Chistine Rebet
The Soul Hunter (2003)
35 mm Transferred to HD, 2min34, colour, sound
II AP
Camera: Moser Rosie, Berlin
Music and vocal :Frederic Rebet
Sound Design :Arno PJ Kraehahn
The film was awarded support by Nipkow programm Berlin
"The Soul Hunter is a short animated film (2 min 30) created from over 1,000 of Christine Rebet's drawings on watercolour paper and filmed in 35mm frame by frame. In her first work of film, the young French artist depicts a disturbing soul hunter battling against a kamikaze 'waterworks' boy.
This bizarre and tremendously poetic tale epitomizes Christine Rebet's world: often absurd and enigmatic, dark and unsettling, filled with crazy, cruel, pathetic and touching characters.Rebet's drawings - much like automatic writing and dripping techniques, but also a child's imagination - are spangled with smears, black streaks and coloured water stains. Put to film, they create a visual symphony that is rather nonsensical, anchored in surrealist illogicality and dreams.
Characters with blurred contours constantly wriggle about with a kind of uncontrollable tremble - an unsteadiness that disturbs the spectator's vision and heightens the unbalanced and violent feel to the narration. The rhythm is jerky and disjointed - like in an Oskar Fischinger film - and explodes the animation's narrative schema, plunging us into a non- Cartesian and visually brilliant space-time.
Midori Matsui, Independent curator, Tokyo