Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Dr Barnaby Dicker
Görresweg 7, 87437 Kempten. Deutschland. barnaby.dicker@kcl.ac.uk
Avant-garde filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk’s disturbing animated short Games of Angels (1964)
opens with an appeal to the real, to actuality: a title card declaring that its soundtrack is “based on an
original chant” from the Nazi death camps in Poland. This is soon followed by an onscreen disclaimer
that “The persons and events in this film are fictitious and any resemblance to real facts or persons,
living or not, is pure coincidence.” This desire to emphasise the film’s status as a work of fiction
actually serves to further assert its bond with the real - after all, why the need here to separate fiction
and actuality if not, precisely, because there is a connection? However, having attuned the viewer to a
“documentary” mode of address, the film proceeds to follow what can easily be taken as a completely
fantastic path; for at no point in this animation can one easily find any resemblance to “real facts or
persons.” Instead, one is relentlessly offered a claustrophobic view of austere landscapes and buildings
and their tortured, unhappy, angelic occupants. I argue that the “documentary” premise of the film
does not disappear, but rather, endures, to raise an ongoing question for the viewer as to how to
reconcile fantastic imagery and historical context. Games of Angels offers an opportunity to ask hard
questions of the emergent terms terms defining “animated documentary.” To do so, I will discuss
Borowczyk’s film in relation to Cornelius Castoriadis’s “imaginary institution of society,” Pierre Mac
Orlan’s “social fantastic” and Jean-Paul Sartre’s equally socially-rooted, yet intimately distanciated
humanistic conception of the fantastic. Importantly, Games of Angels resists narrative; opting rather,
through its strong design, structure and disturbing momentum, to build a topology that exerts a
pressure on painful cultural memories in a non-literal way.
Biography
Dr Barnaby Dicker is a researcher, lecturer, artist-filmmaker and curator. His research revolves around
conceptual and material innovations in and through graphic technologies and arts, including
cinematography and photography, with particular emphasis on avant-guard practices. This has led to
work on topics such as animation, proto-cinematography, experimental film, graphic reproduction
technologies, comic strips and paleoart. He sits on the editorial board of Animation: An
Interdisciplinary Journal and is a member of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded
International Research Network ‘Film and the Other Arts: Intermediality, Medium Specificity,
Creativity.’ In the UK, Barnaby has taught at the Royal College of Art, University of South Wales,
University for the Creative Arts, Royal Holloway (University of London), Kingston School of Art,
and Cardiff School of Art and Design. He is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College,
London and is involved in the 'Reset the Apparatus!' project at Universität für angewandte Kunst,
Wien. Barnaby has been an active member of EAM since 2010.