John and Faith Hubley - "A Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Double Feature" (1966)

 

IC3PEAK / Jakov Burov - "Сказка" (2018)

A student in my Experimental Pop class turned me onto this postpunk-influenced, highly political and persecuted-by-authority Russian duo, IC3PEAK - I was particularly struck by this animated video for "Сказка", or "Fairy Tale". Created by "Ukrainian wierdcore" animator Jakov Burov, from a concept jointly conceived with the IC3PEAK, the promo draws on the Slavic folkoric figure Baba Yaga, "an ogress who steals, cooks, and eats her victims, usually children. A guardian of the fountains of the water of life, she lives with two or three sisters (all known as Baba Yaga) in a forest hut that spins continually on birds' legs".

Some more IC3PEAK videos, via their YouTube channel

Puppets in this next one 

 

Some more of Jakov Burov's videos from his YouTube channel

Harry Smith, Animator, Amongst Other Things

There's a huge exhibition of Harry Smith's work at the Whitney in New York. 

And there's a new book about his life and work by John Zwed: Cosmic Scholar.   

Here's the Whitney's press release: 

This will be the first solo exhibition of artist, experimental filmmaker, and groundbreaking musicologist Harry Smith (1923–1991), whose compendium of song recordings, the Anthology of American Folk Music, laid the groundwork for the popularization of folk music in the 1960s. This major exhibition introduces Smith’s life and work within a museum setting for the first time and includes paintings, drawings, experimental films, designs, and examples of Smith’s collections of objects ranging from string figures to found paper airplanes. Seen throughout this hybrid display of art and ephemera are signs of the esoteric, fantastic, and alternative cosmologies basic to Smith’s view of culture. The exhibition proposes new ways to experience diverse strains of 20th-century American cultural histories.

Over the course of fifty years, Smith made renegade and innovative use of the changing recording and distribution technologies, from his voracious approach to record collecting to experiments with early tape-recording systems to groundbreaking manipulations of abstraction and collage in film. Smith was an innovator in collecting, organizing, and sequencing images and artifacts that structure the ways we understand and share culture and experiences today. He created a life and practice largely outside of institutions and capitalism, offering an eccentric model for engagement with a society today even further dominated by these systems. 

Vitally, Smith brought to light and wrestled with—sometimes imperfectly—facets of America’s rich histories, tracing and sharing underappreciated veins of culture often invisible to mainstream society. Very much outside of his time, Smith nonetheless created his own rich vein of American culture that says more about this country, its arts, and its diverse creative communities than nearly any other artist of his time. 

The exhibition, designed in partnership with artist Carol Bove, distills his remarkable and varied production into a number of distinct sculptural spaces. Smith’s early hand-painted abstract films, his film of Seminole textiles, and Andy Warhol’s Screen Test of Smith will be presented alongside stills from the liner notes of the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952). The exhibition will zig-zag through displays of Smith’s personal collection of ephemera and archival materials to survey the artist’s life. The artist’s rarely seen film Mahagonny (1970–80) creates a portrait of urban America with a mesmerizing, hectic, and repetitive showcase of four films presented simultaneously while an original score from the Brecht-Weill opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930) plays at high volume. A small black box theater will immerse visitors in Smith’s collage film Heaven and Earth Magic Feature (c. 1957–62). Finally, this exhibition will offer a unique listening environment where visitors can explore the Anthology of American Folk Music. 

And here's key paragraphs from the press release for Szwed's Harry Smith biography: 

He was an anthropologist, filmmaker, painter, folklorist, mystic, and walking encyclopedia. He taught Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe about the occult, swapped drugs with Timothy Leary, had a front-row seat to a young Thelonious Monk, lived with (and tortured) Allen Ginsberg, was admired by Susan Sontag, and was one of the first artists funded by Guggenheim Foundation. He was always broke, generally intoxicated, compulsively irascible, and unimpeachably authentic. Harry Smith was, in the words of Robert Frank, “the only person I met in my life that transcended everything.”

In Cosmic Scholar, the Grammy Award-winning music scholar and celebrated biographer John Szwed patches together, for the first time, the life of one of the twentieth century’s most overlooked cultural figures. From his time recording the customs of Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest and Florida to his life in Greenwich Village in its heyday, Smith was consumed by an unceasing desire to create a unified theory of culture. He was an insatiable creator and collector, responsible for the influential Anthology of American Folk Music and several pioneering experimental films, but was also an insufferable and destructive eccentric who was unable to survive in regular society, or keep himself healthy or sober.

Sasha Frere-Jones reviews the biography at Bookforum

And here's me specifically on Harry Smith's animation: 

 "To be an animator requires a methodical and systematic mind, diligence and meticulous attention to detail, and the patience and sheer stamina to withstand long-haul, labour-intensive  and hideously fiddly work. Harry Smith was unusually endowed with these qualities. Although best known for his work as a collector of obscure folk and blues 78 rpm recordings (resulting in 1952’s epochal and hugely influential six-LP compilation The Anthology of American Folk Music), Smith's true passion was animation. 

