‘Meticulously, Recklessly, Worked Upon’
Direct animation, the auratic and the index
Tess Takahashi
In the last decade, direct animation, along with other practices that emphasise the physical presence of the artist, has emerged as one response to the ubiquity of easily produced digital effects. Since the early 1990s, an increasing number of contemporary filmmakers have produced films without cameras. They work directly on the body of the celluloid, using drawing, painting, scratching, contact printing, and the application of materials, in what often is called ‘direct’ animation. The films considered here are not all animations in the narrow sense that they produce the illusion of coherent movement (or gradual change within a stable pictorial field, as in Norman McLaren’s La Poulette Grise (1947) or the animations of William Kentridge). For the most part there are no running animals or human figures; most of these films present moving abstract shapes and colours in sometimes unpredictable sequence. Likeness is unimportant. Rather, as an artisanal approach taken up by filmmakers who associate themselves with the tradition of avant-garde production, direct animation emphasises the contact between the artist’s hand and the film’s surface. In a move that harkens back to the materialist investigations of the so-called ‘structural’ films of the 1960s and 1970s, these films investigate film’s celluloid base: Not just its emulsion, but its capacity to take colour, to be glued, cut, scraped, xeroxed. At first glance, direct animation processes seem to promise a closer relationship to the image’s origin and a guarantee of artistic value.
Within discussions of avant-garde film, the digital has been articulated as a threat not only to the medium of film, but to the filmic ‘avant-garde’. For example, in the 2001 October roundtable, film was said to be threatened with obsolescence, even ‘death,’ by the proliferation of the digital (Turvey et al. 2002). In this roundtable, the digital was seen as a potential hazard to artistic innovation, the tradition of American avant-garde film, and to avant-garde community. In more practical terms, the ubiquity of digital consumer goods has coincided with the rising cost and outright discontinuation of a variety of film stocks, chemical developing agents, cameras, screening equipment and related services such as professional film processing. The ongoing disintegration of older films and the loss of 16mm classroom rentals to the newer (and ironically less stable) media formats of VHS and DVD has also been cause for concern. At the same time, as noted by the October roundtable participants, the filmic avant-garde also seems to be undergoing a revival; it has not been this vital since the 1960s and 1970s. Over the past ten years there has been an explosion of avant-garde film and media exhibition, increased scholarly work,1 and the revitalisation of long-abandoned avant-garde filmmaking practices. Avant-garde filmmaking seems to have enjoyed a resurgence of activity and popularity just at the point at which the medium of film seems most threatened with obsolescence, both figuratively and literally.
While contemporary avant-garde ‘film’ is now regularly produced and screened in a variety of combinations of media, including digital, video, slides and various film stocks and gauges (such as 8mm, super 8mm, 16mm, 35mm and 70mm), a significant portion of this work can be described as devoted to the medium of film in its specificity.2 Generally speaking, the most prominent characteristic of avant-garde work produced on film in the last decade is its attention to the specificity of the filmic medium, its processes of production and film’s indexical status. Current discourse on medium-specificity within the contemporary filmic avant-garde reopens questions about the status of authorship, of film as a ‘work of art’ and of the very possibility of a filmic avant-garde capable of influence within both the art world and the larger culture.
On one level contemporary avant-garde film seems to respond to the encroachment of the digital through a reclaiming of the auratic qualities of the work of art for film and a re-establishing of the centrality of the filmmaker as artist. This movement appears to reclaim aura through a construction of film’s specificity as singular, old-fashioned and one-of-a-kind in its attention to the ‘craft’ of filmmaking. However, this trend does not simply point to a longing for a set of historical conditions set in the past (pre-1960s), when the status of artist and work of art were ostensibly unproblematic. Rather, I believe that appeals to film’s aura can be read as symptomatic of the ways in which the proliferation of the digital image is forcing artists and laymen alike to renegotiate the status of all images.
