Feltus words

'SOLO DUETS, Animator Joseph Feltus describe his award winning stop-motion film'

(published in Vertigo Magazine, for worldwide indipendent film and video, Vol. 3 No.5 Spring 2007)

The main theme of the piece is a deep sense of remorse, which I tried to describe through the confrontation of Rainer's character with the figure of his younger self, the self of the distant past still untainted by regrets. Wanting to avoid talking puppets, I used the duel on the piano, with Erik Satie's Gymnopedie III as a substitute for dialogue, in which the elder loses his pride and ends up wanting to lean on the shoulders of the younger, his past, the unrecoverable.

My background is in painting. In my work I search for that harmonious balance between the dance and the emotional movement that a painting suggests, and the possibilities that the actual movement in film can give. It’s a struggle of keeping that timeless composition of the painting against the backdrop of the ever shifting and changing nature of film. I chose to study animation because it seemed to me the perfect bridge between these two mediums.  An animator is in complete control, as with the brush strokes on the canvas, immediately controlling each movement of the characters. Actors will inevitably move between shots, making it terribly frustrating to maintain a certain detail in the composition. Of course, maintaining this control is still difficult in animation, but it is in principle much more possible, and this fascinates me.

J. Feltus, 2007

JOSEPH FELTUS to FELTIBUS

Attempting printmaking in the foundation year of my studies at the Edinburgh College of Art I found myself making an image of an imaginary ancestral family of mine from the late 19 th century.

I named this image the Octavum Temptationem dei Feltibus.

In a playful manner this became a series of old photographs altered so that each individual was a different character of myself. The Feltibus Family began to spread out across the world and through time; grandfathers and aunts all bore an inherent biological link with myself, as if I were the last of a terribly inbred dynasty.

I found that there was a strange timelessness about early family portraits. The clothing was different, often better, but the faces were the same as those one sees every day today.

The difference however is that the idea of snapshot had not yet come about, and a photographic portrait at that time was a much greater expense and a more serious matter.

Hence rarely one can see the family members in a portrait of this kind with a large grin, a fake smile, the words cheese on their lips. To be seen with braces in a photograph of the early period one had to have braces that extruded from the mouth and lips and that were inevitably visible.

But it is not the simple fact that the subjects of old photography rarely smile that interests me, it is the amount of personality and character that emanates from their somber faces that moves me. And it is here where I noticed that the Feltibus, although all deriving from myself, were each a completely different person.

Feltibus therefore is me, but it is the different layers of myself. It is the child in stripes, the old man from Prussia, the intellectual from Vienna, and the young optimistic soldier from Australia.

I believe most of my work is somehow autobiographical. It is expression of the emotions and ideas that move me most, that fill the widest space in myself with worries and wants.

The Feltibus has kept itself a place in all of my work and not merely in the playful altering of old portraits.

Rainer, the old man in Solo Duets is a portrait of myself as an old man. His name is Rainer Feltibus.

J. Feltus, 30 Oct. 2005