Sciences Participating with Arts & Culture in Education

GL.TCHing The Norms of Movie-Making

Illustrated by Ngoc Tri Tu

“It’s Such a Beautiful Day” is an *experimental animation movie made by Don Hertzfeldt. It is one of my favorite movies of all time, and it is the movie that made me fall in love with this director’s work. Hertzfeldt has a signature style that is recognizable in every film he makes. “It’s Such a Beautiful Day” tells the story of Bill, a seemingly normal guy, until we start learning about his disease which is making him progressively lose his memory and have visions. What happens to Bill is a GL.TCH in itself, but the way the movie is made, since it is an experimental film, is also a gl.tch. The movie is made using mainly animation, but also other film footage and abstract colors. The actions don’t fill the whole screen, either, but they are in bubbles on the screen, small or little, and sometimes overlapping when Bill “goes crazy.” In these moments where he has visions and he panics, everything in the movie goes crazy, i.e. overlapping images and actions, excessive overlapping sound, and intense music and sounds—a flood of gl.tches both in the filmmaking and his mental state.

The actions in bubbles, the black and white simplistic animations, the abstract colors and shapes, and the overlapping sound/music/images are all part of Hertzfeldt’s style and are used recurringly in his work. He also typically explores strange, and ambiguous ideas like the unknown disease in this movie, as well as the very weird unreal ending of the movie. All of his work makes you think about not only their subjects but also the art of cinema, and how his gl.tchy way of movie-making only emphasizes and supports the purpose of the movie. As a cinema student, I find this kind of work really inspiring.

Google qualifies “It’s Such a Beautiful Day” as an experimental movie, but as I have learned in my alternative cinema class that there is not one definition set in stone of what “experimental cinema” is or any other similar terms such as “alternative”, “expanded” and “avant-garde”. The only thing we can truly say is that this movie is out of the norms.

Excerpt from “It’s Such a Beautiful Day”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IUX0Qy-IDM