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Animated to the lively accompaniment of Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5, and created using thousands of handmade black & white charcoal drawings, Fischinger’s delightfully dynamic short film sees dozens of white shapes dance, glide, shoot, and pop across a stark black background, leaving us transfixed in their wake.Read More »
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The first Studies were synchronized with records (Fischinger made a total of 13 Studies all without sound). It was only with the introduction of sound, beginning with Study No 6 that the films did full justice to this musical principle. The play of the white lines, the arcs, and the upside-down U’s running hither and thither like ballet dancers was brought into perfect synchronization with the music, and thus the films offered an abstract illustration of the melodies. Study No 6 is certainly the best of his films in terms of forms. – Hans Scheugl and Ernst Schmidt, Jr.Read More »
Standing apart along the northeast shore of the Great Salt Lake is a huge earthworks project, boulders and potholes, clinging brine and mirrored sky, which the film documents, as it moves back geologically to dinosaur history.Read More »
An experimental short film from Robert Breer with animated and live-action scenes cut together.Read More »
Personal photos are interspersed with fragmentary drawings and flashes of colour, observed and/or remembered everyday events – all of which add to a general sense of reminiscence. Sometimes a hand appears (Breer’s own) on top of a photo, reminding us that the photo is but an object in the film, not the film itself.Read More »
Form Phases IV is the last film in Form Phases, the first series made by Robert Breer to lend movement to the abstract forms in his paintings. Breer was a self-taught practitioner of animated film, focusing particularly on the demystification of the screen space. This was a theme already touched on in the 1920s by Hans Richter, one of the references for avant-garde European cinema. Richter’s work, specifically his film Rhythmus 21 (also in the Museo Reina Sofía collection), the starting point of abstraction in film, was a decisive influence on Breer’s cinematographic output.
Here, Breer applied, in a particularly sophisticated way, the principle by which a static screen is animated by the appearance of a moving shape which then changes as another shape appears, and then disappears, leaving the screen blank, to return once more to its static state.Read More »
An experimental film in which a photograph of an airplane turns into a wire diagram, then into an animated plane in flight, and then it explodes into words.Read More »
16mm, color, silent, 6 minutes, print from Anthology Film Archives Preserved by Anthology Film Archives
“Film is a fragile medium, and some artists push its fragility to the breaking point. Paul Sharits (1943–93) was a pusher.‘I think of [film] as a sort of a primitive, vulnerable medium,’ said Sharits. ‘I know it’s going to disappear, and I almost look upon it with a certain empathy.’ He moved his films out of the theater and into the gallery, creating multiscreen environments that exploited the qualities that made film different from the other visual arts. The projectors, with their clatter and flickering light, became protagonists, and the strips of celluloid, agents of ephemeral beauty.Read More »
