A meticulous medium requiring extraordinary patience and ambidexterity, pinscreen animation has had very few virtuosos over the years. For artists up to the challenge, though, that means there’s still a great deal of room for discovery and experimentation, for improvisation and play. That sense of creative exploration comes through in every frame of Michèle Lemieux’s ambitious film, Here and the Great Elsewhere. It was with this work that Lemieux picked up the torch from Jacques Drouin.
In 2012, the CNC acquired the Épinette, the last pinscreen designed by Alexeïeff-Parker in 1977, with the aim of reviving this unique technique in France. A twin of the NFB‘s “new” pinscreen, the Épinette was brought back into service thanks to the expertise of Jacques Drouin and Michèle Lemieux. A workshop organised by the CNC and led by Michèle Lemieux was then held in Annecy in 2015: eight directors were selected and given a three-day introduction to the technique, which they were able to explore in greater depth during a month-long research and development residency offered to each of them by the CNC at its Bois d‘Arcy site. Since then, the Épinette has been made available for seven artistic projects.
Meanwhile, in 2015, Alexandre Noyer, a computer and electronics engineer with a passion for animated films, created a new generation of pinscreens inspired by the originals. In 2018, Quebec filmmaker Alexandre Roy made a short film called Jim Zipper using the Spinae, which has 103,320 pins. In 2020, La Bande Vidéo, a media arts production and distribution centre from Quebec City, acquired a new model called the Alpine, which contains 201,600 pins. La Bande Vidéo launched a call for projects to offer artist residencies on the Alpine in order to make short films with this pinscreen. In recent years, as Noyer has distributed his new versions of the pinscreen around the world, this hitherto obsolete animation technique seems to have seen a inexorable revival.

Length: 93′