The Angry God of Animation

At first glance Phil Mulloy's twenty years' work might seam as an almost taunting poetical rewriting of the fundaments of Western mythology and history (The Ten Commandments series, 1994—96), the theory of evolution an the history of civilization (The History of the World, 1994), and of course of western, the greatest achievement of contemporary society, the epic of modern civilization, celebrating the worldwide colonization and industrialization (Cowboys series, 1991). Mulloy's take on these fundamental texts of Western civilization resembles the raging fits of an anarchic anti-God, who has decided to punish the human race — unscrupulous, greedy and senseless creatures — with all the perverted imagination animation is more than happy to provide, to set them against one other in war, to cut off their heads at random, to feed them to the dogs, to burn them at the stake and to laugh at them even in the beyond.

As any good satirist — and Mulloy doubtlessly belongs to the noble Anglo-Saxon tradition of social satire — the author is first and foremost a sort of demiurge, creating and destroying worlds, perhaps to knock at least a fragment of sense into humanity. Although Mulloy's "humans" are merely grotesque, crooked two-dimensional figures, reduced to a couple of basic instinctive organs: a bloated head with a gasping mouth and hollow eyes, concealing the bottomless abyss of "reason", and genitalia, the true impetus of life and "progress", as the author expressively illustrates in the series Intolerance (2000/01) and didactically demonstrates in The History of the World: "The pen—>is mightier than sword".

Mulloy's monotonous vision of the human spirit — presented mostly as the history of man's conflict with his biological self — veiled in sombre desperation, is already obvious in his film The Sound of Music (1992), where a series of bizarre, unrelated events transforms into a chaotic carnival of violence and dissolute oblivion. Yet it is exactly through the merciless manipulation of this symbolic figure that Mulloy's vision of society incarnates itself as an expression of fleeing, but accurate observations, of uprooted and barely sensible images, finally converging into a socio-politically-sexual impressionism, an out of tune, yet piercing contemplation of what it means to be human.

The more "articulated" works, as to narrative and stylization, are Chain (1997), where Darwinian jungle gives way to Orwellian atmosphere of entrapment within a permanent state of war and fascism — the genocidal utopia founded on the exclusion of the other (and the different) — and the aforementioned Intolerance series, a contemplation of the relativity of cultural norms under the guise of a hilarious "science"-fiction parody. Thus what guides Mulloy's films is a preoccupation with the individual's impotence in the face of society's totality — a problem, which the author approaches with a fundamental distrust of the existent forms of collective management (of body and mind) and a sardonic scorn for any kind of magical "reasoning". A problem, whose development and dynamics are — almost epistemologically — dissected in the series The Ten Commandments and The History of the World.

However, Mulloy doesn't impart his sarcastic criticism from some sort of a moralistic high horse. His work is not just permeated with an abundance of gallows humour and historical irony, but is also capable of a truly lyrical expression. In the Wind of Changes (1996), his most stirring work, Mulloy exceptionally features a real life hero: an exiled violinist (with the voice and music of Alexander Balanescu), an eternal stranger and elegiac herald of the remembrance of today, of ideals, bending under the pressures of reality — the latter being also incorporated by way of exception, with the use of "real life", although stylized film footage. In this rhythmic composition, where Mulloy's direct images become fragments of another story, of some other memory, the author reveals his romantically engaged creed, which until this moment had lain silent under an uproar of more urgent declarations: "There is no point in being able to perform something really well, if you're unable to express something that can move other people." The violinist is finally sent flying through the sky by a creative explosion, landing on a monument to past musical giants, and smashing the statue to pieces with a driller. Mulloy's animations are imbued with the following paradox of modernity: a desire to rid oneself of false idols, who push us to the ground with the weight of centuries, and at the same time an awareness of the fact that (political) actions without (historical) memory have neither value nor future. Can the hand that erases, also redraw?

And erasing is just the term to describe Mulloy's drawing, the swift and direct strokes of his brush. Above all else, what we have here is reduction; as if a trembling impatient hand fears that hesitation and stylization might cause the meaning and message of the image to crumble. The figures move just enough for the frames to form a slight but continual movement. They speak just enough for us to discern from their squeaking rat voices something at least resembling speech. The loud and concrete sound comes to the fore in order to fill the gaps in image and motion. Mulloy's animation is a barely possible synthesis of elegant haiku and naive Art Brut rattle.

Mulloy's latest work, The Christies series (2006), doesn't deflect from this set course one single bit. The drawing is once again as atavistic as the author's vision of the world, despite being aided by a computer, which Mulloy swings around as a beat-up old troglodyte axe. And similarly as his previous works, which often shamelessly take on an established and even archetypal genre forms, The Christies transform into a family sitcom, which twists the values and aspirations of British bourgeoisie to a grotesque extreme beyond recognition. We are still confronted with an angry demiurge, who takes animation literally — as the idea of animating matter into a crude, but vital image of life.

Nil Baskar

Programme:
Phil Mulloy's Short Films
The Christies