Autour de la perception / Around Perception
Pierre Hébert, Canada, 1968, 16 min 27 sec

Délire ordonné, géométrie sonore, mathématiques en couleurs psychédéliques, ce court métrage d’animation est né d’une collaboration entre un ordinateur et un cinéaste. Cette présentation de fragments disjoints agit à la façon d’une sollicitation violente, d’une provocation. C’est un appel à la perception visuelle et sonore qui ne s’adresse ni à l’intelligence ni à l’affectivité du spectateur, mais cherche à déclencher sa réaction physique.

Canadian animation genius Pierre Hébert started his career with studies on pure shape-driven abstraction and the limits of human perception. Around Perception is a groundbreaking experiment on computer-based animation, consisting of 11 audiovisual events designed to baffle cognition and unrest comfortable notions of reality. Unlike most of his later films, Hébert chose not to collaborate with top-notch experimental musicians and created the soundtrack himself. In this, he followed a method also used by Norman McLaren: to scratch sound directly onto the film itself. The relation between sound and picture, however, is not as symbiotic as in McLaren’s Synchromy: although there are organic reactions between the two domains, one is not a direct translation of the other. This, of course, need not be seen as a weakness.

Indeed, with its fast-paced changes of color and geometrical patterns, and the employment of Columbia-like richly crafted electronic tones, Around Perception works as a tremendously hallucinatory exercise in trompe l’oeil (and l’oreille) techniques. Or, as stated by Hébert himself at the beginning of the film, an exercise « for the mind and against the mind ».