Animation of the Analogue Era - Cel, Cut Out, Stop Motion, Puppet, Pixilation, Cameraless, Sand, Pinscreen... Plus Experimental Films + TV, plus Assorted Visual Weirdness.
Featuring the voiceover of Dorothy Moskowitz of United States of America fame.
Interview with Moskowitz at at Bob Fischer's The Haunted Generation:
Then, by the mid-1970s, she was working as a voiceover artist on Sesame Street, providing half-sung narration for a jazz-fuelled piece of animation that has since become the subject of much online consternation. ‘Cracks’ tells the story of a young girl who sees the fissures in her bedroom wall transformed into a menagerie of animals. Aired fleetingly between 1975 and 1980, it was then banished – for reasons unknown – to a dusty archive, existing only in the realms of fuzzy childhood memory. To seasoned US hauntologists, it has taken on mythical status.
“There’s a lot of action on the internet about it,” says Dorothy. “When I tried to do the research, I found the woodwind player, the great Mel Martin, had passed away. The producer and probable script-writer Peter Scott was long gone too, and his family didn’t know anything about it. The only person left who might know something was Andy Narell, the steel drum player. But talk of hauntology… when we were recording it, a curious apparition appeared in the studio. A wraith of a young woman floated in, wearing shroud-like threads. Her name sounded invented, something like ‘Ether’ or ‘Skyward’, and she said [floaty, ethereal voice] ‘We’ll be finishing the animation soooooon’. A real white witch of a voice!
“I never heard anything more about it until decades later. Never saw it on TV. I was very surprised to learn it had creeped out so many youngsters, and that no one was able to find any record of it for so many years. In 2019 I started getting inquiries about it, and that led to a podcast and some media attention. I wasn’t previously aware that I was the focus of such nostalgia. Maybe I’m the Grandma Moses of hauntology!”
Moskowitz has a new record out with a cat who goes as Retep Folo, full story in the Fischer interview
"To be an
animator requires a methodical and systematic mind, diligence and meticulous
attention to detail, and the patience and sheer stamina to withstand long-haul,
labour-intensive and hideously fiddly
work. Harry Smith was unusually endowed with these qualities. Although best
known for his work as a collector of obscure folk and blues 78 rpm recordings
(resulting in 1952’s epochal and hugely influential six-LP compilation The
Anthology of American Folk Music), McLaren’s true passion was animation.
"Using
various self-developed techniques of hand-painting and marking the film using
masking tape, working with scratch-board
drawings, and cut-out images, Smith would spend years holed up in his New York
apartment toiling over a single film.
His animations often reached several hours in length and required
drastic editing down before he could show them.
Many projects were abandoned in an unfinished state. On their rare
public performances, Smith would project the films onto special painted screens
of his own construction. Music – usually jazz
– was central to his work, as with the original version of Thelonious
Monk’s “Misterioso” that soundtracks “Mirror Animations”.
"Like his
hour-long masterpiece “Heaven and Earth Magic”, “Mirror Animations” (1956-57) emerged out of Smith’s obsessive collation of illustrative material from 19th
Century catalogues. He filed the
cut-outs – photographs or drawings of people, animals, vegetables, tools,
furniture, and sundry other objects - in
glassine envelopes for protection, while noting on file cards every possible
interaction that a given image could have with another image. Yet, contradicting all this
obsessive-compulsive preparation, when it came to the assembly process, Smith
aimed for a state of mental vacancy akin to automatic writing.
