The ego always wins, of course. It always does. And at what price?
Now a man, or rather a man represented by a doll, in top hat and tails walks with great effort from screen right to screen left. Is there a windstorm? There appears to be, for the man leans into it, holding on to his hat. Behind him a crude but delightfully painted backdrop depicts a city street.
Cut to the inside of a human skull.
Certainly stop-motion was still in its infancy in 1916 when this movie was begun (or is that when Ingo was born?), and the technique is in so many ways primitive, but this is not the typical novelty magic-trick animation of the time. This is startling, revolutionary. What if, the movie seems to posit, inside each of our heads, we have personified emotions—joy, fear, rage—in essence at war for dominance? Granted, this was not a new idea, even in 1916, and the inherent fallacy of this charmingly naïve notion is obvious to anyone who has read Danny Dennett or the history of the Homunculus Argument. But, oh, what Ingo does with it! Using the limited technology available at the time, which might have hobbled the efforts of a lesser artist, Ingo exploits the resulting choppiness to explore a quantized interior universe where experience is not fluid, where discrete breaks fragment the thought process, where the limits of reason are exposed like nerve endings. Remember, this was a mere three years after Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 caused a sensation at the New York Armory Show. Had Ingo been aware of the painting? Had it simply been in the zeitgeist? Certainly the Futurists had already published their manifesto by then. In any event, we see the homunculi at war with one another in a brain interior resembling a factory. There are, of course, the two windows, which represent the eyes, overlooking the outside world. Who is this being through whose eyes we now see? It is at this point still a mystery. But within this battle we recognize all the emotions at play (or at war!). And then through the windows we see a girl. The little fighting creatures stop. They stare at this beautiful young woman regarding herself in a mirror. She, too, is a doll, but a doll who has access to a world the creatures can only know through the windows of their prison, into which she now peers. They cannot look away, until she, smiling shyly, does. A title on screen redundantly announces her as The Beloved.
And the internal battle resumes.
Cut to the man fighting the wind.
After five more seconds of slow forward progress, the puppet man slides back, in a way that resembles the performance of a practitioner of the art of pantomime or Mike Jackson doing his delightful “Moonman Walk,” but this fellow appears to be in an actual windy environment because objects blow past him: a pram, a young boy on roller skates, a newspaper, which tumbles by in a simplified manner as a stiff board, its front page facing the viewer throughout. Is the newspaper legible? I attempt to synchronize the movement of my head with the movement of the tumbling newspaper. It is! At least some of it! “Big Windstorm Expected” is the headline. How funny!
Back to the birthing scene: That all this, the miracle and tragedy of coming into being, is performed by inanimate objects fashioned to resemble biologic ones does not go unnoticed by the viewer. The baby is born, the spread-eagled humiliation of the mother complete, for the moment. The umbilicus is cut, another metaphor, and this wailing mass of meat is assigned humanhood. He is white; he is male: He is privileged. This birth is at night, an odd, specific choice, since most births occur in the early morning. Is Ingo attempting to tell us something? Is the mother perhaps Nyx, the goddess of night? This would make these twins (for, yes, here comes another one!) Momus and Oizys, gods of mockery and misery, as anticipated. What will they conjure into existence on this the eve of the First World War? Is the male mocking his sister for her “missing” genitalia? Of course, we now know that Freud was wrong and misogynistic and, indeed, suffering from womb envy, and eventually jaw cancer, but perhaps back then when Freud’s theory was new and exciting, is it not possible that Ingo found himself intrigued, to say the least? And Misery, as is her way and perhaps the way of so many females (tragically!), internalizes her wrath, indeed is compelled by society to do so. This eats away at her, making her miserable, thus spreading through her system, dripping from her pores and infecting those around her, who, in turn, infect those around them, and so goes the world. The babies are born, and with their birth begins the acknowledged horrors of the twentieth century, the bloodiest century in human history.
A STRANGE OBJECT, LARGE and malformed, drops from the sky behind the top-hatted man. It must be made of clay (as are humans, by the way, in so many creation myths) because it flattens upon contact with the ground. Another follows. There appears what can only be described as blackish liquid oozing from them. The horrifying hurled and sundered “bleeding balls” aside, this is a charmingly naïve undertaking. The man continues his trek across screen, and his journey causes me to reflect upon my own love of weather. The complexity of it, the power, its capricious nature. Of course weather is analogous to the finest art: invisibly moving in countless directions at once. If one watches a tree in a breeze, it becomes immediately apparent that rather than the wind blowing the tree uniformly, micro-currents move each leaf, each branch separately. The tree, leaves, and branches bounce and roll and describe circles all at once. Although Ingo’s interest appears to be in the comic potential of weather and mine in its metaphor as an engine of fate, I do feel a certain kinship with— What’s that? The top-hatted man himself is suddenly blown every which way. His tails fly up behind him, and as he attends to this immodesty, his top hat tumbles off screen right. A toy balloon blows toward the viewer, while a second toy balloon blows away from us. The man spins clockwise in place as would a child’s top, as the roller-skating boy is blown back on screen and circles the man counterclockwise. Although the animation is still naïvely executed, the concepts explored are nothing short of profound. And it is so very comical! Ha! Ha! Especially when the man plops onto his bottom and continues his spin, as if rotating on a pole inserted into his very rectum. Ha!
Soon the little boy is spinning so fast that he takes off, disappearing into the firmament. After a perfectly timed moment, one of the boy’s roller skates bops the man on the head, and after a second perfectly timed moment, so does the other. Dazed, he watches as his lost top hat blows back into frame, then, caught in a gust, lifts. We follow as it tumbles—past buildings, into the turbulent clouds made of cotton stuffing, into the ether. The camera is at first level with the hat, then above, looking down past it at the gentleman watching its ascent, then below looking up at the violent sky. Now it is amidst the clouds, which swirl past in remarkable ever-shifting configurations. The movie has gone in an eye blink from simplistic comedy to transcendent and breathtaking. The black-and-white clouds flash with lightning, the intrepid top hat now floating through a heartbreaking sea of fog. The previously tumultuous weather has settled into the ethereal, and as the hat continues its ascension, the fog thins. Soon our hat-agonist finds itself above the clouds, looking down on them. The obscured, lonely Earth far below. Now we ourselves view the world from the point of view (POV) of the hat! We tumble lazily through space, the Earth a distant stormy memory, the heavens black, punctuated by brilliant points of light. That this journey was influenced by the work of Georges Méliès is obvious, but the animation here is so far beyond anything else of that period. It is, quite frankly, far beyond anything I’ve seen to this day, with the possible exception of Wes Anderson’s The Wonderful Mr. Fox, a phantasmagoric cornucopia of treats for the eye, in every “which-way” on the screen, which reimburses the filmgoer for thon’s repeat viewings. Of course, to put Ingo’s work up against Mr. Anderson’s is prodigiously unfair, as Mr. Anderson is a highly educated aesthete and Ingo a sharecropper’s son (presumably) who worked as a Pullman porter (perhaps), but—although I must reserve judgment until I’ve viewed the entirety of this film—I do believe they will be on almost equal footing in the pantheon of