Visual Music - a talk at the Tate Modern, July 27 2018
Presented by 4:3 as part of the Uniqlo Tate Late series
There is a subset of experimental animation that is abstract and that practitioners and scholars call “visual music”
I'm not an expert or scholar, I'm an enthusiast – and it's a relatively recent enthusiasm.
I'm going to talk first about how I got into it this whole area of experimental animation.
Being a music critic and all, unsurprisingly it’s through music that I got drawn into this world
One of my great passions for 20 years now, is avant-garde electronic music, musique concrete, tape music – the post-WW2 vanguard
I’m just obsessed with this area and pursued it into all kinds of obscure zones – I'm constantly staggered that SO much of it was made, both within the academy and by lone DIY weirdos – and it’s a global phenomenon, with amazing work done in Eastern Europe and Latin America and Japan....
And I’ve been aided in my quest for more esoteric and arcane electronics by this label Creel Pone, originally based out of Massachusetts – which put out a series of unofficial reissues of fabulously hard to find recordings... reproducing the original vinyl in miniature form as CDs and copying the artwork and the inserts to a fantastically and fanatically precise level
I’ve been following this label and buying up its output, which now stretches into the two hundred, for about 12 years
I have no idea by the way what on earth the words Creel Pone refer to....
It’s only recently though that I realised that Creel Pone had a precursor [this turns out to be not quite correct...]- a label that called itself New England Electric Music Company, and again put out a series– six in a number – of CD-Rs, actually 3-inch CD-Rs – dedicated to the electronic and musique concrete soundtracks to animations and experimental short films.
Named after the original New England Electric Music Company from the early 20th century, which funded Thaddeus Cahill's ambitious plan to transmit music, produced on his Telharmonium – an early proto-synthesiser - to hotels, restaurants, theatres and private homes via the telephone network.
So again these are unofficial, strictly speaking bootleg reissues – but not for profit - of music stripped off these fabulously hard to find animations *.
So there is a real connection there all through 20th Century of these two avant-gardes – the sonic and the visual.
The makers of the films are seeking out music that is appropriately abstract and futuristic – or strange.
Sometimes from established composers, sometimes from lesser known people of their acquaintance who have institutional access to synthesisers or studios.
One example is Bernard Parmegiani, the great musique concrete composer - who appears in the New England Electric Music Compay series with the soundtrack for Piotr Kamler’s The Spider Elephant, which we will be seeing later.
Before he got into making music, Parmegiani had another artistic past-time: photomontage. He cut out a large number of image-fragments from magazines --human limbs, machine parts, etc--and then glued them into surreal assemblages.
His music-making would follow a similar process, starting with the building-up of a sound-bank, an inventoried miscellany of noises, before embarking on composition.
Photo-collage is like a non-animated form of a particular style of stop-motion cartoon that involves cut-outs – the most famous exponent would be Terry Gilliam of Monty Python, but he was actually influenced by people like Jan Lenica in Poland.
What musique concrete has – and what stop-motion animation has – is this extra quality that Parmegiani’s photo-collages lacked – life, or at least the queer, unheimlich life of animation.
Parmegiani also made an animation himself, L’Ecran Transparent, an excerpt of which is also lined up.
That’s an example of the composer moving into the visual field.
Actually it goes the other way too – you have animators who make their own music. Most famously Normal McLaren, the Scottish-born Canadian animator --who in his long association with the National Film Board of Canada – pioneered many techniques and also brought in and developed talent from all round the world - as we’ll see he often scored his own animations, with a self-devised technique of “hand-drawn sound” that enabled precise synchronization of sonic and visual events. He literally scored the film, scratching miniscule markings on the celluloid’s edge that controlled loudness, pitch and timbre. When the film was run through the projector, this miniature code-work generated electronic-sounding scurries of blips.
Indeed some of McLarens pieces appeared on a record unofficially reissued by Creel Pone, Musique De L’O.N.F / Music of the NFB. This was originally put out in 1977 and comprising animation and short film soundtracks from the National Film Board of Canada between 1952-71.
So there’s a sort of reversibility there, two art forms that in some profound way are connected - there's a shared synesthetic ambition at work
Animation in its most radical, pure form is aspiring to the condition of music
Music, in its most radical, adventurous form, is trying to create pictures in your mind.
Now Norman McLaren was this calm, diligent, methodical Scot who talked about frugality of means as a spur to invention, about how having barebones budget inspired him to come up with all these crafty techniques.
