To preview the 2021 Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival, Robert Delany discussed some of the most exciting films with their creators. Up today is animation team Sandrine Stoïanov and Jean-Charles Finck
Sandrine Stoïanov and Jean-Charles Finck are a French directing duo who have been collaborating since 2006. With each of their projects, Stoïanov acts as the animator and designer and Finck as the scriptwriter, director, and storyboard artist. Their newest film, The World Within (France, 2020) — a highlight of this year’s Rhode Island International Film Festival — is an animated short about a young artist named Elisa who experiences a mental breakdown while preparing for her first solo gallery art show. The film follows her throughout a stay in a mental health clinic where she rediscovers her creative self. The film’s shifting styles mark the different stages of the artist’s life. The city where she creates her work is full of activity and motion; the clinic where she recovers is bare and austere. Moments of panic are cluttered and vibrating, while her surreal daydreams are fluid and vibrant. The visual language of The World Within speaks for the silent protagonist.
In a joint email interview conducted before the film screens at RIIFF, Stoïanov and Finck described The World Within as a means of exploring the ups and downs of the creative process. Their film stands as a vital meditation on both the risks and redemptive powers of art as Elisa’s journey transforms from a stressful endeavor to a source of recovery and rejuvenation.
Split Tooth Media: The transformation of animation style seems so central to the visual language of The World Within. How did you want the style to change over the course of the film?
Sandrine Stoïanov and Jean-Charles Finck: The colors reflect the feelings of Elisa, the main character. In the Parisian scenes, they had to evolve from quite normal to aggressively bright and vivid in order to convey the growth of Elisa’s hyper-perception and delusional visions at times. In the hospital scenes, they’re only outside the window in the “real world” where regular people live, as a painting on the wall; they burst sometimes in the black and white hospital environment as elements from the outside; they also had to gradually emerge at the end on Elisa herself to foreshadow the soon ending of her prostration.
Color seems to be a core contrast in the film: between the lush palette of the city, the yellow and red during the panic attack, and the black and white of the clinic. Why demarcate the different environments with these particular color palettes?
The black and white versus watercolors sequences contrast is supposed to reflect the two different periods in Elisa’s life, [which are] quite opposite. One too loud and overfilled, the other empty, still, and silent. It’s about fullness and emptiness, being daily surrounded by intense urban life and being remote in a box of white nothingness.
It’s about light and shapes, too. Color and line. Painting and drawing. The black and white at the hospital is like a blank page on which the artist is waiting to express herself. The yellow and red are supposed to show a switch from daydreaming to stressful, distorted, and unraveled reality during panic attacks, as if the colors were disintegrating into lines in an electric atmosphere.
The two narrative through lines of the film also seem to be separated by how space is utilized. The clinic is sparse and the city is so dense with color and motion. What did you want to communicate with these different utilizations of space?
Contrast again. The outside world is full and lively, sometimes to an extent that it becomes too overwhelming, too violent for Elisa to cope with. At the hospital, everything’s kinda muffled. It’s calm and safe somehow but terribly idle, empty, and remote. Not a better place. But a necessary stop to refill.
We follow Elisa at an important moment in her artistic career, where she is on the precipice of huge success but is struggling to break through. How did you want to portray this crucial time in a young artist’s career?
Artistic process is about giving. Once you’ve given a work to show, whether it’s a painting, film, book, or music, it doesn’t belong to you anymore but to the public. Still, it’s you who’s going to be judged through your artwork. This can be intimidating, even frightening. That’s why Elisa, even though she seeks recognition, seems reluctant at the same time about giving away all she’s got. She’s not used to it, she feels she’ll lose it for good, and be lost and void. That’s actually the main reason of her fall. She wasn’t prepared. She didn’t spare anything.
What have each of your trajectories been like in the animation industry going from young artists breaking into the industry like Elisa, to now having worked on so many projects?
Our trajectories in the animation industry are a bit different from Elisa’s in the art business. The film, even though it’s based on autobiographical elements, is a fiction. We both come from Beaux-Arts and ended up in animation sort of by accident, making a living by using our drawing and storytelling skills to work on other people’s projects, TV series, shorts, or full length feature films. But making our own animated films (like The World Within, Irinka & Sandrinka, or The Nose) is a different process, close indeed to Elisa’s attempt to break through with her painting, but mainly to express herself and tell about her inner world.
As co-directors and writers on the film, and longtime collaborators, what is the process like working in tandem with each other?
The two shorts we made together were inspired by episodes in Sandrine’s life. We both wrote them together, Jean-Charles shaping Sandrine’s outlines into scenarios. The artwork was conceived by the two of us but mostly executed by Sandrine, same goes for animation. The storyboard and layout were made mostly by Jean-Charles, the editing and post-production too. We’re sort of complementary: Sandrine gives the first impulse, Jean-Charles shapes the film narration and ensures its continuity, Sandrine gives life to it by doing the thousands of drawings and paintings required to achieve the animation and backgrounds of the scenes, which is the longest part of the job.
For Elisa, it seems like it is returning to painting that helps her mentally recuperate in the clinic. How does the creative process transition from being stressful to healing for her?
