Dogged by painting: a recent animated film from Spanish director Luis Eduardo Aute offers a highly imaginative treatment of the lives and works of eight painters, from Goya to Frida Kahlo. . - Film - A Dog Named Pain - movie review

Art in America, Sept, 2002 by Terry Berne

The impressionistic and challenging animated film Un Perro Llamado Dolor (A Dog Named Pain) is a 90-minute, black-and-white feature that audaciously reimagines the relationships of a handful of major painters with their art, their audience, their historical and cultural context, and their erotic lives. The film was written and directed by the Spanish artist and musician Luis Eduardo Aute, who not only drew each frame by hand but also composed much of the complex soundtrack.

Subtitled "Artists and Their Models," the film is divided into seven episodes, or "portraits," focusing on the Spanish painters Goya, Velazquez, Picasso, Dali, Joaquin Sorolla and Julio Romero de Torres, as well as Marcel Duchamp (who shares a segment with Picasso) and Frida Kahlo. The episodes bear whimsical titles such as "Striptease" and "An Immortal, Fake Mirage" (a nod to Orson Welles's documentary F for Fake about the famous forger Elmyr de Hory), while the overall title refers to a pet of Kahlo's. For its narrative stimulus and much of its visual style, A Dog Named Pain harks back to silent films, even if its pictorial inspiration derives indirectly from the painters it depicts.

Some 4,000 pencil-on-paper drawings and five years of work went into the making of the movie, which had its premiere in Spain in September 2001 at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. It had its first U.S. showing at the Tribeca Film Festival, held in New York, May 8-12.

Aute, best known as a singer-songwriter with conceptualist leanings, began his career as an artist and previously directed a half-dozen short films. Some of these, including studies for A Dog Named Pain and a moving pastiche of Carl Dreyer's 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc, can be seen in a video (Metamorfosis Amortal) that was released in 1999 to accompany a poetry anthology. These brief animated subjects, which the artist calls "videographs," display the power of the simple but painstaking animation technique that Aute also used for A Dog Named Pain.

In order to create specific movements and gestures of, say, a face, Aute erases parts of an initial drawing--the eyes, a mouth--and then draws minute changes directly in the newly blank area. The corrected drawing is then photographed, and the process is repeated frame by frame. Certain sequences are later treated digitally to add three-dimensional effects and sweeping camera movements. He frequently focuses on faces and uses the play of light and shadow to potent effect. Aute describes his drawings, which are often reminiscent of Goya's "Caprichos" and "Disasters of War," as "figurative but not realist."

In A Dog Named Pain, cinematic images and references play almost as important a role as those of painting. In the longest episode, a dreamlike fantasy of jealousy, seduction, castration and ultimate--but qualified--redemption, references abound to Dali and Luis Bunuel's collaborative film, Un Chien Andalou, and Bunuel's later Simon of the Desert. Set in Dali's home in Cadaques, the episode throws together Dali, his wife Gala, her former husband Paul Eluard, Federico Garcia Lorca and Bunuel. Other cinematic influences are German Expressionism and the montage technique of Sergei Eisenstein, who makes a cameo appearance in the sequence recounting Aute's apocryphal but psychologically astute version of the triangle formed by Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky. In a fit of jealousy, Rivera (in the film) murders the exiled communist With a sickle, all the While being filmed by Eisenstein.

Although A Dog Named Pain is highly symbolic and often difficult to decipher, Aute rejects the characterization "surrealist" for his film, insisting, during an interview for this article, on the rational underpinnings of every event and image, however arcane or mysterious they might seem at first viewing. The film seems to unfurl on several planes, superimposing factual, allegorical and invented elements. The painter-protagonists create and interact in an almost magical ambience where dream and reality mix, anachronisms abound and physical space is not so much the site of painting's assault on the real as it is a stage for dramatic personal, artistic and historical transformations.

Each "portrait" is filled with references to the relevant artist's work, but Aute also draws on such biographical ephemera as anecdotes and photographs. The airplane that features prominently in the Cadaques sequence, for instance, was inspired by a famous 1924 snapshot of Lorca and Bunuel sitting in a amusement park airplane. The persistent intrusion of the instruments and historical personalities of moviemaking itself--Eisenstein in the Kahlo chapter; Welles filming in the Sorolla sequence; Keaton, Chaplin and Groucho Marx in the episode about Duchamp and Picasso--draws attention to the essentially voyeuristic nature of both artistic creation and esthetic enjoyment, as well as to the porous border between artifice and reality.

At one point, in the film's brief coda dedicated to Velazquez, the director's own hand suddenly appears in the picture frame proffering a cigarette lighter, a jarring juxtaposition which is both funny and unnerving. That the lighter echoes various candles, torches and lanterns in works by Goya, Picasso and Duchamp also featured in the film underlines both the continuity of Aute's symbolism and the frequency of such motifs throughout the history, of art.