Tyger, Tyger in a Folded World

I just came across this, pretty much by accident.  It's amazing, a small film by Guilherme Marcondes, a Brazilian filmmaker, based on the William Blake poem. He uses puppetry, illustration, photography and CGI to make a fantastically rich little gem:


Mr. Marcondes is influenced by the pastiche of Brazilian culture and the DIY quality of the Brazilian film schools of which he came.  Clearly, he uses anything he can get his hands on, including things like origami and the ancient Japanese puppet-art of bunraku.  It's all very stylized and fabulous, and makes me want to know more about his earlier life -- did he study all these kinds of art?  He must have.

I went to his website, where he has samples of his work, and I found this, from a movie called Bunraku, the opening sequence of which he was given carte blanche to do:


 I never heard of this movie, Bunraku.  It looks like it was released in France and Canada, but not here...?  It looks like a very violent movie, definitely not my type of thing, but the art direction looks really interesting: the pans through cities seem to unfold like a pop-up book, and the scenery is an odd conglomeration of bits.  Which leads me to the fact that Mr. Marcondes originally studied architecture: 

"I like experiencing architecture, not practicing it. Just as I go to the movies or listen to music, I like to wander around a city, paying attention to how the space is organized, how the transportation works, etc. I’m interested in how the environment we live in changes and conditions our personalities. That’s clearer in Tyger than in any other film I’ve made. That also explains why I like J.G. Ballard so much!"  [link]

And on that note, I will leave you to ponder a world where cities are made to pop up as you move through them, and when the apocalypse comes, flowers of light grow through the cracks of the world.

Some Artists

Well, I stumbled onto my account at Technorati, which I had forgotten about (shows how much time I have to look around these days), and lo! Several people had actually linked to me whom I had never heard of, and in looking at their sites I was pleased to find they went under the heading of "beautiful things". It's a wide world out there and I'm glad to get to see some of the good parts.
For starters, Blue Tea was showcasing (among many other amazing Book Art people) Su Blackwell, who makes art by cutting and folding books. Some of the images she creates are really dynamic and moving. A lot of them seem to be children's books. She works with books that are no longer readable for whatever reason, and works within the book's subject matter, either directly or metaphorically. And a lot of the books are framed in boxes, which of course sets off drool bells for me.


But what I particularly like about this aspect of her work (she does other stuff as well) is its delicacy, the slight feeling of claustrophobia, as if these characters, this landscape have been trapped in the book all this time and now are suddenly released. A number of her compositions have an urgency about them; the choices she has made for the cut-out people from the illustrations seem to lean toward people on their way somewhere, about to discover something, or perhaps escaping from something. And the landscapes speak of a bleak mystery, a rising, an awareness of the air. Very cool.


In my wanderings I also came across Aria Nadii,
another self-described "book pirate" who creates layered compositions from images found in books. Many of the works are quite wonderful. And if you like her stuff, she has a whole page of really beautiful images for people to take and use as avatars (go to her blog to see them). Her blog is full of nice details of what it's like to make art while keeping on with the daily making of a life. I look forward to seeing more of her stuff.