The craziest film in the official competition of the Annecy Animated Film Festival is undoubtedly that of Spanish director Maria Trénor. His title ? Rock Bottomnamed after the masterpiece album written just fifty years ago by Robert Wyatt, singer, drummer and cornerstone of progressive rock, who in 1966 formed the group Soft Machine and, later, Matching Mole.
The album contains six intense and delicate, disturbing and poetic songs, which the feature film takes up, in order, unfolding from there a part of the tumultuous life of the British musician, in the 1970s. In New York ( Robert Wyatt lived, in reality, in London) and in Majorca, the Balearic island where he liked to retreat with his partner, Alfie (Alfreda Benge, with whom he still lives), a visual artist whom he married in 1974 One year after he fell four floors from a building, during a party at the London home of June Campbell Cramer (1931-1999). A fall which left him paralyzed in both legs, made him abandon his group and undertake a solo career. It was during his convalescence that he finalized Rock Bottom.
The film therefore sends us into the middle of the hippie period, within a community where artists meet, notably Pink Floyd, friends of Wyatt. Drugs and alcohol accompany high days and evenings, also creating states of anxiety and dizzying descents. If Maria Trénor’s film is crazy, it’s because it illustrates all these states, but also the sensations that music provides. And this, through the immense field that animation offers: saturation of colors, juxtaposition of images and artistic trends, shift from reality to dream through the use of various techniques, including painting. In Rock Bottom, with our heads upside down, we lose our footing, we dive into hallucinatory spaces, then into the marine waters of Majorca, in the company of the artist couple. Back to reality.
“Create a coherent narrative”
For this psychedelic immersion, the director, born in 1970 in Valencia, Spain, was inspired by the underground and surrealist aesthetic of the early 1970s, experimental cinema, and artists such as Mati Klarwein, Maya Deren, Barbara Rubin and Shirley Clarke. “I wished that Rock Bottom attempts to capture the essence of Wyatt’s artistic and personal experience, she explains. The differences in style and aesthetic of the film translate into images the ups and downs, the moods and the emotions that pass through him throughout his life. I didn’t make a biopic, but a film about music and creation. The biggest difficulty, in fact, was writing a script, creating a coherent narrative from the pieces of the album, the order of which I wanted to respect. Every scene, every note in this film seeks to immerse viewers in a world where music is not just heard, but felt and experienced. »
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