The Tower Trilogy
The Tower trilogy is a short film, it was made with 16 mm film and a digital film camera. The stop-motion technique was used most of the time to animate children's toys, and various objects like chess pieces. On the 16 mm film strip Barbara Agreste did some twodimensional animation by scratching its surface and adding bleach to it, superimposing the light lines on the other scenes with defined perspectives and threedimensional shots.
The Tower Trilogy has three titles that originated in Italian: "La Torre, Le Formiche, Lo Specchio" and they translate this way in english : "The Tower, The Insects, The Mirror".
This animation is made with 16 mm film, and DV video, and it is very abstract although some
figures appear now and then on the screen. It is a work in which I explore the state of hysteria.
It starts with "La Torre", a 3D animation presenting a claustrophobic space in which some objects rotate on themselves on a chequered floor. This piece is expressing a sense of prisony and
oppression, from which a first stage of hysteria appears identified with the worms crossing the room.
The theme of hysteria manifests more directly in the struggle of the second section: "Le Formiche",
in which a succession of images of shaking hair, falling flowers, black paint on canvas, and frenetic
body movements inhabit the screen.
The third part of the trilogy, "Lo Specchio", revolves around the theme of death and purification in
a settings very similar to the first piece "La Torre", just this time the atmosphere in the room with the chequered floor ha changed, because the struggle and the tension are now gone. Also the light has changed, from night it has become day, and while some dead flowers keep falling from the sky/ceiling together with fragments of mirror, everything else is unmoving until an outburst of rain, the sole element that can clean and restore hope to the sense of anguish of the entire film, occurs.