon lions or sympathise with the plaster-cast victims of Vesuvius. This next is conjecture, but I suspect a similar part of our brain is active when presented with a story. We can empathise with the mental images created with words. We can empathise with a wordless human song or cry.
Wiped-blank faces encourage us to reach elsewhere with our empathy. T0 the right is one of Henri Matisse’s occasional faceless figures, Nude, Spanish Carpet. It hardly evokes the dread of Francis Bacon’s tortured souls. And below are some of John Stezaker’s amazing collages of old photos mashed with landscapes, from his series Masks. Here facelessness is striking, but it doesn’t terrify. For my part it makes me think of worlds within, deep rich realms waiting to be explored.
Characters in fairy stories very rarely have their histories fleshed out. Often they are attributed with only the most basic of personalities and described in the broadest terms possible (they might not even get as far as being ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’ or ‘golden-locked’). Names, too, are not regularly used, unless they’re the same name over and over like Hans or Jack. Instead of being asked to view such characters as distinct from ourselves, we’re encouraged to see them as everymen, almost as a kind of bait for our empathy to leap on. I’m sure we’ve all speculated, at some point in our lives, about what it would be like to disappear completely and reinvent ourselves in some far-flung corner of the world, but in stories we are doing this all of the time. And in the moments of transition, when we are becoming ‘lost’ in a good book or film, perhaps we are noppera-bos, wiping off our regular faces in order to experience life behind another.
I love writing about landscapes. I’m probably guilty of finding them far more interesting to write about, at times, than human beings. That’s because I think so much of humanity is defined by the natural world we emerged from (and I include the weather as a part of that). For so many thousands of years we depended so crucially on the land, on the fertile earth and the just-right ratio between sunshine and showers, that the behaviour of the landscape dictated the terms of our culture. I bet you could root everything that we do and are in the way the Earth behaved back in the day. Landscapes are a mirror held up to humanity, which may explain our tendency to romanticise them, to take comfort in the idea that there is a wild country out there to which we might one day retreat and in which we might be better connected to ourselves. It could also explain part of the affront we feel when a landscape is bulldozed or sliced in half by a new motorway or rail link.
I like writing that reflects these notions by making the landscape something or someone who gets involved in the lives of those who inhabit it. Likewise in the ‘real world’ (I hate that term but there are few alternatives for what it implies) … Likewise in the world of sticks and stones, some landscapes lend themselves so well to personification that they become distinct characters. Mountains are good examples, named and ascribed with personalities that reflect their nature. A mountain of sun-bathed sloping meadows where sheep graze and crops grow is a gentle giant. Conversely, a collossal tor atop which the stormclouds muster and down whose flinty slopes the flash floods race is a menacing behemoth who’d like nothing better than to snuff out the little beings who dwell beneath its shadow.
I try to save up and collect pictures of landscapes that appear to me so rich in character that I can imagine them rising up to walk the horizons when everybody else is tucked safely in bed. While I was writing The Man who Rained I filled my pinboard with Turner’s landscape paintings. I bought a hefty catalogue of his work and filled a notebook trying to describe his mountains and his skies in prose. Much of the descriptive writing in the novel originated in such scribbling. They call Turner the painter of light but he’s as much for me the painter of the air itself, for wherever he paints a mountain he paints a haze or formative cloud, or a full-blown Biblical torrent smashing its way to the foreground.
I had vague intentions of posting various other images and photos saved up during the writing process. The internet is a great source for creating virtual scrapbooks to reference when stuck for words. But rather than include those I’ll just link to the below video, which came out when I was finishing up the novel’s final edit and which tours rather breath-takingly the sort of places I was aiming to describe.
She opened her eyes. The headlights shimmered across nests of boulders and trunks of stone on either side. No grass, only slates splitting under the weight of the car, each time with a noise like a handclap. Eyes closing, opening. The clock moved on in leaps, not ticks. Either side of the road were trees bent so close to the earth they were barely the height of the car, growing almost parallel to the shingly ground. A wind whistled higher than the engine noise.
‘Awake again,’ said Kenneth jovially. But she was asleep once more.
Awake again. The moon lonely in a starless sky. Swollen night clouds crowded around it. And beneath those the silhouettes of other giants.
‘Mountains,’ she whispered.
‘Yes,’ said Kenneth with reverence. ‘Mountains.’
Even at this distance, and although they looked as flat as black paper, she had a sense of their bulk and grandeur. They lifted the horizon into the night sky. Each had its own shape: one curved as perfectly as an upturned bowl, one had a dented summit, and another a craggy legion of peaks like the outline of a crown.
She lost sight of them as the car turned down an anonymous track. The only signpost she had seen in these last few awakenings was a rusting frame with its board punched out, an empty direction to nowhere.
