La course ã l'abime / The Ride to the Abyss
Georges Schwizgebel
Switzerland /
1992 /
4' 30''
Director: Georges Schwizgebel
Production: Studio GDS
Screenplay: Georges Schwizgebel
Camera: Georges Schwizgebel
Editing: Georges Schwizgebel
Music: Hector Berlioz, Boston Symphony Orchestra
Synopsis
At an average cycle of six seconds, an animated painting illustrates a fragment of an opera. The idea of the film was to use just 144 drawings for a fairly long film, the 144 immense cellulose drawings are seen only partially via a camera movement travelling spirally from the edges to the centre, finally to discover the entire scene and to unveil the artifice.
Georges Schwizgebel
Born 1944 in Reconvilier, Switzerland, Georges Schwizgebel is among the greatest names of contemporary animation. This well-rounded author of 15 short films has seen his work awarded in Cannes, Annecy, Zagreb, Hiroshima, Stuttgart, Ottawa and Espinho. Two of his films – 78 R.P.M. (1985) and The Ride to the Abyss (1992) – rank among the hundred most influential animated films on a list published by the Annecy Festival in 2006. (…) Though he first used rotoscoping (Perspectives, 1975; Off-side, 1977), Schwizgebel later traded this tool in for a freer approach marked by the gestural application of colour and frequent use of geometric shapes. (Marcel Jean)