And that’s another parallel with experimental music and experimental animation - this DIY, poorly funded aspect - there is a whole tradition within avant-garde music of inventing your own instruments, tinkering and bodging material together – Percy Grainger’s collages almost of household equipment like vacuum cleaners to invent sound-generating machines, Harry Partch and his gamelan-like percussive constructions made of industrial and scientific objects, glass vessels, etc.
There are dozens more examples.
The experimental sector of animation is very similar.
And in fact one thing about the abstract animation is that it is usually a lone operator, or maybe occasionally a duo - a driven individual, devising their own techniques, spending months or years painstakingly assembling these works.
There’s an affinity with not just electronic music, but with postpunk and a whole tradition of do it yourself eccentricity - stubborn reclusive individuals pursuing their visions.
It’s very different from mainstream animation, the full-length movies that you see at a big movie theater – which involve teams of people – huge staffs with separate divisions for the backgrounds, for special effects, for the characters – if you go see a movie like Incredibles 2, which is very entertaining for sure, it takes about five minutes for the credits to list all the people involved.
With the Digital Era, you would think the technology would reduce the need for labour, but in fact more people are involved in these creations than ever, even more than with the Disney extravaganzas of yore that used cels and analogue methods.
But most of the experimental animation, it’s usually just one person who does the whole thing, or two or three people - director, animator, designer maybe. So it’s kinda punk. DIY.
I mentioned digital animation and there is a powerful Analogue Nostalgia syndrome that connects to the interest in early animation – and it overlaps the world of hauntology - which is actually another route that took me in this field, I should give a shout out to blogs like Found Objects, Toys and Techniques, I HATE THIS FILM, and others who have done a lot of great work digging up obscure short films and animations
Animation is part of the hauntology spectrum – but usually as it relates children’s TV – particularly Smallfilms, Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmins studio, responsible for Bagpuss, The Clangers etc
Hauntology, if you don’t know, is a sort of loose field of mostly music and para-musical activity (design, film) - labels like Ghost Box, artists like The Advisory Circle, Mordant Music, Moon Wiring Club - that makes a fetish of that zone where the elegiac and the eerie meet up - sort of eerie elegiac zone – so children’s television of the 1960s and 1970s, Public Information Films, horror movies, library music and soundtracks, early electronic music especially BBC Radiophonic Workshop – many other things that are bound up with a vanishing Britishness, often with some kind of institutional, governmental or pedagogic aura to them
And that connects to the experimental animation – because so much of it came out of state-run bodies – in Communist-era Eastern Europe, all this really weird hallucinatory and surprisingly subversive work in animation was funded by the governments of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and the Soviet Union. And often it’s a similar situation in the West – as with the National Film Board of Canada – which incidentally is where the name of probably the most well known hauntology artist comes from – Boards of Canada.
This is one of the main driving obsessions of the hauntologists, this mournful sense that all kinds of peculiar and unsettling radio or TV was introduced in the consciousness of children and ordinary people thanks to the BBC – and its equivalents in other countries.
Part of the appeal of these experimental animations of the 20th Century relates to hauntology’s nostalgia for early, hardware based electronics and analogue formats - the sound of vinyl and cassette tape, Super-8 film and the low-resolution images of broadcast TV.
Although there are amazing and brilliantly atmospheric animations from the last 25 years that were made digitally, for me there is something about the analogue means of production - whether it’s the draw and painted kind with cels, or stop-motion using cut-outs or puppets, or painting directly onto celluloid as with the camera-less animation technique, or the many other ingenious techniques like animating with sand, or slicing wax.
It’s hard to put your finger on that different quality – it’s not really related to virtue, the idea that so much painstaking, intricate, work went into it, whereas digital is too effortless – it’s more to do with dare I say it a difference of phenomenology or the nature of perception - there is an illusionism that feels magical in both the conjuring trick and the uncanny, sorcerous sense - a creaky kind of artificial life is created – especially with puppets and models, it’s a different order of magic when actual light falls on actual objects and that’s captured and made to move.
There is another personal hauntological aspect to this – some of the East European animations were actually shown on children’s TV in the 70s, they had completely different feeling and vibe to the British or American standard fare - they generally feature odd disjointed music, like a Slavic version of jazz, or electronica – the graphic design was foreign. This was an acquired taste, like a child palate being introduced to black olives or anchovies.
