FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2012

7:00 PM | Screening of animation @ INTERNATIONAL HOUSE OF PHILADELPHIA
Free Admission

The Cabinet of Jean Svankmajer (Brothers Quay, 1984) 14 m ins.
Selected by VIVIAN SOBCHAK
This early film by renowned animators the Quay Brothers is structured as a series of little lessons in perception, taught by a puppet simulacrum of Jan Svankmajer, whose head is an opened book, to a doll whose head the master empties of dross and refills with a similar open book. 

A Colour Box (Len Lye, 1935) 4 mins.
Selected by HANNA ROSE SHELL
Lye’s first direct film combines popular Cuban dance music with hand-painted abstract designs. It won several awards, though some festivals had to invent a special category for it, and in Venice, the Fascists disrupted screening because they saw the film as “degenerate” art. It was funded and distributed by John Grierson’s G.P.O. Film Unit on the condition that Lye include postal messages at the end.

Trade Tattoo (Len Lye 1937) 5 m ins.
Selected by HANNA ROSE SHELL
Trade Tattoo, which was made with the Gasparcolor process, took black-and-white outtakes from such G.P.O. documentaries as Night Mail and transformed this footage in what has been described as the most intricate job of film printing and color grading ever attempted. Animated words and patterns combine with the live-action footage to create complex and multi-layered images. Music was provided by the Cuban Lecuona Band. With its dramatic rhythms, the film seeks, in Lye’s words, to convey “a romanticism about the work of the everyday in all walks of life.”

Mothlight (Stan Brakage, 1963) 3 mins.
Selected by HANNA ROSE SHELL
What a moth might see from birth to death if black were white and white were black. –Stan Brakhage
Brakhage made Mothlight without a camera. He just pasted mothwings and flowers on a clear strip of film and ran it through the printing machine. -- Jonas Mekas.
Mothlight is a paradoxical preservation of pieces of dead moths in the eternal medium of light (which is life and draws the moth to death); so it flutters through its very disintegration. This abstract of flight captures matter’s struggle to assume its proper form; the death of the moth does not cancel its nature, which on the filmstrip asserts itself. Mothlight is on one level a parable of death and resurrection, but most really concerns the persistence of the essential form, image, and motion of being. -- Ken Kelman.

Ryan (Chris Landreth, 2004) 14 mins.
Selected by DONALD CRAFTON
An Oscar-winning animated short that is based on the life of Ryan Larkin, a Canadian animator who produced some of the most influential animated films of his time. Ryan is living every artist’s worst nightmare—succumbing to addiction, panhandling on the streets to make ends meet. Through computer-generated characters, Landreth interviews his friend to shed light on his downward spiral.

Brains Repaired (Le Repateur des cervelles) (Emile Cohl, 1911) 5 mins.
Selected by DONALD CRAFTON
A highpoint of Cohl’s metamorphic style, Brains Repaired was described in the following terms at the time of its release: “Isidore Palmer, having lapsed into alarming idiocy, is taken by his wife to the celebrated Dr. Trepanoff. After examining his brain with a recently perfected instrument called the cephaloscope, the doctor discovers the little beast that is working on him and proceeds to extirpate it. While he is operating, we see file before us the fantastic and extravagant elucubrations created by the sick, tormented brain of poor Isidore. His mad thoughts bring to the screen a chain of the oddest and most unexpected silhouettes. Finally the operation is over, and Isidore, completely cured, effusively thanks this talented Esculapian.”

Food (Jan Svankmajer, 1992) 15 mins.
Selected by DONALD CRAFTON
Originally conceived in the 1970s but deemed too ideologically risky, Svankmajer’s short film uses stop-motion animation to depict three meals—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—that depict all manner of gastronomic surrealism.

Eat (Bill Plympton, 2001) 9 mins.
Selected by DONALD CRAFTON
A quaint, charming French restaurant, with elegant guests and soft music slowly evolves into a scene of culinary mayhem. Music by Nicole Renaud.

Level 5 (Brody Condon) 16 mins.
Selected by MELISSA RAGONA
This film documents Condon’s perfomative event, where participants are invited to critically explore, via a character they create, Large Group Awareness Training seminars. During the 1970’s hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans came for weekend seminar sessions, to be taught how to free themselves from the restraints of contemporary society. Intended as a kind of self-transformation for the masses, the seminars utilized a combination of various philosophic and spiritual teachings focused on “allowing participants to achieve, in a very brief time, a sense of personal transformation and enhanced power.” Quickly copied, successors included not only similar self actualization seminars, but also grew into the mass of success and corporate training seminars that we are familiar with today. These performances by Brody Condon are an investigation into the ideological legacy of this historical type of group gathering and its influence on contemporary culture.

QT machinima documentation of Gone Gitmo, and a global groundwater animation. 10 mins.
Work by PEGGY WEIL

To Your Health (WHO / Phil Stapp, 1955) 10 mins.
Selected by KIRSTEN OSTHERR
A film made for the British animation company Halas and Batchelor, it features work by animators Brian Berthwick and John Smith. It was produced by Mary Losey for the World Health Organization.