Trained as a composer, Oliver Beer has spent the past two decades developing a multifaceted body of work, using a variety of objects, materials and performance devices to compose music, as in his 2007 Resonance Project, in which he uses the resonance of empty buildings to create vocal performances with architecture. Drawn scores, montages of found films and installations composed of frequencies captured in the cavities of old objects are all exploratory aspects of his work. Beer’s artistic research investigates sound as a conductive element of affect, traversing the memorial traces of what is “already there”.
Realised with the participation of schoolchildren from the south of France, Reanimation 1 (Snow White) is one of a series of films that reinterpret classic American cartoons made famous by their widespread distribution. For this project, the artist extracted the famous passage from Walt Disney's first animated film, Snow White (1937), in which the heroine bakes a pie for the dwarf Grumpy. Wistfully singing “Someday my prince will come”, she is suddenly paralysed with fear at the sight of the wicked Queen, disguised as an old woman, at her window. The artist isolated each frame of this sequence, removing the colours, then sent prints of the unique images to young students in Nice. They made 500 drawings, re-imagining and hand-colouring the scenes, which the artist then reassembled into new sequences. The result is a joyous disorder that defies naturalism and fully reveals the children’s creativity and freedom of expression. For the soundtrack, Beer also reworked the original song, translating it into over ten languages. If the hypnotic dramaturgy of the Disney Studios is characterised by the illusionistic synchronicity of image and sound, the breakdown of this symbiotic continuity reflects the multiple sensibilities of the audience and reveals the unsettling strangeness that pervades all fairy tales.
M.L.
AM 2015-F12