There Is Exactly Enough Time

A labour of love, and with no small quantity of sadness attached, There Is Exactly Enough Time is a charming and heartbreaking piece of animation. Oskar Salamonowitz, a child of film-makers Virgil Widrich and Anja Salamonowitz, had started work on a flip book animation. With 206 frames drawn, at just twelve years old, he died in an accident.

This is his film. Carried on for him now that he cannot, but the impetus, the spark, undeniably his. There is a charm to these little stick men independent of context, a sword fight with rocket boots and energy beams and ice pillars and more. Stalagmites and stalactites of superheroic struggle, blue crystalline intruders to the plane. With each frame the number in the corner counting up one by one to two, two hundred, two hundred and six. Unfinished.

Not just as a whole, the drawing uncoloured, lines missing. To remember being twelve for a moment and what might have prompted the pencil's stop. The call to dinner, to school, the brushing of teeth. The rush of grief.

Siegfried Freidrich contributes sound and music, the clash of blades, the thrum of fuel through footwear, the arcane magicks of rays and shields. Virgil, his father, draws from there. There is a hero, a villain, an ending that relies upon those small numbers. One that uses the brass that retains the pages of the flip book as an artefact, as Oskar already had. Something aware not just of environment but of hands. Much like The Timekeepers Of Eternity the mechanisms of film-making are part of proceedings, literally touching. The drawings held to board for photographing by punched holes that never quite line up, a pulse of process that becomes part of the environment and its storytelling.

It is as long as it needs to be, of course. The last frame counting up is numbered red and then it counts back down. Even how it counts matters, a fuse once lit can have only a few conclusions. Shorn of context it is in and of itself charming, ludic, a testament to the ability of successions of images shown in sequence to create the illusion of motion, of conflict. These arbitrary subdivisions of life, twenty four or thereabouts per second, sixty of those per minute, again to hours, days, weeks, months, too short years.

There is no fair way to review this. In a field like short film where projects are so often personal, autobiographical, deeply, nakedly, heartfelt, there is often a weight granted by intimacy that no level of craft can obfuscate or erode. The charm of this piece is bound up in its melancholic energy, a eulogy where many of the lines were drawn by the lost. Grief is perhaps not an inevitable consequence of aging but it is certainly closely bound, and in its consideration of the elements and efforts of time this carries them with it. Even in an Arcadia with parachutes and sticks of dynamite, a sacred Tex (Avery), there is space for mourning. Even in that possible despair delight, a celebration of a creative vision carried on by other hands. A small and cheering tribute, an opportunity to reflect.