All aboard
the night train

>> Montreal’s Clyde Henry Productions on
their strange and innovative stop-motion
animation Madame Tutli-Putli

by MARK SLUTSKY

Chances are you’ve never seen anything like Madame Tutli-Putli before, and you might not see anything like it again. Created by Montreal artists Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, aka Clyde Henry Productions, in concert with the National Film Board, Madame Tutli-Putli is a stop-motion animated journey that integrates puppeteering and live-action acting to produce an effect that’s sublimely disconcerting. It’s an elliptical, mysterious and wordless story of a woman—the Madame of the title—who gets on a train that takes her on a voyage from day into night, as the passengers around her disappear and things get progressively eerier.

The movie is the result of a gruelling creative process that took the filmmakers from Montreal on a trip across Canada and back, to a leaky warehouse studio in Toronto where the majority of the filming was done, to their current digs in Mile-End where they finished the film. When the 17-minute film was completed, the production and post-production period added up to four years of solid work.

Their labour hasn’t gone unrecognized: a selection at Cannes’ International Critics’ Week, Tutli-Putli picked up a handful of prestigious awards there, and has gone on to win even more as it makes the rounds of the festival circuit, even as the two prepare their next project, a live action feature called The White Circus.

Tutli-Putli is Clyde Henry’s first film, but it’s by no means their first major project together. You might recall The Untold Tales of Yuri Gagarin, for example, a sort of photo-roman comic strip that ran in Vice for years, or recognize the posters they’ve done for Momentum theatre, just two of their many collaborations.

Lavis and Szczerbowski speak to the Mirror over beers at their warren-like studio at the corner of St-Laurent and St-Viateur, a charmingly shabby apartment over a café adorned by drawings, maquettes, lights and other assorted gear.

The two first met in a Religions of Near East Asia class at McGill University in the ’90s. “We started getting drunk and drawing together,” Szczerbowski recalls. “That was it. Then we started sharing a studio together out of necessity.”

“Drawing is where it all begins,” Lavis concurs.

“The thing is, we got into this for the exact same reasons,” Szczerbowski continues. “It’s not like he wanted to be the guitarist and I wanted to sing or something. Weirdly enough our talents are extremely similar. And so this is probably the most essential thing that maintains our interest in keeping it going, that we invent projects for ourselves where we get to do precisely those things we enjoy doing.”

IMPOSSIBLE ILLUSIONISTS:
Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski

Days, nights, and journeys by train

The two are understandably reluctant to talk about the meaning of Madame Tutli-Putli. Lavis will say this, though: “A definite thing was that we wanted to set up the daytime movie and the nighttime movie. Like the daytime movie is funny. The daytime movie is the part with laughs. We wanted to set up a certain kind of movie where you had these expectations: ‘Oh, it’s stop-motion. It’s going to be funny. Funny stuff’s gonna happen.’”

Szczerbowski jumps in: “It’s this European dusty jar of pickles animation that is so quaint and beautiful and—“

“And charming, and how are we going to get to know these people. And then we wanted to suddenly go just like—”

“A hard frozen steel boot to the head.”

Though the idea for Madame Tutli-Putli goes back as far as 1999, it was a cross-country train ride the pair took in 2002 that seemed to truly breathe life into the project. It was a two-week journey in which Clyde Henry boarded a cross-Canada VIA train, armed with movie equipment in order to capture the look and feel of train travel with some level of verisimilitude.

They had everything, really, except for a place to sleep. “We had a special pass from VIA that said we were filmmakers so we got to go to first class,” Lavis explains. “We got to have the champagne, the free coffee, the bananas and use of the first class shower—but not the bed.”

One can only imagine the reaction of the ritzy passengers to a pair of wild-eyed artists invading their domain. “One time,” Szczerbowski recalls, “we walked into the first-class car and some saucy old gentleman turned towards his wife and said, ‘Darling, I believe the plebes have invaded our class.’”

Capturing a feeling

They captured stories as much as the feeling of being on the train: “We’d stay up until 3 a.m. and talk to staff, talk to old people that have been on VIA for the past 40 years,” Szczerbowski says. “Get them in those wee hours of the day just before they’re ready to crash and interest them in the idea of making a film.”

The specific stories didn’t make it into the film so much as the mood they imparted. “One of the stories the guys told us about is how creepy the dining car is in the middle of the night,” Lavis says.

“How even the staff is afraid to walk through the dining car after sleeping hours,” adds Szczerbowski.

“Something extraordinarily creepy happens in the first-class VIA dining car.”

“There’s like a horror-movie symmetry to the whole thing. You have a perfect left side and perfect right side that are exactly the same thing. You know how haunting a restaurant can be at night. But this is where all the silverware that’s still laid out on all the tables is clinking in the most disturbing way because of the vibrations, and it’s silent otherwise. Certain kind of vibrations can make a certain kind of haunted effect in your brain, we understand. We wrote the climax of the movie around that, and we based every single detail on the dining car. We didn’t change the lighting, the tableware, the colours, the decorations, we 100 percent recreated the VIA dining car for the climax of our movie, and shot it exactly the way it looks at three in the morning.”

Wild working conditions

It was not an easy movie to make. The film’s innovative use of live-action in conjunction with stop-motion gives the characters a disquieting life-like sense—an effect created in conjunction with their old friend and collaborator Jason Walker. Just shooting stop-motion alone is a grinding, meticulous process; it can take a week to produce a five-second shot. “Two and a half years of daily animation, every day, going to the studio, doing your two seconds, going home…just shooting,” is how Lavis describes it.

The slightest disturbance can ruin an entire set-up; you need complete control of your environment. “We went through conditions there which are insane for stop-motion,” Szczerbowski says. “You’ve got to live in a place that’s hopefully not on the main street so it’s not shaking. You can pause for a weekend in the middle of animating a finger reaching for a glass and then resume that three days later after you’ve gone camping, for example. It’s impossible to imagine when you’re watching a scene where someone seamlessly reaches for a cup, that that’s where it was for three days. And when you get back to it on Monday, you really hope that it is still there. Not only that, you are hoping that the set hasn’t shifted, you’re hoping that the building hasn’t settled, that there’s no roof work being done. And we had all of it going on. Our roofs were removed during the shooting of this. We were actually shooting animation with no windows, and sometimes no roof.”

“They re-tarred the roof so that there was tar dripping off the sets!” Lavis adds.

“We had two generations of pigeons roost in our studio during the making of this animation. And actually live and shit on our sets.”

But the two seem less interested in the means than the end itself, to the point of venturing that they may not make another stop-motion movie again. “We’re not so much stop-motion animators as much as illusionists,” Szczerbowski explains. “Stop-motion—this is a method. This is just a means to an end. It’s not our métier. Our métier is coming up with ideas and then figuring out how best to do them, things that are impossible otherwise.”

Madame Tutli-Putli plays at
Ex-Centris on Friday, Oct. 12,
7:20 p.m. and Tuesday, Oct. 16,
1:20 p.m. as part of the
Festival du Nouveau Cinéma

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