Tango is a kind of weird dance. The dancers don’t always face each other, but show their absent mindedness and lack of eye contact. Both sides are dancing while maintaining an independent posture. It is said that tango was originally a secret dance between lovers, that is to say, it is an ambiguous way of expression. There is another kind of indistinct connection between dancers outside the dance, which is exactly the metaphor of this film.
The film juxtaposes the scenes of life in the same space at different times. In each individual scene, each person goes his own way, which is consistent with other scenes. Seemingly chaotic but orderly, this juxtaposition produces a kind of rhythm, just like the superposition of different musical instruments and melodies in music, just like the juxtaposition of different dancers’ body language. As a scene or individual, it appears in the deliberately created time sequence, from single to numerous, from simple to complex, which has formed an ambiguous image language.
From the perspective of lens language, the film is shot with a single lens and there is no story. But the live action film won the Academy Award for best animated short film in 1982. For a short film that has neither camera language nor narrative method, it really pursues a new sense of form. Compared with the sense of lens that the real film is good at, the sense of form is just the strength of animation. Because animation is not limited by the camera, so the creation of the picture can be as free as painting, and this film just gives up the sense of lens that the real film is good at, and uses the special effects in the later period to create a unique form that is no less than animation, and plays the advantages of animation to the fullest.
ANIM223 - HISTORY OF ANIMATION - FALL 2019 