BAKUNAWA FESTIVAL
L’écrivain Aveugle (The Blind Writer)
Director: George Sifianos
France I 9min, 50 sec I Animation, Experimental I 2022
ASIAN PREMIERE
L’écrivain Aveugle (The Blind Writer)
Georges Sifianos I France I 9min, 50 sec I Animation, Experimental (Asian Premiere) 2022
The drawings of this film were made blindfolded, that is, without looking at them while drawing but using only tactile cues. This constraint deconstructs the individual drawings, which are then assembled into a whole in the viewer's mind. The film gropes along like a blind man. This reflects the writer’s perplexity, who questions dogmas and certainties. Faced with the complexity of the world, eternal questions concerning the relationships among people, political and metaphysical questions arise: - Who created the universe? - God. - And who created God?
Faced with ready-made ideological answers, the writer admits his helplessness, his blindness is more metaphorical than real. What does “see” mean? Does what we see, the appearance, reflect reality? The viewer is called to provide his/her own answer. S/he is the one who will have to decide, as his perception does, by assembling the disparate lines of the drawings in order to make them meaningful.
In a world where communication has acquired special significance, where images and views are constructed on order, how can one discern what is substantial? Is the candy edible or its colourful wrapping? The orange or its peel? Paradoxically, the answer is not as simple as it appears.
Georges Sifianos, born in Greece, holds a PhD in animation aesthetics from the University of Sorbonne. He is a filmmaker and professor emeritus of animation at ENSAD in Paris, where he founded the Department of Animation Studies in 1995. He has lectured worldwide including universities in Europe, India, Korea, Japan and China.
As a member of PSL academic research group, SACRe (EA 7410), he is interested in the renewal of forms of animation cinema, particularly from the point of view of cognitive science. The blindfolded animation approach employed in “The blind writer” is part of this research. His other recent research interest concerns animation forms found on the Parthenon’s Frieze. His book Aesthetics of Animated Cinema received the 2014 "McLaren - Lambart" award for the best academic book by the Society for Animation Studies and the "Hemingway Grant" in 2015.