At stake are questions of what constitutes the grounds or guarantee of artistic value when the author has long been dead, the work of art has lost its aura, the filmic medium has lost its specificity and the individual ‘work of art’ has extended into a textual system in which personal vision is put to the side. However, the emphasis currently placed on the presence of the artist’s hand in discourse surrounding contemporary avant-garde film (in programme notes, artist’s descriptions and film reviews) obscures other issues that have been crucial to the rise of films concerned with various aspects of film’s medium specificity. More than recentring the author and reclaiming the nostalgic work of art, contemporary avant-garde film made on the medium of film can be read as a product of the current crisis of the image. As Mitchell (2005) and others have noted, such crises occur at historical points in which an ‘old’ medium is being encroached upon by a ‘new’ representational technology (Williams 1980). The implication of the filmmaker’s bodily contact with the image thus emerges as the most important point of reference in its guarantee of authenticity and claims for auratic presence in contemporary avant-garde filmmaking.
Within discourse on avant-garde film, the capacity of digital media for editing within the frame (as opposed to between frames), along with its capacity to alter an image seamlessly, seems most threatening to artistic intention. The work produced by the digital apparatus is considered too ‘automatic,’ the options it provides too ‘cookie-cutter’.3 As Lev Manovich (2001) observes in The Language of New Media, the computer’s capacity for ‘automaticity’ (32), its ability to perform previously time-consuming operations such as collaging, animation and the repeating or looping of images at the click of a button, seems to remove human intentionality from the creative process. Such so-called ‘avant-garde strategies’, Manovich continues, now ‘have become the normal, intended techniques of digital filmmaking, embedded in technology design itself’ (307). While Manovich sees these innovations as cause for celebration, for the avant-garde filmmaker they constitute an implicit threat both to his or her place as artist and to the definition of what constitutes a so-called avant-garde film (ibid., 32).4 Little wonder that a recently reclaimed and increasingly preferred term, ‘artists’ film,’ has achieved currency in avant-garde film discourse.
Within the traditional fine arts at both the turn of the last century and the turn of this one, the uniqueness and contingencies involved in human production have been opposed to, and valued over, what is produced by the machine.5 Many programmers’ and filmmakers’ protests against work that utilises the computer’s automatic functions reveal a continuing anxiety about the relationship between human being and machine. It is in this context that the digital is figured discursively as unavailable to physical manipulation. One cannot go into the machine and rearrange pixels by picking them up with one’s fingers. By contrast, film, figured as a material medium, is constructed as having the capacity to ‘index’ artistic intervention through its celluloid, its chemistry, its ability to be cut physically and even in its mechanical projection. The physical variability and irregularity of film have become newly important aspects of its ontology. Thus, the medium of film has been reconceived in recent years according to its ability to bear the artist’s physical intervention, as well as the indexical touch of light.
Direct animation’s emphasis on artisanal processes and homemade qualities is reinforced by textual support that exploits the artist’s retreat from not only digital techniques but the traditional mechanical technologies of filmmaking, such as professional chemical processing labs, lenses and even the camera. In turn, much of this writing celebrates the turn toward film as hand-made object. For example, filmmaker Sandra Gibson’s process is described in terms of its intricacy and craft. As one programmer writes, Gibson’s films are comprised of ‘painted, scratched upon and braided strips of film-surfaces meticulously and recklessly worked-upon, until blistering and flowering with the maker’s material mark, [they are] further reworked and rephotographed through optical-printing’ (Gibson and Recoder 2004). In this description of Gibson’s work, her use of an optical printer is carefully downgraded in its importance to the film’s production. ‘Setting aside the stop-action-of-frames characteristic of the optical printer’, the note continues, Gibson’s Tablecloth (US, 2002) and Precarious Path (US, 2003) ‘were made without the optical aids of camera, projector and sometimes even circumventing a trip to the lab’. Such descriptions produce the impression of a complicated, but highly personal, artisanal process that takes place in a space set apart from the industrial world of the ‘camera,’ ‘projector’ and ‘lab.’
