The elegance of image

I spend most of my life dealing with words.  I write them, I preach them, I broadcast them and I savour them.  Even so, there are times when words must move over and give space to the elegance of wordless communication. Marsha Onderstijn’s gorgeous animation on life and death is one of those times. Produced as a degree piece four years ago, it has now seen the light of day, and is receiving the kind of acclaim it surely deserves.

Life and death are such huge subjects that sometimes our words seem no more significant than a tiny insect on the back of a charging rhinoceros. In the five minutes’ of film below, Onderstijn has tamed the rhinoceros, I think: