“The Four-Dimensional Art”: On One Animated Adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe
- Issue:
- УДК / UDK: 82(091)
- DOI:
- Abstract:
The paper focuses on the animated adaptation of Edgar Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” created by “United Productions of America” in 1953. The film is analyzed in the broad context of the studio’s aesthetical principles, its artist’s special affinity to the Bauhaus style and their interest towards Cubist and Surrealist experiments. “UPA”'s specific visual primitivism, or “limited animation”, is an experimental technique, closely related to the aesthetics of avant-garde, a quest for the new imagery and new rhythmic structure of a film. Making The TellTale Heart, its director Ted Parmelee and background artist Paul Julian created primarily a film about a madman, a split personality with distorted vision; this character perfectly matched the Cubist method and the idea of simultaneous “vision in motion” (L. Moholy-Nagy), actual for the artists of “UPA”. However, at the same time the studio was ready to meet the expectation of the mass audience, introducing the parallels with crime drama films. Parmelee and Julian strive to demonstrate multidimensionality and variability of psychic phenomena. The main visual images of the film are symbolically linked to the problems of power, control, time, and decay. The principles of collage, described by John Hubley, one of “UPA”'s leading artists, are employed in different techniques. First, the fusion of multiple emotions of Poe’s narrator is represented by sophisticated multi-layered images. Second, the eye of the obsessed narrator creates the chains of similar elements, which are successively combined through montage. The ending of the film visualizes the result of the crime, its reverse effect. It is impossible neither to hide nor to destroy the victim’s body, as it over and over returns in its reflections. The evil observer’s control is not overcome, but increases.
- Keywords: Edgar Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, animation, adaptation, visuality, experiment, primitive.
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