We think of ourselves as land animals, but in truth the air is our element. We live on the seabed of a gaseous ocean, and just because the air we inhabit is invisible to us that does not mean it does not exist. What is invisible to us is so often what is most important. While writing this book I have come to think of the air as something reassuringly connective. Something that links me to you, as it does you to everyone you know. We are all submerged in it and drawing upon it together. The air in your lungs becomes the air in your blood, in your heart. As long as you remain alive and breathing, a part of you is always air.
We think of the clouds as distinct objects floating in empty space backdropped by blue, but in truth they are just patches of air that have lost their invisibility. They are a heavy sort of air more susceptible to gravity. They are the patternation of the thing we are breathing and we can breathe them on mountaintops or on foggy or misty days. Then the air we are breathing is cloud and because the air we breathe becomes a part of us we are part cloud too.
In books and films the weather has always been part human, raining in sympathy with characters who are down, raging during wars and ordeals, letting rip the feelgood fuzzy sunshine when the happy ending comes to pass. At some point a few years ago I began to wonder what it would be like if the weather really did come to life, becoming flesh and blood in various forms.
These are some drawings I made while writing The Man who Rained. They’re studies of Finn Munro, who is the titular character. He is, of course, part weather, perhaps all weather, although you’ll have to read it to determine for yourself his exact complexion.
Happy New Year, my dears. I hope those mince pies were piping hot and that mulled wine was topped up with enough brandy to make you giddy.
I’m going to be at Blackwell’s Broad Street, Oxford, at 7pm on Tues 17th January to talk about The Man who Rained with the fabulous Roma Tearne. It would be wonderful to see you there if you can make it. This is going to be my first time talking in any depth (in public, at least) about the novel so it will be an exciting first for me.
I love this time of year. Mistletoe and wine (and port, of course, and brandy and mulled ale if you can), and trying to grab an hour to read beside the Christmas tree. I enjoy the retrospectives that appear in the press, the closing year’s events considered at a pace there’s no time for during the preceding fifty one weeks. That said, it’s tricky for me to be retrospective this particular year, with The Man who Rained published on the 1st January. It’s nerve-wracking, to say the least. I’ve just got back from some last minute Christmas shopping, from weaving through the long queues at the butcher’s door and the cheesemonger’s, and while out I spotted it already on the shelves, which was an experience just as surreal and rewarding as first seeing The Girl with Glass Feet there.
Above are some drawings to accompany those first glimpses of the novel. I drew a lot of black-and-white mountains and smudgy skies while I wrote it, and will post more over the next few weeks. In the meantime I hope you have a marvellous Christmas this year. If you don’t celebrate Christmas, I hope you have a recuperative holiday. Either way, may 2012 bring you magic and gladness.
Regular readers may have noticed that I haven’t talked a great deal about my novels here. There isn’t a lot, if I’m honest, that I feel it’s helpful to say about them beyond what you’ll find between the front and back covers of the books themselves. I can’t add to or qualify the prose, and I don’t think that anything supplementary I write can enhance the experience of reading them. Hence I prefer to talk about the things I enjoy or that inspire me, in the hope that those who enjoy my writing might enjoy them too. In the hope that the act of compiling such enjoyments sheds light on my writing in some abstracted way.
The Man who Rained will be published in a little over a fortnight and I want to mark that publication here on the blog. At the same time, in keeping with the above, I don’t have a lot to say that isn’t said by the story itself. So I plan to post some of the things I drew around the time I wrote it, some of the things I learned about Cumulonimbus, some of the footage I watched of the weather overturning the world, some of the things that I read about the clouds and the atmosphere and the eerie old legends of thunder beasts and animals that vanish in a shimmer of rain.
The book is about the weather coming to life. Or about when people come apart into something like weather. I see it as a sort of sister book to The Girl with Glass Feet, but there I go talking about it like I said I shouldn’t. It’s better that you decide what it’s about, if you decide it is indeed about anything. Reading about lightning bolts made me want to write it. I thought they worked much like people do when they’re looking for love…
Time for our second Stop-Motion Film Night. Roll up. Settle down with the popcorn, the pick ‘n’ mix or the pack of cold beers. Let the cinema curtains crank open in the dark. The first Stop-Motion Film Night was a somewhat creepy affair, so for this second instalment I tried to find some light-hearted videos [...]
His body was as smooth as a weathered pebble on the sea shore. He had very little complexion: he was not so much a white man as a grey one. He had a flat pair of buttocks and skin as hairless as that of his head. He stood on the ridge between her viewpoint and [...]
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Ali Shaw is the author of the novels The Man who Rained and The Girl with Glass Feet, which won the Desmond Elliot Prize and was shortlisted for the Costa First Book Award. He is currently at work on his third novel.
