Long Low Line (Fordland) (animation)

Danielle Dean

Long Low Line (Fordland)2019
18:01 min
Video, color, sound

Long Low Line, (Fordland) takes as its starting point a collection of Ford Motor Company commercials archived in Detroit, where the company has long been based. The print advertisements, beginning in the 1920s, positioned the latest Ford cars against the backdrop of various American landscapes. When viewed collectively, these advertisements reveal how an instrumentalized landscape has been crucial in supporting consumer culture and promoting the aspirational ‘American Dream’. In this work, the commercials are deconstructed and the cars removed, placing the viewer in the passenger seat. However, rather than moving through scenes of beauty and abundance as depicted in the original commercials, the audience is presented with an alternative perspective that highlights the human labor and environmental cost that enabled this capitalist enterprise.

Central to Dean’s formal investigation is the use of a technique called multi-plane animation effect, whereby the different elements of a perspective image are separated into successive layers, crafting an illusion of three-dimensionality, immersion, and perspectival depth or parallax. This technique, extensively mechanised by Walt Disney in the 1930s by re-purposing automobile parts into a multi-plane camera, was a crucial aspect of the industrialization of advertising and the intensification of the technical division of labour in the production of capitalist imaginaries. As Dean explains, “Disney effectively turned the multi-plane camera into a Fordist assembly line for the production of subjectivity”.

Sources: Ford commercials: 1924 - present; The National Archives, Ford, The Rubber Plantation at Boa Vista on the Tapajos River, Brazil, transferred 35 mm black and white film, 1930

After effects animation: Gary Dumbill
Illustrations: Danielle Dean, Marceline Mason, Tida Whitney Lek
Sound: John Somers
Sound contributions from: Cruce Grammatico, Dominic Coppla, Sacramento Knoxx

Included in exhibition:
Quiet as It’s Kept, Whitney Biennial 2022
Midnight Moment, Times Square Arts

Video still, Long Low Line (Fordland)