Chistine Rebet
In The Soldier's Head (2015)
In the Soldier's Head, 2015
16mm transferred to HD
4:25
Edition of 5 plus II AP
Camera: John Donnely
Soundtrack: Matteo Nasini, Algis Kisys
Editing: Kevin Messman
Film transfer: John Rizzo
Animation assistants: Louise Pignier-leroul, Julie de Halleux, Aude David
Animation Intern: Michelle Kramer
Thanks to: Greg Ford, Birgit Rathsmann, Dorothee Charles, Fanny Rolland, Francois Darasse,
Joel Schlemowitz, Christopher Gorski
"Beyond these erotics, it was clear to me that I wanted to talk about mental disruption as a figure for the collective experience of colonization, and that I wanted to carry this out through the disruption of the animation itself." - Christine Rebet as told to Joanna Fiduccia for Artforum, 2015
A powerful animism and energy is evident in Rebet's five-minute, hand-drawn animation, "In the Soldier's Head," which flows like the delusions conjured by a young soldier within an empty desert landscape. In the animation Rebet gives her viewer an intensely personal perspective on historical traumas, reinterpreted through the lands, bodies and minds that are subject to them. The film depicts the delusions flowing from a mind ravaged by violence: a vision grown from the inside out. Like a mirage amidst a blank, desert expanse, specters are conjured as the inanimate comes to life. Whirring machines sputter, gears turn and levers crank as ceaselessly firing synapses of a hyperactive psyche pour out. The helmet, like the soldier's head itself, becomes a crucible for burning delusions fed by the violated land: no more than a vessel for wildly-flowing cerebrospinal fluid impulses. Rebet's charged, inky depictions of landscapes express the potency of the inanimate amidst the hills and roads of a post-colonized land.