RIP Lillian F. Schwartz (1927 - 2024)

 

"Resident artist and consultant at Bell Laboratories (New Jersey)....  during the 70s and 80s Schwartz developed a catalogue of visionary techniques for the use of the computer system by artists. Her formal explorations in abstract animation involved the marriage of film, computers and music in collaboration with such luminaries as computer musicians Jean-Claude Risset, Max Mathews, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Milton Babbit, and Richard Moore. 

".... Lumen has collaborated with Lillian Schwartz and curator Gregory Kurcewicz to compile a touring package of these important works. “A Beautiful Virus Inside the Machine” features animations restored to video. “The Artist and the Computer”, 1976, 10 mins is a documentary about her work. Produced by Larry Keating for AT&T, “The Artist and the Computer is an excellent introductory informational film that dispels some of the ‘mystery’ of computer-art technology, as it clarifies the necessary human input of integrity, artistic sensibilities, and aesthetics. Ms. Schwartz’s voice over narration explains what she hoped to accomplish in the excerpts from a number of her films and gives insight into the artist’s problems and decisions.” 

– John Canemaker

"To create Pixillation, Schwartz wrote lines of code to create a black and white texture, which she overlaid with hand-colored animation. The artist edited the film so the color of the digital and analog shapes contrast and match in varying frames, creating a shifting effect.

The soundtrack, written and performed by Gershon Kingsley on a Moog synthesizer, increases in tempo as the film cuts from digital to analog imagery at a faster pace, building a sense of urgency.

The saturated colors, complex rhythm, and geometric shapes of Pixillation, Schwartz’s film featuring digitally produced images, went on to define the look and feel of 1970s computer art.

- Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts.

“The changing dots, ectoplasmic shapes and electronic music of L. Schwartz’s ‘Mutations’ which has been shot with the aid of computers and lasers (worked with Don White, Bell Laboratories, to create laser images), makes for an eye-catching view of the potentials of the new techniques.” – A. H. Weiler, N. Y. Times. Music by Jean-Claude Risset–commissioned by Office de Radiodiffusion-Television Francaise. Golden Eagle-Cine 1973; Red Ribbon award – Special Effects – National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences; Cannes Film Festival, 1974. Recent screening at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 10, 2012. shown at festiva musica acoustica. Mutations exhibited in a concert of works by Jean-Claude Risset. Oct 2013

"Music by Emmanuel Ghent. “UFOs proves that computer animation–once a rickety and gimmicky device–is now progressing to the state of an art. The complexity of design and movement, the speed and rhythm, the richness of form and motion, coupled with stroboscopic effects is unsettling. Even more ominously, while design and action are programmed by humans, the ‘result’ in any particular sequence is neither entirely predictable … being created at a rate faster and in concatenations more complex than eye and mind can follow or initiate.” – Amos Vogel, Village Voice. Awards: Ann Arbor-1971; International award-Oberhausen, 1972; 2nd Los Angeles International Film Festival; Museum of Modern Art collection; Commissioned by AT&T. Recent screening at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 10, 2012.- Study in motion based on Muybridge’s photographs of man-running. “Figures of computer stylized athletes are seen in brilliant hues chasing each other across the screen. Images are then reversed and run across the screen in the other direction; then images are flopped until athletes are running in countless ways … not unlike a pack of humanity on a football field.” Bob Lehmann, Today’s Film-maker magazine. Lincoln Center Animation Festival of the 5th New York Film Festival. Recent screening at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 10, 2012.

METAMORPHOSIS

Music Symphony in D Major by Salieri. “As expert hands in the complex techniques of integrating the computer and animation, L. Schwartz and Ken Knowlton make fascinating use of exotic, flowing forms, colors and electronic music in ‘Metamorphosis’.” – A. H. Weiler, N. Y. Times. “Schwartz’ METAMORPHOSIS is a complex study of evolving lines, planes, and circles, all moving at different speeds, and resulting in subtle color changes. The only computer-generated work on the program, it transcends what many of us have come to expect of such film with its subtle variations and significant use of color.” – Catherine Egan, Sight Lines, Vol. 8, No. 4, Summer 1975. Sinking Creek-1974; 1975 American Film Festival “Film as Art”. A three screen production.

“Apotheosis, which is developed from images made in the radiation treatment of human cancer, is the most beautiful and the most subtly textured work in computer animation I have seen.” – Roger Greenspun, N. Y. Times. Film created by Lillian F. Schwartz. Computer data supplied by David Sterling. Music by F. Richard Moore. Award Foothills-1973. Recent screening at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 10, 2012.

