Fear (s) of the Dark and Import/Export

9:08am Thursday 2nd October 2008

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Back in the 1960s, famous European directors regularly clubbed together to produce collections of themed shorts that became known as 'portmanteau pictures'. Recent examples, like the 2002 Ten Minutes Older twosome, The Trumpet and The Cello, have come close to recapturing such joyous exercises in idiosyncratic collaboration. However, the majority of shorts selections are little more than cinematic equivalents of the Now That's What I Call Music albums, even though they can be as admirable as the new DVD anthology, Adventures in Short Film, Vol 1, which includes such excellent efforts as Gaelle Denis's City Paradise, John Harden's La Vie d'un Chien, James Thraves's I Want You to Kiss Me and Marc Craste's Jojo in the Stars.

Coming between the award-winning Persepoli and the forthcoming Waltz With Bashir, Fear(s) of the Dark is a portmanteau that continues the trend for adult-oriented animation. Graphically, it's hard to see how this could be bettered. The draughtsmanship is exceptional, with the contrasts between the inky blacks, sharp whites and occasional flashes of colour being as good as anything currently to be found on either the comic-book page or in such monochrome animations as Christian Volckman's Renaissance. But the actual content is rather inconsistent.

Marie Caillou fails to meld anime and Tarantinoesque bloodlust in the story of an 11-year-old Japanese girl whose nightmares in a psychiatric institution are stalked by the ghost of a 19th-century samurai, while Lorenzo Mattotti's similarly flashbacking effort about a man-eating critter stalking some remote marshes also struggles to capture the imagination. Then there's the puzzling decision to fragment both Blutch's vignette about an 18th-century marquis and his pack of vicious hounds and Pierre di Sciullo's series of geometric abstracts, as utilising them as codas between the longer tales implies a lack of faith in their overall quality that is roundly countered by the former's expert engraving-style imagery and the latter's ireful litany of pet peeves, which is delivered with breathless lassitude by Nicole Garcia.

Fortunately, the picture is bookended by the superior sagas of Charles Burns and Richard McGuire. Revelling in Cronenbergian body horror, the first chronicles how a geek's obsession with entomology proves his undoing, as his first girlfriend becomes an amanuensis to a colony of giant insects who use the man's increasingly corpulent torso as an incubator for breeding. But even more impressive is McGuire's night in a haunted house, which makes such deft use of line and angle, light and shade that it often feels like watching an animated hybrid of Aubrey Beardsley's iconic illustrations and Felix Vallotton's woodcuts. The segments seemingly illuminated by the flame of a single candle are breathtaking and leave one hoping that McGuire can be persuaded to attempt a feature follow-up to his 2003 short, Micro-loup.

Elsewhere this week, the dubious benefits of the freedom that have accrued since the disintegration of the Soviet Union are assessed by Ulrich Seidl in Import/Export, which sees Ukrainian nurse Ekateryna Rak being forced to suppress her professional instincts while working as a cleaner on the Austrian geriatric ward run by martinet Maria Hofstatter, while Viennese security guard Paul Hofmann hooks up with shady stepfather Michael Thomas to service fruit machines in the desolate backwaters of the Ukraine.

With Ed Lachman and Wolfgang Thaler's unflinching photography reinforcing the Hobbesian truism that life is nasty, brutish and short, this is a sobering treatise on the bleakness of existence that skirts miserabilism by emphasising the decency that persists even in the most soul-destroying situations.