"Using various self-developed techniques of hand-painting and marking the film using masking tape,  working with scratch-board drawings, and cut-out images, Smith would spend years holed up in his New York apartment toiling over a single film.  His animations often reached several hours in length and required drastic editing down before he could show them.  Many projects were abandoned in an unfinished state. On their rare public performances, Smith would project the films onto special painted screens of his own construction. Music – usually jazz  – was central to his work, as with the original version of Thelonious Monk’s “Misterioso” that soundtracks “Mirror Animations”.

"Like his hour-long masterpiece “Heaven and Earth Magic”, “Mirror Animations” (1956-57) emerged out of Smith’s obsessive collation of illustrative material from 19^th Century catalogues.  He filed the cut-outs – photographs or drawings of people, animals, vegetables, tools, furniture, and sundry other objects -  in glassine envelopes for protection, while noting on file cards every possible interaction that a given image could have with another image.  Yet, contradicting all this obsessive-compulsive preparation, when it came to the assembly process, Smith aimed for a state of mental vacancy akin to automatic writing. 

"The deliberately stilted movements of the snipped-out images have a quaint and creaky quality that casts back to the magic lanterns of the 17^th Century. Magic of a different kind – not conjuring tricks and illusions, but the occult and hermetic knowledge – suffuses Smith’s work....  No wonder film-maker and critic Jonas Mekas celebrated “the magic cinema of Harry Smith” while avant-jazzman John Zorn hailed him as a “Mystical Animator”."  

                                      

                                     

                Harry Smith contact sheet by Allen Ginsberg

  

                                

4 images from Harry Smith's Objective Studies 

Harry Smith's notes on his work for the Film-Makers Cooperative:

My cinematic excreta is of four varieties: batiked abstractions made directly on film between 1939 and 1946; optically printed non-objective studies composed around 1950; semi-realistic animated collages made as part of my alchemical labors of 1957 to 1962; and chronologically superimposed photographs of actualities formed since the latter year. All these works have been organized in specific patterns derived from the interlocking beats of the respiration, the heart and the EEG Alpha component and should be observed together in order, or not at all, for they are valuable works, works that will live forever—they made me gray.

No. 1: Hand-drawn animation of dirty shapes—the history of the geologic period reduced to orgasm length. (Approx. 5 min.)

No. 2: Batiked animation, etc., etc. The action takes place either inside the sun or in Zurich, Switzerland. (Approx. 10 min.)

No. 3: Batiked animation made of dead squares, the most complex handdrawn film imaginable. (Approx. 10 min.)

No. 4: Black and white abstractions of dots and grillworks made in a single night. (Approx. 6 min.)

No. 5: Color abstraction. Homage to Oscar Fischinger—a sequel to No. 4. (Approx. 6 min.)

No. 6: Three-dimensional, optically printed, abstraction using glasses the color of Heaven & Earth. (Approx. 20 min.)

No. 7: Optically printed Pythagoreanism in four movements supported on squares, circles, grill-works and triangles with an interlude concerning an experiment. (Approx. 15 min.)

No. 8: Black and white collage made up of clippings from 19th-Century ladies’ wear catalogues and elocution books. The cat, the dog, the statue and the Hygrometer appear here for the first time. (Approx. 5 min.)

No. 9: Color collage of biology books and 19th-Century temperance posters. An attempt to reconstruct Capt. Cook’s Tapa collection. (Approx. 10 min.)

No. 10: An exposition of Buddhism and the Kaballa in the form of a collage. The final scene shows Aquaric mushrooms (not in No. 11) growing on the moon while the Hero and Heroine row by on a cerebrum. (Approx. 10 min.)

No. 11: A commentary on and exposition of No. 10 synchronized to Monk’s “Mysterioso.” A famous film. (Approx. 4 min.)

No. 12: A much expanded version of No. 8. The first part depicts the heroine’s toothache consequent to the loss of a very valuable watermelon, her dentistry and transportation to heaven. Next follows an elaborate exposition of the heavenly land in terms of Israel, Montreal and the second part depicts the return to earth from being eaten by Max Müller on the day Edward the Seventh dedicated the Great Sewer of London. (Approx. 50 min.)

No. 13: Fragments and tests of Shamanism in the guise of a children’s story. This film made with van Wolf, is perhaps the most expensive animated film ever made—the cost running well over ten thousand dollars a minute—wide screen, stereophonic sound of the ballet music from Faust. Production was halted when a major investor (H.P.) was found dead under embarrassing conditions. (Approx. 3 hours)

No. 14: Superimposed photography of Mr. Fleischman’s butcher shop in New York, and the Kiowa around Anadarko, Oklahoma—with Cognate Material. The strip is dark at the beginning and end, light in the middle, and is structured 122333221. I honor it the most of my films, otherwise a not very popular one before 1972. If the exciter lamp blows, play Bert Brecht’s Mahagoney. (Approx. 25 min.)