Many films that use direct animation techniques suggest a desire for the pure communication of an image through techniques based on the impression of an implement held in the filmmaker’s hand. This can be seen in films in which the filmmaker draws on the surface of the celluloid by hand: For example, the films of Goh Harada, Nina Paley, Richard Reeves and Carol Beecher.6 Much of this work is highly abstract, presents simple geometric or organic shapes and recalls animations from the early twentieth century, like those of Walter Ruttman, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling and Oskar Fischinger.7 The framing of these contemporary animations suggests that they do not want to be an ‘illustration’ of music but rather seek to be a ‘presentation’ of processes. Reeves’s 1:1 (2001), which was drawn and painted directly on the surface of the celluloid, proudly announces that its colourful, geometrically expanding animations were hand drawn on the film stock itself. Not only were no computers used, but the film’s caption claims that no cameras were employed in the film’s creation. There is, the film announces, a literal ‘one to one’ correspondence between the mark of the implement and the image produced. Here, Reeves claims a direct, existential link between artist’s pen and the strip of celluloid, a link that seemingly avoids the machine altogether, despite the fact that what is screened is surely a print.8
Likewise, hand-painted films such as those by Robert Ascher (Cycle, 1986), Jeremy Coleman (I, Zupt 49, US, 1994; Ecclesiastic Vibrance, US, 1995–96), Bärbel Neubauer (Passage, Austria, 2001), Zoran Dragelj (Simulacra, Canada, 2000), Rena Del Pieve Gobbi (Insurrection, Canada, 2000), Courtney Hoskins (Munkphilm, US, 2001) and Stan Brakhage emphasize the presence of the artist’s body in the production of its image through allusions to the tradition of abstract expressionism. The work of Stan Brakhage, who produced hand-painted and scratched film for three decades before his death in 2003, has been aligned with the abstract expressionist tradition, and his written descriptions of this work would seem to confirm that observation.9
Descriptions of these pure colour abstractions tend to suggest that they function as direct presentations of the experience of human emotion or of physical encounter with the natural world. They imply a desire for a prelinguistic, primal form of communication based on texture, color, form and rhythm. Programme notes and artists’ statements draw connections between the colours presented and the embodied experience of the movement and hues of nature such as vegetable and animal life, rocks, lava flows, the ocean, stars and branching of roots. There is also the implication that the films communicate human emotion in a visceral, unmediated way. For example, Numerical Engagements (US, 2004) by Chelsea Walton is described as a ‘lush’ and ‘colorful … love poem’ in which colour, through ‘the film’s rhythm of editing is like a heartbeat’ (Mad Cat Women’s International Film Festival Notes, 2006). Similarly, Brakhage’s Sexual Saga (US, 1996) is a hand-painted, step-printed film whose form is said to express the movement of sexual arousal, beginning with ‘“explosions” of white, yellow, orange (deepening into reds), vermillion and darker red flame shapes’ (Canyon Cinema Catalogue). Communicating a very different mood, Brakhage’s Self Song/Death Song (US, 1997) produces the struggles between ‘glowing ambers’ and blacks that threaten to take over the image in order to ‘document a body besieged by cancer’ (ibid.). Films such as these imply a desire for unmediated communication and a distrust of both the indexical image and the written sign’s capacity to translate adequately the natural world, human emotion or individual experience.
