Robinson Art Festival

Robinson Art Festival is a celebration of creativity in the College and beyond. Planned and delivered by our own students, with oversight from the College’s Visual Arts and Design Committee, this year’s programme of artistic events included visiting speakers, life drawing sessions, craft makers’ events, film screenings, and events exploring identity and creativity. The Festival culminated in a public art exhibition in College, showing a variety of work, including textiles, animation, painting and sculpture. Among the highlights of this year’s entries was a hand-drawn animated short film entitled Blue Things by Freddie Dobbs (English Tripos, 2021) who explains more:

I had the pleasure of projecting my short film Blue Things upon the chapel walls at the Robinson Art Festival this year. The film is a work of animation, consisting of hundreds of hand-drawn illustrations. Resisting a linear narrative, the film is closer in structure to a poem - a sequence of separate images connected by their visual and tonal similarities.

Blue Things manifests my academic interests in the intersection of poetry and film which I explored in my undergraduate dissertation on the ‘montage poetics’ of Beat poetry and film. I was largely influenced by Derek Jarman’s experimental work Blue. A single still shot of the colour blue, Jarman’s film is a poetic document of his experience of AIDS-related illness, with the film’s visuals representing the artist’s partial blindness. Though Jarman’s diaristic discussion of AIDS is integral to his work, for the purposes of my own piece I was focused on his poetic musings of colour. Akin to cinematic montage, the colour blue is a tapestry in Jarman’s film in which all manner of disparate elements are woven together: the hospital’s blue IV ‘drip’, the ‘blue jeans’ of his partner and the ‘blue heat haze’ of summers past.

I hence set out to create my own visual poem: a tapestry of personal associations of the colour blue. With its mass of drawn frames and the inherent messiness of a hand drawn style, I see the film as a sort of flotsam and jetsam of pop-cultural references and personal memories: a close-up of David Bowie’s blue eye shadow in the music video for Life on Mars, the lips of Samuel Beckett’s Not I and the stuttering movements of a childhood mechanical toy robot to name just a few of the film’s images.

Having just graduated with a distinction in the MPhil in Film and Screen Studies at Cambridge, I am continuing to build my portfolio in hand drawn animation in the hopes of pursuing a career in such. My ongoing personal project is a short film about greyhound racing; however, I am excited to be maintaining my connection to the university as I am currently working on a commission to be projected as part of a theatrical production this coming academic year. Updates of my work are regularly posted on my Instagram account @fdobbsfilm.

Take a look at Freddie's other animated work on his vimeo channel @FreddieDobbs.

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