Hollow Man

CROSS CULTURAL OUTLINE presents:

Ryan Larkin (1943-2007)

Ryan Larkin was a Canadian animator, famous for his 1969 Oscar-nominated short 'Walking' which influenced a generation of fledgling animators. He worked at the National Film Board of Canada from the early 1960s until 1978. He created countless storyboards, tracings, drawings and paintings for his unique and often surreal animations. Ryan was homosexual but had a long-term close relationship with a young woman named Felicity, the "love of his life".

Larkin's chronic abuse of drugs, cigarettes and alcohol eventually lead to homelessness and a dismal subsistence from panhandling on the streets of Montreal. He died on Valentine's Day, February 14, of this year at age 64 from lung and brain cancer.

"To possess your soul in patience, with all the skin and some of the flesh burnt off your face and hands, is a job for a boy compared with the pains of a man who has lived pretty long in the exhilarating world that drugs or strong waters seem to create and is trying to live now in the first bald desolation created by knocking them off."

- Charles Edward Montague (1867-1928), British Author, Journalist and critic

This is a video of Chris Landreth's 2004 CGI (Computer-generated imagery) film 'Ryan', a docu-mation, as CROSS-CULTURAL OUTLINE has dubbed it, which reveals and visualizes his character's personality and emotional scars.

In the Oscar winning animated short film 'Ryan', we hear actual recordings of the voice of Ryan Larkin in conversation with Landreth and with other people who knew him. These voices speak through hollow, twisted, broken and disembodied 3D-generated character images. Landreth, born in 1961, calls his style of bizarre, sometimes humorous and often disturbing animation "Psychorealism".



[See also: Ryan Larkin Dies (Video)]




[Related: A Greg Anderson quote]



[See Part Two of the video on AMALGAMATED PERSPECTIVES]


.

Have you forgotten yet

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon (1886-1967) was a British poet, diarist and author, known for his anti-war verse which resulted from his own experiences while in military service during World War I.

Horrified by the brutal realities of war, Sassoon's writing took a drastic turn away from the romantic sweetness of his early verse. This new stark and unembellished war poetry was intended to disclose the ugly truths of the trenches to an audience that had been seduced by patriotic propaganda.

Graphic descriptions of mangled limbs, rotting corpses, horror, depravity and despair are the trademarks of Sassoon's poems about WWI. These word-paintings are rendered in a rich and compelling language and with the utmost candor.


In 'Aftermath' the poet admonishes us, not to be lulled into complacency, to always remember "the slain of the War" and to "stop and ask, 'Is it all going to happen again?'"

Sadly, since Sassoon's time in WWI many more wars have been unleashed on mankind right up to the current U.S. war with Iraq.

Yes, Siegfried, it did all happen again, is all happening again and will continue to happen again...


[Related: Looking back on World War II ]

.

Looking back on 1945 - Memoirs of a US Soldier

:
...The City Square (in Leipzig) looks a little like the square I was in with the 69th. We were at the near end and a Kraut ran across the far end. We all shot at him, but I don't know whether he got out. It was almost dark.

Some time after that, Dan Carey and I captured one. I just recall Carey talking with the guy in his high school German. The Kraut seemed to be a decent guy so we treated him well.

I have a picture of a few guys from our squad sitting on a curb waiting for orders to move out. Carey was the one who liberated a camera and took the photos I have. He had a German print copies for some of us.
He's also the guy who shot his rifle right next to my ear and left me with the ringing I still have after all these years.

Carey really was some piece of cake as was a guy he used to pal around. (I think the guys name was Rowe.) Once they went kind of crazy and went into a German home and ripped it apart for no reason whatsoever. The only German Rowe knew was, "Guten tag. Fraulein. Haben sie Kinda?" (For John: Ich weiss. "Kinda" hat Recht nicht. When he saw a Fraulein, he would ask her that stupid question, looking straight at the woman and rubbing his hands together. (That wasn't in Leipzig.) ...

One other thing I remember in Leipzig was being in a large cellar
with booze all over the place. Don't remember how or why I was in there.

[Military humor: How to prepare for Deployment]

.