“Lines and rectangles are the geometric shapes basic to ENIGMA, a computer graphics film full of subliminal and persistent image effects. In a staccato rhythm, the film builds to a climax by instantly replacing one set of shapes with another, each set either changing in composition and color or remaining for a moment to vibrate strobiscopically and then change.” – The Booklist. Awards: Foothills-1972; Kenyon-1973; 16 mm. de Montreal; 5th Annual Monterey Film Festival; 2nd Los Angeles International Film Festival; Nat. Acad. of TV Arts & Sciences; Spec. Effect (72). Recent screening at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 10, 2012.

Olympiad - Study in motion based on Muybridge’s photographs of man-running. “Figures of computer stylized athletes are seen in brilliant hues chasing each other across the screen. Images are then reversed and run across the screen in the other direction; then images are flopped until athletes are running in countless ways … not unlike a pack of humanity on a football field.” Bob Lehmann, Today’s Film-maker magazine. Lincoln Center Animation Festival of the 5th New York Film Festival. Recent screening at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, December 10, 2012.

all blurbs from Lillian F. Schwartz website 

More Lillian F. Schwarz films here

Józef Robakowski - Prostokąt dynamiczny / Dynamic Rectangle - 1971)

                                                    Muzyka: Eugeniusz Rudnik

                                                    Józef Robakowski

"An integral part of Robakowski's work are his statements and self-commentaries, as well as numerous programming texts and manifestoes, e.g. Calling Once Again for 'Pure Film' (1971), Video Art - a Chance to Approach Reality (1976), or Manipulating! (1988).

"Robakowski made his first experimental film in 1962, 6,000,000, a compilation of fragments of Holocaust-era documentaries. Photographic activity dominated the early period of his practice, also as part of the collective Zero-61..... According to Robakowski, the group drew inspiration from the "tradition of metaphorical montage known from interwar painting, photography, and avant-garde cinema." During that time, besides various photographic experiments (e.g. Photo-Painting, 1958-1967; double-exposure photographs employing mirror-image composition), Robakowski made photo-objects, such as Colander (1960), the photograph of a colander nailed to a plank. 

"One of Zero-61's most important presentations was an independent exhibition at a deserted smithy in 1969, where instead of photographs the viewer encountered 'objects for photographing'. 

"Between 1965-1967, Robakowski was also active on the collective Grupa Krąg, which brought together visual artists, filmmakers, poets, sculptors, and photographers. The artist remembered: These exhibitions were like quasi-theatrical happenings, with all kinds of actions, 'tricks', transforming exhibition presentations into spectacles (...) I was closest to a simulated character that didn't really exist, and its name was Józef Korbiela. Józef Robakowski 

"The smithy exhibition took place at a time when Robakowski was already studying in Łódź. There, in 1970, the Workshop of Film Form (Warsztat Formy Filmowej) was founded, initially within the framework of the Student Science Club of the National Film School in Łódź, active through around 1977. The Workshop's practice, focuses on an analysis of the new media language (photography, film, video), drew its inspirations from the constructivist tradition and conceptualism, striving to get film rid of 'alien elements' (anecdote, literary forms, narration) and make its language simpler and information denser. The artist's analytical position at the time was also manifested in his interest in the peculiarities of human perception towards the still cameras and film cameras, in questions about these tools as extensions of the human organism's mental and physiological functions. 

"During this time, from 1974, Robakowski also embraced a new medium - video. The move away from the traditional forms of filmic narration often went hand in hand with a rejection of the representational function. The non-camera film Test II (1971) is among the most radical statements against the narrativity and illusiveness of the traditional filmic message, made by puncturing a dark film tape, as a result of which the viewer was 'attacked' by a strong beam of projector light, producing the effect of afterimage. During a festival in Knokke-Heist in Belgium in 1971, Robakowski enhanced the effect by using a mirror to reflect the projector light towards the audience (Test I). 

"Light also played an important role in many of the artist's later works, such as 1, 2, 3, 4... (1992), or Attention: Light! (2004), made in collaboration with Wiesław Michalak, with a score by composer Paul Sharits, and music by Fryderyk Chopin. In the 1971 manifesto Calling Once Again for 'Pure Film', the artist wrote, Currently the subject of my work is eliminating from film elements characteristic for literature. I am aware that such a conception constrains my freedom of action, raises artificial barriers, and leads me to the peripheries of the genre. I believe however, or rather, am convinced, that through various kinds of experiments, trials, propositions, I will succeed in freeing film from the ballast of habits adopted from literature, uncritically accepted almost universally by both filmmakers and viewers. The question the Workshop of Film Form artists were asking was therefore one about whether there exists a language appropriate for the film medium. 

