Shown in Compétition #2.
Synopsis
In Valdediós Gualterius built a monastery in the 13th Century. In Valdediós there is a wall, there is a horse, there is a road, there is the whole universe.
Texte du comité de sélection
Alternating Super8 footage and digital stop motion animation with joy and playfulness, Elena Duque crafts a shaky – yet balanced – dimension where a village and the universe meet and collapse together, where even the Bach lute suite is shaky and doesn’t know if it is going to tumble down or fly even higher.
– S.M.
What is the starting point for your film?
The starting point is a super 8 cartridge I shot in Valdediós area, in Asturias (Northern Spain), some years ago. I lived nearby back in the day, and I went there just attracted by some kind of “aura” of the place, seeking to capture the sensations I had when I visited Valdediós. Then I left Asturias and forgot about the cartridge for a while, but after some years I re-watched the super 8 footage and I decided to digitize it, and I decided that I needed to do something with it. So, in a way, I worked with my own material as if it was found footage.
How did you know, how did you find out that the whole universe was in Valdediós?
When I re-watched the super 8 footage, I started to see that almost all the shots had something in common: some sort of vanishing point going towards the light or towards the darkness. Then I started to see that as a possibility to “open a window” to animation, which is a totally foreign realm to that landscape, and I started to imagine where I could go with this. And my mind went towards the space, towards far places in the world. Later in the process I remembered Jorge Luis Borges’s short tale El Aleph, and that thing he writes about that punto que contiene todos los puntos del universo [“something like how that point contains all the points in the universe”], and I thought that maybe Valdediós’s magnetism had something to do with that, with being some sort of “portal”. I have to clarify at this point that I am not a believer of the supernatural and I am far from being a mystical person.
What was your creative process for Valdediós?
I started to reunite these ‘vanishing points’ and I tough that they could function as hinges in the montage. So I figured out a technique close to rotoscopy to make the animation depart from the ‘real world’ images. I use analogue animation techniques, in the sense that I shoot frame by frame even when I work with a digital camera. After establishing this technique and knowing how I would join the different shots, I started to work in the animation, which is made in some parts with hand-painted animation, and in others with collage elements (from old books, encyclopedias, magazines, cardboard cutouts, painted papers, and so on), and even there are some parts made with drawings on paper. The music (Bach’s La Bourrée de luth played in the guitar by Narciso Yepes) was clear for me from the beginning. To me it suggests some sort or harmony and clarity. So, as Valdediós was unfolding with the animation, I decided to loop some parts of the music and superimpose them, to echo somehow the multiple layers that reality can have, at least according to the film!