Birth of an Animation

The man sketching in this photo is none other than Winsor Mccay–creator of the fantasy comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland in which a young boy traverses dream after strange dream–and the hand behind some of the most groundbreaking animation work. Film reels that were as revolutionary and influential as early Hollywood luminaries. Born just a few years after the start of the American Civil War, Mccay, along with George Herriman, would go on to shape and in some ways define modern concepts that would mark the Sunday strip for decades to come. While helming, what had then become, In the Land of Wonderful Dreams for William Randolph Hearst’s New York American, Mccay, with producer J. Stuart Blackton, filmed a sort of adaptation of the aforementioned comic.

Little Nemo (1911) was a small step into film work, and featured just two minutes of animation. The majority of the ten minute short deals in the fictional behind the scenes realm of the animated creation, which follows standard, silent, operating procedures. The remaining minutes are devoted to imaginative, nearly magical recreations of Nemo and his fellow travelers, Flip and the Imp. There is no story to speak of, but rather a collection of sight gags the best this side of the vaudeville circuit in which the cigar smoking Flip quickly gestates with the help of the artist’s pen before transforming into a fully colored character capable of the most extraordinary interactions. A title card quickly flashes, “watch me move,” and this is just what we see, movements that are something of a revelation seen even today. In the end Nemo unites with the Princess before being whisked away in the mouth of a dragon; pure flights of fancy, and two of the most endearing minutes to be experienced in all of cinema.

A few more shorts followed, but it wasn’t until the 1914 production of Gertie the Dinosaur that Mccay’s animation legacy was guaranteed. Animation was never the same; when he introduces the title character, Mccay creates a fully formed creature that was unheard of in animation up to that point, a point not lost on future pioneer Walt Disney. With his use of key frames Mccay made a technical advance that wasn’t so much a step toward modernizing the art form as it was a leap; he also draws on aesthetic precedents from live performance in presenting Gertie, which ultimately leads to Mccay inserting an animated version of himself at the end of the short. The seemingly reflexive nature of this nearly six minute short is at once odd and fitting, as Mccay is one of the great enigmas of the last century.

Mccay would go on to write more strips, but would have both his flagship Nemo, and his freedom to make films taken from him by the very person who initially championed him, newspaper magnate Hearst. What followed was generally unremarkable (at least in comparison to his earlier work) political cartooning, and the artistic wilting away of one of the great cartoonists and animators to grace the American populace with fantasies so deeply connected to the uncertainties of 20th century America, and utterly timeless in there bittersweet yearnings, few have come away unmoved. The question then that biographers and historians inevitably come to concerns his unassuming manner. How could such an otherwise ordinary man create such grand works of the fantastic? With so few concentrated works concerning this wonderful life it’s very hard to answer.

American Collage

Bruce Conner is a visual artist who covered many mediums, traversing the American landscape both in the abstract and physical. His films tend to be the most startlingly original of his many pieces, and have drawn the attention of critics and compatriots alike throughout the many decades of Conner’s career. Growing up in Wichita, Kansas, Conner was drawn to visual art through dada and surreal precedents that allowed for his dream-like visions to burst forth, first through dark assemblages that later gave way to celluloid masterpieces. These shorts would, in many cases, prove to be both prescient explorations of the potentialities of film and forerunners of the commercial mode of music video.

Conner’s first major film work, A Movie (1958), is a groundbreaking meditation on violence that is listed in the Library of Congress National Registry of Film. Through found footage the short evokes both grandeur and failure in its dialectical use of soaring music, circa golden-age Hollywood, and images of natural and man made disasters. A Movie is a film that takes its logical place in the long lineage of non-narrative cinema while creating its own kind of storytelling that subverts both pop-film stiltedness and avant-garde complacency. In its rapid cutting, melancholic undertow, and thriftstore sensibility, Conner shares much in common with Joseph Cornell, but where Cornell is light and fleeting, Conner is heavy and austere. That isn’t to say Conner was without humor; during a period of creative malaise, due to an overly controlling New York gallery, he would go to gallery openings and silently pin buttons reading “I am Bruce Conner” or “I am not Bruce Conner” on attendees clothes. The pinning shtick was one of many conceptual acts fitting more and more in line with the burgeoning counterculture of the 1960s.

It was in San Francisco that Conner further refined his aesthetic techniques of assemblage and abstract contemplation. In 1966 he (re)composed a young Toni Basil’s “Breakaway” in which tightly edited and sped up scenes of Basil dancing seem to leap off the screen:

Just as the song comes to the end, and the film goes black, music reverses along with the images in tow. The images are hyper kinetic, accentuating and exaggerating Basil’s movements, featuring her both in a number of slim outfits and completely nude. Her form, cutting so sharply against the black background, completely consumes the frame. The emphases on feminine mystique and power, the flexibility of rock music, and editing techniques totally in step with the new waves are what connect Conner’s work from the period to the zeitgeist of the period.

