Robert Morgan: Film Retrospective Presentation
Robert Morgan (1974) was raised in the cursed town of Yateley, England. At the tender age of three, he developed a passion for cinema when he saw Fiend Without A Face (1958), a British black and white science-fiction film about mysterious deaths at the hands of an invisible life-form that steals human brains and spinal columns. As a result, he became a weird kid obsessed with monsters and the things that hide under rocks. He now lives and works (under his home label studio Swartz Can Talk) in a haunted house in London.
Morgan graduated in 1997 from the Surrey Institute of Art and Design, where he majored in animation, with his diploma stop-motion film The Man in the Lower-Left Hand Corner of the Photograph, a creepy story about a lonely old geezer and a maggot. In 2001, he made The Cat With Hands, a masterpiece horror tale about a very bad pussycat, shot partly live partly stop-motion animated. It was inspired by a recurring nightmare Rob’s older sister Eleanor had when she was young. In 2003, Robert made The Separation, a stop-motion jewel that won 15 international awards and got Morgan a definite worldwide recognition. A story about the separation of conjoined twins and its extraordinary consequences, made a member of the audience at the Stuttgart festival faint from emotional shock, which made Robert most happy and determined to carry on making films.
Structured like a downward spiral into madness, Bobby Yeah (2011) is set in a kaleidoscopic world which furthers Morgan’s fascination with body as abject object and physical transformations, as well as his characteristic twisting of spaces, creating another isolated character seemingly living in an inward world of his own fabrication. According to the author, Bobby Yeah was made completely without storyboard or animatic in one of his home rooms, where he was having fun and was relaxing building up a rhythmic composition during a period of almost three years. He was using the set as a playground to liberate his stream-of-consciousness, just like his favoured film directors David Cronenberg, Ingmar Bergman, Tim Burton, the Quay Brothers or David Lynch worked in some of their films.
Looking forward for more Robert Morgan bizarre filmic experiments!
Igor Prassel, Animateka
The Man in the Lower-Left Hand Corner of the Photograph
An old man looks at a photograph of his younger self and strange things happen.
The Cat With Hands
The legend of a cat who, legend has it, longs to become human.
The Separation
The separation of conjoined twins and its tragic consequences.
OverTaken – A 48 Hour Film
A weird, nonsense film written, directed and edited within a frantic 48-hour period.
Bobby Yeah
The delirious and disgusting adventures of a subhuman petty thug.
Invocation
A short horror film about the dangers of stop-motion animation.
D is for Deloused
A segment of the anthology feature film, The ABCs of Death 2. A film about the cost of life.