Bat City Marquee: ANIMATED ROSE

It’s no small feat to create a piece of media that feels both new and deeply grounded in studied tradition, both narratively compelling and also dripping with feelings-packed imagery and arcana, and both specific yet fully unmoored in time. Travis Kent, backed up by an ace team and working with a killer track by Austin-based Chronophage, makes it look breezy, and in just four minutes and nineteen seconds, no less! Take a look, then stick with us below the jump:

For an avowed cinephile — and I don’t use that word often, but I feel like it applies here — seeing La Jetee, Stalker, On the Silver Globe, Mauvais Sang, and The Seventh Seal all obliquely or directly referenced here was… how should I put this. Transporting? Seeing them seamlessly fused and laced tightly throughout the wholly original mythos here by the immediacy and supreme unfussiness of a handheld film camera, as though the Stalker’s dreamy-eyed kid followed him into the zone with a salvaged Soviet-era news rig, is really something special.

For some of us Hyperrealers who came of age passing a plastic jug of Captain Morgan around before swirling off into whatever late-aughts free-booze Southby party we could find, there’s always going to remain a galaxy-sized soft spot for this type of moody lo-fi post-punk music that you just KNOW would have you crying or thrashing or both at a live show. It’s a testament to both the music and the film that these Eastern Bloc apocalyptic vibes don’t interrupt or crowd out my irrepressible associations but rather take them by the hand til we end up at – damn I wish I could join our Hero on the beach where we’d black out on shitty rum and watch the sun rise, groggy and wiped…

Travis was kind enough to write up and send over some great details about the origin of the film, some technical details, and his collaboration with Chronophage:

“Animated Rose was shot between August and November 2020. It was filmed largely in landscapes I used to wander as a kid on the North shore of Long Island, a decommissioned Naval weapons base, and a large drainage tunnel under Interstate 35. I used to stand outside the perimeter fence of Grumman Airbase as a kid and watch F-14s and F-18s take off. This was my first time really exploring the base inside which was left largely intact and deserted.

“I shot the video on a totally untested Canon 514 Shannon had given me, and edited it in premiere pro which I had to google how to use (outside of a few friends that gave me some starting tips: Shannon, Faiza, Vanessa Pla). I had never shot super 8 before either, so between learning as I went and the camera eventually breaking down.. it was a learning experience, and I only ended up losing one or 2 rolls worth of material to either camera failure or metering error.

“When I heard Chronophage start playing Animated Rose live, maybe two years ago, I used to see similar scenes in my head when listening. It sounded like a slow sad procession to me; it's a dirge. Eventually it seemed logical to me that 'Hey I could really just do this and make it an actual thing'. Parker, Sarah, and Casey were very welcoming and supportive about it the whole way, and I was excited to have something to work on while being largely isolated this year.”

Chronophage is a rock band in Austin, and the song from the video is on their second full length "th'pig'kiss'd album" which was released late last year and is now being re-pressed (it’ll be available here soon).