Trade of the tricks

>> Gerd Gockell's Muratti and Sarotti sheds light on German animation

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

It's a bit like flowers pushing their way through concrete.

Gerd Gockell's documentary, Muratti and Sarotti: The History of German Animation Film 1920-1960, brings to light a variety of remarkable, seminal talents in the "trickfilm" medium--"trickfilm" being German for animation.

What's particularly moving is that the artists' stories are told in the context of modern German history. That is, we see how they negotiated their way past the triple threat of mustachioed miscreants Hitler, Stalin and Disney.

Things get rolling in the early '20s, when animators were taking their cues from the avant-garde art scene that was as progressive as the Nazi culture which crushed it was regressive. New ground was broken left and right. Lotte Reiniger, for instance, was the woman credited with creating her own genre of animation--silhouette films, an extension of shadow puppet theatre drawing on opera and fairy tales for inspiration.

Then there was Rudolph Pfenniger. His theory of "signatures of sound," transforming visual patterns into soundscapes, predated electronic music and sparked the first round of debate over the obsolescence of traditional musicians.

At the same time, art and commerce snuggled happily in bed, resulting in animated ads like Hans Richter's work for Philips tube amps and Oscar Fischinger's spots for Muratti cigarettes--graceful coffin nail ballets.

When confirmed Disneyphiles Hitler and Goebbels took the reins, "degenerate" art vanished, to be replaced by clumsy mimicry of the Yanks' high-end, lowbrow epics. Politics weaselled their way into the animation studios, leading to visits from the SA thugs and a mass of rogue animators on the run.

After the war, the nation was split in half. Those in the west pimped product while those in the east pushed propaganda. Regardless, moments of true brilliance shone through, like Fischinger's Motion Painting No. 1, an abstract piece mirroring early computer animation of the '80s.

This is the strength of Muratti and Sarotti. A valuable document of animation history, and notable in that it is entirely animated itself, the film goes further by drawing the audience toward those flickering pockets of light that crept around the cruel, grey monoliths that were the swastika, the hammer and sickle and, of course, the almighty dollar sign. :

At the Cinematheque quebecoise on Sunday, January 23, 5pm. See repertory listings