"The first piece made as part of WFF was Robakowski's Market Square (1970), an animated film compiled with still images of the Łódź market square, Czerwony Rynek, made every five seconds on a single day between 7 am and 4 p.m. In the film, that time was compressed to five minutes. 

"An important aspect of Robakowski's WFF work were experiments with image and sound - an extra soundtrack, asynchronicity of sound and image, or their mutual relation. The artist experimented with them in Próba II (1971), juxtaposing intense red colour with classic organ music. 

"In Dynamic Rectangle (1971), Robakowski manually shaped a rectangle to music by Eugeniusz Rudnik. The issue of the relation between sound and image returned frequently in the artist's oeuvre, including the films Videosongs (1992) and Videokisses (1992). Józef Robakowski’s Own Cinema at CSW - Image Gallery 1 / 13 

"Since 1978 Robakowski has run Exchange Gallery (Galeria Wymiany), a private gallery of recent art featuring leaflets, films, videos, objects, photographs, books, posters, documentations, and all kinds of publications, both the artist's own and donated by other artists. The guiding idea of Exchange Gallery is to 'exchange artistic ideas, cause ferment, and stimulate creative initiatives'. 

"In 1987, Robakowski photographed himself - or, rather, his chest - with objects from the collection, creating the Fetishes series. Exchange Gallery was also responsible for initiating a number of important artistic initiatives - exhibitions, symposiums, publications, particularly in the 1980s.....

"Since the 1970s, an important role has been played in Robakowski's art by his concept of art as a field of energy transmissions. Hence he has focused in many of his works, which are often biological-mechanical recordings, on issues such as vitality or energy resulting from the contact with a tool. The film are often an effect of an encounter between the mechanical camera and the human body, a confrontation between man and medium

""I want to tell you all that art is energy", Robakowski says, jumping out of water in his Energy Manifesto (2003), as if paraphrasing and referring to a conception by Andrzej Pawłowski, who claimed that "art is an energy field". 

"Robakowski wrote in 1977, For many years I have been studying the relationship between my psychophysical organism and the devices I make mechanical recordings with (film camera, still camera, video camera, tape recorder). These studies have resulted in a sense that technological inventions are of fundamental significance, because they make it possible to convey my psychophysical states, my temperament and consciousness, to tape. 

"The best example of this may be the film Walking, made during the Workshop of Film Form period (1973), recording the artist's climb up the stairs of a parachute tower. In the single-sequence film, growing increasingly tired, he counts off steps from one to two hundred. 

"In 1975, Robakowski started a series of works called Energetic Angles, which, as he says, reflect my fascination with the problem of the existence of 'Angles' as a kind of intuitive geometry. (...) I've been wondering to what extent geometry, whose goals are intended to be purely practical, can function in art. For the problem to gain significance, I've decided to establish the Angles as an energetic culture sign in the form of a personal fetish. 

"Energy fields have also been realised in Robakowski's art in other ways. In the 1980s, he made films based on recordings of rock concerts, especially his favourite band, the punk group Moskwa. In 1989, in the film My Videomasochisms, he mocked self-mutilating tactics of performance artists: during a for-camera performance, he manipulated various tools next to his face, inflicting a kind of torture on himself. 

"In 1996, in a TV studio, he carried out a happening, broadcast live, during which he was connected to electricity, asking viewers to increase the voltage (I Am Electric). Most recently, in 2008, the artist introduced, as Energy Manifesto, the vastness of the Niagara Falls in the space of Galeria Atlas Sztuki in Łódź. The artist said in an interview given prior to the exhibition's opening, "This is to be a laboratory-like, artificial situation, but favourable for the person willing to spend time in it. The viewer's contemplative bliss, despite the powerful audiovisual energy, is to be guaranteed by a stylistic figure I call monotony". 

"In the early 1980s, Robakowski introduced yet another term explaining his practice - 'personal cinema', that is, one based on the observation of one's immediate surroundings as well as 'self-observation'. He wrote in 1981, "So let's keep filming everything, and it will turn out we're always filming ourselves. Such a filmed and filming individual lives fully only on screen and while his physique is similar to yours, his character and personality are different. It is extremely interesting that you can polemicise with yourself via the screen. So keep filming and keep looking closely and critically with a sense that you on screen are more wonderful than in nature, because you are better able to remember the past. Finally, take into account the fact that your memory often becomes the viewer's memory." 

