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.