Avant-garde sci-fi stop-motion animation, anyone? French, as well, or made in France, at least, the only full-length feature made by Polish-born Piotr Kamler. “Full-length” is actually a bit of a stretch as a description. Chronopolis is only 52 minutes long, and the original version was 66 minutes, so hardly The Irishman.
The shorter one is Kamler’s preferred cut. It removed a chunk of late action and completely obliterated the narration by Michael Lonsdale, the French-born actor of British ancestry who’d turn up now and again in English-speaking movies, often in villain roles (he was Hugo Drax in Moonraker, for instance).
But, as said, no sign nor sound of him in the only version of Chronopolis you’re ever likely to see. Which is what, exactly? Good question. A meditation on eternity, perhaps, though it could just as well be described as a joke about existentialism, even though scrolling introductory text tells us that it’s about an encounter between humanity and a race of immortals who live up in a giant city in the sky playing with time.
Kamler makes clear, from repetitive opening sequences, which give way to more repetitive sequences, that the immortals live lives of exquisite ennui, performing mindless tasks repeatedly to keep themselves occupied. Sitting there like Egyptian hieroglyphs barely come to to life they make and unmake things, join dots together to make a big dot, then break it apart again. Set a ball off bouncing around along some pipes, then watch, mute and expressionless, as it bounces back along the pipes towards them.
Though nowhere near as colourful, Kamler’s style of things taking shape and then dissolving again is faintly reminiscent of the claymation video for Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer – which was by Aardman and the Brothers Quay – with the added jerky junk-shop aesthetic of a Jan Svankmäjer production.
The Myth of Sisyphus – a key text for the existentialists – springs to mind, the figure in Greek mythology who endlessly pushes a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down again.
The problem with depicting sheer boredom and pointlessness is that it can be boring and pointless to watch. Kamler attempts to head this problem off at the pass by interspersing this largely monochromatic tableaux of endless sameness with flashes of colour, layering image on image, sudden zooms, endless movement.
You could call it hallucinogenic, or extremely stylised, and use various of the other adjectives pressed into service when a “what the hell is going on?” isn’t quite fitting the bill.
At times a story does start to assert itself. First of all with a rubber ball that seems to have acquired consciousness (is this where Quentin Dupieux found the inspiration for his rubber-tyre-comes-to-life movie Rubber?). Later, as the human climbers, who might in fact be just one climber in a mirror-like repetition, finally arrive in the megacity and start larking about. Is it a moment of Star Trek-like humanism, with play and fun the elements missing from the lives of the immortals? Perhaps.
Like a perpetual motion machine that appears to actually work, it’s fascinating but not very interesting, if that isn’t too weird a distinction. What keeps it together and adds a layer of drama not always apparent on the screen is the score by Luc Ferrari, his last. Ferrari was a musique concrète man, a fan of Schoenberg and Varèse who was an early adopter of the use of tape machines in the creation of “serious” music. Initially it sounds as if we’re in for 52 minutes of atonal boings, bleeps and burbles, but Ferrari shifts gear early to something more evocative, with the best bits coming in the mid-section where Ferrari takes the music down to almost a burbling bed of disquiet and things get quite spooky.
Amazingly, the film won an award for Best Children’s Film when it was first shown in 1982. What were they thinking? Perhaps an award for “Animation about Animation” might have been more appropriate. Because in Kamler’s obsessive making-and-unmaking scenarios, and his repeated repetitions, he forces attention onto the process of stop-motion film-making. Which does, as everyone knows, take an awfully awfully long time and requires the patience of an immortal.
Chronopolis (as part of a Piotr Kamler box set) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
