A Prairie Love
Edmonton, 2011
3:14
Dir: Michael Pedruski
Digital Stills animation of charcoal, graphite and ink drawings
If uncompromisingly bleak in tenor, A Prairie Love is nevertheless an extremely affecting short. Like Haleigh Toney’s Dragon.Love, this simple animated work is built using a sequence of more or less still images, in this case depicting a stream of memories, intercut with captions. Here the static nature of animator Michael Pedruski’s black and white hand drawings works exceedingly well because their subject is a harsh prairie winter, possibly occurring during the Great Depression. Snow driven vistas of field and town in east central Alberta’s Kalyna country are brought to life by the agitation of Pedruski’s charcoal and pencil strokes as differently shaded versions of the same scene are presented from frame to frame. Judiciously chosen sound effects, gleaned from the creative commons, play an equal role in eliciting a sombre mood. The chalkboard scrawl of the captions, sometimes hard to decipher, appears to be that of a personal hand, yet the writer’s anonymity amplifies a sense of alienation in the viewer. Inspired by Pedruski’s own family history, A Prairie Love, on another level, examines the loss of cultural memory as descendants of ethnicized immigrants increasingly assimilate into mainstream Canadian culture.
MICHAEL PEDRUSKI
A distant descendant of European immigrants to what is now Canada, Michael Pedruski is a hobbyist animator/ filmmaker from Edmonton. He currently studies community ecology at McGill university in Montréal.