For those who are interested in such things: No. 1 to 5 were made under pot; No. 6 with schmeck (—it made the sun shine) and ups; No. 7 with cocaine and ups; Nos. 8 to 12 with almost anything, but mainly deprivation, and 13 with green pills from Max Jacobson, pink pills from Tim Leary, and vodka; No. 14 with vodka and Italian Swiss white port.*

via P. Adams Sitney's "Animating the Absolute: Harry Smith",  Artforum, 1972 

Václav Mergl - Laokoon (1970) + Crabs (1976)

                                                                        music by Jiří Kolafa

"Astronauts landing on an unknown planet are overcome with greed evoked by all-consuming amoebas transformed into gemstones. The greed kills the entire crew and the amoebas can take over their ship and eventually Earth. Among other techniques, [on Laokoon] Mergl uses animated xylographic illustrations and the film‘s uniqueness is underscored by its soundtrack.

"After a five-year ban imposed on Václav Mergl after Laokoon, the director was allowed to adapt a sci-fi story [Crabs] by Anatoly Dneprov which is warning against the development of intelligent weapon systems. Supplied with enough metal, these systems are able to reproduce out of control. The embossed cut-outs in this film are pasted together in several layers, and the metallic look was created with the tin foil from cigarette packs."  -  from  "Václav Mergl: It’s time to end Disneyism", Anifilm, 2016

related

Mummenschanz

(via Jody Beth LaFosse)

 

Swiss company specializing in visual and object theatre, mask and mime. Mummenschanz was established in 1972 and is based in Altstätten in the Canton of Saint-Gall. It was set up by three actors and mime artists: Andres Bossard and Bernie Schürch, both Swiss, and Floriana Frassetto, an Italian American. Bossard and Schürch were trained at the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris; Frasseto studied at the Roy Bosier School and the Alessandro Fersen International Academy in Rome.

They presented their first show at the Festival of Avignon in 1972. The completely silent puppet production was entitled Mummenschanz, a title derived from the German and Swiss masquerade tradition. This show, the start of their long partnership, was a great success. They moved to the United States in 1977, launched by a theatre critic who was in total admiration of the impossible-to-classify character of their productions, and retained a place of pride on the playbills of the Bijou Theatre on Broadway for the next three years.

     After the death of Andres Bossard in 1992, the company not only continued its work but also enlarged its repertoire when the Danish mime artist, Jakob Bentsen, and the Italian dancer and choreographer, Raffaella Mattioli, joined the troupe. The company travelled widely, playing in Europe, South America and Asia. Their productions without words are a mix of masks, mime, dance and object theatre. The actors are often completely hidden behind the “heads/objects”, or concealed within the “body masks”, over-sized costume puppets made of a coloured foam rubber on a black background. The entire body can actually “inhabit” the costume/mask, which could be a representation, more or less figurative, of a face or of a part of a face. This “live” puppet moves in disconcerting or comical ways that sometimes come within a hair’s breadth of being purely abstract.

In 1988, the troupe established a foundation that allowed it to tap several sources for aid or sponsorship, and also to start puppetry classes and workshops for young people. Among their many productions one must mention Parade (created in 1993 and dedicated to Andres Bossard), Next (1998) and 3 x 11, a retrospective of thirty-three years of creating theatre.

- World Encyclopedia of Puppetry Arts

Kenneth Anger - Eaux D'Artifice (1953)

"When they get around to unpicking the tangled threads that connect The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Psychic TV, somewhere at the web's centre will lurk the tarantula figure of Kenneth Anger. Aleister Crowley fan, ex-chum of Jimmy Page, and chronicler of the psycho-sleaze behind Hollywood's glittering facade, Kenneth Anger is also the maker of a series of films whose themes uncannily prefigure the abiding fixations of leftest-field rock. Pass beyond a certain limit, and you enter a realm where magic and ritual, S&M,Crowley, Manson, Nazism, bodypiercing, tattooing,hallucinogenics, mytho-mania, voodoo dance, all interconnect as facets of the same quest: for the ultimate transgressive,transcendent, self-annihilating mystic HIGH.

"Both "Inauguration Of The Pleasure Dome" (1954) and "Invocation Of My Demon Brother" (1969) are about this search for supreme bacchanalian release. ("Inauguration" was inspired by taking acid, "Invocation" by the counter culture created by acid). Both are a kaleidoscopic montage of images grotesque and bizarre, with all the key Anger motifs (cocks, pagan ritual, bikers, Swastikas, cabbalistic symbols) brought into play. "Inauguration", with its strident Janacek soundtrack and vampily made-up actresses, is simultaneously camp and disturbing; "Invocation", with its maddening moog soundtrack by Mick Jagger, captures the apocalyptic vibe of the bitter end of the hippy daze, and must surely have influenced Nic Roeg's "Performance".

