Chris Sullivan
Nearly 15 years in the making, Chris Sullivan's Consuming Spirits is a meticulously constructed tour de force of experimental animation. Shooting frame by frame in 16mm, Sullivan seamlessly blends together a range of techniques—cutout animation, pencil drawing, collage, and stop-motion animation—into a distinct, signature visual style. In the process, he constructs a hypnotic, layered narrative, a suspenseful gothic tale that tracks the intertwined lives of three kindred spirits working at a local newspaper in a Midwestern rust belt town. The accumulation of these images builds to a great atmospheric effect, achieved through an adroit combination of inventive set design, ever-shifting visual perspectives, fluid camera movements, a vivid color palette, and a haunting music track. Sullivan succeeds in creating, with great artistry, a hermetic, self-contained world emanating from his own unique and vivid imagination. (Jon Gartenberg, Tribeca Film Festival)
A university has found the leg bone of Amelia Earhart. A high school science teacher travels to the underworld to bring back his girlfriend. Animals are organizing into concentric circles and helium has escaped into the luminiferous aether.
In Pieter Bruegel's painting, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," the fall of the god, Icarus, passes unnoticed on earth. The farmers continue to work the land and the boats sail on. As William Carlos Williams later wrote in his poem of the same name, "a once mighty god becomes a little splash quite unnoticed." In Chris Sullivan's version, Icarus becomes Ray, an aging priest whose congregation is dwindling as fast as his sanity. As Ray's condition deteriorates, society fails to notice or care.
A house burns to the ground and the occupants perish. As the fire rages through the house, the family's efforts to escape are futile. Doors, walls, objects stand in the way. As the dying transform into spirits, the voices of the house resonate. Before they head to wherever it is spirits go, death decides to put on a nice little vaudeville show to cheer up the recently dead. Only in death do we truly silence ourselves.
On a city street, a man rants about god, the devil and repentance. Nearby, people sit in a crowded restaurant. Detached from those around them, they eat, mumble and fantasize without any passion or engagement. A waitress apathetic recites the specials. Two men literally pass through each other near the toilets. These people have shelter and food, but they aren't alive. The restaurant almost becomes a security blanket, a place to hide from their crazy, mundane and trapped existence. The mad street preacher is a lone voice of conviction and delusion.
A solitary man's mind, becomes a battlefield of overlapping images and voices. As he spends the day in his house doing an assortment of domestic jobs: cooking, eating, reading, writing and bathing, images of war and death enter the man's mind. The anonymity of life can haunt you if you think on it too much.
