film morning 4

In an illuminated box, there are walls of white square boards, where glass balls dance in defiance of gravity along the floor, walls and ceiling. A fantastic play with shapes and textures, toying with the imagination in a way in which a child will definitely understand. The film is part of the Great Art for Little People project presented in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2005.

Normal rolls of sticky tape begin to come alive. Stuck symmetrically to a smooth surface, they slowly begin to expand, stretched by gravity. The creator of this animation, Johan Rijpma, films it from many different points of view, and then reverses the picture, showing the process of expansion speeded up, thanks to which we can see not just tape, but moving sculptures continuously metamorphosing.

Another stop-motion animation by Johan Rijpma. This time, the artist juxtaposes photographs of footpath flagstones or tiles, which are cracked, smeared with chalk, overgrown with grass, stained, or covered in the remains of peeling paint. The footpath turns out to be a kingdom of pictures, changing like a kaleidoscope in front of our very eyes. The edge of the footpath is the only border there is.

Maarten Visser made his films photographing arrangements of coloured tiles and juxtaposing them in stop-motion animation. In this way, he has brought about unusual rhythmic, almost musical, visual compositions. The changes in rhythm are counterpointed here as a game of colours. It is not only playing with form, it is also a delightful display of the precision of the abstract moving picture.

The inspiration for the abstract animations of Maarten Visser were the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach. The preciseness of the rules and the precision of the compositions are wonderfully visible here. Visser photographs arrangements of tiles through textured glass, thanks to which the picture gains softness and an unusual, almost spatial, structure. The main motif is still the rhythm of the changing colours and shapes. The picture, however, becomes both flickering and hypnotic.

This time the picture grows and expands, and is much more specific, but the angular forms are replaced with liquid ones, almost like waves. Their juxtaposition on a black background of six screens, on which the same animation is repeated, only helps to reinforce the impression. The liquidity is in total harmony with the angular shapes and, at the end, it fades to black.