"At the time when Robakowski wrote these words, he had already begun shooting footage for From My Window (1978-1999), a collection of camera observations of the courtyard of the artist's tenement in a part of Łódź known as Manhattan, recording the residents and the changes occurring in the space over the years. The film ends with images of the construction of a hotel that is to ultimately obscure the view from Robakowski's window. The moving video About Fingers (1982) is, in turn, a kind of biography, told for each finger separately (with the characteristic independent narrator from Robakowski's works delivering a background monologue), and at the same time, a 'self-observation document', revealing the private and subjective. Patricia Grzonka notes that, given the piece's historical context and the artist's personal situation at the time - he had just been fired from his teaching position - About Fingers "can also be interpreted as a metaphor of the political situation of the era, a manifesto of the artist's withdrawal at a time of his exclusion from public life". 

"Of similarly private nature was My Theatre (1985), enacted for the camera by the artist's hands and fingers, again accompanied by an off-screen monologue..... 

 https://culture.pl/en/artist/jozef-robakowski

Eugeniusz Rudnik

RIP Keiichi Tanaami

"If you want to see the West as you’ve never seen it before, go to Japan. Since the end of the Second World War, there have been few big Western phenomena in which Japanese creators have not taken an interest, then turned around and made their own. One of the most powerful imaginations among those creators belongs to Keiichi Tanaami, who came of age surrounded by the likes of Mickey Mouse and Elvis after doing much of his growing up amid the chaos and devastation of war. Born in 1936... he’s produced a body of work whose earliest pieces go back to the 1950s, and even the variety of media he’s used — illustration, graphic design, paintings, comics, animation — can barely contain his ever-expanding vision, a mixture of pop culture and and symbolic iconography drawn from America, Japan, and deep down in his own psyche.

“A magazine that is packed to the brim with human interests and desires bears a strong resemblance to who I am as a person,” Tanaami once wrote, a description reflected by his current work as well as that of previous eras.,..

In 1971’s Good-Bye Marilyn, Tanaami pays tribute to perhaps the most iconic woman America has ever produced; that same year’s Good-Bye Elvis and USA draws its inspiration from quite possibly America’s most iconic man. Tanami makes use of the imagery of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley in a way no other artist has, though he was hardly alone in his fascination with the very fascination those figures commanded: Andy Warhol, for instance, also got artistic mileage out of them.

It was Warhol who showed Tanaami how artists of their sensibility could make a career. Tanaami first saw Warhol’s work on a trip to New York City in 1967. “Warhol was in the process of shifting from commercial illustrator to artist, and I both witnessed and experienced firsthand his tactics, his method of incision into the art world,” Tanaami once recalled. “He used contemporary icons as motifs in his works and for his other activities put together media such as films, newspapers and rock bands.” In 1975, after becoming the first art director of the Japanese edition of Playboy, he returned to New York to visit the magazine’s head office and took a side trip to Warhol’s Factory and took in what Warhol and his collaborators had been up to with experimental film. But Tanaami had already been making serious inroads into that field himself, as evidenced by the two aforementioned shorts as well as his 1973 animation of John Lennon’s “Oh, Yoko!” — a kind of early music video — up top.

Few artists of any nationality have hybridized the thoroughly commercial and the deeply personal as Tanaami, who got his start in advertising and not long thereafter was designing the covers for Japanese editions of albums by Jefferson Airplane and The Monkees..... Tanaami’s 2013 animation Adventures in Beauty Wonderland above shows how that integration has continued, taking as it does just as much from traditional Japanese symbols and design motifs as it does from the work of Lewis Carroll — a characteristically thrilling and elaborate aesthetic journey....

- Colin Marshall, Animation Art / Open Culture 

More of Tanaami's films at Ubuweb

https://www.ubu.com/media/video/Tanaami-Keiichi_Bride-Bachelors_1975.m4v

https://www.ubu.com/film/tanaami_crayon.html

John Coulhart at Feuilleton on Tanaami's record covers

Osamu Tezuka - "Memory" / 手塚 治虫 - めもりい (1964)

"An experimental animation created by Osamu Tezuka to explore the possibilities of expression.
An animation that expresses the uncertainty of memories by combining photos and using pictures that emphasize deformation" - unknown.

(Turns out I have posted this before, and forgotten - a wry inadvertent comment on the fragile unreliability of memory  in itself)

 

"An extremely witty and imaginative boy, he grew up in a liberal family exposed to manga and animation.

As a boy he also had a love for insects reminiscent of Fabre, and, reflecting the level of his interest in the insect world, later incorporated the ideogram for "insect" into his pen name.

Having developed an intense understanding of the preciousness of life from his wartime experience, Tezuka Osamu aimed to become a physician and later earned his license, but ultimately chose the profession he loved best: manga artist and animated film writer.

Tezuka Osamu's manga and animated films had a tremendous impact on the shaping of the psychology of Japan's postwar youth. His work changed the concept of the Japanese cartoon, transforming it into an irresistible art form and incorporating a variety of new styles in creating the "story cartoon." Changing the face of literature and movies, his work also influenced a range of other genres.