These abstract animated films produce their ‘guarantee’ through a building of extra-textual evidence that draws on the idea of the pure presentation of colour (as opposed to the presentation of the inadequate sign), the visible material properties of paint, the implied physical presence of the painter/filmmaker and the communication of an experience. Their presence and veracity are figured as abstract and therefore potentially more immediate for a potential spectator. Many films produced in this mode are described in ways that exhibit a desire to achieve a basic, universal communication attainable through the medium of film that depends on its figuration as material and present, unlike the digital image, which is figured as ephemeral and always somehow mediated. In some ways, the process of painting on film seems to promise a prelinguistic fullness, in the sense that it is figured as able to communicate on the level of the emotional, the universal and the natural.10
Some contemporary avant-garde filmmakers reference the tradition of direct animation in the work of Len Lye and Norman McLaren, who began working in the 1920s and 1930s, and the mid-century ‘early abstractions’ of Harry Smith.11 However, many contemporary filmmakers’ interpretations of the relationship between film and image have shifted from Lye’s suggestion that direct animation was a way for the artist to imbue the film with the imprint of the filmmaker’s essential self and suggest that it is physical human contact with the materials of filmmaking that emerges as most important today. As Arthur Cantrill (2002) writes for Senses of Cinema, Lye asserted that ‘his “absolute truth” was in “the gene-pattern which contains the one and only natural truth of our being”’. When film art draws on this information through direct contact with the artist, Cantrill continues, paraphrasing Lye, ‘it resonates with our sense of essential selfness, and we experience the aesthetic value as happiness. For Lye, this “selfness” was anchored to the body and to bodily weight and motion’ (ibid.). The filmmaker’s essential self, represented for Lye by the then new discovery of DNA, was transmitted in the process of direct animation.
Stephanie Maxwell, one of a number of young filmmakers inspired by Len Lye, adjusts his theories to suggest that all that is transferred in the process of filmmaking is evidence of physical contact – though that contact is crucial to the individual work of art. Maxwell (2006) describes direct animation as a ‘process which reproduces very exactly the individual physical impulses of the artist: The artisanal images reflect the vibration of the fingers, the variations of pressure, the internal rates/rhythms externalized’. There is no claim for the transfer of ‘essential selfness’ through direct animation. Rather, Maxwell and others point to the importance of the physical proximity of the artist’s body to the film. This contact is between the physical human body and the material embodiment of the image on celluloid, not a transmission of the ‘self’. However, still present is the idea that working on film ‘directly’ produces the artist as a guarantee of meaning. More often, direct animators claim the capacity for direct, primal communication via the filmstrip, the communication of bodily ‘rates’ and ‘rhythms externalized’ as opposed to the communication of emotion, vision or artistic genius.
While all direct animation film produces a gap between the image projected and the image on the celluloid, these abstractions eliminate the problem of the gap between indexical representation on film and material referent. Hand-drawn and painted films such as those described above index the process of their production. Films that use the techniques of the photogram, layering objects onto the celluloid, or using bodily fluids to produce an image, introduce the problem of indexical representation. They point to the direct, unmediated experience of an object (often taken from the natural world) and to the necessary gaps between the image’s point of capture, its index on celluloid and screened projection.12 However, the desire for the immediacy of presentation rather than the gap in time and space associated with representation can be observed in the discourse surrounding contemporary photogram films such as Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof’s Light Magic (Canada, 2001) and Jeanne Liotta’s Loretta (US, 2003). This suggests a desire to align film with nature rather than with the world of machines and computers. In reference to Light Magic, Marcus Robinson (2001) writes that Pruska-Oldenhof’s images are ‘created through this technique are traces of light that passes through each object leaving its mark on the film surface’. He continues, ‘Photograms bring both the maker and the viewer closer to the object, thus revealing the essence, that neither the naked eye could see, nor the camera lens could capture’ (my emphasis).
Something similar occurs with films that not only eliminate cameras but incorporate actual objects and transparent materials into the celluloid itself. For example, Jon Behrens’s Anomalies of the Unconscious (US, 2003) uses bleaching, baking, painting, inking and chemical hand processing in conjunction with the inclusion of leaves, flowers, hair and insects. San Francisco collective silt’s Ouroboros (US, 2000) incorporates cast-off snakeskin, and Rena Del Pieve Gobbi’s Interception (Canada, 2003) uses dried fruit as negative. Johanna Dery’s The Natural History of Harris Ave, Olneyville (RI) (US, 2002) utilizes actual plant life found during her walks along this avenue and attaches it to the celluloid in a way reminiscent of Brakhage’s Mothlight (1963) and Garden of Earthly Delights (1981). In ironic contrast to the natural objects incorporated into most films in this genre, Rock Ross’s Baglight (US, 1998) was made by ironing plastic bags onto film stock. Here, it is the filmmaker’s engagement in the process of selection and application of materials that is narrativised. Films in this mode rely on the assertion that artist, worldly referent and medium were present together at the site of the film’s production for their claims to immediacy, presence and singularity. Although the spectator cannot touch the film, the material body and testimony of the filmmaker can serve as a guarantee of authenticity. ‘I saw’ is supplemented by ‘I found’, ‘I touched’, ‘I made’ and ‘I bring to you’.
