PHILIPPE GRAMMATICOPOULOS THE REGULATOR (2004)

Director: Philippe Grammaticopoulos

Year: 2004

Time: 16 mins

Music: Ivo Malec

Eye of Sound: Just like any sane religion must project a golden era back in the past and label the present as  a barbaric, devilish or immoral period in the scale of time, so any sane reflection about the future must be grim and dystopian at best. Sci-fi and utopian literature have many traits in common. One of them is the simple fact that a narrative needs an imbalance, a crack in the system, to evolve. A most relevant one is the fact that, just like anthropology goes to distant places to consider vices and virtues of the homeland, utopian and sci-fi frameworks are most aptly used as pretexts to reflect on the conditions of the present. French animator Grammaticopoulos has been exploring some of these links in his career, constructing distant universes that turn out to be too familiar.  The Regulator tells the tale of a couple who ventures into a supermarket to buy parts from which to build a baby: they happily wonder through the aisles selecting arms, legs, heads, eyes - the entire body of "their" progeny. Once selected they hand the task to the technicians and machines in charge - most notably, a giant mechanical vulva that will toss up the newborn. Ivo Malec's typical electrocaoustic soundtrack is efficiently used to underscore the artificial nature of the production line, but its theatrical, almost expressionistic organ sequences are creatively integrated in semi-burlesque scenes. There is always a crack in the system - a ghost in the machine, a chip gone human, an assertion of individuality. The Regulator choses to crack the eugenic machinery where it hurts the most: by damaging the only part of the human body which remains constant throughout one's life, it reinvents the so-called "window of our soul" as an instrument of resistance against industrial, eugenic and capitalist repression.

  

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