"The
deliberately stilted movements of the snipped-out images have a quaint and
creaky quality that casts back to the magic lanterns of the 17th
Century. Magic of a different kind – not conjuring tricks and illusions, but
the occult and hermetic knowledge – suffuses Smith’s work. Some of the imagery
in “Mirror Animations” looks like it’s plucked straight off a set of Tarot
cards. No wonder film-maker and critic
Jonas Mekas celebrated “the magic cinema of Harry Smith” while avant-jazzman
John Zorn hailed him as a “Mystical Animator”." - SR
".... An eccentric polymath. He painted, made experimental films, practiced occult alchemy (he was ordained in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, a spiritual group affiliated with the magician and self-appointed prophet Aleister Crowley), and believed that the careful accumulation and ordering of things could bring about new knowledge.... Smith collected all sorts of stuff: paper airplanes, Ukrainian Easter eggs, figures he made by looping or weaving lengths of string, anything shaped like a hamburger, and thousands, if not tens of thousands, of 78-r.p.m. records... Like many serious collectors of arcane but precious objects, Smith could be irascible, mean, and single-minded to the point of psychopathy. There are stories of his thieving, particularly when he believed that an item would be better off in his care. He never married, drank to unconsciousness, went absolutely nuts if anyone talked while he was playing a record, and, according to his friend Allen Ginsberg, kept “several years’ deposits of his semen” in the back of his freezer for “alchemical purposes.' "
- Amanda Petrusich, in The New Yorker, on The Harry Smith B-Sides, a box set of the flipsides of all the 78 rpm tunes that he collected on The Anthology of Folk Music.
Confession: I have owned the reissue of The Anthology for a couple of decades now, but only ever got round to playing one of the discs. When I did, I unawares miscued the CD-player controls - as a result, one particular Dock Boggs song played over and over for about 35 minutes. It took me quite a while to notice - about 20 minutes in, I was like "wow this is intense, this endless incantatory folksong saga, verse after verse!". Eventually I twigged what had happened.
Never went back to the set - never seemed like the right time, always something more pressing in the present, or a corner of the past that seemed more compelling. Perhaps it's finally time - indeed the box is sitting reproachfully near the front of the records by the stereo. Should definitely listen to first, before getting on to the B-sides...
"In this extremely rare surviving example of “Auroratone” films, abstract visuals are created by
filming crystalline growth using polarized light and time-lapse photography. Melancholic sentimental
music plays, crooned by Bing Crosby. All but forgotten today, the Auroratone films were produced in the early 1940s by an obscure British inventor and mystic named Cecil Stokes (1910-1956). He intended for them to be used as a therapeutic aid in the treatment of post traumatic stress, manic depression, anxiety disorders, and similar conditions. They were much like this one – slow, mildly sad and melancholic music combined with imagery, usually abstract, but some used semi-animated drawings instead, according to contemporary descriptions.
"Stokes was awarded a patent for his film process in 1942, and he formed the Auroratone
Foundation of America to make and distribute his films. One of his partners in the effort was Bing
Crosby, who also contributed new song recordings to a number of them. Auroratone films were donated to a number of hospitals in the US and England, where records indicate they were indeed used as part of therapy with vets. One of them was a VA hospital in Ohio, where the trial program led to a series of articles in major medical journals, written by Capt. Herbert E. Rubin
and 2nd Lt. Elias Katz of the Crile General Hospital in Parma, Ohio. They consistently reported positive benefits. “Most patients became more accessible” after watching the films. They “spoke more freely,” making it “possible for the psychiatrist to establish rapport.” Curiously, an article about Stokes and his Auroratone films also appeared in a 1944 issue of Rosicrucian Digest.
"According to reports published in Billboard magazine, Stokes later hoped to make the films
available to the general public in “film jukeboxes,” commonly known as Scopitone machines, which were popular in bars and lounges during the 1940s and ‘50s. In the summer of 1945, he made a presentation to a number of such distributers in Chicago, but the businessmen demurred, reportedly saying “the haziness of the color pattern – or lack of pattern – made the process unsuitable for adaption to jukes.” In a word, it was just too weird. The record fades after that, except to note that Stokes died less than 10 years later."
text borrowed from program to Visions: Animation and Abstraction Experimental Masterpieces, 1908 – 1994, shown at Northwest Film Forum, Seattle, WA, on Wednesday, August 10, 2011 - a co-presentation of The Sprocket Society and Third Eye Cinema
"A young artist, a career full of promise, a life of innovation and energy tragically cut short. Such a summary barely begins to describe the bright, fast burn that was rising star Adam Beckett (1950-1979), one of the first graduates of the CalArts Experimental Animation program, and a prolific animator, sketch artist, and effects prodigy. Known for his unique abstract film loops, as well as for his precise, yet organic work with the optical printer, Beckett’s work continues to influence young animators both at his alma mater, where he is frequently mentioned, as well as in the wider animation world....
