The Archive: notes…
The Archive of the Movements of Inanimate Objects
“I want people to take as much as they can from the movie.
“It started as a basic psychodrama, with a character entering a space and investigating what seems strange and then possibly finding something that they can’t understand. The space is defined by the character’s ignorance in relation to what they are seeing. As it’s said in the world, “you see what you want to see.” But, of course, there’s a spirit of truth that lives intrinsically behind what we see and what we don’t. What many people call God, I guess.
“Then the character finds something and has both an external and internal – or objective and subjective – experience with what they take from that place, all of this “mixed experience” is fairly easy to express through animation because it’s all constructed as collage, so what’s interior can be exterior and vice versa, very much like our simultaneous interior and exterior experience in conscious life. That’s what I love so much about animation, it’s how much better it expresses reality than live action cinematography! Yes motion is inherent to realism, but it’s not the whole story. Internal moving-visual-thinking is the other half, and for some it’s way more than half.
“So, I was turning that into a kind of essay on the very normal experience of objectification and desire for answers, and the capacity for compassion and empathy in the face of that as well. The film is a real human story about our role as a mind in the world, and how it affects the world, and how it affects ourselves for that matter. I think it reaches way past the narrative itself, and into a kind of poetic mythologizing of “the questioner of reality”, or “the scientist”, who we all are in some way, and who is also human, and who also has a spiritual side, but then has to make compromises for their own humanity, and for their own empathy, in order to even ask the questions that they want to ask about the world and what they’ve found.
“It’s a story of poetic redemption and consequences, but, maybe there are consequences to questions that we don’t really have a choice in asking. So, in some ways, the film is a dramatization of everyday experience, and what we do to our minds and to our own spirits in order to navigate this journey that we’re all on. To accept the consequences of our actions, to continue to act, and ask our questions, and make choices about what we will sacrifice on a daily basis, and in many ways, also while we sleep and dream.”
– C. Pearce
