Max Litvinov’s L’Hydre D’or

This Monday Short was originally posted on March 13, 2017. We are re-posting Peter Hemminger's Monday Short Blog posts until we've exhausted the incredible archive.

This week’s selection is a quick one, but it’s a stunner, and hard to believe that it’s a first-year film (Max is a student at l’école de la Poudrière). The markers-and-gouache construction is a pretty brilliant touch—along with adding some texture to the solid blocks of bright colour, the visible lines from the markers really emphasize Litvinov’s hyper-skewed perspectives and warping shapes. The atonal soundtrack does the same, the sonic equivalent of balloons inflating and deflating, knocking the film even more off balance. It feels more like a forgotten piece of modernist mythmaking than a first-year exercise; it’ll be very interesting to see what Litvinov does next.