Short of the Week: the unique surrealism of the Lauenstein brothers
While the cinematic art form has broached philosophically important subjects in visually interesting ways since its conception, animation has always managed to push the boundaries of the medium itself. Be it the crucial ecocriticism of Hayao Miyazaki’s art or the technical innovations of Walt Disney, animated films have redefined cultural conversations as well as artistic conventions. One fascinating example of this is Balance, a 1989 gem by the Lauenstein brothers.
The twin brothers, Wolfgang and Christoph, were asked by German synth-pop band Alphaville to create a video for their album The Breathtaking Blue. Although it was paired with the song ‘Middle of the Riddle’, the Lauensteins’ project didn’t exactly align with its narrative. The track was an exercise in symbolic association, painting a portrait of loneliness and desolation, but it wasn’t nearly as nuanced as the subtext of Balance.
A truly conceptual work, Balance presents a vision of a platform suspended within a void devoid of all subjectivity. Five entities coordinate their movement through each quadrant in order to keep the floating platform in place, dependent on the actions of each other to sustain the balance of their precarious existence. In an ideal world, they could blindly trust each other to maintain this coordination in perpetuity, but that’s not the case.
Each individual, with numbers painted on their backs, searches for meaning in the vast infinity of the strange space to no avail until one of them complicates the dynamics of their nothingness by stumbling across a box. Instead of offering something concrete like food or water, the mysterious object releases beautiful music into the void and sows certain ideas into these previously uncorrupted beings: of property and possession.
The perfect theoretical balance of their choreography is completely disrupted by this newly discovered object, resulting in a completely unnecessary quest for survival. Utilising the whimsical eeriness of stop-motion animation, the Lauenstein brothers brilliantly demonstrate how human traits like greed, envy and violence inevitably make their way into seemingly utopian systems that fail to account for the destructive nature of these ideological seeds.
Although it’s a damning critique of capitalist tendencies, Balance is also an attack against the collapse of communist societies like the Soviet Union, which also disintegrated due to similar power struggles at the very top. The final image of the film is simply haunting, featuring the lone survivor at one end of the platform, completely alienated from the object at the other end that pushed him to commit murder. In seven minutes, the filmmaking duo achieved much more than many directors do in their feature-length works.
Watch the film below.
