The Ecstasy of Abstract Animation: Ja'Tovia Gary's An Ecstatic Experience

Abstract Rather than reading An Ecstatic Experience (dir. Ja'Tovia Gary, US, 2015) as presenting the reality of the history of Black people in the United States, as some critics have claimed, this essay examines the film's formal qualities as repeatedly articulating a disjunctive cut between invisible experience and visible manifestation. Over and over, An Ecstatic Experience argues for the impossibility of adequately visualizing complex internal forms of experience: the religious ecstasy of baptism in the Holy Spirit; the contradictory and sometimes fleeting feeling of freedom under the restrictions of slavery; and the mixture of despair, rage, and hope that often underlies embodied forms of political resistance in the age of #BlackLivesMatter, with which the film closes. Gary figures all of these as unrepresentable. Throughout the film, Gary manipulates the emulsion of filmic excerpts, including found black-and-white 16mm footage of people in church, a black-and-white extract of actress Ruby Dee performing a monologue in a 1965 kinescoped television presentation, a video clip from the 1980s featuring Assata Shakur talking about her escape from a US prison to Cuba in 1979, and recent color digital video footage of street-level political resistance in the face of anti-Black police violence in the 2010s. Neither do Gary's painting, drawing, and scratching over her carefully assembled collection of contemporary and historical images elicit the one-to-one correspondence between form and image sometimes called “mickey mousing” in the animation world. Instead, An Ecstatic Experience's abstract animated shapes and patterns emphasize the difficulty of translating the complexity of internal transformation into legible form outside the self.