Associação Cultural Videobrasil

In Through the Revolving Door: Dave and Alex Beesley’s Animated Address of the Oldest Profession…

Despite the profound impact of the independent animation sector over the course of animation history, in challenging the assumption that the animated film is usually understood as the ‘American Animated Cartoon,’ animation still finds itself dubbed as an ‘innocent’ medium; mere children’s entertainment. Such a limited view, of course, has merely permitted animation artists, even in the studios of Hollywood’s ‘Golden Era,’ to get on with properly exploiting the freedoms of the form, and to create truly challenging, and sometimes, subversive work. Crucially, animated film uniformly challenges the orthodoxies of traditional ‘live action’ cinema, by offering up different ways of imagining ourselves, and by revising the ‘realism’ embedded in conventional representations of the material world. The humblest cartoon can reinvent the Universe; a more conscious and invested use of the medium can revise attitudes and offer insights.

Dave and Alex Beesley’s Revolving Door is a resonant example of the ways in which animation can be used to challenge the limitations of photographic record. Their film—an engagement with the life of a prostitute called Gillian, on the streets of St. Kilda, Melbourne’s ‘red-light’ district—uses animation to redefine the codes and conventions of documentary, seeking to provoke debate, discussion, and ultimately, social change. In the first instance, this combination of ‘animation’ and ‘documentary’ might seem to suggest ill-suited bedfellows—animation, the stuff of imagination and fantasy; documentary, the genre of nonfiction and interrogative essay. This is to deny the presence of fiction in nonfiction forms, of course, and the ways in which all mediated forms, documentary or otherwise, have a high degree of subjective input.

Animation has a long history of engaging with the documentary form stretching back to Winsor McCay’s The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), which imitated newsreel and propaganda forms of the period in apparently depicting the German attack on the Lusitania, and the tragedy of its subsequent sinking. McCay’s film is but one of the first animated films, however, to demonstrate that ‘nonfiction,’ far from being ‘objective,’ by virtue of its seemingly unmediated use of factual or real world material, is actually as constructed as any other film form. Ironically, though, the self-evident artifice of animation, in exposing the terms and conditions by which documentary achieves its sense of authenticity, works not to suggest that approaches to documentary are flawed or deceptive, but to add another dimension in its claims to ‘truth.’ By foregrounding its deliberate illusionism, and its inherent subjectivity, the animated documentary equally foregrounds its authorship, and consequently, defines the film as an essay with a specific argument, or point of view.

In Revolving Door, this enables the Beesleys to show Gillian as she oscillates between childlike naïveté and streetwise grittiness, a tension which is captured in the ways animation is overlaid on vérité-style actuality footage, sometimes amplifying a particular image through exaggeration, or sometimes diluting it for other kinds of persuasive effects. When Gillian injects herself with heroine, for example, there is ironically something shocking about the graphic depiction of bloodletting, such is the taken-for-granted nature of the spilling of ‘ketchup’ blood in live action cinema. Equally, the use of drawn features on the face of a client cruising the St. Kilda area, looking for prostitutes, serves to protect his anonymity, and offer up the problem of the ‘curb-crawler’ as an abstract social phenomenon, and not merely the reported sexual predilections of an individual. The latter becomes particularly important because the client is surprisingly honest in his admissions about his need for casual sex, his fears of infection, and most significantly, his understanding of prostitution. He notes “I can’t see what the problem is … how can it be a crime? It’s a victimless crime—it’s crazy—they make the money, I have a good time …” This observation is made one of the most resonant in the film by the fact that by this time we have seen that Gillian is far from empowered in her choices, suffering drug dependence, police harassment, and the brutalities of violent clients. Simply, the taken-for-granted and naturalized existence of the oldest profession has denied it proper recognition as a significant social issue. In a world in which the sex industry is increasingly mainstream, the Beesleys are seeking to open eyes once more to show the real and unacceptable consequences of prostitution.

