Re-staging Stalingrad: model animation as liminal ruinscape

Seventy years earlier, the Battle of Stalingrad ended, changing the course of the European theatre of the Second World War. As the researcher of this project, I now stood in southern Russia, inside the siege boundary of this pivotal turning point during the war. My direct, subjective perception of this ruinscape, of geographical and meteorological extremes, juxtaposed with my long-held fascination with the narrative and representation of combat spectacle of the Stalingrad combat film canon. These sources fed the desire to reconstruct the spatiality of encircled defendable spaces and make-shift urban battlements on the threshold of combat, from a merging of two sources: the documentation of the historical event as a decaying landscape of ruin and the recreation of these events as cinema. This exegesis investigates the perception of these liminal spaces through the lens of autoethnography. The research analyses the narrative state and ambiguous potentialities of the non-combat scenes from a tangible craft-based production design point of view. Attention is focused on the morbid scenic design of the geographical panorama, ruined architecture and extreme meteorology of these in-between battlefield microcosms; the visual state of environmental conditions translated into stages suspended on the threshold of combat violence. It examines how these combine to shape the interpretive nuances of the liminal miseen- scène comparative to the macrocosm of combat. The architectural landscape of the urban battlefield becomes perceptually invisible inside the spectacle of modern warfare. This architecture of warfare, originating from the frontline event, is re-discovered inside the architecture of the combat film. Acknowledging that there are inherent political overtones to the study of military warfare, this research is purely concerned with the on-screen architecture of the liminal scene mise-en-scène in the Stalingrad canon and how this can be reconstructed and transformed into stop motion animation. The purpose is to offer a new reading of the staging qualities of this production design as threedimensional craft. This production design explores the spatial through the tangible, translating a personal experience of actual battlefield spaces into a scale-model. The restaging of this architectural landscape of ruin, is re-directed by interpretation into a re-constructed image, through deep mapping, that is then translated into the three-dimensions of a tangible film set design. Reconfigured through the stagecraft of stop motion animation, the ruinscape reappears in the miniature and is transitioned and re-produced as a system of production design.