Dryden Goodwin in Conversation with Barnaby Dicker

Dryden Goodwin’s frame-based films both challenge and reaffirm the principles and conventions of animation. A fundamental component of his wider artistic project, this form of filmmaking is intertwined with his other concerns, which include drawing, portraiture and notions of ‘series’. In this interview, Barnaby Dicker invites Goodwin to discuss, from a number of perspectives, his approach to frame-based cinematography and how it relates to his work in general. Dicker finds this a rich and important but neglected topic in animation studies; a problem the present interview aims to contribute to correcting. The interviewer is particularly interested in the links between Goodwin’s work and 19th-century chronophotography, which he proposes is more usefully applicable here as photochronography — Etienne-Jules Marey’s original term for the process. A further link is drawn between the ‘documentary’ aspects of Goodwin’s art and Jean-Louis Comolli’s theory of direct cinema. Although the two would seem to be poles apart, the interviewer finds a number of Comolli’s remarks exemplified through Goodwin’s approach. Other themes running through the interview include the role of film within gallery and installation contexts and the relationships between classical and contemporary art practices and technologies.