Some of the animations remind me of teenage first encounters with modern art – the thrill of surrealism, that very teen thing of having your mind blown by Dali, which you later learn to be embarrassed by, see as a naïve and immature failure of taste. The paintings of Miro. Discovering the Sixties, psychedelic art and Op Art. The delirious excitement of Terry Gilliam and Monty Pythons’s anarchic absurdist humour
But in tonight’s selection I’m focusing not so much on the figurative forms of animation, but on the purely abstract - patterns of colour, rhythms of light that relates to another subset of avant-garde 20th Century ambition which is a long-running dream cropping up in different contexts and with different composers – the dream of a unified artform in which sound and vision are completely merged – a machine that could produce sound and image simultaneously.
In the UK, from the Sixties onwards, the independent electronic experimentalist F.C. Judd worked on his the Chromasonics system, which would create electronic images whose movements were driven by sound.
In America, from 1974 onwards Laurie Spiegel also worked at Bell Labs in New Jersey, developing a video graphics system called VAMPIRE, an acronym for “Video and Music Program for Interactive Real Time Exploration and Experimentation”, that would govern parameters like color, saturation, size, texture, and motion, as well as sound. She told me the goal was to create “ a visual analogue to music that involved a similar kind of emotionally meaningful or perceptually meaningful language, with cadences and tension and resolution.... I wasn’t interested in using computers to do realistic animation, I was interested in exploring the possibility of an abstract, nonrepresentational but time-based visual art form.” Because she experienced a degree of synaesthesia, she was “looking for a system that could communicate and share those sensations, using the exact same data to generate the sound and the visuals.”
As we’ll see this aspirations date back much earlier in the century.
There is a whole separate but adjacent history of attempts to build colour organs - like Thomas Wilfred with the Clavilux – which means “light played by key” and allowed the user to perform “lumia” compositions. He saw ‘lumia’ as the eigth art form – however although this art form was like music, it didn’t come with musical accompaniment, in fact Wilfred was clear and strict about the fact that it should be a silent art form.
I find this whole area fascinating - there’s a romance to it, these heroic tales of outsiders struggling to do things their own way, chasing a vision – one thing that has puzzled me is why it is so obscure, as a fields go. There are scholars and institutions dedicated to this area, with conferences and books - there’s an organisation in America called the Center For Visual Music that archives materials and produces DVDs of the life’s work of key pioneers in the field. But if you were to ask an averagely hip young person – or indeed an averagely hip older person, such as myself only a year ago – if they’d heard of Jan Lenica or Jiří Trnka or Julian Antoniszczak , Ferenc Cakó, Caroline Leaf, Adam Beckett - you would draw a complete blank, I’m certain. And this is with people whose knowledge of music would stretch into fairly esoteric corners of Krautrock, psychedelia, DIY postpunk, library music.
And these are figures whose work in animation is every bit as strange or raw or chaotic or hallucinatory or disturbing as Beefheart, Faust, Sun Ra, The Fall...
Take a figure like Harry Smith – if he’s known, it’s for his compilation of American folk and blues and roots music, and the influence that had on Bob Dylan – and not for the handmade animations that were the obsessive focus of most of his artistic life.
I do often wonder why it is relatively peripheral zone.
Probably not getting shown very often is one factor - the lack of exposure.
Perhaps to do with its non-figurative / non-narrative nature.
Also, it’s not usable in the same way that even quite challenging music can be listened to as background sound, inattentively.
Like all moving image artforms - films, video art – you have to submit to it, accept that you are being detained - and even though it’s rarely detained for very long with these animations, they range from 5 mins to 10 mins typically, with the occasionally 20 minute piece animation – it’s still a demand on your attention.
Perhaps there is also a lack of an obvious connection to youth culture, and indeed, conversely, a lingering association of animation with children’s entertainment – that persists even though some of the animations are grotesque and ominous and creepy in ways that parallel avant-rock artists like Pere Ubu or The Birthday Party.
When you read old interviews with some of these animators, a leitmotif is the question of access to audiences – some of them, poignantly, imagine the cassette being their savior – they imagine a market developing for short animations and experimental films, that would be bought in the same way that singles or EPs were bought.
But it has remained a minority interest.
