About

Director's Statement

This short animation was made with images from my large, ongoing two-dimensional series of works in drawing and painting. My goal in creating and directing this film was to take what was implied in my work into a moving reality. In the series of drawings and paintings, I have constructed a synthetic world of characters, symbols, and signs interacting in vast fields of micro and macro space that is both private and collective. I am engaged in a discovery of how space and form parallel human thought and emotion - how we continuously endeavor to understand and respond to science and poetry, language and movement, time and space, and all manner of enigmatic causes and effects.

In this film and all my work, I am attempting to recreate a world that metaphorically parallels this one. I want my imagery to be strangely recognizable and unknowable at the same time. As I work, characters emerge in spaces with an ominous quality, sometimes a sense of dread and fear, because just like the real world, this parallel place contains dualities of pleasure and pain, strength and weakness, compassion and tyranny. It can also be a place where miraculous interactions occur. I am interested in things that are obscure interacting in concert with and in opposition to things that are crystal clear.

The sound was created in response to the animated visuals by musician/composer Jay Batzner whose experimental work in digital music seems to me to be the perfect counterbalance to the visual work in this film.

Critiques

From The Critique Committee, Rochester/High Falls International Film Festival - "Movies on a Shoestring:"

We found your film to be visually interesting and imaginative. One viewer described it as "a fantastical voyage of sight and sound that intrigued from beginning to end." It was visually stunning according to another and tickled the imagination. The abstract art was interesting. We found your film to be technically well done. There was an excellent synchronization between the images and sound. The choice of black and white worked well and made the textures stand out nicely. The gradual introduction of a little color was an interesting aspect.

Essays

From Mark Price, Writer and Visual Artist:

You find yourself floating high above a rolling gray, geometric landscape inside someone’s dream. Presently you are either soaring or the ground below you is falling away. You are not breathing but then you determine--almost comfortingly--that you have no physical body and no need for air. You are disoriented but strangely exhilarated. What has happened to gravity? Where are you? How did you get here?

A blurry cloud appears. You cannot tell if it is nearby or far away, below you or beside you. It is either moving rapidly past you, or you are quickly moving past it. Or it might be a stationary cloud that is blurry because it is made of vapor. Perhaps it is not a cloud at all and is, instead, a hovering flat picture of a blurred cloud.

A crisp, flat shape crosses the expansive surrealistic earth that lies far below, before the shape loops back toward you and then again away from you. The shape casts no shadow on the ground, so you cannot determine how close it is to the earth. Feeling lost and separated from everything that is familiar, you give up caring whether the shape is flat or fully three-dimensional. It is gently shaded near its edges, and you know that it might be three-dimensional. Anxious for certainty, you imaginatively round off the edges of the shape so you can regard it as a solid, and therefore as *real*. Though the shading may not impart overwhelming sculptural solidity, you cannot accept an improbably flat shape floating aimlessly in space either. You reconcile yourself to a paradox, which is that the floating shape is alternately two-dimensional and three-dimensional. You finally posit the accommodating notion that you are inside a two-and-a-half-dimensional world.

From Iain Machell, Musician and Visual Artist:

Your animation is a big tease. "Hey look! Those shapes are moving....they're changing...they are interacting, why...(blush!) I do believe they are copulating! No, that pointy shape is floating in liquid, no, outer space- I've got it...we're looking at the beginnings of life....or the end of life?" Shapes-R-Us could be the title as I found myself alternately relating to or being repulsed by the inner lives of your abstract beings. The static, ambiguous shapes and spaces of your drawings and paintings are loaded with the implication of movement, and the animation is an extension into a different reality. Just when you think movement in real time will help to decipher the mystery of your flat invented worlds, the worlds become more obscure, and this new information merely creates more questions rather than answering any.

These shapes have real identities, characters navigating their funky world, characters that are fleshed out by the excellent sound/ music by your collaborator.

In other words, totally cool, I loved it.

Genres

Alternative, Micro-cinema, Musical, Deconstruction, Film Noir, Fantasy, Independent, Magic Realism, Post Modern, Surreal, War/Peace, Environmental, Supernatural, Art

Synopses

3-Line Synopsis

In the animated short, Carnival Daring-Do “Featuring the Floating Apparitions”, inevitably propelled characters journey into fields of energized micro and macro space, in a mind-expanding reverie touching on current philosophic preoccupations, cosmic homesickness, and lyrical emotions.

125-Word Synopsis

Carnival Daring-Do “Featuring the Floating Apparitions” plays with ambiguity and delights in exploiting confusions of time and space. As the arts could have told the sciences all along, reality is elusive and imprecise. It is uncertain and paradoxical. Carnival Daring-Do suggests a parallel universe where inevitable propulsions of invented characters through allegorical spaces allude to current philosophic preoccupations of our fragile new century - with its accumulations of knowledge, its fears and doubt, its aspirations for liberty of mind and body, with all its cruelty, with all its limitless dreaming.

This collaborative, experimental, animation pairs the visual art of Carla Poindexter with the electro-acoustic compositions of Jay Batzner. Poindexter manipulated her drawings and paintings to create and direct this 2-D nine-minute animation. Batzner created his music in response to the visuals.

250-Word Synopsis

In quantum physics, there is no such thing as negative space. Everything is filled.

In the animated short, Carnival Daring-Do “Featuring the Floating Apparitions”, inevitably propelled characters journey into fields of energized micro and macro space, in a mind-expanding reverie touching on current philosophic preoccupations, cosmic homesickness, and lyrical emotions.

"You find yourself floating high above a rolling gray, geometric landscape inside someone’s dream. Presently you are either soaring or the ground below you is falling away. You are not breathing but then you determine--almost comfortingly--that you have no physical body and no need for air. You are disoriented but strangely exhilarated. What has happened to gravity? Where are you? How did you get here?"

-Excerpt from an essay in response to Carnival Daring-Do by Mark Price, Writer and Artist, 2007.

"Those who feel the exhilaration of the creative process have slipped the bonds of the known to venture into the infinite unexplored territory lying beyond the frontiers of the obvious. Poindexter’s audacity of vision offers us a parallel universe, complete in itself, yet accessible, where we may free fall in multi-dimensional trajectories, and succumb to the gravitational pull of extraordinary bodies, gyring and spiraling through deep space."

-Catalog essay excerpt from an exhibition of Carla Poindexter's artworks entitled, The Devil at the Door, by George Donald, RSW, M.Ed, Duns, Scotland June, 2006.