Reykjavík Grapevine - 21.06.2013, Page 20

20The Reykjavík Grapevine Issue 8 — 2013
Speaking to Icelanders about volcanic matters, he
“wound up sounding entirely nonspecific.” So he
listened to the people who’d sprouted beside volca-
nic soil, even as their need for a “specific consis-
tency” seemed needlessly obdurate at first.
While the lava caucus haggled in Sagafilm’s
backroom, Huang deployed widely divergent skills
to shore up the puppetry rigging in the front. The
first step was creating a platform in which to bury
Björk. The next steps were to marshal a system of
ropes and lines to orbit and enliven the foam rocks
on set. Even if the rocks couldn’t be made to dance
like whales until post-production, Huang knew some
of his smoky vision had to be coaxed out of the bottle
without computer help.
In reality, Huang is at least as gifted a puppeteer
as he is a producer and animator. Growing up in Los
Angeles, an early hatred for sports and the sun blos-
somed into opportunities like he had at age nine,
when he learned puppetry from Jim Henson’s crew
in a now-defunct after-school initiative.
“Not only did they teach us how to do puppetry,
but how to actually work with these really toxic ma-
terials. How to make puppets out of special foam,
how to use toxic, bitter glue to make patterns, how
to make a sphere out of foam by cutting orange peel
slices and pasting them together,” he says. “It was
basically an introduction to making sculpture—but
making sculpture that had to move in a certain way.”
Watching the Star Wars films around the same age,
he would “freakishly study” the objects they used for
X-wing fighter planes and the Death Star. He wanted
to know how George Lucas’s team did what they did
and how he could replicate it.
Experience with puppetry moulded his early artis-
tic development and guided his application to film
school. And it continues to crystallize in his oeu-
vre—including the world created to house the pro-
duction “Solipsist.”
In the first scene of “Solipsist,” clipped frag-
ments of hair, fabric, and painted, sequined paper
sprout serpent-like from the shoulders between two
dancers seated back-to-back. As their backs writhe
and lunge together—attempting singular motion—
blue feelers like a sea anemone’s and pink pouch-
es glide into what are now wreaths around each
dancer’s neck. Feathers spread beneath their hair to
reach the space around their ears, and soon finger-
like creatures spread in Technicolor like gummy
worms to encase both dancers in a precursor to the
tectonic “mutual core.”
In the second scene, the union is imagined on
a more abstract level. Puppets ingeniously devised
operate in a space underwater, yet immaterial.
Beautiful and weird, creatures red, yellow and blue
like fishing lures chirrup a chorus of R2-D2-esque
beeps and shock to connect to one another—in
Huang’s word, “synaptically.” Even as the dancers’
bodies remain entwined in the earliest deposited
layer of the film, “violent” and “kinetic” battle is
being waged at one still deeper.
“I think “Solipsist” is focused on this idea of
spatial division between two coordinates—that be-
tween one person and another, the void is elastic and
ever-expanding,” Huang says.
“What does it mean when two people are touch-
ing? Where is the skin? How are both skins touch-
ing each other? Your nerve endings are a series of
chains of cells, and between all those cells is a se-
ries of chains of more cells, and between each of
those cells is a necessary gap. Information and elec-
tricity pass through that gap—a gap that “Solipsist”
explores.”
The symbolism intensifies with further scenes
in “Solipsist,” but it is the middle, “synaptic” sec-
tion Huang remains “most proud of.” With abstract,
highly technical puppetry he succeeds in evoking
the crackling violence belying even basic human in-
teraction. And it is this scene that he knew he want-
ed to bring back to Björk—this scene that gave him
the “impetus” to evolve the fishing lure creatures
into rock puppets in the music video.
Back in the studio, Huang and his art directors
have decided on the chemistry for their lava mix-
ture. For the right splatter patterns, they tilt a spe-
cific consistency of pancake batter in with ketchup
and “some other little bits.” More than the science
diagram-like depictions of tectonic plates, “Mutual
Core’s” universe is growing into something “vio-
lent, bigger, grander” than even the world Huang
quickened in “Solipsist.”