Like films that incorporate material objects, films that incorporate the artist’s own body seem to want to present those bodies as physically present in the film, rather than represented. Filmmaker Thorsten Fleisch’s films are striking in that they present the filmmaker’s bodily fluids and oils directly on the celluloid and on the audio track. Blutrausch (Germany, 1999), translated as ‘bloodlust’, was made through the application of the filmmaker’s own blood to both the optical audio track and the picture area in order to produce a ‘dizzying variety of splotches, drips, and cracks in dried blood which fleetingly resemble butterfly wings and stained glass windows’ (Finkelstein 2002). Fleisch’s Hautnah (Germany, 2002) begins with sounds ‘produced by running a finger on a phono cartridge’ (Finkelstein 2002) and images produced by the filmmaker’s fingerprints where they made contact ‘directly’ with the celluloid. In a film that points to its status as a direct index of the filmmaker’s body, Emma Hart’s Skin Film (UK, 2004) uses cellophane tape to produce a map of the artist’s body from head to toe as the tape picks up pieces of her hair, body oils and skin (Rees, personal communication to author, September 2004). This film fluctuates between presenting bits of hair and skin as objects for the eye and producing a readable map of a woman’s body that must be mentally reassembled. In their use of materials from the filmmaker’s own body, films like this literalise the filmmaker’s physical role in their production. However, their implicit reference to the traditions of conceptual, performance and body art draws attention to the gap between image and the presence (or absence) of the filmmaker’s body in the exhibition space. Despite the desire for presence implied, such films inevitably draw attention to the spectatorial experience as an act of reading rather than of immediacy.
Many contemporary hand-scratched films, in which filmmakers scratch directly into black leader, tie the specificity of celluloid and its emulsion to the idea of an originary language, making reference to ancient, hieroglyphic, cuneiform and non-Western alphabets. However, they also invoke problems of translation, between written language, image and worldly referent. Donna Cameron’s World Trade Alphabet (US, 2001) utilizes oil, charcoal and ink on paper emulsion to combine drawing and scratching in the production of cuneiform symbols. Bärbel Neubauer’s Passage and Moonlight (Germany, 1997) utilise basic, geometric shapes meditating on the evolution of the alphabet. Brakhage’s Chinese Series (Canada, 2003), made while bedridden in the last months of his life, was produced by ‘scratching on spit-softened emulsion with bare fingernails’ (NYFF programme note 2003). It is the last of a series of major works based on ancient languages undertaken by Brakhage in the last two decades of his life. Such practices, and their framing discourse, suggest a desire to get back to an original, primal language of film, made through direct contact with the most basic of materials – fingernails, spit, wood (celluloid). In the Chinese Series, there is no tool mediating between the filmmaker’s hand and the film in the creation of such an image. Scratched films suggest that the filmmaker’s body is essential to the representation of the basic forms they image, and yet point to the problems and gaps inherent in the process of translation and the need for the caption in order to be understood.
Likewise, David Gatten’s Fragrant Portals, Bright Particulars and the Edge of Space (US, 2003) presents stick-like forms, scratched individually into the emulsion, based on the Ogham alphabet. Most spectators would not guess that these are the letters of an ancient writing system until reading the programme note, in which Gatten (2004) describes the film as spelling out one ‘early’ and one ‘late’ Wallace Stevens poem, ‘both about making sense/language from the natural world – the palm tree and the ocean’. These were then ‘translated into Ogham, the 5th century “tree alphabet” derived from a notational system used by shepherds to record notes on their wooden staffs’, Gatten’s note continues, ‘and carved a letter at a time into a piece of semi-transparent flexible wood (black leader)’. As such, Fragrant Portals, like much of Gatten’s work on film, invokes the relationship between written text, image and the material world through the use of an early alphabet, whose letters bear a striking, if abstract, relationship to the trees on which their form is based.