By the 1970s Conner was exploring photography in the punk scene, while continuing to work on his visual

art. Following his 1967 work dealing with the assassination of JFK, Report, that saw Conner dealing with consumer culture, and an increasingly dreadful country. In Valse Tiste (1977) navigates dreams, memories and death in a little over five minutes. Utilizing old footage awash in sepia tone, combined with loops and the title music, Conner composes with the richness of a symphony conductor. This is the work that most truly resides in the same melancholic territory occupied by Cornell, an America of love that has been irrevocably marred by loss. Out of all of Conner’s work this is the most engaging in any traditional sense, partaking in the same sort of amorphous storytelling that marked the surrealists work.

The late seventies and early eighties would prove to be a vital period in Conner’s career. After Valse Triste, and ‘music videos’ for Devo, and Brian Eno and David Byrne, his is work would increasingly become occupied by spiritual imagery, and a depth of soul that was somewhat missing from his earlier work. Recent years have seen a revived interest in his work with several retrospectives and a touring exhibition of nearly the entire corpus of his film, a truly deserving tribute. A great wealth of aesthetic richness, and innovative technique may be gleaned from his work. In the face of the increasingly blandness of Indiewood, and the unseen avant-garde, Bruce Conner deserves our attention now more than ever.

Iron Man, or The Failures and Successes of Contemporary Pop Cinema

Jon Favreau’s Iron Man is at once a deft melodrama, and a daft action film, equally full of bright moments of comedic gold and insufferably clichéd character development. Its strengths lie in its use of old Hollywood aesthetics that grew out of the improvisation between the wonderful pairing Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert Downey Jr. But the film is too overwhelmed by the same kind of contrived plot that hampered most of the Spider-Man and X-Men trilogies to allow the sassy sparring between Gwyneth’s “Pepper” Potts and Downey’s “Tony” Stark to truly shine.

Favreau is obviously a gifted filmmaker and has a knack for the kind of crowd pleasing movie that Iron Man so perfectly inhabits. His Elf is an undeniable success in my eyes because it so perfectly captures the kind of wide-eyed wonder that golden age Hollywood was so known for. That doesn’t mean his filmmaking aesthetic is particularly nostalgic, but it captures the sort of adventure and romance that use to strike children so affectively in the mid 20th century. By that same token his films can turn maudlin and put on the cheesy action sequences in the blink of an eye, and sink so far in to themselves that there’s no escaping the feeling that you’re left wanting more emotionally and visually.

For all the big production sheen that is slapped on Iron Man, it’s an all too standard action film. One that is becoming increasingly grating in the never ending line of superhero franchises. That said, it is obviously (based on its box office) a film that satisfies the hunger of the modern cinema goer. Distinctions between good and bad are simplified and the edge is slowly warn off Starks’ rebellious character; politically it is the perfect mythos-booster for our time. What that mythology is is hard to say. The portrayal of the U.S. government is at times bumbling, pernicious, and still again just plain annoying. On the other hand the terrorists that make up the villains of the first half are even simpler in characterization, as men who wish only to take over the world. For its first 30 minutes Iron Man poses itself as a political allegory for the distracted digital age where subtlety is passed over in favor of texts that can be reduced to uncomplicated signifiers.

Moments that shy away from this ideological narrative framework are all the more satisfying, but fail to save the film as a whole. A fatal flaw that mars runs rampant through the majority of the studio system’s output; the saving graces of Pixar and Apatow productions are largely the result of fierce aesthetic persona’s that are allowed to breath, which has always been the exception that proves the rule for Hollywood.

Pop Songs for War

Serge Bozon’s WW I saga, La France, was screened at the recently wrapped New Directors/New Films festival here in NYC. It is a moving piece on the trials of a band of soldiers who attempt to escape the war to a foreign land, all the while accompanied by Camille, a woman who has disguised herself as a man in order to find her lost husband. A serious drama indeed, but one that is broken up by the naive ’60s pop stylings of the wayward group of Frenchmen. It’s a strange journey, one that subverts the regular notions of genre film in its concoction of war, romance and musical. In doing so it becomes a dark fantasy, a notion the filmmaker dismissed in the Q&A, but which I believe is a more than reasonable analysis.

Bozon says the film’s events are all concrete and are meant to be taken as real occurrences within the film. No character bats an eye at the songs, which lends credence to this reading, but it ignores the critical eye we the viewer bring to such a heady-brew of a war film. With the songs set aside, the happenstance and the odd monologues that play such prominent roles (such as the dialog on Philippe, the lost soldier, that forever shifts the arc of the plot away from the bright themes expressed in the song interludes) have invariably lead critics to draw comparisons between the film and that of a classic fairytale.

Such a reading leads, quite naturally, to a fairytale ending. An ending that reveals one of the films few weakness; it’s, at times, overly studied, overly self conscious. Everything feels a bit too calculated, the men feel a bit too knowledgeable about their destiny. Sylvie Testud, who plays Camille, constantly shines though and provides a great deal of sincerity to the mix. In doing so the film builds up contrasting fields of view that come to a head when she must separate from the men. It’s a heartfelt goodbye and she is forever transformed, taking along the men’s embattled spirit to her husband who leaves the viewer with metaphysical considerations on the mind. The film is itself an act of transformation, and I can’t help but feel subtly changed by its gentle and melancholic ebb-and-flow.

