Palaeolithic Animation

[eller]

Part 1, Shadow theater, the process
Part 2, Papercuts and storytelling
Part 3, Shadow art, paper art

The little series continues - in part 3, I've mentioned seeing an animation of running animals in a cave with very old paintings, and I've decided to discuss this topic in a bit more detail... From the artistic perspective. (Art critique of paleolithic cave paintings is not really a thing, I'm afraid - not least because an archaeologist who goes "this cave is boring; I've seen better aurochs drawings" will be fired.) The bad news: I still have no idea which cave it was that I saw as a kid. I don't even remember the type of animal! (I was a little kid; I wouldn't have been able to identify prehistoric fauna.) The good news: a bit of research showed that cave art animation was, indeed, a thing in Very!Ancient!France and Very!Ancient!Spain. (So, I'm not completely misremembering things; good to know.) And it's suuuuper impressive: just imagine being in a cave, in the dark, and suddenly you're surrounded by running animals! (There is, of course, no proof whatsoever there were other aspects beyond the visual, but as a performer, I'd also add some percussion soundtrack as hoofbeat.)

There are actually several examples of this described in literature.

Check out, for example, this very nice paper, Animation in Palaeolithic art: a pre-echo of cinema by Marc Azéma and Florent Rivère. The authors argue that cave art was supposed to convey narrative as well as movement, and they back this up with examples from the Chauvet Cave, the cave system of Lascaux, the Baume Latrone, and several others. (The genre must have been popular!) Most interesting to me is that the authors also discuss the techniques used by those prehistoric artists: interestingly, they had both superimposition and juxtaposition of successive images in their repertoire, and they were able to make quite advanced stop-motion animation, which means they must have known and used the principle of retinal persistence. Consider me impressed... (The authors also discuss another animation technique: a very old thaumatrope. There's also a short (2-minute) video by Marc Azéma, showing pretty neat examples:

Watch on YouTube

...you get the idea.

If you want to see actual shadow art... There seem to be several examples of that as well. On Youtube, I found this very nice 1-minute video of a bison shadow of a decorated rock, in El Castillo cave (Spain):

Watch on YouTube

Whoever made that bison shadow was a really great artist. And that's a shit ton of work that went into the piece...

Have I mentioned that shadow art is really fucking old? Here's an interesting article about the phenomenon, including the reconstruction of the light sources that would have been available to the artists, and how that influences the way the art looks.

Comments

[sabotabby]

This is really awesome and I am swiping these videos to add to my already super long Ancient Art lectures. It's clever as fuck. I'm struggling to think of how they would have even planned something like that out. 14/10, A++ auroch.

[eller]

Oh, I know how I would plan this out, no problem - but then, I'm a computational modelling specialist with a focus on geometry. XD It's possible to do this without computer help but it does require some math. (If you're really interested, I could at some point do a step by step of one of my shadow theater preparations. It's very similar on a technical level though I'm shameful to admit my work doesn't involve any decent aurochs pictures whatsoever.) Whoever did this definitely wasn't some primitive creature only a small step above an animal. At the very least, they had a basic understanding of trigonometry - doing this stuff "instinctively" is entirely impossible, even for a very intelligent person. (Yes, that's my professional opinion.)

[sabotabby]

I do not even have a primitive creature's understanding of trigonometry but yes I would be fascinated as to how they did it.