Drawing and Its Imitation

Chris the Swiss (2018), the first feature film by the animator and director Anja Kofmel, creates an interesting dialogue between the conventions of documentary filmmaking and animation. The relationship between the indexical image typical of documentary filmmaking and the “anti-index” typical of animation is created with the real story of the director’s cousin Christian Würtenberg, who died in the Serbo-Croat war in the nineties. The main contrast of the story is established through digital animation that is made to look as drawn. The documentary footage and the photographs signify the objective, whereas the animated sequences signify the fictional, the unconscious. Together, they function in an interesting dialectical relationship.

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