Whale Tale
Early in Herman Melville’s wild, seafaring classic Moby-Dick, the young would-be whaler Ishmael seeks lodging at an old sailor’s haunt. In the entryway is a massive oil painting, which Ishmael declares “a boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted.†He can’t tell what exactly the painting depicts (“the Black Sea in a midnight gale� A “blasted heath�) but its indeterminacy seems beside the point, or perhaps the point itself. “There was a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it,†he marvels.
Ishmael’s description might equally apply to “Orson Whales,†an animated short by Alex Itin that offers a hypnotic riff on Moby-Dick. The film will be screened for the first time in New York on March 21, as part of a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council event highlighting innovations in multimedia book art. Since its completion in May, however, it has been freely available on Vimeo, the video-sharing website-cum-artist community, as well as on YouTube.
Itin, a painter by training, created the animation by drawing over pages torn from Melville’s novel. Each page—almost a thousand in total—forms a single frame in the four-minute film, which Itin collated using iMovie, the popular editing software from Apple. When the film is played, Itin’s thick, inky images seem to dance over the yellowing pages, trampling the spindly type underneath. “Orson Whales†doesn’t have a narrative per se, but watching it—especially alone, at night, huddled over a laptop—the flickering figures almost seem to tell a story. It is like a fever dream, recalled just at the point of waking: Eyes morph into a woman’s pearl necklace; a hot air balloon turns into a white whale; waves become a mirror and then dissolve into waves again.
Itin, for his part, likes the idea that the film is something of a puzzle, a not-entirely-coherent collision of happy accidents. “My whole thing about meaning is that it’s an illusion, a little bit,†Itin says. “Or at least, it is for me.â€
Itin is a firm believer in the power of found material, delighting in “accidental collisions of images that seem to inform each other.†The soundtrack to the film is compiled of various fragments Itin found by rooting around on YouTube. He thought he might find a clip from John Huston’s 1956 Moby-Dick movie, in which Orson Welles plays a seaside preacher. Itin had always been fascinated by Welles: The director had a showman-like hucksterism that Itin sees as supremely American. He felt that Welles’s largeness, his voraciousness, and his unstinting self-destructiveness would make him a fit partner for that messianic pegleg, Captain Ahab. Itin never did find any Huston on YouTube, but he did stumble across something that worked even better: a recording of Welles reading Melville’s text, which had been shot for a never-completed Italian TV special. Itin made it the backbone of his soundtrack. For good measure, he also took an infamous blooper reel from a commercial that a drunk, bloated Welles made for Paul Masson Champagne in the late 70s. The clip is highly popular on YouTube, proof that, even if you’re a genius who died before the advent of the Internet, you can’t escape the prospect of eternal digital shame.
Underneath Welles’ dialogue, Itin lay down the sound from another YouTube discovery: Led Zeppelin’s “Moby-Dick,†a furiously propulsive drum track, whose energy drives the entire film. The layered images, along with the layered sounds, make for a dizzying palimpsest.
Itin is 40, but he has the soft face and pronounced slouch of a much younger man. He also has a younger man’s tendency to end his sentences—particularly when he gets excited, which, once he gets going, happens a lot—with “you know?†or “I don’t know.†Often he simply gives up on words and relies instead on sound effects and hand gestures, such as when he tries to describe his spontaneous, freestyle drawing method: “whoosh, pftthht.†His fingers go flying in a pantomime of brushstrokes.
Itin first read Moby-Dick in the late 1980s on a family camping trip in Moab, Utah. It’s unclear whether the Moby-Moab-Ahab thing guided his reading selection that summer, though it is exactly the kind of jokey language game Itin loves. In his eyes, Melville’s polar, sodden novel and the vast deserts of America seemed like a “perfect†pairing, just as Moab itself seemed full of significance. Itin was dating a Japanese girl at the time, and, as he notes, Moab was where Americans had mined the uranium used to make bombs in World War II. He was using his girlfriend’s picture as a bookmark and he vividly remembers losing it and watching it float across the sands. A guy picked it up and handed it back to him, saying pointedly, “’You don’t want to lose a thing like that.â€
“And it just touched me on several levels,†Itin says wondrously. “I don’t even know what it means.â€
Here is another interesting thing written about Orson Whales. It is a blog done by some students at George Mason University who had to watch it as a college assignment: Textual Media