{"id":236,"date":"2011-06-13T00:01:02","date_gmt":"2011-06-12T23:01:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mannveille.com\/tim\/blog\/?p=236"},"modified":"2019-01-12T09:55:57","modified_gmt":"2019-01-12T08:55:57","slug":"tricky-women-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mannveille.com\/tim\/blog\/blog\/tricky-women-2011\/","title":{"rendered":"Tricky Women 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Tricky Women<\/a><\/strong> is a wonderfully specific annual film festival located in Vienna: the 4-day programme consists entirely of short animations by women<\/strong>, which I find particularly brilliant, since not only does it Venn two things I’m particularly interested in (animation of any form because it’s like art squared, and stories from women, who are generally underrepresented in the creative landscape as a quick application of the Bechdel\/Wallace test<\/a> to the last 10 films you’ve seen is likely to attest), not only<\/em> that, it also <\/em>provides a wonderful opportunity to be ostentatiously unconventional when people ask about what you did on your holidays, which would be a terrible reason to go on its own, but was a particularly enjoyable bonus for me, as for some reason ostentatious unconventionality directly supports a large part of my self-esteem.<\/p>\n

(At this point I have to specifically thank Clare for coming up with such a brilliant idea for a holiday, and her friend Anna for making the accommodation part of the trip so fantastically simple).<\/p>\n

Altogether, we ended up watching over 100 short animations over a 4-day period<\/strong>, which as we should perhaps have anticipated is quite intense, and ended up giving me the entirely novel feeling that my brain was, at least temporarily, at standing-room-only for new ideas. Brilliant.<\/p>\n

You can get some idea of this effect from my holiday scrap-book, in which I collected together the thumbnail images from every animation we saw from the programme along with other memorabilia and self-made stickers<\/a> for doing various things:<\/p>\n

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As I noted<\/a> after Edinburgh International Film Festival 2010, the great thing about short animations is that in many cases you can subsequently find them online. So after watching more short animations in one weekend than I had previously seen in my entire life, It seemed like a good idea to bring together a few of my favourites.<\/p>\n

For Pedants<\/strong>
\nWhat exactly does “animation by women” encompass? Specifically, what counts as animation, and what counts as “by”? The curators of the festival seemed to adopt a sensible standard for the latter, with (as far as I could tell) the primary driver of any given piece (usually the Director) being female in every case; they were on occasion rather more broad with the idea of animation. Arguably, the medium of film itself is a kind of highly-automated stop-frame animation, and so perhaps on these grounds they included things like the first video below.<\/p>\n

Vitalic – Birds <\/strong>(Pleix, FR 2006, 3′)
\nEven though it raises questions about the consent of animals in art, and even though it’s really not an animation in any commonly understood sense, I was very glad that this was brought to my attention:<\/p>\n