His impact on animated film was equal to that which he had on the manga world. The lovable characters appearing in works such as Japan's first animated TV series "ASTRO BOY," the color animated TV series "Jungle Emperor Leo", and the two-hour animated special "Bander Book," captured the hearts of the Japanese through the medium of television, propelling the animated film to tremendous popularity in Japanese general society.

Tezuka Osamu's work was exported to the U.S., Europe, and other Asian countries, becoming the stuff of dreams for children around the world. He also ventured into the world of full-length adult animation, exploring all possibilities of the field of animation.

In addition to his record of achievement in TV and commercial animation, he also received international acclaim for his work in experimental animation in his later years.

His enduring theme that of the preciousness of life, formed the crux of all of Tezuka Osamu's works. Tezuka Osamu, creator of a great cultural asset and gifted with an unbeatable pioneering spirit combined with an enduring passion for his work and a consistent view to the future, lived out his entire life tirelessly pursuing his efforts, passing away at the age of 60 on February 9th, 1989."

https://tezukaosamu.net/en/about/

Most famous for Astro Boy probably 

With great Matsuo Ohno soundtrackism as Creeled here

With great music and sound FX as Creeled here

After watching a bunch of his stuff you detect certain ah kinks - a clownish lechery - a forthright Russ Meyer-ish love of the female form 

Danny Breaks - "Voyage" - 2000

 

Animation appears to be the work of Brainfoodmedia

Oskar Schlemmer - Triadisches Ballett (1912 / 1922 / 1968)

"... while still remembered as a Bauhaus designer, painter and teacher, Oskar Schlemmer’s contribution to dance gets little more than a passing reference. With one exception. His designs for his Triadic Ballet, which premiered at the Wurtemburgische Landestheater in Stuttgart on September 30, 1922 remain among the most striking and unusual ever conceived.... 

"The costumes or figurines as Schlemmer called them, of which nine of the eighteen originals survive, seven in the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, are extraordinary. Even a hundred years later, they look strangely futuristic, like something from a science-fiction cartoon. Schlemmer only hinted at possible interpretations of them in his manuscripts. “Precision machinery, scientific apparatus of glass and metal, artificial limbs developed by surgery, the fantastic costumes of deep-sea divers and a modern soldier,” he wrote.

"Heavy and made from unusual materials such as foil, sheet steel, plywood, wire and rubber, they transform the human body into moving sculptures where movement is severely restricted.

"Gold Sphere is an armless ovoid torso. Sphere Hands is a figure whose handless arms end in swollen coloured balls. The twin Disk Dancers, whose heads and bodies are set with thin blade-like disks, move toward each other from opposite directions, appearing to slowly slice through one another as they merge together. Wire appropriately appears as a figure snarled within the coils of barbed wire. Made of wood, The Diver is armless, grotesquely deformed and comes with a strange oversized helmet. It’s original, housed in the Bauhaus Dessau, is apparently so heavy that it takes two people to carry it.

"Perhaps oddest is The Abstract, which it has been claimed was something of an alter ego for Schlemmer, who danced the role himself on several occasions. Split into unequal areas of light and dark, largely white with patches of red, black and blue, it comes with a large half-head, one-eyed mask and wields a dagger and a club. On top of that, it has a permanently outstretched white leg that cannot be bent, which reduces the dancer to limping or hopping around impotently.

"The female costumes do all bear some resemblance to a traditional ballet tutu, however. Perhaps that’s not so much a surprise when one considers that Schlemmer saw himself not so much as a radical but someone updating historic tradition for the new age with new materials and ideas.

"While detailed designs for the remaining costumes remain, the choreography is long lost. Schlemmer’s left many diaries, notes and sketches but they do not detail the steps and there is no known surviving film. Those notes do at least detail many of the floor patterns though and have been used for modern re-imaginings that challenge perceptions of dance just as much as the 1922 ballet must have done.

"Schlemmer was mooting the idea of a gesamtkunstwerk, a bringing together of visual art, dance and costume design, as early as 1912 after meeting husband-and-wife dancers Albert Burger and Elsa Hötzel.... 

"Having staged initial sketches for what would become The Triadic Ballet at a charity event for his regiment in Stuttgart in 1916, Schlemmer continued to design a formalised, plotless, three-act ballet, which he referred to as a ‘Dance of Trinity’. It had three dancers, one female, two male, in 12 dances and 18 costumes. There were also the three dimensions of space – height, depth and width; and three basic shapes: sphere, cube and pyramid. Finally, there were three basic colours, one for each act: yellow for the first, which was festive burlesque; then pink, solemn; then black, mystical and fantastic.

