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FLYBLACKS

VIDEO BY EITAN BEN MOSHE

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This work was born in the winter of 2015 after the general elections in Israel. As a response to the raise of racism and fascism in my country, I raised a black flag on the balcony of my apartment. The flag is still hanging there. This video is a contemplative continuation of this act.  

 

Flyblacks is a video that combines low-tech animation techniques with 3D animation. The film describes a world of surrealistic black bodies, made from fabric, floating in a modernist architectural environments located in Tel-Aviv. The movement of the bodies, in its long and slow gestures, resembles the moves of the Japanese Butoh dance. While the objects are flying into the architectural scape shown in the photos, they create symbols such as the Star of David, cross, or a moon that disappears into the slow motion pace. The black bodies fall apart and come together as they gather, thus create a sense of a broken world, dismantled of any known rules.

 

The fragmented soundtrack, played mostly with a children’s xylophone intensifies the dreamy, almost fantasy-like atmosphere in the film. There is an apocalyptic aura in the scenes proposing the mourning of the Zionistic dream, in particular in its current

fascist term.

 

In a manner, the subject of the film is “time” and more specifically the “historical time”. The movement of the black triangle bodies is inspired by Bergson’s term Duration (French: la durée). Bergson became aware that the moment one attempted to measure a moment, it would be gone. Duration is ineffable and can only be shown indirectly through images that can never reveal a complete picture. It can only be grasped through a simple intuition of the imagination.

The film is in B&W, an element that highlights the sharpness of the objects, their geometry and keen movement. In addition, this aspect makes it difficult for the viewer to understand when the film was created, as it contains both tributes from the surreal movies emerging from the beginning of the 20th century, and elements from the modern sci-fi animation world.