trespass

In English, “trespass” means to intrude, but it could also be an unauthorized entry, or in legal jargon, a “domestic disturbance.” trespass, Paul Wenninger’s ten-minute real-animation film plays with all of these meanings in a technically impressive, varied, and precise tour de force. A consistent element throughout is a type of avatar of the director, a character created from real images, whom the film sends on a world journey, of sorts, within his own four walls. The penetration of the outside world is both abrupt and varied: whereas the strange, inert main figure with his jerky movements initially seems isolated in the bare dungeon of a green-painted cell, all at once, windows are inserted in this monad—to use the terminology of the philosopher Leibniz. A wild process of transgression can now begin. Not only does an excess of “world” suddenly appear in the cell windows, but the entire background, from which the character is set-off, is filled with profuse images of the most distant scenes in Eritrea, Brussels, Helsinki, Vienna, and France. The “backdrops” change and tumble into one another, as though by mouse click, which hardly affords the thoroughly stationary protagonist a hold. Although he maneuvers through and deals with a seemingly endless assortment of everyday objects, he still remains imprisoned in a cell-like existence. In the end, he must attend his own death and the slow draining of his blood—paint that mutates to blood and then back to paint again. The “intrusion” from outside is thus subjected to a paradoxical twist: it is not the world, another life, a foreign power that can suddenly be felt in the here and now, but instead, despite all of its animation and dynamics, the character’s own vitality is increasingly “divested” as the film progresses. trespass hereby brings to bear a clever, visually enchanting subject-object reversal—moving beyond, even moving beyond oneself, which for the longest time, one seems to perceives as an invasion from the outside. (Christian H?ller)