QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

An offscreen doctor tells an unseen patient in the opening of Giulia Falciani’s short experimental animation: “=we’re going to try to save your eye”. Inspired by her own eye injury, Falciani made Occhio to explore the emotions and anxieties around possibly losing her sight and ability to work as an animator forever. Starting on a close-up of a human ear – the last image Falciani remembers before undergoing her surgery – the film gives us the emotional details and terrors of her experience without needing to ever fully elaborate or explain the specific circumstances. What we get are eerie sounds, dream-images, the recitations of childish rhymes – “my little eye, my little eye; don’t be ill” – and matter of fact textbook anatomical talk which play and contrast with each other, creating a hallucinogenic feel.

The film stands out through its inventive animation, deploying a mix of macabre visual styles that evoke everything from the claymation work of Jan Svankmajer to the post-industrial otherworldliness of the Quay Brothers to the hand-drawn 2D, fuzzy uncanniness of certain childhood cartoons. At one point a scruffy teddy bear appears to clean a clouded eyeball, wiping it away with a window wiper while castigating the eye’s owner for doing nothing with it but watching TV.

Strongest perhaps may be the touches of Cronenbergian body horror, from trips through the retinal tubes to hand-drawn depictions of a needle stitching up an eyeball, that left me squirming in ways I hadn’t since watching De Humani Corpris Fabrica. That’s no easy feat for a film that only runs five minutes and it’s also aided by a perfectly eerie soundscape, courtesy of Mischa Kissin and Weronika Malinowska, which uses hollow spaces, electric fuzz, hospital machine beeps, and drips of water to accentuate the film’s perfectly pitched surreality.

Occhio just premiered in the the PÖFF Shorts section of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.