NOLA PICTURES
The French artist Louise Bourgeois, born in 1911, has created many sculptures of spiders, making explicit connections between these creatures and motherhood. In turn, the Hungarian doctor, poet and playwright Gabor Barabas wrote a poem, “The Spider,” inspired by Bourgeois’ sculptures. Now the Spanish director Juan Delcan has taken both of these creative explorations and spun them across cultures and media as a short animated film.

The Spider is the direct outgrowth of Delcan’s appreciation for the artists. “This project was at once incredibly attractive and very intimidating,” says Delcan. “I have such an emotional reaction to Louise’s work, and Gabor’s poem was so beautiful and dramatic that I was worried about doing them an injustice. Fear literally paralyzed me in the beginning, but through Gabor’s encouragement, I managed to get started by animating one drawing of a spider. When Louise saw it, she was disappointed there wasn’t more. That reaction motivated me to commit completely to the project.” And commit he did, rising at 3:30 a.m. over several months to painstakingly draw and animate each and every frame before heading off to his day job as a director at Nola Pictures.

The film begins with a drop of what looks like blood sliding down into the frame, accompanied by eerie music that reminds one of clinking shards of glass. Out of this reddish teardrop, multiple lines emerge to become legs, growing into a spider that walks out of the frame. The words The Spider appear, with lines of letters shimmering like a web in an early morning breeze. Then a complete spider web appears with an arachnid spinning busily in its center, and we hear the opening lines of Gabor’s haunting poem, read by the poet himself and accompanied by the same minimalist music:
“If her web be art, then she is an artist of symmetry who walks on air, drawing each silken filament like a rare offering from within herself.”
As the animations continue, the spider and webs are constantly reformed into abstract patterns, a man and a woman, a bed, a nursery, a female form and back to a spider again, all reflecting the themes of love, procreation, birth, death, art and redemption, as articulated in the poem. The illustrations are almost naive in their simplicity, even as the animations flex, flux and change to create constantly evolving tableaus that mirror the cycle of life. “The work of Louise is very primitive, almost childlike in a way,” says Delcan. “It’s all about the line and how visceral it is. So I wanted to do the animation in the same way.”

While the project was purely personal, Delcan did receive a welcome response from its intended audience of one: When Bourgeois saw it, she clapped. “It was such a moving experience for me that I would like this to be the first of many more pieces,” says Delcan. “Blending art, poetry and animation can be so powerfully emotive that I would love to keep doing this.” Laurel Saville

NOLA PICTURES | DIRECTOR: JUAN DELCAN | PRODUCER: CHARLIE CURRAN | WWW.NOLAPICTURES.COM