Animistica

(Nikki Schuster, Germany, 2018)

In our digital age, the boundaries between still and moving photography, and between animated and live-action footage, are becoming ever more blurred and indecipherable.

Nikki Schuster plunges us, for 6 minutes and 50 seconds, into a continuous, impossible flow that has been constituted from the incessant morphing of macro-photographed, static details: insects, fluids, hair, bark.

Adding to this magical, hypnotic artifice is an elaborate sound design (also by Schuster) composed from clicks, hums, groans and roars.

Animistica is a film well in tune with current ecological speculation on the anthropocene, and all types of animate and inanimate life that lie beyond the strictly human realm.

© Adrian Martin September 2018