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“This new medium of expression is the Absolute Film. Here the artist creates a world of color, form, movement, and sound in which the elements are in a state of controllable flux, the two materials (visual and aural) being subject to any conceivable interrelation and modification.” – Mary Ellen Bute
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An epic cycle created on the tiny, domestic medium of Super-8, the film combines the intimacy of its chosen gauge with the evocative sweep of Freudian dreamwork. It’s a moving collage clipped together out of photos and illustrations from the Atomic Age, reconfigured into a private visual language that speaks of both Klahr’s own childhood and a greater strangeness: how images from another era stand as uncanny evidence for a very different stage of development in the American psyche.Read More »
not recommended for people sensitive to flashing lights and colors,
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This film further indicates that computer animation — once a gimmick — is fast becoming a fully-fledged art; the complexity of its design and movement, its speed and rhythm, richness of form and motion — coupled with stroboscopic effects to affect brain waves — is quite overpowering. What is even more ominous is that while design and action are programmed, the ‘result’, in any particular sequence, is neither entirely predictable nor under complete human control, being created at a rate faster (and in concatenations more complex) than eye and mind can follow or initiate. Our sense of reality is thus disturbed not only by the filmmaker but also by the machines we have produced.
– Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive ArtRead More »
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A tone poem [in which] two woodland sprites dance about, atop power lines and among flowers and leaves, while being pursued. Everyone spends some time pulling levers to switch trains, too.
“Anthony Gross is best known as a printmaker and painter. The animated films he made with American Hector Hoppin reflect his distinctive graphic style, but add a sophisticated choreography of lines and space. The escapist theme of the film developed from an earlier suite of etchings called SORTIE D’USINE (1931).” – David CurtisRead More »
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When you’re a bored teenager looking for thrills, sometimes the only thing you can turn to is rock ‘n roll. Having no skill, money, or even a full set of drums, a feared trio of high school delinquents nevertheless decide they are destined for musical glory in a quest to impress their only friend Aya, avoid a rival gang, and – most importantly – jam out. Animated almost entirely by director Kenji Iwaisawa, and featuring a lead performance by Japanese alt-rock legend Shintaro Sakamoto, ON-GAKU: OUR SOUND brings its own sound and vision to the Hiroyuki Ohashi manga from which it was adapted. With pitch-perfect deadpan humor, the film presents a highly original take on the beloved slacker comedy: a lo-fi buddy film with a blaring musical finale that will leave you wanting an immediate encore.Read More »
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“One of the livelist of Mary Ellen Bute’s abstract films, DADA was intended to be part of a Universal Newsreel segment, showing Bute and her partner Ted Nemeth at work in their tiny New York studio. No copies of the newsreel itself are known to exist at this time.” – Cecile StarrRead More »
An animated Soviet look at black-white race relations in America, about the very brief rebellion of a black sugar plantation worker against a white “Sugar King”.
Only the final 7 minutes of the originally 20-minute cartoon have survived to our day. It is an adaptation of a poem written by the famous Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky on July 5, 1925, the day after he spent a day in Havana, Cuba, because his passenger line “Espagne” made a stop-over there.Read More »
“Mary Ellen Bute’s first color film tells a story in abstraction of an orange/red triangle imprisoned behind a grid of vertical and horizontal lines under a sky-blue expanse, perhaps representing freedom. J.S. Bach’s Toccata and Fuge in D Minor adds dramatic tension to the visual variables in motion.” – Cecile StarrRead More »
