_grau | d 2004 | 10:01 min

director, producer, animator: robert seidel

music: heiko tippelt, philipp hirsch

_grau is a personal reflection on memories coming up during a car accident, where past events emerge, fuse, erode and finally vanish ethereally various real sources where distorted, filtered and fitted into a sculptural structure to create not a plain abstract, but a very private snapshot of a whole life within its last seconds



KunstFilmBiennale 2004 | Honorary Award | the jury assigns the movie _grau by robert seidel an honorary award, because of the technological mastership which is used to show never seen phenomena in the borderland of science and aesthetics.

SHIFT Japan | DOTMOV Festival 2004 selected and commented by Motion Theory | _grau is a mesmerizing, beautiful and disturbing work of art that fuses dark and light to create organic forms and amorphous shapes. The scenes unfold slowly, elegantly revealing tensions between seemingly simple fragments of life. It feels like a long look at some primordial soup giving birth to some of the world's first life forms, or one-celled organisms that can't quite fully resolve themselves. The soundtrack, with its lonely drones rising and falling, make us believe we are witnessing a dark creation. The director's most impressive accomplishment was in going beyond the technology of the computer to create something that feels as if it is made of real moments in time, inside a reality only slightly offset from our own.

Media critic Matt Hanson, author of The End of Celluloid and founder of onedotzero festival | _grau appeals to me because it is organo-tech. it does not deliberately ape the abstract pioneers of abstract cinema, and it is worlds away from the motion graphic masturbation of many of those enamoured by digital animation. seidel's work is impressionistic, melding biological and emotional currents. out of amorphous shapes we make out bones, heads, a hand. a spirit leaving the body. at least, this is what i sense out of the chaos of galactic reconfigurations, neurological connections, and biological forms. this is a powerful piece of digital animation precisely because it does not feel like such, it feels emotional, epic. and once you release the background to the animation--communicating a 'coming to terms' with the aftermath of a car accident--you realise why.