Animation of the Analogue Era - Cel, Cut Out, Stop Motion, Puppet, Pixilation, Cameraless, Sand, Pinscreen... Plus Experimental Films + TV, plus Assorted Visual Weirdness.
"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."
"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".
"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).
