The Rockaway Film Festival opens tonight with a selection of handmade animated shorts in the program "Paper Trails, Chain Reactions." Guest-curated by artist and animator Lilli Carré (whose film Glazing [2021] screened in the 2024 Festival), this twelve-part sampler shows how the handmade can become alive, tactile, and convincing on a 2D screen, whether ordinary or nonsensical. Through painting, pencil, and ink, with anthropomorphic beings and relatable humans, these shorts from differing decades and countries depict themes of deconstruction, assembly, and what Carré calls the "residue of actions and cycles" on paper.
The evening starts off with two surrealistic films: Matthew Thurber's conspiracy-tinged watercolor "supernatural thriller road movie" Ecto Petrol Patrol (2018) and Sandra Desmazières's shapeshifting "nonsense day" catalogue, Sans queue ni tête (2001). In contrast, Nora Rodriguez uses unscripted audio of her mother and grandmother to construct Angels Going to Work (2021), rendering anxiety of growing older with hand-drawn forms. Choreographing the mundane from dull to droll, Atsushi Wada's Day of Nose (2005) uses minimalist line drawings to follow the repetitions of absurdist institutionalism while Kate Renshaw-Lewis's Busy Bodies (2025) is a domesticated factory akin to Dr. Seuss attempting an M.C. Escher drawing on acid, while it disintegrates over time.
Two works present dizzying experiments with patterns: Jodie Mack's frenetic Unsubscribe #1: Special Offer Inside (2010), which presents a rapid succession of close-up images of the interiors of security envelopes from paychecks and student loan bills, and Paul Glabicki's Mondrian-styled Object Conversation (1985, pictured at top), both of which will screen on 16mm. They're sandwiched between vignetted narratives, like Kathryn Roake's lesbian dog romance on Coney Island, Fifi va à la plage (2014), and Sam Gurry's "animated fanzine" Britney Spears: Diaries, Notes, & Sketches (2024), followed by Jennifer Levonian's docu-fiction hybrid The Poetry Winner (2012) and Chris Sullivan's haunting depiction of death and its victims, Master of Ceremonies (1987). Closing the night's program is Hoji Tsuchiya's anxious narrative of lust, Black Long Skirt (2010), seemingly straightforward in plot but increasingly rejecting any tidiness of animation by portraying the characters' motions without removing the positions drawn in the previous frames.
While "Paper Trails, Chain Reactions" surveys a variety of animation and illustration styles across drawing and stop-motion, audio is frequently given heavy importance. Thurber's voiceover, delivered entirely as a whisper, transforms Ecto Petrol Patrol into a secret you have to lean into to be let onto, while Rodriguez's matriarchal dialogue is the whole skeleton of her illustrations, similar to how Mack's "stroboscopic" Unsubscribe #1 is guided by Christy LeMaster's entrancing and emotive cello. Tsuchiya composed the music-box score for Black Long Skirt, and Desmazières enlisted Cédryck Santens to score Sans queue ni tête. But it's Wada's attentive sound effects in Day of Nose that perhaps make the biggest impression of creating a world beyond the simple lines of the characters, imbuing a trance-like repetitiveness that defies predictability with a sense of unease but also play.
Around 350 BC, Aristotle argued in his De anima (On the Soul) that the mind's intellect is immortal and immaterial, unlike the tangible senses such as sight and touch, which cannot lie in our experiences of them. Tonight presents animation as a tangible form of illusion, one we can see (and hear) to believe, but which without its anima loses its soul as a "moving image."
The program "Paper Trails, Chain Reactions" screens tonight, August 20, in the Rockaway Film Festival as part of opening night, outside at the Arverne Cinema. Filmmakers Nora Rodriguez, Jodie Mack, Kathryn Roake, and guest curator Lilli Carré will be present for a conversation after the screening. The Rockaway Film Festival will continue with additional (animated and live-action) shorts and feature films through August 24.
