Revisit | Reconciliation

REDISCOVERY

In my junior year in college, I had the chance to go back to China for a visit - the first substantial return to my old home since I left almost 10 years ago then. Up until then, the project I embarked on in my Directed Research course under Professor Stephen Prina had been primarily reproductions of mementos of mine from that distant part of my life. It was a brutal way for me to re-engage with my past, because it was often said that if one tries to dig up an old memory and bring it to reality, that process inevitably distorts or even destroys it (destruction didn’t matter much to me since I thought my old self was already estranged when I immigrated to America and assimilated). This was the keystone piece in that project: the reproduction of a photo portrait of me that was dissected and then reassembled staple by staple. It was displayed alongside a pile of staples that I broke in the process - the failed attempts at stitching back together what I had willingly torn up.

My revisit was thoroughly destabilizing. The same spaces and places had changed - or rather, transformed. I had held an idea of what they would still look like, and over the years, I had carefully constructed an illusory timeline for my past to evolve along. I imagined persistence, dilapidation, or renewal, and I found evidence of those everywhere I went, but it was different because what I found was not exactly what I imagined. I just didn’t know how much this part of my identity depended on my own fanciful, imaginary construction. With a town I could no longer call my own, I did not know how to update my mental album with these real images.

So I just documented my visit with photographs, drawings, and writing - whatever it took to try to find a foothold to re-stabilize myself. Perhaps I could work through these newfound mementos and stitch together something real, but perhaps it was precisely the act of working through mementos that had uprooted and displaced my earlier memories. It was a double-edged sword.

Under the guidance of Stephen, who was now my thesis adviser, I gathered all of my raw material and began my thesis exploration.

RECONSTRUCTION

I dove in with the intent to bring drawings and photographs of my past to life with my experience in animation, but I soon realized that the meticulous planning that was characteristic of many non-experimental animation became more of a chore than it was illuminating the subject matter. I was so focused on the final product of illusory motion that the raw images I was using were simply a means to that end. So I shifted my methodology, honing in on singular moments and describing them in great depth with different media.

As my exploration dealt with distortion of memories of spaces, it felt appropriate that I not only work with conscious acts of distortion (e.g. the process of drawing remembered spaces on paper), but also with unconscious acts of distortion - most saliently in the form of spaces in dreams and nightmares. One of my recurring nightmares (or fever dreams, as I remembered its occurring frequency would intensify whenever I was sick) took place in an unstable geometric space. I would be running through the faceted terrain, but the scale of the place shifted constantly - in the field of what looked like upturned Lego bricks, at times I felt like a giant stomping over everything, and at other times I felt like an ant struggling to scale up even one single slope.

To push for an even more open reconciliation between what I remembered and what I documented, I had the idea of expanding my process of reconstructing the past by reconstructing a whole section of my neighborhood as a melange of both my pictorial evidence and my memories of it. I used vellum cardstock, in part because it was a medium of least resistance to me and hence I could work without needing to climb a learning curve, in part because the translucency of paper implied fragility, permeability (by light and shadows), and layerability - all of which are characteristic of memories. It became a fluid process where I would gaze into a photo I took of a building or alley, allow myself to be swept up by the Proustian flood of reveries, and rebuild these reveries in paper.

Once the neighborhood was constructed, I rigged a small tripod for a camera to inhabit the set. I shot in stop-motion, moving the camera through the paper alleyways and revisiting the same turns and corners again and again - but with a catch: I raised the height of the tripod incrementally. Thus, it became a literal reconstruction of my experience of going back home 10 years later to revisit the same spaces, only with a vantage point a head and a half taller. The height difference was enough for home to stay recognizable yet become just a bit stranger; on film, the difference in the height of the camera was enough for the transformation to feel profound.

Outside of studio work, I was an avid gamer, especially of the simulation genre. I sympathized with many gamers who would tediously create an entire world brick by brick so that they might escape into it. What I found fascinating, as I began taking architectural features in the photographs I took of my old hometown and rendering them with paper, was that what I was doing was exactly what world builders did. The difference was that by escaping into it, I might finally escape from the castle in the cloud I had been building all these years and find resolution in a reconciled reality. In a sense, I was doing what the protagonist did in Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg: I was making a film about my Winnipeg so that I may leave my Winnipeg.

REVIEW

The final film was projected onto the entire wall of a darkened room. It was an empty room except for a sole pedestal in the middle on which a small music box perched. I remembered back when I was a little boy in elementary school, I would always go to my great-aunt’s house after school was over, and she had a toy windmill on her desk that would play a small tune if I wound up the music box in it. I was so enamored with this toy and its tune (which I would later discover to be “It’s a Small World”) that it haunted a large part of my memories of childhood.

When I was back in China, I sought out the music box so that - just like how one would rid themselves of a catchy tune - I might listen to it one more time and write over the memories. I was successful in finding it, winding it up again, and letting the ring echo in the same room for the thousandth time, but my plan backfired: the tune dug up reveries I thought I had lost and brought them face to face with the versions I had created, binding them together and rendering me no longer able to discern which was real and which was imaginary.

I ended up bringing this tension to the film through a recording of this tune set against a backlit shot of reconstructed windows, visually blurring the distinction between what was interior and what was exterior. With these shots projected onto the entire wall of the exhibition room, the screen became the walls of a room in which the viewers would suddenly find themselves, breaking the suspension of disbelief of the animation. It is a self-referential break from the filmic illusion, eerily parallel to the break from my own illusion that I had experienced.

Supplementing this was the small music box in the room. I purchased one that played the tune “It’s a Small World,” but in an act that mirrored my own rejection of the past, I sanded off all of the pins on the cylinder that plucked the tuned teeth. I rigged a motor system mounted within the pedestal that was set on a timer to run at precisely when the film switches to the scenes with the tune and the backlit windows. A rod ran through the pedestal and into the music box, turning the cylinder when the motor runs. Thus, whenever the recorded “It’s a Small World” played through the speakers in the projection system, the music box ran, and you could see the bare cylinder rotating on its axle, but no sound would come from it.