O movimento das coisas: Jodie Mack e as animações experimentais em looping

Since 2003, the english experimental director Jodie Mack has used primordial resources of cinema to produce cinematically powerful and entertaining works. With looping as the main artifice, her films explore different speeds, textures, colors, cuts, reflections, compositions and points of view. In movies like “Dusty Stacks of Mom: The Poster Project” (2013) and “The Grand Bizarre” (2018), the musical background is a constant. In the first, the director makes a rock opera adapting The Dark Side of The Moon to record the fall of the poster market, transforming the cultural products accumulated in her mother’s store into discard and consequently into raw material for her abstractions. The second is a roadmovie that moves around the raw material, mainly fabrics, tapestry pieces and maps that move around accompanied by music. Her movies stand out in contemporary experimental cinema for the uniqueness of having fun; experimentation is a great joke. Our aim is to analyze how Mack’s works dialogue with the looping of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey’s pre-cinema, with Stan Brakhage’s experimental provocations that encourage the exploration of movement, colors, textures and with animated GIFs. Despite the cinema’s proximity to GIF, it is not an easy task to point out names in contemporary cinema that relate to GIFs. Mack’s films are one of the few that can be seen as a series of GIFs and possibly the only one that, through a range of visual stimuli, manages to create movies as GIFs.