" "Lucifer Rising" (1970-80) shares much the same pre-occupations as the other two films, but expresses them in less histrionic fashion, through images of serene, stately beauty, set to a beatific soundtrack by Bobby Beausoleil (an acolyte of Manson's). "Lucifer Rising" is a rehabilation of Lucifer, reclaiming him as the Light god, a Rebel Angel whose "message is that the key to joy is disobedience". Anger's biker movie, "Scorpio Rising" (1963), on the other hand, is a "death mirror held up to American culture". The biker represents American myths of Lone Ranger individualism and Born To Run freedom, taken to their psychotic limit. "Scorpio Rising" is a giddy miasma of death's-heads, Iron Crosses, cocaine and blasphemy, with Anger salivating over the well-stuffed crotches and leather-clad torsoes of his subjects - and all set to the incongruous soundtrack of Sixties pulp pop!

"Of the five shorter films also included in this series, "Fireworks" (1947) is a blue-tinted homerotic nightmare about being brutalised by sailors (the final image is of a sailor with a Roman Candle jutting out of his zip), while "Eaux D'Artifice" (1953) is a beautiful Midsummer Night's dreamscape, with a full moon suffusing off the cascading, gushing and spurting waters of the Tivoli fountain gardens."

- SR

David Lynch - Six Men Getting Sick (1966)

"Six Men Getting Sick" was Lynch's first exploration into film, made during his second year of study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, in Philadelphia. Lynch describes it as "Fifty-seven seconds of growth and fire, and three seconds of vomit."1 The transition into film came from a desire to make his paintings move. "I was painting very dark paintings. And I saw some little part of this figure moving, and I heard a wind. And I really wanted these things to move and have a sound with them. And so I started making an animated film as a moving painting. And that was it. I wasn't in the film business."2 "I always sort of wanted to do films. Not so much a movie-movie as a film-painting. I wanted the mood of the painting to be expanded through film, sort of a moving painting. It was really the mood I was after. I wanted a sound with it that would be so strange, so beautiful, like if the Mona Lisa opened her mouth and turned, and there would be a wind, and then she'd turn back and smile. It would be strange."3

"Six Men Getting Sick" was the result of Lynch's desire to create a moving film. It featured a animated film of several heads and arms which slowly grew stomachs and caught fire. The film ended with the transformed images vomiting. The film was shot frame by frame with a secondhand 16mm wind-up camera. Lynch built a special rig on top of the projector to allow the film to run in a continuous loop. The film was projected on a sculpture screen created by Lynch and Jack Fisk. It consisted of three plaster casts of Lynch in various poses and another face painted on. The sound was a tape of a siren played continuously.

The entire project cost $200 to do, a lot to Lynch at the time. It was shown at a Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts exhibition in 1966. Ten minutes out of ever hour the lights would be turned off so the film could be seen. The sculpture/film won a shared first place in the second annual Dr. William S. Biddle Cadwalader Memorial Prize. One of the judges on the competition panel was H. Barton Wasserman, who would finance Lynch's next project which became "The Alphabet."

- Lynchnet

 

Takashi Ito - Thunder (1982)

 

Music by Yosuke Inagaki

"Ito Takashi’s second period, which begins with the short film Thunder (1982), adds many of these elements to the experiments of the first: light painting, superimpositions, mystical demons, ghostly voices. Although the number of techniques employed is multiplied, the principle resembles that of his previous films. Thunder is limited to a single space (what seems to be a university building), and a single gesture (the ghostly image of a woman veering and uncovering her face), and through a mathematical and arbitrary series of possibilities the film builds up expectations, disappointing them, bringing them to paroxysm and surprise each time the viewer believes the film has exhausted its systemic possibilities. A gesture of shame, of timidity thus inhabits a building like an monomaniacal ghost projected upon its walls, captured in a photograph, re-animated through stop motion, granted a half-life between the perceptible world and the imagined one.

"Thunder and the other films in this style—Ghost (1984), Grim (1985)—all portray retinal echoes of ghosts and televisions and lights, remnants of abandoned images, accompanied by insidious electronic soundtrack. And the temporal regularity of the stop-motion process in combination with the insistent sound creates a cinematic vortex through the repetition of its mantra-like image and sound.

- Yaron Dahan, Ghosts of Time and Light: The Experimental Cinema of Ito Takashi (a report from the Japanese artist's in-depth profile at the 61st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 2015).

"Ito is one of the leading experimental filmmakers in Japan. He graduated from Art and Technology Department of Kyushu Institute of Design in 1983 during which he made a debut with the film SPACY in 1981 (Inagaki who created sound effects for the film was also a filmmaker and his classmate at the institute). He was rather a premature virtuoso.