Diary as Film, Film as Diary

Jonas Mekas’ cinema is one of personalized vision reaching the greatest heights of universal experience. His films consist of ‘everyday things’ that evoke are tied to very firm times and places, yet evoke a sense of timelessness in there concern for friends and family. His aesthetic is one built around the concept of film as diary, diary as film. These works include early examples such as Walden (Diaries, Notes, and Sketches) (1969) and Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972), where pieces of celluloid collected through years of ‘home movies’ are assembled to create contemplative pieces on love, life and memory. What very well might prove to be his crowning achievement in this model, As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, screened last Friday at Anthology Film Archives.

Completed in 2000, As I Was Moving Ahead is Mekas’ longest film, with 6 reels totaling a near 5 hours, it is an exercise in metanarrative. Scene after scene of familial life shot in 16mm awash in warm colors, it is composed of chapters without a chronological order, but possesses an internal logic that is driven both by clever title cards (‘this is a political film’) and Mekas’ own dreamy narration. The final essential component comes by way of Auguste Varkalis’ improvised piano score, which is at once melancholic and sweet in its swirling haze of impressionist clusters.

The content of the movie itself is of the family Mekas built with his wife Hollis and his daughter Oona. Caught on film they do little out of the ordinary, but the rapid-fire cutting and juxtaposition enchant these moments (days spent in the park, nights spent dancing after dinner) with a kind of magic that is rarely found in the common home movie. He is in a dialogue with the past, where he constantly speaks of the search for paradise.

This paradise is in a constant state of becoming; for Mekas there is only the now. The past is as much a part of the present as anything else. As he admits there is very little narrative tension, but an implicit struggle against loneliness is always at hand, caught on every frame. He is fighting against the mundane to discover poetry in every moment of life. As I Was Moving Ahead is a film that relishes the positivity of marriage, birth and hot summers. More than that, it is a film that finds the bittersweet in all of these occurrences in life, amplifying them to a point where the film as a whole takes on a reality of its very own.

“There’s no devil in church…only among men.”

These fateful lines, are at times apt descriptors for what Sergei Parajanov’s epic Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964) is all about, while at other times, it’s meaning remains just as elusive. Finishing its run at BAM Rose cinemas tonight, it is a film that presents Hutsul culture and a is a fine, rather early example, of metanarrative. Filmed in both color and black&white, Parjanov’s film utilizes song, dance sequences, archetypes, on screen text, and a myriad of other social devices to build a mosaic of a life of an individual and community. As film critic J. Hoberman noted in his Village Voice review, the only other film that is in any way comparable just happened to be completed the same year, half a world away in the Colorado mountains. Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man explores many of the same themes, at once beautifully composed and seeming about to come undone under the weight of the birth-death-birth cycle that posits itself so centrally in the narrative framework.

Plot-wise, the film concerns the young Ivan, and his journey from childhood to manhood, his love Marichka’s longing for marital fulfillment, and his eventual love lost, seemingly regained, before meeting his final death to complete the cycle. Throughout it all the camera exhibits a constant kinetic energy, aided by the collage-like editing makes aesthetic connections where there aren’t usually any to be found. His immersion in image, exhibited in the opening scene of Ivan’s father’s death, provides another Parajanov-Brakhage connection through their limited soundtracks. The minimal sound to be experienced is usually relegated to important sensory clues that link a viewer to an image, while the aural focus usually rests with the musical scores built from collections of old Russian folk songs. These older sounds ground the film when it leaps through narrative time.

Ivan is thrust in to an adult role, but is apparently not prepared for the love of Marichka, as he must leave to fulfill their ‘fate.’ What this fate concerns is a changing of the seasons, which is quite literally displayed on screen, as Ivan’s childhood begins in the winter-y snow, while his lovelorn period is spent in the spring as he wonders through the woods to an unknown destination. This constant traveling and separation from others and the pain it incurs emerges as a central theme in the film. At other points this is expressed through the artificiality of the set pieces and the muted colors the camera captures. When Ivan arrives at his destination, a deforested pasture, he discovers his dead lover after traveling down river in search of her after he discovers she is missing.

The complete destruction of the characters inner self is interesting, giving that it is proceeded by images of deer and and cross captured by the camera’s lens in the low grass, which, when Ivan approaches, seems to suggest a kind of redemption. Yet, what follows is anything but. The color is completed drained from the screen and Ivan is left to wallow in front of an often stagnant camera. His rehabilitation only occurs after he marries Palanga in a ritual ceremony that includes a disrobing scene captured from the feet, an oddly effecting moment-at once more personal and objective in what it portrays than most of the other symbolic pieces of the film.

This respite from fate, it proves, is not long lived. For what follow is the return of harsh winter, a procession of masked men, betrayal, death and the most ritualistic of burials. Poetry is recited between two lovers, a tragic display that is unmatched in even the most melodramatic of Hollywood dramas. While the children at the end of the film, peering through a window, towards the dead body, suggest a kind of structuralist view of the world. The movie is a hard one to unpack and an even harder one to conclusively analyze, offering a myriad number of images and paths to look further down, if only glanced for a moment. Paths where the devil may lie, far away from the watchful eyes of the church.