The problem of translation between spoken text and image can be seen in Québecois avant-garde animator Pierre Hébert’s live enactment of the process of hand-scratched animation. Sitting at a light table in front of an audience, Hébert progressively adds scratches and shapes to a loop of black leader as it repeats its lengthened path around the room and back through the projector (Chris Gehman and Elizabeth Czach, personal communication to author, January 2005). In one Montréal performance, Hébert collaborates with his partner by animating a poem she wrote about a homeless woman falling on the street. Hébert animates the poem using simple, gestural figures as it is read aloud, a few lines at a time, in French by his partner. There is a gradual accumulation of both markings and language over the period of time in which the poem is read and the marks are scratched. As the performance progresses, the image is transformed from a series of unreadable marks to a legible animation of a stick-figure woman falling on the sidewalk. In this piece, the filmmaker’s presence before the audience anchors the image to his readily observable handiwork, while the poem/narration directs the reading of the images. However, the gaps between written language and spoken language, French and English, still images and moving images, dark and light, one person and another (whether an intimate like his partner, or a stranger like the homeless woman) resonate with one another in their various translated versions.
While most of the filmmakers discussed do not incorporate indexical filmic images within their texts, quite a few do, including Naomi Uman (Removed, Mexico/US, 1999), Lawrence Brose (De Profundis, US, 1997), Christophe Janetzko (Axe, Germany, 2004) and Steven Woloshen (The Babble on Palms, Canada, 2001 and Two Eastern Hairlines, Canada, 2004). Hébert himself has produced a large body of work over the course of his career that deals with the relationship between image and text, world and representation and the aesthetic in relation to the political. Steven Woloshen has produced films that combine filmed images with scratched and painted animations. In The Babble on Palms, Woloshen paints over a filmed 35mm colour image of a hand and forearm blocking the camera’s unobstructed view of a sequence of seemingly unrelated scenes. The painted hand pulsates and transforms itself in bluish purples, drawing attention to its status as an intruder within the frame of the camera’s indexical view. However, the painted hand transforms quickly into the film’s point of interest, contrasting with the film camera’s stasis. The paint, messy and throbbing, draws attention to its own ‘life’, to the celluloid as a surface and to the indexical scenes’ illusory impression of depth. It produces the celluloid as a material, embodied medium, rather than a window onto the world. The Babble on Palms thus thematises the role of the filmmaker/animator as having a direct ‘hand’ in the production of the image in an explicit way that emphasizes the physicality of the animation process.
The body of films discussed here, in their attention to the material aspects of film, can be read as commenting on the problems of representation, translation and experience in the age of the digital. Unfortunately, many contemporary avant-garde animations have been categorised as purely formal, decorative or conservative in their preference for film over the digital. As such, some see these films as hermetic and inward-looking, a charge levelled at many of the medium-specific investigations of so-called structural films of the 1960s and 1970s, a period also marked by the introduction and convergence of new and old media forms. However, there is a complicated politics at work in the aesthetic choices made in these films that evokes contemporary problems of relationship and communication over both distance and difference.
Notes
1 There has also been a remarkable development of individually or collectively run microcinemas devoted to the avant-garde, such as The Robert Beck Memorial Cinema (NYC), Movies With Live Soundtrax (Providence) and Pleasure Dome (Toronto). There has also been increased activity among avant-garde film festivals and organizations such as Black Maria (Jersey City), Ann Arbor (Ann Arbor), Images (Toronto), Views from the Avant-Garde (New York), Wavelengths (Toronto), Anthology Film Archives (New York), Northwest Film Forum (Seattle), Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley), the Iota Center (Los Angeles) through its touring programs, Cinematheque Ontario (Toronto), Harvard Film Archive (Cambridge, MA), Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (Thailand), Seoul Experimental Film Festival (Korea), Image Forum Festival (Tokyo), Oberhausen Film Festival (Germany), London International Film Festival (UK), Rotterdam International Film Festival (Netherlands) and the Videoex Festival (Switzerland).
