I don’t know a lot of remix art, and I admit, my avant-garde film knowledge is basically nonexistent. But I know Stephen King, and I know Stephen King television movies from the 1990s, and let me tell you – with love – that THE LANGOLIERS was one of the worst. As wooden and dry as the floor of a sawmill, okay? Lines from the melodrama were thrown around in my friends group for years after we watched it. “There’s something bad in that man’s head” in particular, because when you’re a teenage girl, you get to throw that thought around at least a few times a day with certainty.
It was the promise of an hour-long, reedited version of the classic that got me curious about THE TIMEKEEPERS OF ETERNITY, but it was the overwhelming, painstaking artistry of director and animator Aristotelis Maragkos that kept me seriously riveted.
The process of the filmmaking is the star and standout, of course. Physically putting each frame together by hand, Maragkos – obviously a genius and a madman – first printed each compressed frame of the original film. He then tore, crumpled, and reassembled the pieces of paper into an animated collage that plays like a film reel. It’s roughly textured and gorgeous, layers of paper ripped into windows for other elements to peek through, frames placed with such care that the art of the paper tells a story that seriously heightens the one told in the original movie. Creases in the paper are exclamation points for characters diatribes, torn edges are clean transitions, and the finale uses techniques in paper craft that are both unexpected and once reveled, inevitable.
The narrative of THE LANGOLIERS is, blessedly, also reanimated from the anemic sprawl of the original three-hour movie. Maragkos has fine-tuned the airplane time-tripping plot to focus on Bronson Pinchot’s detestable character, Craig Toomey, and in the process left the unnecessary characters as scrap paper. The Frankie Faison, Dean Stockwell, and David Morse characters are left somewhat intact, whittled down from the original ten passengers, but it’s Pinchot who gets the spotlight – gnashing his way through so many (I hope recycled!) pages. The original two-night television event of a movie is purely an over the top canvas for the real creativity to play with.
The look and feel are reminiscent of an original Twilight Zone episode; jerky black and white, inky and smeared printed copy paper doing remarkable heavy lifting the way that only practical effects can. I want to hold THE TIMEKEEPERS OF ETERNITY in my hands like a ream of fresh copy paper, and the absolutely cool thing is, I could. Every moment is tangible, not just emotionally, but physically too.
Tags: Adaptations, Animation, Aristotelis Maragkos, Bronson Pinchot, David Morse, Dean Stockwell, Fantastic Fest, Frankie Faison, Stephen King
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