Waliczky: The Garden

Tamás Waliczky: The Garden (21st Century Amateur Film), 1992, excerpt

THE GARDEN (21st CENTURY AMATEUR FILM)

In 1991 Waliczky wrote the script for THE GARDEN, an animation based on an idea which came from an old piece of Super-8 film, made over ten years before, showing a little girl playing in a country garden. The artist's aim was to portray the alertness and curiosity of a small child investigating its surroundings, and to evoke the particular sense of affection that children often inspire in us. To illustrate these lines of force, Waliczky devised a new type of perspective, the "waterdrop-perspective-system". The conventional notion of perspective, dating from the Renaissance, privileges the viewer as the person for whose benefit the depiction of the world unfolds and whose gaze completes the image; the stability of his or her position is mirrored by the fixed vanishing point. "Waterdrop-perspective" is a quite different principle which structures every object from the vantage point of the child within the space of the image: the objects grow or shrink as the approaches them or moves away. Thus everything in the space becomes visually distorted; the world is seen as a sphere and the child as its centre. In other words, the depicted world is the child's own private universe; shaped entirely by the child's movements, it is independent of the viewer who stands outside it and sees the dream of another.

Anna Szepesi, 1995

"THE GARDEN (21st CENTURY AMATEUR FILM)" 1992, second version 1996

Computer animation, video installation, 4' 27".

Master: Betacam SP

Storyboard: Tamás Waliczky and Anna Szepesi

Music written by Tibor Szemzö, performed by Éva Posvanecz

Software support: Imre Kováts, Zoltán Császár, Pierre Dinouard, Thomas Krol

Child: Annamária Waliczky

Director of photography: György Pálos

Directed and animated: Tamás Waliczky

Produced by: Wallada Bioscop Ltd., Budapest; Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe; CIRAD Laboratoire du Modellisation, Montpellier.

Copyright © 1992-1996 Tamás Waliczky, Anna Szepesi

Distributors: Tamás Waliczky, Anna Szepesi, Wallada Bioscop Ltd.

"The Garden" in "Image and Bibliography" exhibition, Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo, 1995

Pictures provided by Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography