Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016

Mathias Poledna’s Imitation of Life is an animated 35mm film produced in the virtually obsolete technique of hand-drawn animation. In it, a cartoon donkey performs a song-and-dance number reminiscent of the animated films made during the Great Depression in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Poledna has appropriated and reassembled the complex visual language of those Golden Age creations, which many decades later continue to reverberate in our collective imagination.