THE FILMS AND THEIR CREATORS
Walter Ruttmann - Lichtspeil Opus 3 (1924)
Walter Ruttman was not the first person to conceive of abstract animation, that was Leopold Survage, just before World War 1, but his colored plates were never turned into film sadly. So Ruttmann became the first to actually complete a film. From his series of “Lichtspiel’ works – that translates as game of light or play of light - the first “Lichtspiel Opus I” was shown in Frankfurt in 1921 and immediately hailed as the birth of a new art form, christened as “Visual Music” by one critic and “Absolute Film” by another. Informed by his studies of painting and architecture and work as a graphic designer, it was made by daubing oil paint onto a glass plate, then wiping it clean or augmenting the pattern for the next frame he shot. Ruttman was dissatisfied with his debut effort, so here we see Opus III or Opus IV. Alongside the abstract short films, Ruttmann created more figurative animations for adverts, the non-animated masterwork Berlin-Symphony of a Metropolis and – bizarrely – a sound-only film, Wochenende. He also contributed a dream sequence to Fritz Lang’s movie Siegfried. Regrettably after Hitler’s rise to power, Ruttmanns worked with Leni Riefenstahl and making propaganda reels, then died in 1941 from injuries incurred as a war photographer on the Russian front.
Hans Richter – Rhythmus 21 (1921) / Viking Eggeling "Diagonal-Symphonie" (1924)
The next two films “Rhythmus 21” and “Diagonal-Symphonie” are by two close colleagues associated with Dada – Hans Richter and Viking Eggelin. Both were heavily inspired by music –using terms like counterpoint and orchestration, and referring to elements of any given work as themes or instruments. Born in Sweden, Eggeling travelled around Europe and settled in Paris a few years before WW1 where he dedicated himself to finding a universal language of abstract symbols, which he would draw onto large scrolls of paper – Eggeling’s Diagonal Symphonie, took three or four years to make and was a step towards “an all embracing system based on the mutual attraction and repulsion of paired forms” – the name Eggeling gave for that system was Thorough Bass of Painting - thorough bass (also known as basso continuo, or figured bass) is yet another term from music, referring to an approach that flourished in the 17th and 18th centuries involving keyboard improvisations over a stable bassline – Bach would be the supreme exponent there, at least until The Doors. Eggeling believed that film would reach its highest potential as a completely non-representational form with no reference to the literary or theatrical (so there goes plot, character, motivation) or indeed the natural world. Richter’s Rhythmus 21 is as we shall see in a second, black-and-white, but with the tragically lost later film Rhythmus 25, he embarked upon the “orchestration of colour” and devised a system of notation on graph paper, which according to the critic Brian O’Doherty promised “a method of composing films according to scores, where both musical and visual consideration could come into play”.
Fischinger started out as a draughtsman and engineer and then, reading the critic Bernard Diebold’s calls for a purely abstract form of cinema, started experimenting with moving graphs, a self-invented technique of animation involving sliced wax, clay-figure animation, and animation based around charcoal drawings. By the mid-thirties he hooked up with Bela Gaspar who had invented a form of color film and created the acclaimed film Composition in Blue. Then he moved to Hollywood to work for Paramount Pictures, which didn’t work out well, and he ended up in New York trying to get backing for a full length and completely abstract interpretation of Dvorak’s New World Symphony. That sounds a bit like what Walt Disney did with Fantasia and in fact there is a connection - Fischinger approached the conductor Leopold Stokowski with the idea of animating one of his Bach orchestrations – Stokowski promptly sold the idea to Disney, and Fischinger was signed to work on what would become Fantasia. However once again his approach and temperament did not fit in with the American way – and all that survived into the finished movie was his work on the Back Toccata and Fuge in D Minor. But apparently Disney used to screen Fischinger’s earlier work like his Studies series of films to the animation teams on a weekly basis to inspire them – one of them, Study No. 8 used the same music as the most famous and popular sequence in Fantasia, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Another brief stint in the Hollywood studio system – this time at MGM – led to the film we are about to see, “An Optical Poem”, which was made using an unusual method – paper cut-outs suspended on sticks and wires, moved around in front of backgrounds, to create a sense of spatial volume and depth - it is soundtracked by Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody.
Originally a painter, Texas-born Mary Ellen Bute Bute decided that the static forms of visual art were “not flexible enough and too confined” within their frame. Forming a company named Expanded Cinema, she adopted the term “abstronics” to describe her goal: “images in rhythm”, light manipulated to create “visual compositions in time continuity much as a musician manipulates sound to produce music.” This quest led her to experiment with color organs. She then attempted to develop with Leon Theremin an optical version of his electronic instrument, a device that would completely synchronize light and sound as a single unified artistic mode. Bute also collaborated with Bell Telephone Laboratories on an oscilloscope-based device that could electronically paint with light and choreograph the movements of graphic patterns. The piece were going to see if from earlier in her career in “visual music” –“Tarantella” titled after a folk-dance from southernmost Italy that according to legend originally served as a magic remedy for the tarantula spider’s venomous bite.