Art is the poison and the remedy. Art hurts and Art saves.
When she’s at the hospital, at first she’s empty. Unable to draw or paint, think or feel. Even less communicate. She’s locked down.
Watching the squirrel, an animal’s daily routine as it’s gathering nuts to survive the wintertime, helps her. It makes Elisa contemplate herself and the way she’s been mindlessly throwing herself into her creation, like a swimmer crossing a seaway who never thinks of saving her strength for the come back. As the crack in the window ledge fills up with nuts over the passing weeks, on the other side of the frontier-window, Elisa chooses to believe the animal is trying to tell her something, or to give her a present: each nut is a step toward freedom. She gradually fills up too, with colors that she had lost.
When a weirdo guy at some point gives her a cheap box of watercolors for children (with no brush) as a naive gift that he perceives she needs, she starts painting again, with her fingers: she actually metaphorically re-learns by herself everything about her art practice.
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Since the gallerist once pointed out that the sketches she was drawing with no particular purpose were more interesting to him than the paintings she was slowly and carefully elaborating, because her sketches were telling more about her than her paintings, she knew she had to reinvent her art, to start again from scratch, and the first attempt of doing it was by drawing colored nudes of herself, offering her bareness in every sense, which she immediately regretted when the gallerist took them. This reveals part of the mixed feelings and contradictory thoughts that she’s struggling with in her artistic approach and endeavor, as a female artist.
As she finds a nut on the floor inside the locked building, she’s surprised at first then she starts believing in being able to break free at some point and get out of that clinic for real, since the squirrel obviously managed to get in somehow. In her mind, the locked box can now be open and she can draw and paint again.
When she gets a real box of professional watercolors from the gallerist, she’s moved of course because it’s another strong symbol of what she longs for, it’s like a key to the locked door.
But when she departs from the clinic though, she only takes with her the finger-made portraits in cheap children’s watercolors. Because she finds now that there’s more art in those clumsy first new attempts of capturing an instant than in the well-made watercolors of the tree or the squirrel. Because she understood that, in order to achieve pure expression of her mind into her artwork, she also had to break free from the techniques and art school mind-shaping that she was previously putting into her paintings.
One of the most interesting touches to me is the silence of Elisa. Why make her silent?
She’s silent because people are speaking.
Making too much noise.
She perceives too many things and she can’t express what she feels with words.
That’s why she paints.
She feels as if she was out of the world, and on the opposite sometimes as if the world was inside her. She never really feels she belongs to the world.
Or maybe she’s just shy.
There are multiple vivid dream sequences in The World Within. What role do these surreal sequences play in the overall presentation of the film?
The purpose of the film is trying to convey and describe some stages of perception. The kind that makes people think you’re insane when you start talking about them. A reality apart from what common sense calls reality. We’re talking here about the subway sequences mostly, when Elisa starts hearing people’s thoughts, thinking the ads are personally addressing her or that she is the cause of every burst of violence she witnesses in the street. There’s also the daily clinic routine requiring she take strong sleeping pills at night that make her feel like she’s sinking into her bed and into an infinite black nothingness… from which she’s reborn in a dream.
The dream sequences such as the daydreaming about art in the subway after the gallery, or the female giant dream, are more of a symbolic musing telling about how she feels about life and the chain of artists through history that she wishes to be part of, and the way she pictures her awkward place into the world.
One of the most intense moments of the film is after the gallery when Elisa needs to create new work, when she dances feverishly in a blank space and paint is flying off of her body. Could you tell me more about that moment?
It’s a metaphoric dance of the total « body and soul » commitment of Elisa into her creation as an artist, using her own body as an instrument and throwing her entire own self against the walls or the dimensions of the blank canvas.
The idea was inspired by choreographer Pina Bausch’s version of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. It might remind of artist Yves Klein’s work using female models, making them dip their naked bodies into blue color and then print them on the walls… Except here it’s the artist herself stripping to the bone and hitting the walls.
How did you want to pace the different story lines between Elisa’s descent and her recuperation in the clinic?
The two storylines run and evolve in parallels. The two periods in Elisa’s life are closely intertwined through editing, but the arch of the global storyline would be X shaped if we wanted to make a diagram of it, because the descent crosses the path of the re-ascension in this montage parallèle. Sequences of urban life rhythmically respond to sequences at the clinic in the narrative pace and vice versa. The pace of the film was built this way to create this repeated contrast between full and void, noisy and silent, colored and white/black. It seemed obvious and right to us to tell the story this way rather than in a chronological order.
The use of the music and sound underlines this: repeated piano notes all along that constantly create a rhythm, strong and violent in the city, lancinating and haunting at the clinic, until a bare piano melody emerges at the end to reveal that Elisa found her path (or part of it), her own inner melody.
Though, the sequences of Elisa’s dreams or musing (the journey through art and “the giant” moments) kind of disturb this systematic musical pattern. In these sequences, the cello or the violin make the promise of a melody hatch from the pace of slow, repeated piano notes, but it’s more an ornament than a real melody. The real melody had to come at the end, and it had to be on the piano alone.
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