"SPACY is consisted of 700 continuous still photographs which are re-photographed frame by frame according to a strict rule where movements go from rectilinear motion to circular and parabola motion, then from horizontal to vertical.

"The technique itself of reconstructing sequential photographs was already seen in the earlier Japanese experimental films during the 70s such as ĀTMAN (1975) by Toshio Matsumoto (he was Ito's teacher at Kyushu Institute of Design) and DUTCH PHOTOS (Orandajin no Shashin,1976) by Isao Kota whose influence is apparent in Ito's works. However, one finds Ito's style more complex and sophisticated, and utterly new.

" For example, in ĀTMAN the subject is a human being disguised with Japanese Noh-mask whereas in SPACY the subject is photograph itself. This, together with the last shot where the camera and the filmmaker (self-portrait) come into the same frame indicates the self-reflexive characteristic of his work. Compared to the two-dimensional "flip-book" style illusion of DUTCH PHOTOS, SPACY has vast spaciousness and dramatic sensation of movement and when it's accompanied by the sound, the film reveals the side of a fantastic film.

""Film is capable of presenting unrealistic world as a vivid reality and creating a strange space peculiar to the media. My major intention is to change the ordinary every day life scenes and draw the audience (myself) into a vortex of supernatural illusion by exercising the magic of films." (Takashi Ito, in Image Forum, Oct.1984)

" We were also enchanted with the fast speed of "automatic" camera as if it was computerized. The ecstasy of auto-machines which move beyond man's logic and sensation. And the filmmaker's desire to "get into" the film instead of possessing it. This ecstasy and the desire are common to all of his films including sequential photograph works as well as his other series such as THUNDER (1982) GHOST (1984) and, GRIM (1985) which are occult experimental "horror" films featuring the technique of bulb shutters and time-lapse photography. In his most recent works THE MOON (1994) and ZONE ( 1995), two styles are integrated under the motif of "dreams and memories".

- Norio Nishiiima, "The Ecstasy of Auto-machines"

More from Ito

"Artists by nature tend to despise their earlier works, not so much because they fail, but because these films, like adolescent loves, tend to reveal their motivations too plainly. Ito Takashi’s three earliest works shown in this retrospective—Noh (1977), Movement 2 (1979), and Movement 3 (1980)—are no exception. These early experiments reveal a desire to dissect time and space into their most basic cinematic unit—the frame—recomposing their space-time into the artifice of motion: the facets of a Noh mask, the spaces of temples, the distances between shrines…

"As these initial experiments develop, Ito Takashi’s films grow in complexity. This first architectural stage of film experiments comes to a head in Spacy (1981): the camera is placed in the center of a basketball court and progresses through its space-time at first along the four walls, the four cardinal directions of its axis. Near each wall stands an easel, and upon the easel is an animated image of the same basketball court through which the camera slides. Ito Takashi’s camera travels time and again through the reflexive image of itself through the sealed cinematic continuum, accompanied by the electronic spasms of a synth soundtrack. As the camera travels from screen to screen, from wall to wall, each moving image functions both as a screen and a portal. Ito’s animatronic camera animates the basketball court into jittery stop-motion impulses traveling joyous and playful across the court from image to image creating motion though photographic stillness.

"Play is the exact word to define Ito Takashi’s game on the court, for as in every game, this film posits its arbitrary constraints (the limited space of the basketball court, right angle turns, animated stop motions in black and white). Ito Takashi’s game begins following the filmic rules, before evolving quickly into one of inventiveness and surprise. The camera moves along invisible geometric patterns (not unlike the lines which define the game of basketball), and the spectacle of space is reinvented.

"Once these cinematic-temporal playgrounds are constructed, Ito begins to haunt them with phantom females, child-demons, light-ghosts, and plaster-mannequins. Bodies inhabit these re-constructed space-times, moving within them in skittish stop-motion spasms; animated dolls with blurry faces and limbs akimbo marking their presence as retinal imprints or analog superpositions. Throughout the rest of his oeuvre Ito returns to his animated iteration and variation in space-time as the foundation for his later experimentation, which grows in both breadth and complexity: adding variations first of rhythm and angle, then color, then frame size or shape, then adding characters and symbols, and finally dramaturgical elements woven into the formalist experiments. As his films develop, bodies find their ways into the frame, as do television screens, photographs, lights, hands, flowers always pushing Ito Takashi’s experiments into unexplored areas, however always motivated by the same obsessions.

- Yaron Dahan, Ghosts of Time and Light: The Experimental Cinema of Ito Takashi (a report from the Japanese artist's in-depth profile at the 61st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 2015).

x

Pramod Pati - Abid (1970)

In the mid-1950s, Pramod Pati left India for Czechoslovakia to study puppet animation under the tutelage of Jiří Trnka. He returned to head the animations division of the state-run Films Division in Mumbai.  During his brilliant but tragically brief career, Pati made a bunch of innovative educational films, documentaries, and animations characterized by rapid editing and inventively rhythmic use of sound. Titled after its subject and sole character, the artist Abid Surti, the pixilation piece “ABID” (1970) is five minutes of kooky delirium sound-tracked by the percussive psychedelia of Vijay Raghav Bao.

