Seeing, without existing
- Renee Ng
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My fascination with dinosaurs is a never-ending frustration, for our existences are so unaligned. The great distance between us is not made of physical lengths but aeons of irreversible time. We have devised entire fields of studies, genres of literature and painting for only a modicum sense of knowing these creatures, hardly ever achieving a full satisfactory picture. Against their inert corpses, they miss a crucial touch of movement, among other things. Barring the valuable scientific knowledge to be reaped, if what we deeply desire of all this is to truly see the prehistoric, then perhaps it is a sense of transient beholding that only cinema can bring to life. But where would we, as humans, stand within that visual imaginary?
In 1955, filmmaker and animator Karel Zeman set out to create a prehistoric world that would not sit still on pages or museum stands, but would move, live and breathe. With ingenious methods of blending strategic lighting, stage sets and canvas backdrops with 2D and 3D illusions, Zeman wanted to bring to life the purest of fantasies: to plainly see our dreams before us. To observe over time, with eyes half-closed, gradually pinching and asking ourselves: Did it just move?
Behind the scenes of Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955)
Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955) is best described as an extended episode of The Magic School Bus (1994-1997), where four young friends embark on a self-led expedition to find a real-life trilobite. Extinction poses no issue to them as they simply jump aboard a boat and row back 521 million years. They conveniently skip past all devastating extinction events, and, within the first 12 minutes of the film, come face to face with a live woolly mammoth — the first of many impossible encounters. These formulaic, but effective scenes become all about the suturing of two realities: ours and the prehistoric world upon a medium of tangible, celluloid reality.
Across the film, this pattern of a “We’re not in Kansas anymore”-type revelation repeatedly returns. At a languid pace, each picturesque shot here is a testament to Zeman’s craft, a tailored, orchestrated collage of animated plates, laboriously colour-matched false landscapes. First comes the wide shot of the meeting itself. The boys and the prehistoric creature are seen simultaneously onscreen, cementing a merging of reality and illusion on the same visual plane. The boys gasp, excited and wide-eyed. When we see their faces up-close, we believe them. The wind blows, we hear a primordial call, and as we become fully persuaded by this fantasy, the boys fade away for the final reveal of the glorious animal, alone, at home, and alive. Not only imbued with movement, but personality. In the subtle flicks of an ear against an unseen insect, and many a time from Zeman’s attentions to designing dancelike twists of their necks as they turn their eyes about. Searching, watching. The belief we reap of these special effects comes not with a single sleight of hand, but a calculated unfolding of time.
Various mediums, including miniatures, life sized replicas and false 2D backgrounds were combined.
Behind the scenes of Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955)
Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955) was neither the first nor last film to fantasise about the prehistoric, but it set itself apart by harbouring none of the thrill-starved overstimulation of monstrous blockbusters. It nursed something else entirely. Zeman drew inspiration from Jules Verne’s novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864) and Zdeněk Burian’s paleoart, both marked by an emphasis on temporality and observation that would shape the film’s unusually restrained emotional approach. Verne’s novel was told through diary entries, describing many observational recounts witnessed from a distance in the characters’ raft, while Burian was known for imbuing his creatures with much sentimentality and stoicism. Much of the stop-motion image sequences would directly reference Burian’s reconstructions for their scientific accuracy and naturalistic character.
Watching Zeman’s love letter to nature rekindled much of my initial love for reading and studying about dinosaurs. Their journey across time mirrored many serene, hazy afternoons I had spent pouring over time graphs and diagrams in my second-hand copy of The Day of the Dinosaurs (1986), admiring the gouache painted osteoderms of an Ankylosaurus, rolling the long scientific Latin names off my tongue. I saw in their approaches what I admitted in myself, that dinosaurs and the prehistoric were, and have always been a means of escapism.
Millions of years, otherwise unfathomable, are compressed into a single page.
Reference and Contents Page of The Day of the Dinosaurs (1986)
The boys refer to their hand-drawn graph as they time travel.
Still from Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955)
At 18 years of age, seeking reprieve from the realities of my less-than mediocre A-Level results and unhopeful university applications, I had dived headfirst into an online university class on palaeontology. Needless to say, I became a lifelong fan. Against the tenets of Jurassic Park, when I think of dinosaurs and the ‘land before time’, I have no sense of danger. It never occurs to me that I might be eaten, or that out in the wild I might contract sepsis and die. I do not need to exist in my dinosaur fantasies. I am a formless spectre that can only observe, never participate. These sentiments and imaginaries of removing oneself belong well in the niche discipline of paleoart, where wildlife scenes are given full colour and beauty. It is much harder to express in “lost world” literature and cinema, where human characters often evoke a looming need to confront our status as a species. Expectedly too, Zeman’s more innocent passions proved unusual in a time of moral-existential panic over human-wildlife clashes, climate change, post-Hiroshima nuclear Godzillas and xenophobia-inducing King Kongs.
Still, these considerations will always plague our engagements with nature and the primordial. The anxiety of animalistic brutality has notably been absent from most of Zdeněk Burian’s paintings, but figures prominently in Jules Verne’s oeuvre. For the realistic continuity of a film, danger remains unavoidable. Zeman’s approach comes in the middle. A seeming neutrality to the wills of nature, with low-angled shots of respect for the predator, yet serene empathy for the fallen prey. When it comes to the boys, there are momentary hints of danger that fade as quickly as they come. They witness most violence, like the climactic Tyrannosaurus and Stegosaurus duel from an opposite island, with a body of viscous water to separate them from emotional and physical peril. So while together in the same space, the boys remain relegated to the audience floor, severed from the prehistoric phantasmagoria set upon an elevated stage. Under a dramatically backlit auburn sunset that masks the artifice of Zeman’s miniature stage set, we are forever apart, but still awarded the privilege of seeing, without existing.
Still from Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955)
About the Author
Renee Ng is a freelance video editor and film programmer based in Singapore. She has curated film programmes for the Singapore International Film Festival and Asian Film Archive, and was a participant of the Objectifs x AFA Programmer’s Lab. Her current favourite dinosaur is Deinonychus, but it changes every week.
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