100 Years of Cinema

Six and a half seconds of cut paper moving fast under a rostrum camera, with no voice-over and no let-up. On a hot orange ground, cut shapes assemble a bowler hat, a dark oval and a curved cane, which read as Chaplin without anyone having to draw him, while painted cotton-wool clouds slide in from the sides and two long white wedges cross the frame like projector beams. Portraits from old films are dealt in one after another, first tinted orange so they sit inside the orange, then torn and layered in black and white into a painted green and pink landscape beside a poster fragment reading REGIN, with the split black and white circle and its 100 riding over the pile. The colour is doing the work a dissolve would normally do, because each new layer arrives as a different palette rather than as a different shot, and the split circle is the one fixed thing that survives every change. It closes on black with white paper shapes scattering off the frame over the two lines ELOKUVA 100 VUOTTA / FILMEN 100 ÅR, in Finnish and Swedish, the logo left alone in the middle.