The Imaginary Kaleidoscope - Narrative Short - USA

Director Masha Vlasova

​​“The Imaginary Kaleidoscope” is a series of close-ups of animal sculptures, small and large. The close-ups, which excise context from the frame, suggests portraiture. We encounter these animals at eye level and observe them looking at us. Even without context, lawn sculptures are recognizably mass-produced and made of inexpensive yet robust material intended to endure outside. The male voiceover reads a monologue quilted with quotations from the western canon in which the author ventriloquizes an animal voice (i.e. Kafka, Rilke, Bishop, Tolstoy). 

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The video offers a meditation on voyeurism and the performative quality of public-facing private displays, and on the desire to reintegrate animals into our life. The yard art animal sculptures are dinky monuments to that desire for reintegration. I gathered the footage in small towns across the Northeast, Midwest, and the South suggesting a collective place-less portrait of Americana.

​AniFab judge's aggregate score for The imaginary Kaleidoscope was 6.2 out of 10 with one judge writing, "​I really enjoyed this short movie.  It is hard to imagine the concept of poetic intellect and discourse presented through lawn ornaments. It was almost trance like.  This movie was meant to be presented by AniFab.  We were made for each other."