"The choreography itself was developed by Burger, Hötzel and Schlemmer in collaboration. Floor geometry and geometric shapes determined the paths of the dancers. The music was a collage by eight composers across three centuries. The programme for the opening night noted how the ballet flirted with comedy without being grotesque and brushed against conventions without becoming base. It also suggested that it might demonstrate the beginnings from which a particularly German ballet could be developed. The costumes certainly determined the movements of the dancers, who had to subordinate themselves to their rigid shapes, although, from his notes, it seems that restricting movement per se was not Schlemmer’s prime aim.

"In the premiere, Schlemmer danced under the pseudonym Walter Schoppe but, in a letter to Swiss artist Otto Meyer-Amden, he wrote, “As a dancer…I failed. I may be a dance director, but not a dancer.” The reviews were mixed, although the Frankfurter Zeitung commented, “The foundation has been laid for a completely modern ballet that is real art.”.....

"Schelmmer’s work was removed from the Staatsgalerie in 1933 as part of the now Nazi German government’s purge of art and by 1937, prominent Bauhaus artists such as him were completely ostracised.

"Schlemmer died in 1943 and the Burgers’ costumes were destroyed by fire in 1944. 

"The ballet itself fell into oblivion until it was reinterpreted in 1968 as a 30-minute piece for German television by Margarete Hasting, Franz Schömbs and Georg Verden.

".... Schlemmer’s influence has reached outside dance too. lives on. Among others, David Bowie has twice worn costumes that closely resemble those from the ballet." 

- David Mead, Seeing Dance

Bathetic ending to the piece: "in 2019, the American alternative rock band Smashing Pumpkins adapted them and turned them into three giant inflatable fantasy figures that towered over the performances."

Surely this video is influenced by the Triadisches Ballett? 

Ah, yes: 

"The release of "True Faith" was accompanied by a surreal music video directed and choreographed by Philippe Decouflé and produced by Michael H. Shamberg. The opening sequence, showing two men slapping each other, is a reference to Marina Abramović and Ulay's video performance Light/Dark, shot in 1977.Costumed dancers then leap about, fight and slap each other in time to the music, while a person in dark green makeup emerges from an upside-down boxer's speed bag and hand signs the lyrics (in LSF). Other parts of the video were inspired by Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer's Triadisches Ballett."

I thought maybe also Fine Young Cannibals's "She Drives Me Crazy" promo but I had a look at it and not really. 

Another pop-detournement, although not by the pop group itself: a fan-made video for Japan's "Suburban Berlin"

Jules Evens - Cut Happy (2024)

 

An animation created by Jules Evens, one of my students at California Institute of the Arts (with sounds contributed by another student, Zhu Dongchen). 

Evens explains: "It's all hand drawn/painted, each frame on a single piece of printer paper. I used different mediums for different frames: colored pencil, marker, pen, pastel, acrylic paint, and water color. After I scanned the frames in, I mutilated each frame in photoshop. 

"The music is small samples (1 sample per frame) of: my voice, my friend’s voice, and electronic sounds from a no-input mixer."

putty putty good

                                                              (via Andrew Parker)

"Animated Putty" (1911)

"Walter Booth made a number of films that began to explore the potential of stop-motion to bring cut-outs, string, and here clay to life. Many of these scenes are also filmed backwards adding to the uncanny effect, with the devilish, gargoyle faces towards the end of the film being particularly delightful." - BFI

"W.R. Booth was born 12 July 1869, son of a china painter. Apprenticed as a painter to the Royal Worcester Porcelain factory (1882), he worked there until about 1890. In 1895 he gave a comedy lecture in Worcester entitled Skit and Sketch, illustrated with sketches on a blackboard. In May and June 1897 Booth appeared in Exeter with Slade’s Animated Photographs (prop. W.D. Slade of Cheltenham). A keen amateur magician he joined the company of J.N. Maskeleyne and David Devant at the Egyptian Hall in London, and from late 1897-1900 toured with Devant’s Animated Photographs performing conjuring (sometimes as the Turkish Magician), ventriloquism and sketching. The films included productions by Robert Paul. Booth began devising and stage-managing (the then term for directing) short trick films for Paul, beginning with The Miser's Doom and Upside Down; or, the Human Flies (1899) in which, by turning the camera upside down, he made his actors perform on the ceiling.

