Looking for Letine

Unable to locate the grave of Letine—leader of a 19th century acrobatic cycling troupe (and buried locally)—I went home and wondered.

And then I made this film.

Equal parts experimental animation, stylised domestic drama, and autobiography accompanied by reflections on mortality, filmmaking, and magic. Plus more.

— Paul Tarragó

Looking for Letine incorporates several moving image techniques: stop motion, live action, drawn animation, and open shutter work. The film includes HD, Super 8 and Pixelvision formats, each utilized for their particular properties and potentials. Much of the footage involves single frame work, operating with the smallest unit of intervention. Quite normal, magical, or seemingly uncanny things can happen, depending on the ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ relationship of one frame to the next. And, correspondingly, a sense of energy and velocity comes when operating at this scale. 

The narrative is metafictional and nonlinear, including footage of the making of the film not as a distancing device but rather as a narrative element that foregrounds awareness of the film as a constructed cultural object so as to afford viewing pleasure.