James Whitney - Variations on a Circle (1941-42)
Alongside Bute, the brothers James Whitney and John Whitney are American pioneers of visual music. “Twenty-Four Variations on an Original Theme” was the title of their first collaboration and it drew inspiration from Schoenberg - as a response to the way Fischinger – who they admired – relied on traditional orchestral music, which seemed stuffy and retrograde for such a 20th Century modernist artform as atract animation. William Moritz, the eminent historian of visual music, describes their process as follows:
“James designed geometric shapes on small index cards and created positive and negative stencils that could be painted or air-brushed onto the cards. They intended these modular elements to function like tones in Schoenberg's musical theories, and submitted them to musical permutations (such as inversions, counterpoints, chord clustering and retrogressions).”
Franciszka and Stefan Themerson - The Eye and The Ear (1944/45)
The first, but not last of the Poles in this selection – and cutely, a husband and wife partnership (again, not unknown in this field) – were a multi-talented pair, working together or separately in the fields of poetry, painting, fiction and music, as well as in experimental film, and also writing criticism and theory. The Eye and The Ear was made in London, where they settled after an eventful and nomadic World War Two, and is their last film. It is based on a score, four songs composed by Karol Szymanowski based on a poem by Julian Tuwim. As Marcin Gizycki explains, the film was made in simple but highly inventive ways - organ-like forms were created by glass sticks - triangular smoke-like forms symbolizing notes were achieved by passing the light beams emitted by small bulbs through a special lens- a glass container filled with water become a receptacle for small clay balls’ – and was approached almost as a scientific study - “They treated the film medium as a tool for the analysis of musical structure.
Norman McLaren - Blinkity Blank / National Film Board of Canada (1955)
Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk are two giants of Polish animation - Poland probably was the leading country in the world for animation for much of the post-War period in fact, the number of talented directors and designers and amazing films is staggering. This particular film strays from the visual music concept, but I wanted to get some East Europe flavour in there – like Lenica’s famous “Labirynt” animation, there’s a mixture of stop-motion photographs and drawn and painted illustration - and there’s a vibe that you get a lot of the Communist Bloc work of that time that coming from the same place – absurdist and surreal with a tinge of the macabre and grotesque – as Ionesco, Kafka, Max Ernst, and Bruno Schulz. Everything works according to dream logic. The musical element here is the collaboration with the avant-garde Wlodzimierz Kotonski - who like his compatriot Eugeniusz Rudnik – contributed frequently to the animations pouring out of Warsaw animation houses like Studio Miniatur Filmowych.
Piotr Kamler - L'Araignéléphant / The spiderelephant / Slonoiga (1968)
(Shadok and Co)
longer version here - https://vimeo.com/25135972
Parmegiani’s solitary foray into animation
Pramod Pati - ABID (1970) India Film Division
Pramod Pati head the animations division of the state-run Films Division in Mumbai, India. During his brilliant but tragically brief career, Pati made a host 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 Suri, “ABID” uses pixilation – a technique of stop-motion animation in which human beings are essentially used as puppets: posed for frame-by-frame shots that are then reinjected with a zany simulation of life. The original meaning of “pixilated” is eccentric, mentally disordered, or whimsical. the technique allowed the film-maker to caricature normal gestures and movements, while also evade the natural laws of physics like momentum, inertia, centrifugal force and gravity. The tempo of action could be modulated drastically and objects or persons made to appear and disappear at will. The idea for ABID 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. Pati approached Surti and they recreated Surti’s apartment in the Films Division studio. It took 20 days of 19-20 hours work to shoot the film. It has a very suitably frantic and intricate soundtrack of perrcussive psychedelia of Vijay Raghav Bao. Sadly, Pati died in 1975 at the age of 43.
Jeff Keen – Irresistible Attack (1995)
Brighton-based
Jeff Keen was an important figure on the
1960s British underground scene of happenings and “expanded cinema”.