 

The idea came to Pati after reading a magazine story about Surti’s single-room apartment-cum-studio, which he had turned into a unified artwork – painting not just the walls and ceiling, but the furniture, the overhead fan, and everything right down to the smallest utensil. This “experiment of living within a painting”, recalled Surti, treated “that whole space... like a canvas”. Visiting an exhibition of Surti’s collages made using broken mirrors, Pati approached the artist and proposed the idea of a film inspired by his work.

 

The pair embarked on a 20-day shoot that recreated Surti’s apartment in the Films Division studio. The plotline follows the life-arc of an artist, who emerges magically from the floor (birth) and then returns there (death) after a manic burst of hyper-active creativity that fills the cramped space with a dizzying number of canvases.  Surti recalled Pati as “a giant of a worker... he used to work about 19-20 hours a day while we shooting it... He was completely committed.”  Sadly, Pati died in 1975 at the age of 43. 

- SR

 

More Pramod Pati films can be found here - which is where the text below is taken from:

Pramod Pati was born in Odisha in 1932 and studied there and Bangalore and worked for a few years in the Odisha state government. He was awarded a scholarship to study in Czechoslovakia under the legendary puppet-maker, illustrator, motion-picture animator and film director Jiri Trinka.

Emboldened by this experience and a growing artist-driven milieu at the Film Division, he joined the Films Division and put his ideas into practice. While previous Films Division documentaries were narrative-driven and didactic, Pati infused his films  with non-narratives storytelling techniques and a broad range of influences from both India and the West.

The Films Division of India was started by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in the late 1940s. Nehru’s guiding vision in launching it was for it to document the new socialist and scientific India that his government was building.  The style of these initial films was of the straight documentary with an obvious message.  In the 1960s and 1970s, the Films Divisions’s output moved in a more experimental, artistic direction.  At the forefront of this shift was Pramod Pati.

A BRIEF FILMOGRAPHY

The selections below eschew traditional storytelling techniques and represent a breakthrough in independent Indian cinema. 

Experimental Work

“Explorer” (1968) is a series of jump cuts juxtaposing abstract imagery, religious ceremonies, and traditional iconography set against a soundtrack of cut and pasted excerpts of classical Indian music, found sound, and sound effects. The result is a dizzying exploration of different methods of acquiring knowledge. 

The style shows the influence of the Western psychedelica and growing subversiveness (notice the “fuck censorship” snuck in) while trying to connect these “new” trends with Indian tradition. Similar techniques are utilized in “Abid'' and the other selections below.  Arguably the “trippiest” aspects are inherent within Indian life itself and Pati used these avant-garde techniques to bring these elements to the foreground.

Explorer (1968)

“In the late 60s, Indira Gandhi appointed this producer Nagary to head Films Division, and he was critical of that kind of straight documentary filmmaking. He felt the country needed more film artists so he created an atmosphere at Films Division where people could experiment. They started doing found-footage stuff, crazy animation, some radical montage work. . . . He orchestrated for [Indian] filmmakers to train with Czechoslovakian filmmakers [who were doing more avant-garde work at the time]—like, this one guy, Pramod Pati, trained with the great animator Jiri Trnka. And Pati is one of the leading pioneers, in my book.” - Shai Heredia (Source)

Abid (1972) A short showcasing the artist Abid Surti

“He imbues these films with a deep sense of rhythm with his editing technique and sound. In those days, there were no sound designers like today. Pati conceived sound design in a unique manner, the only other example that I find in this realm is Ritwik Ghatak.” - Amrit Gangar (Source)

Trip (1970)

Claxplosion (1968)

Educational Work

These films represent a continuation of the traditional purpose of the Films Division to inform and educate a newly independent nation.  Although seemingly more staid than his overtly experimental works, the subtle introduction of contemporary animation techniques to what was usually a banal presentation of facts, figures, and instructions, does produce a certain delight.

This Our India (1961)

“In the early 1960s there was a little-known man in Films Division [Government of India’s film-production house] called Promod Pati, who defied the prevalent principles, norms and laws of establishment and let loose a burst of madness on the screen. The results were varied but I was fascinated by the youthfulness and verve of the filmmaker and by the fair amount of gay abandon that he seemed to display.” -Mrinal Sen (in Montage: Life, Politics, Cinema, p.5).

