Between the Folds (2008), a documentary by Vanessa Gould.
Go ahead: be impressed by this film. Be delighted, awed, thunderstruck — by what, did you say? Yes, origami as it is practiced today, around the world.
Wait a minute, hold it. Isn’t origami that kid stuff where schoolchildren learn to fold paper and make little birds and fish and butterflies? Isn’t it that thing you do with paper napkins to make little flower-like bowls and candy-dishes for kids’ parties?
Oh, viewer, think again.
Sure, it’s all of that, and it’s much, much more, especially nowadays. If you take origami as the art of folding a square piece of paper (without cutting or tearing it) into some other shape, representational or not, then, as Jimmy Durante nearly said, eveybody’s gotten into the act: sculptors, artists of all stripes, papermakers, mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, educators, and many others.
Origami as a movement now has realists, abstractionists, an avant-garde wing, and even post-modernists who create non-folded (OK, crumpled or bunched) achingly beautiful and imposing works. There are those who fold only once, then bend the result; or fold flat in many complex ways then cut once. There are those who fold paper wet, those who fold it dry; those who make pieces that fold and unfold themselves before your eyes (and yes, you see this on film) and those who make pieces that pull themselves into one or more specific attractor-shapes by the stresses of their own folds.
Other practitioners create computer programs that can produce diagrams of how to fold and shape the paper into any finished design you can convey to the machine. Still others use origami as a way to begin to teach kids about geometry — and other things like focus and concentration, and feelings of success and achievement from their own efforts.
Between the Folds is a documentary film, distributed on disc by PBS. It’s 56 minutes long, doubtless to fit into PBS broadcast schedules. You can watch it instantly here on Netflix, if you’re a member, or you can request the DVD. Note, please, that on the DVD, they’ve done a great thing: they’ve put in the outtakes.
On many discs, the outtakes are slightly longer takes or variants of scenes in the film, scenes cut from the film, or bloopers and mistakes. On this disc, they are the superb additional material that would likely have been in the film if the 56-minute limit hadn’t dictated otherwise. There’s a good deal of this very interesting material, all of it touched on briefly in the film, and shown in more expanded form as part of the DVD extras.
Just make sure you see it, and soon.
