For the Austrian pavilion’s effort at the 55th Venice Biennale, Vienna-born, Los Angeles-based artist Mathias Poledna takes us to the movies — to a very short movie, that is. At just over three minutes long, “Imitation of Life” should feel like a slap in the face to the hulking structure in which it sits (both literally and figuratively). But the single animated scene, which reproduces to exacting detail the process used by film studios in the late 1930s and early 1940s, is a joy. It’s simple, light (at least on the surface), heartwarming even, and then it ends leaving one wishing for more.
Content-wise, a dog in a sailor costume trots back and forth across the screen singing a tune by Arthur Freed from the ’30s. The hook, “I got a feelin’ you’re foolin’…foolin’ with me,” points at both the absurdity of the Disney-esque display — production on this was run by Tony Bancroft, whose animation credits include “Aladdin,” “The Lion King,” and “Beauty and the Beast” among others — and the trompe l’oeil of the medium itself. Around 30 hand-drawn and colored sketches flick past the screen each second on their 35mm spool, which along with the full orchestra commissioned to record the score, made this a massive undertaking in hours of work alone.
Certainly, there are political undertones to be plucked in the piece’s context. The late ’30s and early ’40s saw animation’s rise not only from technological advancement, but also on the shoulders of hundreds of Austrian and German immigrants that fled the Third Reich and came to Hollywood. They defined the classic sounds, look, and feel of cinema to an extent that reverberates today. But however present that history's backdrop in Poledna's work, he more or less shirks its heaviness in favor of a meditation on process. The piece is all the better for it. With the slew of exhibitions across German-speaking Europe this year that reflect on the 80th anniversary of the Nazi rise to power, “Imitation of Life” refreshingly celebrates the future rather than didactically harping on the atrocities of the past.