I Made A Thought-Provoking Short Film Showing The Collapse Of Ancient Greek And Roman Statues

Les Dieux Changeants is a CGI short film that depicts the virtual demolition of some of the great sculptures of Western art history.

I got the idea to produce this film the day I stumbled upon a 3d model of the Laocoön Group created by Denmark’s Statens Museum for Kunst. I was interested in some time in dynamic simulations involving fragmentation and disintegration of 3d objects and I thought it would have been fascinating to employ 3d scans of ancient masterpieces for those tests. The project has grown to a point much further than a simple 3d work and in the end, I used my own suggestions to create a short movie of it with a philosophical significance.

More info: lucioarese.net

The film creates a visually intriguing legacy: the static millenary beauty of those marbles being suddenly put into motion by a physical event, the hit of a bullet.

Obviously, NONE of this is supposed to happen in real life: this work wants to represent the act of destruction allegorically, as an uncertain process oscillating between negative annihilation and positive creativity readable on many levels and left open to the viewer to discern. I like the idea that everyone could draw his own interpretation of the film with the emblematic end quote from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. It could represent the end of something, a transformation, a cycle, a re-evaluation of established values, the beginning of something new, or just something mysterious or fascinating to look at.

Chopin Nocturne op. 27 n. 2 is the musical counterpart of this film. It’s one of his most beautiful pieces. Its intimate sweet melancholy opposed to the kinetic brutality of the statues disgregating creates a contrast that gives force and delicacy, primitive energy, and decadence at the same time.

The statues displayed in the film are the Laocoön Group, the Barberini Faun, the Belvedere Hermes, the Athena Pallas Giustiniani and Belvedere Apollo.

This work is a contribution to publicize Open, the Statens Museum for Kunst initiative to digitize their entire collection to make it freely available for the public to use, remix and re-elaborate to create new art. In the words of Merete Sanderhoff, digital advisor of the Museum, this film “bears evidence to the creative powers bubbling at the intersection of crowdsourcing and open heritage”.