On the Edge of Alchemy

Brian D. Butler

March 1

I was intrigued by the wonderful collage animation (below) created by Stacey Steers. The 20 minute film presents a unique approach to collage animation by combining backgrounds, objects and creatures taken from engraved illustrations with characters lifted from early cinema.

"Mary Pickford and Janet Gaynor, seamlessly appropriated from their early silent films, are cast into a surreal epic with an upending of the Frankenstein story and a contemporary undercurrent of hive collapse. In this handmade film, Stacey Steers selects sequences from early cinematic sources, prints the frames and re-contextualizes the action, allowing the 'story' assembled from appropriated images to evolve over time. She inserts her actors into newly imagined collage environments, built by hand from fragments of 19th century illustrations and engravings. Steers' labor-intensive project took five years to complete. The construction process is intuitive and organic: she Edge of Al engravings and illustrations. Edge of Alchemy is the third film in a trilogy examining women's inner worlds. Music and sound by the Polish composer Lech Jankowski (Brothers Quay).

https://vimeo.com/191596712

"Edge of Alchemy is the epitome of Stacey Steers' unique vision of collaged re-examination animations, an uncanny way to carry on in the great tradition of surrealist cinema. Max Ernst would refer to Lautréamont's sewing machine and umbrella to define the structure of the surrealist painting as 'a linking of two realities that by all appearances have nothing to link them, in a setting that by all appearances does not fit them.' I would add, making it all feel so seamlessly inevitable and inexplicably right...the 'feeling of form', as Suzanne K. Langer might have put it…" (Phil Solomon)

Steers' labor-intensive project took five years to complete. The construction process is intuitive and organic: she selects motion sequences from early cinematic sources, prints the frames and re-contextualizes the action, allowing the 'story' assembled from appropriated images to evolve over time. She inserts her actors into newly imagined collage environments, built by hand from fragments of 19th century engravings and illustrations and then photographed with 35mm film stock."

via Vimeo