The Soundless Spectre of Motion

"The Soundless Spectre of Motion is the culmination of several years of working with animation, exploring its logics and processes in a way that would allow me to use the narrative to reveal and dramatize a position within this process and within its social context.

My process is quite intuitive, the work and its logic build up slowly, over a period of time. I create object-assemblages out of everyday materials and drawings that might be used in the animations or function as works themselves. Working with animation, particularly in this project, meant that ideas around the role of illusion, transformation, the convergence of realism & fantasy, the animation of life and re-animation of the dead, were to be dealt with. 

I was inspired by the writings of Dr. Alan Cholodenko, a theorist who has written extensively on cinema as a form of animation, and about the uncanny experience of animation as a result of its paradoxical condition –  the (im)possibility of bringing death to life and life to death, the illusion of such. 

As a peripheral project to the video, I posted an ad on Craigslist that asked: 'Would you like to be photographed with a spectre?'.  I eventually photographed one of the responders, Susie Kahlich, writer and contributor to Order of the Good Death, a blog whose mission is to promote the inclusion of death and of the dead. She subsequently wrote about the attraction of death as a spectacle in historical Paris.

The title of the work, The Soundless Spectre of Motion, pays reference to the opening lines of Maxim Gorky’s 1896 review of a Lumière screening: 'Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there – the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air – is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre...'

His remarks are one of the earliest written accounts on the idea of cinema as a realm of death, and it contrasts with the idea of cinematic images as ‘living’ representations. Gorky was describing the shock of seeing the uncanny ‘essence’ of animation stir images to life. He meant for his review to be a critique of a technology he found sinister and depressing, yet the experience he describes is one that audiences of the time found fascinating. This is apparent in the immense popularity of the Phantasmagoria shows that turned summoning phantoms of the dead or absent into an attraction, concealing the human action and apparatus involved in producing them."

Bridget Walker in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (October 2013)