Hamara Rashtragan (1964)

The avant-garde turn at the Films Division has its fair share of critics, too, with some, such as the writer and filmmaker, K.A. Abbas, decrying that the “waste of public money” that were the films of Pati’s and other experimentalists. (Source)

Wives and Wives (1962)

A Fable Retold (1965)

“Unlike a cartoon film, which is a rapidly moving series of photographed drawings, in pixilation, a moving object is shot frame by frame, and then through clever editing made to appear in motion. By its nature, this movement is agile, energetic and unpredictable just like the pop art movement.” - Pramod Pati

Mansube Machilidhar (1963)

Pramod Pati died from cancer at the age of 43 in 1975.

Alwin Nikolais - Crucible (1985)

 

"The dancers' limbs appear and disappear behind a mirror and are lit by different effects: colours and slide projection. The soundtrack, made up of sound effects, and the reflections of the bodies in the mirror, create the illusion. Fingers appear, followed by hands, then forearms, lit by a red light, giving free rein to our imagination. The world that we are offered evolves over the course of the extract through different rhythms, the use of different parts of the body, changes of colour, projection of patterns, but also variations in the soundtrack. At no time are we allowed to see the dancers in their entirety. Later, it is the turn of the lower limbs, legs lit by projected zebra patterns which transport us into a whole new world."

- Numeridanse

One of the great modernist choreographers of the 20th Century, Alwin Nikolais used light design, costume, make-up, electronic sound and the moving human form to create enthralling spectacles that hovered somewhere in-between ballet, kinetic sculpture, avant-garde fashion, and ritual ceremonies from the far future or from some alien civilisation.

"It is impossible for me to be a purist; my loves are too various for that," Nikolais wrote in 1966. "I look upon this polygamy of motion, shape, color and sound as the basis of the theater." The multi-sensory impact of his work is conveyed in titles like “Fetish (ritual of shadows and blades of light),” “Prismatic Forest (maze of colored bars before infinite vista)”and “Glymistry (parts of people and things illuminated in glows of colored light).”

Born in Connecticut in 1910, Nikolais pioneered the use of side-lighting in ballet, as opposed to the traditional way of illuminating from above. He deployed “shinbusters” to bounce light off the performers’s bizarrely costumed bodies, pushing the spectacle towards abstraction. Some of his pieces involved dancers carrying flashlights or little lanterns, or wearing internally-lit tubes that sheathed the dancer’s arms and legs.

As well as inventive light-design, Nikolais devised the sci-fi garments, masks, wigs, and head-bands that his dancers wore, some of which anticipate Bowie’s more outlandish costumes of the early Seventies. If that wasn’t enough, Nikolas also composed his own music, using tape-editing and a variety of sound “conditioning” techniques to transform percussion and other acoustic instruments. Later, he would be an early adopter of the Moog synthesiser.

Webbing a troupe of dancers within a cat’s cradle of elasticated ribbons, “Tensile Involvement” (1953) is probably Nikolais’s most famous piece and can be seen in recreated form as the opening credit sequence to Robert Altman’s 2002 ballet film The Company. Also created in 1953 but here performed in 1993 as part of a posthumous Nikolais retrospective, “Noumenon” is less kinetic than “Tensile Involvement” but even more disorienting. The dancers are completely encased in a cocoon of Lycra fabric, which kinks and ripples as they gyrate and contort sightlessly within. The human body becomes a generator of planes and folds of abstract texture. The title “Noumenon”, incidentally, comes from philosophy and refers to objects that reason can conceive but which are not knowable by the senses.

This excerpt from “Noumenon” belongs to a longer survey of Nikolais’s oeuvre that can be found on YouTube. As for his music, look out for Choreosonic Music of the New Dance Theatre of Alwin Nikolais, originally released in 1959 but reissued a few years ago on the Cacophonic imprint. A 1993 collection of Nikolais’s later purely electronic and digital scores can be found on streamers like Tidal and Spotify. 

There is an extensive tradition of experimental composers who worked closely with avant-garde choreographers, from John Cage’s partnership with Merce Cunningham to musique concrete visionary Pierre Henry’s collaborations with Maurice Béjart. But Nikolais appears to be unique in creating his own electronic scores. Before moving into the dance field, he worked as a musician, providing keyboard accompaniment to silent movies. When he started to create his own dance pieces, Nikolais recorded his own scores, always creating the sounds after the choreography was written, as a series of “motion-cues” timed for short sequences of dancing. Sound generated from acoustic instruments or from materials and objects (“tubes, pipes, pieces of wood, aluminum, steel and tin containers, glasses, elastic bands, coils of wire”, according to the Choresonic liner note) were subjected to various processes using the tape recorder: “speeded up or slowed down, interrupted, ‘pulsed’, reverberated, reversed [and] superimposed.” Just as his choreography, costumes and lighting worked to break up the human form into abstract motion-shapes, Nikolais was keen to avoid the “identification of sound sources” and strove to encourage listeners to hear “the sound itself divorced from its initial derivation.”

