Hidden Hearts of Fish

Details: 1993, 2.5 mins, 16mm, hand painted onto filmstock

Reviews

• Chapter Arts Cardiff, Film Catalogue, December 1993, “Visually stunning animated exploration of communication.”
• Lucy’s fish hit the big time, South Wales Argus – CINEMA, September 1993
• The hidden hearts of fish by Lucy Lee, South Wales Argus, 14 September 1993, “A bright and beautiful film in which collage of undersea images becomes a metaphor for conscious but deep thoughts of the individual. Others may try to divine those thoughts, the film suggests, but somehow they stay submerged, being rebelliously coloured by the inner light of the self.”, Adrian Ross

Background

(written in 1993)
I will start with a description of the basic idea. The contrast of two methods of communication. There are two contrasting characters. One is represented by the voice on the sound track, I’ll call him (although it’s actually a woman) “word” character. The other is represented by a visual representation of thoughts, “visual” character. “Word” wants to know what “visual” is thinking. She is thinking about deep sea fish. Unfortunately he needs her to explain in words, but she doesn’t know how. He then asks her to draw him something. She does, but he doesn’t know what the drawings are saying. They speak different languages. The drawings she does for him explain how certain fish hide parts of themselves (their hearts) away in the ocean bed so they will always be hidden from predators. This is where the title of the film comes from. It describes a similar thing in people. “Word” eventually gives up with “visual”, who continues to think about deep sea fish.

I guess now I think that the hiding activity is about the lack of desire to communicate. Because although she makes a very clear effort to communicate, niether characters can or bother to do the other half of communicating which is to try to understand the other. Basically there are many different forms of communication, each can describe their own unique things, and we need to be able to use them all, to an extent, to fully communicate.

This is the image that inspired the film, its me and my mum walking somewhere near where we lived, coupled with a memory of my mother saying “I wander what goes on in that head of yours”. I didn’t know how to put what I saw into words.

There are film makers well known for their use of the ‘direct method’; Len Lye, Oscar Fischinger, Norman Maclaren. But I do not feel that I was directly inspired by these because when I first painted on film I had no idea that such film makers existed. The film that inspired me was a scratched super-8 film that I saw when I was about 10. I’ve no idea who it was by or where I saw it, it was fairly basic – as you can imagine, scratches and occasional shapes scratched into black film at various depths for variations of colour, but to me it was the freshest, most exiting, funniest thing I had ever seen. It was another example of film showing something that nothing else could, so I remembered it vividly.

Credits

Made by Lucy Lee

Festivals & Distribution

1993
London Film Festival
Start – Plymouth
Filmworks Showcase
1994
BBC Wales TV, ‘Shot in a Shoebox’
Feminale – Koln
1995
NFT, London – International Video
NFT, London – Avant Garde Showcase
1998
NFT, London – Short Cuts, New Experimental Animation
2005
ROSHD International Film Festival, Tehran – Iran

(I didn’t know about film festivals in those days so I didn’t apply to any, but it was distributed by the London Film Makers Co-op, so it was shown a few times in programmes at the ICA and NFT in London and maybe some other places, I didn’t know when or where)

This film is currently being distributed by the LUX.

Technique

Hand painted onto 16mm film, using various inks. I found that some inks reacted to others, breaking them up and filling the cracks left. If an ink didn’t want to dry on the celluloid then I would put some talc on it.

Some animating elements were scratched directly onto the film stock using a biro with a pin taped to the end of it. I found that pins scratch more cleanly than compasses. I used the kind of guide seen in this picture, which is basically a piece of paper with the frame size drawn out and marks within this frame to guide the next frame.

If I remember correctly I first started to make lots of footage then applied some structure to it by editing it, then made any more footage that I felt it needed.

I then ‘bipacked’ this painted stock myself on a 16mm Oxbury rostrum camera and included some more images and sand animation during the bipacking. This was mostly guesswork as no-one at the college had done it before.

Film stills

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