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The visitors to this year’s Anifilm will have a rather unique opportunity to see the debut film of a self-taught director who became the most famous Swiss animator. Georges Schwizgebel combines a simple drawing of a figure with photographs, cut-outs from magazines and samples of cloth. A prominent motif of this collage mix is a drawn male face slightly inspired by pop-art.

This film benefits from the possibilities of a distant camera in animated films. It begins with a static shot of a merry-go-round. As the camera withdraws, we begin to understand that the merry-go-round is merely a part of a colossus that moves in the rhythm of waltz. Apart from various types of carousels, other circular motifs such as staircases and a cup of coffee play an important role in this film evoking the flow of time.

Mephistopheles – as the painter – sends Faust on a journey through famous paintings. This time, the moving camera shots that are typical for the director remain static in order to enable the paintings to speak. First one of the director’s paraphrases of a famous story ends with a painting in which Mephistopheles, the intrepid mover of the plot, gets Marguerite. In the same way he nudged Faust with his brush in the beginning, he now immobilises him.

The film’s concept revolves around using animated sequences that are only six seconds long. Arranged one after another, they illustrate the music from Hector Berlioz’s opera The Damnation of Faust. To shed some light on his concept, the author ends his film with a shot of all the sequences together. By portraying two characters escaping on horses and using a dizzying style, the film resembles a strange romantic epic fulfilling its name.

After an impressive flyby through a rugged landscape, an unusually clear story begins to unfold. During a hunt, a doe is wounded by a dog. Its master takes it home and cares for it. The dog keeps going after the new resident, but its master eventually forces it to befriend the doe. But one day, the doe escapes the mansion and runs into a pack of dogs. In the end, the doe pays for its trustfulness.

Fugue is one of the author’s most fluid films so far. It constantly challenges the viewers to revise hypotheses about what they’re actually watching as changing perspectives, settings and colour confuse them. The author transfers the principles of musical form into film language and uses visual polyphony. But in the end, we find out that everything is in fact rather simple and behind all this is one man’s dream.

To his version of Cinderella, the author added – among other things – the motif of clouds that form a kind of dividing line between characteristic scenes from the popular fairy tale. The director also set his version in modern times and so the heroine and the “prince” eventually leave the old world on a plane through the clouds.

One of the highlights of Schwizgebel’s work is a successful adaptation of the novella Peter Schlemihl’s Miraculous Story. Particularly the first half of the film is characterised by constant movement of an imaginary camera and offers the viewers a breath-taking spectacle full of changes in shapes and perspectives. This film telling the story of a man who sold his shadow to the Devil only to get shunned by society is a variation on the story of Faust.

Jeu is one of just a few of Schwizgebel’s films in which the narration isn’t the primary goal. Fulfilling its name, the film is a visual and musical play that builds itself and then collapses to the tones of music by Sergei Prokofiev. Numbers become shapes and shapes become letters and people. The film’s finale set in a cinema hall alludes to the medium itself and the limits of its interpretation.

This atmospheric film portrays volatile scenes from the dreams of a young woman. The interruptions of the dreams are underlined by repeating motifs of deletion and shifts to other means of expressions. In this film, the author uses a unique combination of his favourite acrylic paintings with pastels on paper. The film’s unfathomable story is explained at the very end when a silhouette of the woman emerges from the dark in the rhythm of her breathing.

A man and a woman fall asleep next to each other onboard a plane. When flying through a turbulence, their hands touch, and the man gets carried away by his imagination. His fantasy turns into an epic romantic saga in which the director connects the film’s score to the movements of its image. Using a specific artistic technique, he draws a clear line between the desire and the reality of the characters.

Another captivating film by one of greats of traditional animation, Georges Schwizgebel. His suggestive animated ride is based on Goethe’s poem, Erlking (Erlkönig), and the music of Franz Schubert and Ferenc Liszt. A man and his sick son ride through the forest and the delirious child thinks that they are following the Erlking.

A movement within a painting, which begins with the savagery of a battle and comes to a halt in a rendition of a masterpiece from the 15th century: The Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello. The famous painting is a perfect perspective study combining surface and depth effects. The same methods are used by the Swiss master of painted animation.