2 Some of the most prestigious festivals, like Views from the Avant-Garde (called Projections since 2014, a part of the New York Film Festival) privilege work made almost exclusively on film, although this is a practice that has been criticized by some.
3 In terms of its threat to artistry and singularity, the threat of digital technology to analogue media closely resembles nineteenth century disputes about the artistic value of photography in relation to painting. According to popular nineteenth century claims, photography was not an ‘art’ due to its mechanical nature. Now, film and photography have taken on the status of ‘art’ and it is the digital that is too automatic.
4 This is despite the claims of Manovich and others who see the artist’s ability to manipulate pixels as more akin to painting (and thus more easily under the control of the artist). Paul Arthur (2001, 35) also found this formulation troubling in his review of Manovich’s book.
5 As has been discussed by theorists from Walter Benjamin to Peter Bürger, the historical avant-gardes in the form of the dada and surrealism embraced mechanical reproduction, looking to the machine (and to film) as a way to escape the hold of the bourgeois museum and the traditional fine arts.
6 Goh Harada’s Lampenschwartz (Japan/Germany, 2001), Nina Paley’s Pandorama (US, 2000), Rick Raxlen’s hand-drawn Rude Roll (or how to dance ska) (Canada, 2001); Richard Reeves’s Linear Dreams (Canada, 1997) and 1:1 (Canada, 2001), Carol Beecher’s Ask Me (Canada, 1994) and Sandra Gibson’s colourful Edgeways (US, 1999), Soundings (US, 2001) and Outline (US, 2003).
7 Walter Ruttmann (Lichtspiel Opus I, 1921), Hans Richter (Rhythmus 21, 1921) and Viking Eggeling (Diagonal Symphony, 1925), Oskar Fischinger (Study No. 7, Germany, 1930–31), etc. Such techniques can also be seen in avant-garde films from the 1960s and 1970s, such as Michael Mideke’s Twig (US, 1967), Storm De Hirsch’s Peyote Queen (USA, 1965) and Margaret Tait’s Color Poems (UK, 1974).
8 Reeves is a founding member of the Calgary-based Quickdraw Animation Society, founded in 1989, which works to support artists engaging in direct animation and to spread the practice.
9 Brakhage explains that he was ‘strongly drawn to the Abstract Expressionists – Pollock, Rothko, Kline – because of their inner vision … To me, they were all engaged in making icons of inner picturisation, literally mapping modes of non-verbal, non-symbolic, non-numerical thought. So, I got interested in consciously and unconsciously attempting to represent this’ (quoted in Ganguly 1993, 21). Sam Bush, Courtney Hoskins and Phil Solomon, among others, have optically printed Stan Brakhage’s hand-painted films, which he has been producing since the mid-1980s. Brakhage describes these films as collaborations with the printer. Among the most recent of which are the hand-painted, step-printed shorts Autumnal (US, 1993), First Hymn to the Night – Novalis (1994), The Preludes 1-24 (1996), Shockingly Hot (1996, made with his young sons), The Birds of Paradise (1999) and Lovesong (2001).
10 In this way, contemporary avant-garde filmmaking practice recalls one of the fundamental questions of film theory – the tension between film’s status as language (Eisenstein) and its capacity to represent the world (Bazin).
11 For example, Len Lye’s hand-painted and scratched A Colour Box (UK, 1935), Free Radicals (UK, 1948) and Color Cry (US, 1952); Norman McLaren’s Hen Hop (Canada, 1942) and Begone Dull Care (Canada, 1949); Harry Smith’s Early Abstractions #1–5, 7, and 10 (US, 1939–1956).
12 If early uses of photogram techniques, such as those of Man Ray, imaged man-made objects (like nails), today the objects imaged are overwhelmingly taken from the natural world.
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