"Many of his early films were based on conjuring tricks (Hindoo Jugglers, Chinese Magic, both 1900), and with The Devil in the Studio (1901) he began to introduce effects involving cartoon type artwork. Later that year his Artistic Creation featured rudimentary animation, while his Political Favourites (1903) featured Booth rapidly drawing caricatures of Lord Rosebery, Joseph Chamberlain and other current politicians. By 1906 Booth had joined the Charles Urban organisation and made The Hand of the Artist, no doubt prompted by J. Stuart Blackton's Humorous Phases of Funny Faces of a few weeks earlier. Booth constructed his own outdoor studio in the back garden of Neville Lodge, Woodlands, Isleworth, London W., and here, with F. Harold Bastick as his cameraman, he produced and directed a large number of films for Urban. At least fifteen films a year were made up to 1915, after which he entered the publicity film market, making advertising shorts for Cadbury's cocoa and chocolate, including A Cure for Cross Words. He also invented an advertising method called 'Flashing Film Ads': 'Unique colour effects in light and movement'.

- Denis Gifford, Who's Who of Victorian Cinema

Yōji Kuri -- (愛 (Ai) (Love) (1963)

 

Music by Toru Takemitsu

".... Freud would have had a field day with the animated shorts of the grandfather / bad boy of Japanese alternative animation Yōji Kuri (久里洋二, b. 1928). His black, and often bawdy, sense of humour pervades the mood of most of his films.  In his 1963 film Love (愛, 1963), a big woman with prominent breasts breathily gasps the word “Ai” (Love) repeatedly as she chases a man who is much smaller than her. The woman is depicted as being so desperate for love that she even embraces trees in frustration. In contrast, the man seems repulsed by her attention and races to keep himself out of her clutches. 

"In one moment, the woman clutches the man as if he were an infant or a ragdoll and he transforms into a giant drop of water in order to slip from her grasp and escape. The man also chants the word “Ai” but in a less passionate, more matter-of-fact manner. The couple play a kind of hide-and-go-seek amongst a row of trees. The woman chases the man with a net as if he were a butterfly. Once captured, she consumes him whole, only to have him come out the other end and escape again.

"She chases him through a gallery lined with portraits of the man and through an empty café with identical tables. Their chants of “Ai” are sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted at top volume, increasing in tempo and desperation. The woman’s arms stretch out to an impossible length in order to grab the man again. In another scene, he stands on all fours like a doll on a leash and eats his food on the floor.

"The chase grows increasingly desperate with the woman beating the man into submission with a baseball bat, reducing him to a stuttering idiot in their shared bed, and putting a leash on him and taking him on a walk. The ends with the soundtrack fading out as the man leads the woman into the horizon like a dog on a leash.

:This animated short is based on a poem by Shuntarō Tanikawa (谷川 俊太郎, b. 1931) with music composed by Tōru Takemitsu (武満 徹, 1930-96). Takemitsu is perhaps best remembered today for his composition of soundtracks for the films of great directors like Akira Kurosawa (Ran, Dosdesukaden), Hiroshi Teshigahara (Pitfall, Woman in the Dunes), and Masaki Kobayashi (Harakiri, Kaidan, Samurai Rebellion) and for his significant contributions to aesthetics and music theory. I am a fan of Takemitsu’s early experimental period, and his anti-academic Jikken Kōbō (experimental workshop) had a profound impact on the animator Yōji Kuri, who has used experimental composers like Takemitsu extensively in his films. 

"The soundtrack of Love does not fall into the category of “music” in the classical sense, but in the postmodern sense of creating music using unconventional techniques and instruments. The recorded voices (H. Mizushima and Kyōko Kishida) have been distorted using a synthesizer. Sometimes the voices draw out, like a record playing at the wrong speed, or at other times they playback at pitches impossible for the human voice to attain. The tempo and volume is varied in order to create tension."

-  - Nishikata Film Review

"Yōji Kuri is an animation artist most known for his work during the 1960's and is known to be of large importance to the history of animation. Known to be dark humored, independent and minimal artist, his work seems to capture a disturbing perspective of love and sex. Some such films as Human Zoo (1960) and Ai-Love (1963) depict this type of imagery and end fairly quickly. The time range for Kuri's work seems to be shorter then ten minutes, perhaps implying the shorts are more of a thought then a statement. He later produced an animation film The Bathroom (1970), it too was along the same subject matter as previous work. One part of the film at the end depicts butt and leg sculptures; the style and location (bathroom) reminded me of the TV show Shin Chan. Shin, a 5 year old boy whom is obsessed with human privates, frequently flaunts his rear and enjoys time in the bathroom.
Yōji Kuri continues to draw today as well as teach animation at the Laputa Art Animation School."
                - animation blog at School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"Kuri’s films have bite and he helped lift Japanese animation out of decades of cozy narrative cartoons into a new era of graphic and conceptual experimentation. His films mock and shock, attacking technology, population expansion, monotony of modern society while playfully toiling with the tricky goings-on between guys and gals. Witnessing the surrender of Japan during WW2, the devastation of his country followed by the quick rise of Western inspired materialist culture and rampant consumption, Kuri, like many of his colleagues of the time, questioned the state and direction of his society and world. One of his more experimental, stream of consciousness works is AOS (1964). Working with a vocal composition by Yoko Ono, Kuri takes the avant-garde artist’s assorted screams, moans, licks, and grunts and twisted them into a haunting and surreal series of black and white scenarios often involving discombobulated body parts of frustrated and repressed men and women who exist in cramped, isolated trappings – desperate but unable to connect or touch the other" - Chris Robinson, Animation World