This film “Irresistible Attack” comes from 1995 but is essentially of a piece
with his earlier work - typically
consisting of short bursts of rapid-fire imagery, scrawled drawings, roughly
clipped photographs from magazine advertisements and newspaper stories, and
sometimes 3D objects like plastic toys that melt before our eyes. Although not typical ‘visual music’ in the
sense we’ve seen earlier, there’s two connections to music here. There’s a
violence that convulses Keen’s work, in both the editing and imagery itself -
endless explosions and savage acts, mutilated scraps from the mass media, the
burned black materials – and that reminds me of Bomb Culture by Jeff Nuttall –
a British counterculture contemporary of Keen’s, although involved in
experimental poetry more than the visual arts – in which Nuttall writes
evocatively of for the orgiastic violence coursing through the music of the
Sixties – the overloaded, distorted guitars, the heavy amplification, The Who
and Hendrix destroying their instruments – which Nuttall saw as a kind of
Dionysian reaction to the threat of living under perpetual threat of nuclear
obliteration, as well as to contemporary carnography of Vietnam. And then
there’s soundtrack, which Keen made himself, using processed shortwave radio
sounds and other electronic effects. The scores to the films were released a
few years ago by Trunk Recordings under the title Noise Art. So let’s go out with bang not a whimper, with
“Irresistible Attack”.
* A la New England Electric Music Company, I have made my own compilations of electronic and wacky soundtracks and sound FX from animations, that are otherwise completely unreleased and unsourceable.
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Yes, a lecture, given at the Tate Modern, by yours truly, who'd have thought it...
I had naively imagined being a venerable and powerful state-run institution, they might source the original films in pristine quality. But no, I had to play them off from YouTube. And for reasons I can't remember - legal? institutional protocols? - I was instructed to only play about 50 seconds of each animation. An absurd stricture, given the nature of the material.
The lecture was sponsored by Uniqlo, to add an extra level of farce to the proceedings - and I didn't even get any free T-shirts or those cool capri shorts they used to do!
The idea originated with the Boiler Room and its then recently created website for underground and weird film / video, 4:3 - now defunct or at least dormant (much of the stuff is still up there). For 4:3 I had done an annotated playlist of experimental animation. They had some kind of team up with Uniqlo and the Tate. The second half of the lecture is the text for that 4:3 playlist.
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Another text on the same subject, introducing my immense YouTube playlist of "dreams built by hand", which is at 751 films and counting...
It was music that actually led me into the world of 20th Century experimental animation. I noticed that some of my favorite avant-garde electronic composers had provided the scores to various films: Bernard Parmegiani and Francois Bayle both made music for Piotr Kamler, a Polish animator transplanted to France, while his erstwhile compatriots Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk drew on the eerie abstractions of composers like WlodzimierzKotonski and Eugeniusz Rudnik.The makers of the films sought out music as alien and futuristic – or surreal and creepy – as the moving images they created. Sometimes that was from established composers; other times from lesser known people of their acquaintance who had institutional access to synthesisers or studios at universities. In some cases, animators like Norman McLaren and Jeff Keen, created their own peculiar scores, using various methods. In McLaren’s case, this involved a self-devised technique of “hand-drawn sound” whereby he literally scored the film, scratching miniscule markings on the celluloid’s edge that controlled loudness, pitch and timbre. When the film was run through the projector, this miniature code generated electronic-sounding scurries of blips.
The connection with avant-garde sound makes sense because much of this animation is so abstract it falls into a category that scholars call “visual music”. So there’s a reversibility at work: two art forms united through their shared synesthetic ambition. Animation in its most radical, pure form is aspiring to the condition of music; music, in its most radical, adventurous form, is trying to create moving pictures in your mind
Another parallel between experimental music and experimental animation is that much of the work involves a do-it-yourself, outsider ethos. Just as there is a whole tradition within avant-garde music of inventing instruments (Percy Grainger’s assemblages of ready-made household equipment like vacuum cleaners to invent sound-generating machines, Harry Partch and his gamelan-like percussive constructions), likewise in experimental animation, it is usually a lone operator, maybe occasionally a duo, creating these projects over a long period of time. You often have an obsessive, eccentric individual, like Harry Smith, devising their own techniques and spending months or years painstakingly assembling these works.
Hence the playlist title “Dreams Built By Hand”. It’s almost all animation from the pre-digital era. The means of production is manual, laboriously fiddly, time-consuming, and it involves working with the stubbornly material realm of the analogue. Techniques range from widespread ones like drawing cels and stop-motion using puppets, models, paper cut-outs, etcto more bizarre, self-invented modes (Julian Antonisz’s “non-camera films” that involve painting directly onto the surface of the celluloid film, Ferenc Cakó’s patterns drawn in sand, etc).
These literally hand-made movies have a certain quality that is phenomenologically different from digital animation. The illusionism at work feels like magic, in both senses: conjuring tricks, and the uncanny and sorcerous. A creaky kind of artificial life is created before your disbelieving eyes.
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