A human touch
When Björk saw “Solipsist,” Huang thought, she
responded to its minimalism—the fact that it takes
place in a “black void.” She responded, he thought,
to the “elasticity” of the distance between two co-
ordinates, and to the invisible “polarities” which
alternately coax them toward union and finally re-
pulse them.
She responded above all, he thought, to the
idea of violent and kinetic motion he’d put forth in
scenes like that with the underwater creatures.
So when he began directing her in the smoky red
scene that splices into the action’s final cataclysm,
he told her to dish it to him violently. In what he
considered a “ferocious” and “volatile” part of the
song, he wanted her to give way to her “anger.”
With the red light glaring and fake smoke spew-
ing on the set, Björk, did her best to channel the
anger Huang wanted. But after a few takes failed to
stick, she gave up and broached with him what she
thought was the song’s deeper emotion.
“She said, ‘I think performing this as if I were
angry is a bit too simplistic. This song is about erup-
tion, and eruption is actually something that makes
me happy.’”
For Björk, volcanic phenomena have a “positive”
significance—so, too with “Mutual Core.” Huang
immediately saw her point. In 'Biophilia,' an album
celebrating destructive phenomena and the invisible
polarities that attend them, Björk was in fact op-
erating at a “genius” double-remove—not in thrall
of mere destruction but open to a broader picture:
one in which even tectonic-scorched earth fuels the
planet’s never-ending cycles.
The movement of tectonic plates—“as fast as
your fingernail grows,” in Björk’s lyrics—can oc-
cupy centre stage in a drama that captures time on
the correct scale. After Huang’s discussion with
Björk on the slight directorial axis of “anger” in
her video, they both opened up more. Björk became
more “playful” during and between takes. She en-
livened the part of “Mutual Core” that Huang calls
“romantic and sensual.” And even if he continued to
pull his hair out during the protracted struggles of
managing a set, Huang felt more at ease with him-
self now that he understood her vision. He took the
puppeteer’s reins and commanded his smoky vision
to marshal before him.
Björk remained nothing if not “hardy.” She sat
for seriously dense costume and make-up applica-
tion that worked her eyes black, her hair blue and
her skin golden-scaled. She stood half-submerged
in Huang’s precious sand for hours at a time. She
even consented to froth the mix of ketchup and pan-
cake batter in her mouth and spit it so Huang could
finesse the take into a later animation.
In the “making-of” video for the production, she
smiles without fail.
“This is just my projection, but I don’t think
Björk wants to be treated delicately,” Huang says.
“She’s a fine artist and performer herself, so she’s
pretty hardy. Her husband is pretty hardy. They’re
like tough, working artists. It wasn’t a problem for
her to get on her hands and knees to do what we
needed her to do.”
This fact benefitted Huang, working as he was
on a limited budget with few crew members and
even fewer hours to dedicate to filming. After
rehearsing the production so many times in his
head—and so many times across storyboards bleed-
ing with expression— Björk completed the circuit
with still more energy in her performance.
But if their connection on set was electric, the
feeling for Huang after time ran out was that of a
hand unclasping.
“It was such an ambitious shoot and such an am-
bitious shot list that at some point, you knew it was
time to just let go,” he recalls.
Continues from previous page
While the lava
caucus haggled in
Sagafilm’s back-
room, Huang
deployed widely
divergent skills to
shore up the pup-
petry rigging in
the front. The first
step was creating a
platform in which
to bury Björk.
“
„
Step into
the Viking Age
Experience Viking-Age Reykja­vík a­t the
new Settlement Exhibition. The focus of the
exhibition is a­n exca­va­ted longhouse site which
da­tes from the 10th century ad. It includes
relics of huma­n ha­bita­tion from a­bout 871, the
oldest such site found in Icela­nd.

Multimedia­ techniques bring Reykja­vík’s
pa­st to life, providing visitors with insights
into how people lived in the Viking Age, a­nd
wha­t the Reykja­vík environment looked like
to the first settlers.
The exhibition a­nd
museum shop a­re open
da­ily 10–17
Aða­lstræti 16
101 Reykja­vík / Icela­nd
Phone +(354) 411 6370
www.reykja­vikmuseum.is
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