A true polymath seeking to create total art experiences, Nikolais was – as Jack Anderson wrote in his 1993 New York Times obituary – “not merely a choreographer” but also “a wizard… a prophet, and a wonderful entertainer.”

— SR

Ed Emshwiller - Film With Three Dancers - 1970

"A cine-dance film featuring the dancers Carolyn Carlson, Emery Hermans and Bob Beswick. The trio, first in leotards, then in blue jeans, then naked, pass through rituals of movement. They are shown in stylized, "naturalistic" and abstract images accompanied by stylized, naturalistic and abstract sounds. A series of ways of seeing the dancers. "Best (underground) picture of the year."

- Camille J. Cook, Chicago Sunday Sun-Times

" ....Ed Emshwiller worked in his second-floor home studio, painting illustrations for the covers of sci-fi magazines, including Galaxy, Infinity, and Astounding Science Fiction, and cheap novels by Philip K. Dick, Leigh Brackett, and Samuel R. Delaney...  He won five Hugo Awards. He supported his growing family. Some months, his illustrations accounted for a third of all those published in the sci-fi pulps. He drew aliens on other planets, spacemen in cockpits zipping through the cosmos, and rats controlling men’s brains.... "By the 1960s, Emshwiller, like Andy Warhol, had turned from commercial illustration to 16-mm filmmaking, blacking out the windows in his studio so he could make movies, Factory style, in Levittown. His singular body of work experimented with form, dance, narrative, and social psychology; he mixed them together, sometimes uneasily... Self-taught, he first experimented by photographing close-ups of paint, rewinding the film in the camera, then filming dancers so they would move around the brushstrokes. He debuted Dance Chromatic in 1959 at Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16 in Manhattan and promptly won an award. Soon he was part of the New York avant-garde.... 

"Emshwiller was as prolific a filmmaker as he was an illustrator, working on more than seven dozen films and videos in his lifetime. He also became a cinematographer, shooting Jonas Mekas’s The Brig (1964) and several documentaries. He shot black-voter-registration drives in Mississippi, cinema vérité style, and Resnais-like hallways filled with banks of data-crunching computers for a PBS film on mind control. He worked for the United States Information Agency as a director-cinematographer and made Project Apollo in 1968, a stunningly original spaceflight film. Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick both came to visit him in Levittown. It seems like they were the only filmmakers he ever turned down. While he was a dean at CalArts in the 1970s, he worked on primitive computer animations with Alvy Ray Smith, one of the guys who would go on to start Pixar.

"“It’s Emshwiller’s body that is vomiting out its existential memories and suspicions,” Jonas Mekas wrote in the Village Voice in 1970. Emshwiller’s busyness, his constant Brownian motion, takes away from his most lasting achievement as a film artist. Post–Maya Deren and pre–Yvonne Rainer, he is the best director of dance films in experimental and expanded cinema. The two dozen or so he made, including Chrysalis (1973) and Film with Three Dancers (1970), surpass his earlier, knottier film work with an otherworldly beauty absent from death-haunted cascades of images like Thanatopsis (1962) and Relativity (1966).

"His dance films take place “in space”; Film with Three Dancers features Creation of the Humanoids–esque performers in monochrome leotards and silver bathing caps who are lit with colored lights similar to those in Italian space flicks and horror movies. Made with the Alwin Nikolais Dance Company and often featuring the choreographer-dancer Carolyn Carlson, three movement studies connect Emshwiller’s view of natural landscapes and space flight to the human body. In other videos, like Scape-Mates (1972) and Pilobolus and Joan (1973), which was written by Carol, Emshwiller took dance from his homemade stage into the laboratory, where the real world met a virtual one inside his computer.

"In the latter film, members of the dance troupe Pilobolus crawl in centipede-like formation against a chroma-key backdrop of the twin towers, serenaded at times by a folk singer. In the former, dance figures blip out of colorful grids and blocks. Both films are trippy, complex, and not a little nuts. A final work, Hungers (1988), an avant-garde space opera worthy of Sun Ra, with music by Morton Subotnick sung on-screen by Joan La Barbara, expresses the human soul flying free from corporeality, free from Levittown and any known planet. "

- A.S. Hamrah, Artforum

 "Throughout Emshwiller’s film and video work, illustrations, paintings, works on paper, and sculptures (painted neckties!), there is a sort of deeply compelling mania, as if he could not possibly record everything he felt compelled to in the mediums available to him and in the timespan of a life. In remarks that followed the opening screening of “Dream Dance,” Emshwiller’s daughter Susan recalled her father’s monomaniacal documentation of their shared everyday life, an object of her teenage frustration. When asked by an audience member what, of his sprawling body of work, Emshwiller was most proud of, Susan replied without hesitation, “Whatever he was working on at that moment.” ' -  Heather Holmes, Art in America

I think this Pulp video for "The Trees" owes something to  "Film with Three Dancers". 

More Emshwiller genius