Street Musique
| Street Musique | |
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DVD cover for the film
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| Directed by | Ryan Larkin |
| Produced by | Ryan Larkin |
| Music by | Rick Scott, Dick Tarnoff, Rick Stone, Rick Watson, Jim Colby, Jon Van Arsdell |
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8 min. 45 sec. |
| Country | Canada |
Street Musique is an animated short film by Ryan Larkin produced by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and released in 1972. It is a line animation of "music as performance", in which actions of the film's characters are choreographed to the music of street musicians.
Soon after returning from the 42nd Academy Awards in 1970, for which his animated short film Walking had been nominated, Larkin was loaned by the NFB to a Vancouver art school, where he stayed for eight months conducting animation workshops. He would travel to each student's studio to direct them, one of which was a group of street musicians. These street musicians were the origin of the idea for the film, as Larkin had stated that "they would make a great focal point for my abstract images".
The film consists of five or six vaguely defined segments whose animation matches the pace of the music to which it is set. It begins with a photograph of a musician that is replaced by a line drawing of that photograph. A transition leads to images of a man's body transforming into abstract improvisational forms using line shading and watercolours. The figures undergo a continuous metamorphosis throughout the film.Chris Robinson stated that the film's awkward ending is indicative of Larkin's creative hesitancy, as the last image is a figure waiting for music. Larkin said that he "ran out of ideas" and "didn't know how to end the film".
Street Musique won the Grand Prize at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 1973, which included a cash prize of A$2,500 from the Government of Victoria in Australia. The film also received the Jury's First Prize at the Berlin Film Festival of Animated Films. Larkin was fond of the Melbourne International Film Festival award because Street Musique "was a ten minute film up against all kinds of complicated feature films". He used the prize money to support young artists in Montreal, to whom he rented his nine room apartment for C$100.
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