Throughout February, BFI Southbank is celebrating the work of Indian director, actor and producer, Raj Kapoor.
Also known as The Show-Man, Kapoor directed his first film at the age of 24 – at the time, the youngest directorial debut – having already been acting in major films since the age of… 11. No slacker he, then.
His films were nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and his performance in the film Awaara – modelled on Charlie Chaplin’s The Tramp – was rated as one of the “Top-Ten Performances of all time”, by Time Magazine.
So, all in all, a pretty talented guy.
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In last week’s Film of the Week, we saw a stop-motion animation, at the centre of which was a blank page continuously lacking any drawings, despite the peripheral gestures of creativity. This week sees an inversion of that; a page upon which a story unfolds through half-definable video and gorgeously drawn titles.
Note: If the video is too tall for your screen, zoom out using ‘ctrl/cmd’ and the ‘-’ key. Nathaniel Whitcomb has hitherto been a montage artist. Creating his works through cut-up pictures from old National Geographic magazines, he re-contextualised nature to purpose his own visual whim, later taking this forward into ‘visual-collage’, where gentle manipulations of motion and opacity would give subtle new life to these images. A defining aspect of Whitcomb’s motion work is the irregular choice of aspect ratios. It really makes sense that, in an age when we consume video more via the internet page than through our TVs, that video can break free of its old plastic borders and take shape to suit its purpose.
In the case of The Birth of Medusa, that purpose is to tell a story as if read from a storybook. With big characters, embellished with detailed pencil drawings, a narrative unfolds, part-science, part-myth. Images of biologically simple lifeforms serve as backdrop to a story implying the consideration of life before ‘consideration’ itself. Having been shot on an iPhone at a local aquarium, I believe this film shows how the most basic footage can be contextualised into beautiful abstract sci-fi.