"Before joining the then-new Experimental Animation Program at CalArts, Beckett had studied mathematics. A seemingly incongruous link, his ease with numbers and abstractions would prove essential, and made him a natural when it came to manually exposed and re-exposed animation.
Appropriately, Beckett's earliest works are very much a representation of the direction of Jules Engel's Experimental Animation program in the early 1970s. Engel, a former animator at Disney, and later UPA, was at that point a dedicated abstract expressionist whose interests were concentrated in visual music and painterly, geometric animation. The influence of this iconic program chair can be felt in early Beckett pieces like the musically-driven Dear Janice, with its mixture of abstract cycles, words, sexual imagery, and live footage, or in Kitsch in Synch, where playroom shapes build and build in time to a nonsense chant that grows from child-like voices to wild cacophony.... Works such as Evolution of the Red Star, with its cycling, multiplying shapes, color tinting, and playful use of the animated frame, or Heavy Light, with its energy trails optically printed on black, showcase Beckett’s sense of experimentation and personal evolution. The figure makes an appearance, too, memorably in the pornographic, yet placid, Flesh Flows with its homages to Schiele and Dali enveloped by pulsing, gradually distorted imagery....
"In many of the shorts, Beckett’s focus is on rhythm, and on new configurations of repetitive movement and morphing shapes.... In his work, Beckett displays an easy mastery of the optical printer, used to create multi-layered effects that, at the time, were a far cry beyond what was capable using a single or multi-plane downshooting rig. For those unfamiliar with the technique, an optical printer is a device that links one, or several, film projectors to a movie camera, allowing for the re-photographing, layering, and alteration of film.
"... in Beckett’s case, this understanding of the optical printer’s range of uses straddles both the art and VFX fields. Shortly after graduating from CalArts, Beckett went to work at Industrial Light & Magic. His previous experiments with the optical printer, particularly the so-called Knotte Grosse Experiments, and his tinkering with the roto camera setup at Lucasfilm paid off, as Beckett was put on visual effects development for a new science fiction film called Star Wars...."
- Zoe Chevat, Animation World
"Off and on, Carol and I spent a few days in the woods filming. We got some images of her, some of trees, leaves, twigs and logs. These I combined with sounds from a thumb piano, which were sometimes modified ..." - Ed Emshwiller
"After serving in World War II, Emshwiller, an academically trained artist with a talent for figurative illustration, settled down to start a family with his wife Carol in Long Island. There’s a clear trajectory from the military drawings he sketched during his time as a lieutenant to the science-fiction novel covers, tense with armed conflict, that became his livelihood (his illustrations won five Hugo Awards). From his unassuming suburban home, Emshwiller pivoted from this illustration work into the pioneering experimental film work that comprises much of “Dream Dance”—complexly layered musings on interpersonal relations, the interconnectedness of the universe, and the form of film itself. Emshwiller’s talent and vision in this medium landed him a position at the computer animation lab at CalArts; he served as dean of the film school there from 1979 to 1990.
"... In a quiet corner of the gallery, Carol (1957) and Certificate of Appreciation to Carol Emshwiller (1975) hang side by side. The former is an oil portrait of Emshwiller’s wife, who looks stately, radiant, and mannishly handsome, even in a dress. In the frame to her right, Emshwiller has inked a certificate to Carol, noting her numerous collaborative roles in and around Emshwiller’s work: as model, actress, editing consultant, photographer, writer, and mother to the couple’s three children. She was a noted science-fiction author in her own right. The tribute to her is an unexpected punctuation mark in this wide-ranging retrospective, a funny and tender moment that is self-aware on multiple levels, acknowledging the difficulties of proper accreditation amid conventions of authorship....
"Throughout Emshwiller’s film and video work, illustrations, paintings, works on paper, and sculptures (painted neckties!), there is a sort of deeply compelling mania, as if he could not possibly record everything he felt compelled to in the mediums available to him and in the timespan of a life. In remarks that followed the opening screening of “Dream Dance,” Emshwiller’s daughter Susan recalled her father’s monomaniacal documentation of their shared everyday life, an object of her teenage frustration. When asked by an audience member what, of his sprawling body of work, Emshwiller was most proud of, Susan replied without hesitation, “Whatever he was working on at that moment.” ' - Heather Holmes, Art in America