Initially, the film was a ‘conventional’ documentary shot over an extended period, utilizing handheld cameras to convey a sense of dynamism and energy in an attempt to capture and evoke the adrenalin of prostitutes working the streets. The capture of what the Beesleys describe as ‘raw energy’ was intrinsic to the idea of communicating lived experience, and not an overly ‘mediated’ view, but it was clear that the social issues, which the couple wished to address were embedded within the ‘spectacle’ of what they were recording, and not sufficiently revealed by it. The superimposed animated material starts to suggest some of the more complex and contradictory aspects of the material, and the approaches by which documentary authorship functions as a possible way of showing the subject more clearly to herself. There is the implied suggestion that Gillian might even have rendered the frames herself, for example, sometimes reflecting her own naïveté and powerlessness in the face of her experience. In showing a rendered poster of Girls in the Night, with its tagline, ‘the tense terrifying truth about the big city’s delinquent daughters,’ the Beesleys enjoy a playful reference to the fantasy idioms of B-movie street girls, which are a far cry from the realities of Gillian’s unglamorous and painful existence. In capturing Gillian looking in the mirror, they also present a clear metaphor for her confronting her own identity, as she considers her childhood, and the feeling of abandonment she felt when taken into care, ultimately running away and selling her body on the streets. Again, the Beesleys insist that there are causes and symptoms for social problems, which often reside in the choices some are forced to make as a consequence of their backgrounds and economy. Documentary allows the subject a voice; animated documentary reinforces the subject by insisting upon the author’s presence as its politically invested guarantor.

Authorship in animation is always implied and often foregrounded in the self-reflexive illusionism of the form, but authorial presence is especially significant in animated documentary, as the creator of a rhetorical condition for political and aesthetic critique. A film like Revolving Door thus functions as a reaction to conventional, highly structured, computer-generated, ‘new traditionalist’ animation, epitomized by Pixar’s exemplary work, and the digitally liberated, computer-assisted animation underpinning many approaches to moving image practices. Consequently, its retro-styled, hand-drawn approach reinforces its apparent immediacy and spontaneity. Crucially, Revolving Door, though nominally comparable to Richard Linklater’s Waking Life or A Scanner Darkly, in animating over live-action material, is more selective in its approach, and wants to draw attention to the relationship with the actuality footage, rather than reinterpreting it. Further, Linklater effectively reanimates ‘performance,’ while the Beesleys reanimate ‘social action,’ using the animation to enhance the tragic ‘record’ of drug addiction, client indifference and brutality, and the social powerlessness of the street girls in the face of middle-class resident opposition.

The Beesleys present a provocative and ethically engaged narrative, demonstrating the ‘revolving door syndrome,’ that perpetually places women in a cycle of debt, which makes their plight inescapable. This is a point well made, but the couple also wish to move away from the idea that ‘documentary’ works only as a film form, and suggest that it should operate as a living, ongoing phenomenon of social record and responsibility. Consequently, an extensive companion Web site (www.beeworld.net.au/rdoor) has been constructed to add a further dimension to Gillian’s narrative. The Beesleys note ‘the companion Web site adds an entirely new dimension to Gillian’s story; again it is meant to break away from traditional Web paradigms, attempting to build a site that is tactile, heuristic, and open to the ‘serendipitous’—i.e., accidental discoveries. It also works as a powerful global marketing tool—especially amazing as we haven’t really marketed the site and are averaging five hundred plus hits per day, which has proven to us the awesome potential of the Web. Revolving Door is a prototype delivery model for future projects for us—cross platform with broadcast (linear) and interactive (Web) components.’

The Beesleys have resisted the ‘herd mentality’ that has accompanied aspects of using digital animation software, and properly found the appropriate form to service their message. In being socially engaged and technically inventive in a fashion that enables accessibility without sacrificing impact or artistic ambition, Revolving Door points the way to a successful model of public information. This is teaching without preaching; insight without oversight. While the culture of digital-animation technologies offers everyone a voice, and implicitly encourages investment and experimentation, it is still the case that the most pertinent tools need to be chosen to facilitate an idea to its most enriching and revealing extent. The Beesleys engagement with, and development of, the animation documentary enterprise has ensured this is so; the past, present, and future bound up in a progressive and pertinent model of expression.

A Professor at Loughborough University, in the United Kingdom, Paul Wells is the author of books and documentaries on animation, one of his main objects of study. In addition to the recently published Re-imagining Animation (Ava Publishing, 2008), in which he analyzes the video Revolving Door, he has released books such as Animation and America (Rutgers University Press, 2002), and Animation: Genre and Authorship (Wallflower Press, 2002). The author of documentary film Cartoons Kick Ass (for Britain’s Channel Four), he is also writer and a theater and television director.