                                                


                                                   

                                            

John Hofsess - Palace of Pleasure (1967)

via Peter Stanfield 

 Watch The Looking Cure -  a mini-doc about John Hofsess's Palace of Pleasure - made by Stephen Broomer.

“See it and you’ll see a window on the future: a Joyce-Burroughs assemblage of bold, poetic surreal visions of physical love in every conceivable form." - Gene Youngblood

As Broomer writes in CineAction (the full essay reproduced here): 

Hamilton's McMaster University of the mid-1960s had a thriving campus art scene. The annual arts festival attracted prestigious and daring North American guests, such as Amiri Baraka, Cannonball Adderly, Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, and Leslie Fiedler among others. In 1966, mature student John Hofsess, a frequent contributor to the campus newspaper, began to produce 8mm and then 16mm films. Hofsess founded an organization of student filmmakers called the McMaster Film Board (MFB), a group funded by the student union. Hofsess's interests in sexual revolution and American underground art made for a tense relationship between the McMaster Film Board and the student union. Through the McMaster Film Board, John Hofsess began Palace of Pleasure (1966/67), a series of experimental films. Intended as a trilogy, only two parts were completed.

The films were designed as showcases for Hofsess's concept of 'cinematherapy,  an experiment that combined ideas from contemporary media--from Warhol and McLuhan--with ideas gleaned from writings on psychoanalytic liberation. His project was similar, if more in spirit than practice, to Wilhelm Reich's orgasm theory, wherein the organism was freed from its neurosis through the total release of dammed-up orgastic energies. Reich envisioned a healthy and functional mankind that could build a sex-positive society away from the tyranny of repressive institutions. 

Hofsess saw his films operating in opposition to a filmmaker such as Jack Smith (Flaming Creatures), whose shocking work, in Hofsess's estimation, could only reinforce the alienation of the neurotic and their bond to the repressive institution. The ideas underlying the productions were Hofsess's own, but the first part (Redpath 25) was a collaboration between Hofsess, McMaster art community organizer Patricia Murphy, who starred in it, and Robin Hilborn, a science student who applied bleach effects during the film's processing.

 The second and more substantial part of the trilogy (Black Zero) was announced in the student press as being co-directed by McMaster Film Board president Peter Rowe, who was primarily responsible for the cinematography. Hofsess had also cast members of the McMaster Dramatic Society, specifically its director David Martin, who would go on to make a film with the McMaster Film Board titled To Paint the Park (1968), a single-screen experimental narrative that was heavily influenced by Hofsess's work. Martin's performance in Black Zero, according to Hofsess's model of therapeutic film form, was "flattened out" in editing. The film was presented in dual projection: tension would dissipate between the two screens. 

The film acts as a sensual experience by emancipating the viewer from the expectations placed on them by the narrative tradition, their view of the film disrupted by the intentional compromise of performance elements as well as frequent obstructions of kaleidoscopic psychedelic images and appropriated magazine advertisements. Palace of Pleasure is an auteur work, supported through a manifesto that Hofsess contributed to Take One Magazine that expressed his unique aesthetic perspective ("Toward a New Voluptuary: From the Black Zero Notebook"), but it was made with conscious attention to the participation of others, in the spirit of collaborative practice. Hofsess showed a dedication to filmmaking as a social experience, here as well as in his community work as founder of the McMaster Film Board.

Interesting case study in the meeting ground / overlap between the avant-garde and pornography (see the famous Sontag essay), between libidinal liberation and titillation. 

Broomer says that " Hofsess's film aesthetic had been informed by thinkers such as Wilhelm Reich, Carl Jung and Norman O. Brown, and by the literature that had been issuing from Grove Press through the 1960s...".

But one of his partners on his next project was Ivan Reitman, who would later make National Lampoon's Animal House. 

That next project was titled Columbus of Sex. The makers were prosecuted. Some portions of that film were then turned into the arty erotica film My Secret Life (based on the diary of an anonymous Victorian sex maniac) by another director.  Traces of it appear to be only findable on sites like xhamster.  

The story is rather convoluted but can be found in this essay by Stephen Broomer.