Short-Order - HPYNEROTOMACHIA (1992)

The challenge of capturing dreaming through art is more than unique, and creating new dream art that draws inspiration from another is also challenging, requiring an intimate understanding of the structural and imagistic tricks employed by the original author to capture the stuff dreams are made of*.  This is easy enough to witness whenever a new Alice's Adventures in Wonderland/Alice's Adventures Through the Looking Glass retread is unleashed and hardcore fans are sent gnashing into the shadows in argument over its Pros'n'Cons.  After witnessing Andrey Svislotskiy's 8-minute animated short Hypnerotomachia (literally "sleep-love-fight", or "The Strife of Love in Dream" in the usual English translation) I sat back in my chair wondering if something that unsettling should be unleashed to a general audience, and realized that something of its skill, passion and imagination should get as wide an audience as possible.  I also wondered what in the hell the short had to do with this:

This is part of a page from Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, an anonymously** authored allegorical tale published in 1499.  Widely considered one of the most beautiful books ever published, the tale follows the dream journey of Poliphilo ("Friend of Many Things") as he pursues his love Polia ("Many Things") through a series of densely described landscapes and kingdoms.  

The original publication features 168 exquisite woodcuts, simultaneously flat and crammed with detail, that became a major influence upon late-19th century Aestheticism.  The font is unusually clear and attractive for the time, and as can be seen on the above page the publisher found many creative new layouts for text.  Here's a page that looks like a vase:

All of this is written in a sui generis hybrid of Italian, Latin and Greek with a lot of Arabic and Hebrew text mixed in, along with some imaginary words for good measure.  The book is a masterpiece of aesthetic elegance and no translation can replicate its power of enchantment.  With all that in mind, be aware that I've been scared to attempt to read it in one of its English translations, primarily because it was written long before Modern conceptions of fiction writing were set and what I've read so far is anything but conventionally entertaining.  Its descriptions of monuments and buildings are so exhaustive multiple reconstructions, by hand and using computer modeling software, have been successful at making its dreams catalogable.  From what plot summaries I've seen the allegory does have a comprehensible and beautiful philosophical message, but I know it would take a Herculean effort to make it through the meat of the thing.  If you're interested, here's the whole book in digital photographs at the superb rarebookroom.org.  If you can't get the 1999 Joscelyn Godwin translation you can get the 1592 partial English translation here.

So once again, I have to ask - what does that have to do with this?

Made for Pilot Animation Studios in 1992, Hypnerotomachia may have been influenced by Dalí and de Chirico (or Krazy Kat considering the stark, off-balance landscape), but I highly doubt it sprang from the mind of Poliphilo.  My best guess is that Svistlotsky deconstructed the title to its three components - "sleep-love-fight" - and ran with the "fight" part as fast as he could through the hallways of the squirrel factory.  Shucking off the noble pursuit of lost love across a continent of classical wonder, the short enters the dream of a man who looks like a corpse made out of old raincoats.

The pupil of his eye is the sun.  It turns out there is a hole in his head, revealing the sun behind.  Then the tandem men appear (like those two pics above), and the perspective swerves so radically the hills appear gelatinous.  They screech and bicker, and small rooms float past like perverse votive scenes (like that Blood'n'Knife scene).  The scene climaxes inside the face of a woman, the other sleeper, and then focuses on a dog with shining eyes.  It produces tandem dogs - 

- that pass through the face of the male sleeper -

- and then more things happen, and I'm fine not describing them in detail, suffice to say I've never seen more animated ladders break before with such unsettling detail.


I read that this director also did animation for children.  I'll just have to take their word for it.

Joking aside, while this short may have a message, I was a little too shell shocked to want to think deep thoughts about what I'd seen.  The connection between the two dreamers is razor-thin, and an easily-noticeable arc isn't anywhere to be found.  I've seen a lot of animated shorts take place in dream landscapes, but this one is the most terrifying I've seen yet, and its homaging to Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is tenuous at best.  The animation is great, though, and its cumulative power can't be understated, so if you're interested in the art of animation you may want to give it a whirl.  I'd tell you to proceed with caution, but you could probably could have guessed that from the screencaps.

~PNK

*Apologies, apologies.

**Each chapter's first letter is of the enlarged, decorated style of ancient books -

- and putting them together makes an acrostic that reveals the author's name: Brother Francesco Colonna, an Italian Dominican priest.