MicroCinema Scene

Eternal Gaze is a short film based on the life of Alberto Giacometti, an Italian artist of the twentieth century who used images of darkness and death to express his love for shape and sculpture. Chen is a filmmaker who decided to use computer animation to bring to life the story of Giacometti’s death.

Sam Chen’s animation is flawless. Not only is it the result of painstaking detail and enormous artistic talent, it’s all done in the style of Alberto Giacometti’s death-like, and morbid, art. Instead of making a short independent film about the artist Alberto Giacometti, Sam Chen opted for the less-traveled, and much harder, path of making an independent animated short. Chen uses art, Giacometti’s own tool, to harness emotion, intellect, and power into one very amazing short film.

Beautiful, gloomy, and eccentric, stylistically magnificent, intricate and emotional, brutal and heartbreaking; these are the feelings that this film evokes. Chen uses colors and shapes to show Giacometti’s pain and frustration with art, the tortuous process through which he expressed himself. No dialogue mars this tale. Using only the power of music and sound effects to enhance his visual creations, Chen’s Giacometti is haunted by images of death, shadows that his own fears made real in art.

Chen explores Giacometti’s death and his love for the macabre in his art. The world of Giacometti, down to the minuscule, is consistently brooding. Chen has an eye for style and knows how to evoke emotion without using real actors. The haunting music competes the film, both technically and actually. Eternal Gaze is the most amazing and intelligent animated sequence I’ve ever seen.

You have to give Chen credit for attempting what most people could never accomplish; a Pixar-quality film done independently, and in one’s free time, all in computer animation. He also deserves props for making an intellectual film that is also beautiful.

Four stars.

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