The Most Beautiful Thing I've Ever Seen

Colihouse: "Adagio is legendary animator Garri Bardin’s 10-minute stop motion masterpiece in origami, set to Remo Giazotto’s Adagio in G minor. The events of this stark fable about ignorant intolerance among shadowy bird-creatures unfold [huhh huhh!] against a minimal backdrop in a variety of expert shots. The famous string score [used in the 1962 adaptation of Kafka's The Trial, and 1998 film Show Me Love just to name a couple] imparts a melancholy tension throughout.

The camera work is astounding, as is the vast range of expressions Bardin is able to assign these pieces of gray paper. He’s something of authority on bringing everyday objects to life, his famous earlier works being Conflict, where a war erupts among matches and Banquet, in which an entire dinner party plays out without people. Though most of Gari Bardin’s repertoire consists of embittered social commentary, Adagio stands apart in its sheer elegance.

Adagio is loosely based on one of my favorite short stories, Maxim Gorki’s legend of Danko and his burning heart. A part translation, part summary by E.J. Dillon:


Many thousands of years ago in a land of the sunrise beyond the sea, among a despised people who had been driven by a hostile race to the forests from the fertile steppe, lived the hero of this story, Danko. From the swamps and marshes of this dense virgin forest rose mephitic vapors which decimated the persecuted clan. These miserable fugitives, finding no outlet from their living sepulcher, finally decided in despair to seek out their foes and give themselves up to slavery or death.

At the critical moment the handsome young Danko comes forward and, like David among the Hebrews, boldly offers to save his people from the ruin with which they are threatened, to lead them onward to light and life. “Arise, let us enter in the forest depths, pushing on to the other side, for on earth all things have an end.” So mighty was the force of his will, so ardent the fire that burned in his breast, that the multitude rose up and followed him. But their ardor and hope were soon damped by the difficulty of forcing a way through the sunless forest tangle. They soon lost courage and loud were their murmurs against the enterprising leader. Like wild beasts they gathered round him and were on the point of putting him to death for his rash, unmediated interference. Thereat his heart burned with rage at their black ingratitude, but pity for the people quenched the fire. He loved those people and thought within himself that perhaps without him they would perish. And so his heart flamed forth with a blazing fire of desire to save them and to lead them along a smooth path, and his eyes forthwith glistened with the rays of that consuming flame. And all at once he tore open his breast with his hands, plucked out his heart and raised it aloft over his head.

It burned brightly like the sun, brighter than the sun, and all the forest was hushed thereat; illumined by this torch of love for men, darkness fled from its light far into the denseness of the wood and shuddering fell into a quagmire. The people, curious and spellbound, followed him once more, and very soon they saw before them a broad steppe suffused with the brilliant light of the sun reflected by the sparkling river. Softly whispered the wondering trees - now left behind - and the grass, moistened by Danko’s blood, answered them back. The proud dying hero, Danko, glanced at the breadth of the steppe outspread before him, surveyed joyfully the free earth, and proudly smiled. Then he fell and died."