{animation} – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 832

Dark Corridor (1990s) by Unknown Artist.

• “I greatly enjoyed this rich, allusive and strange text, which has affinities to the literary form and style of TS Eliot, David Jones and Iain Sinclair, uniting high modernism with demotic and pulp elements, as well as to the occult thrillers of Charles Williams, Mary Butts and others.” Mark Valentine reviews B-Movie: Serial of Seven Stars by Andrew Duncan.

• New music: Electronic Meditation For Inner Space Travel by Studio Kosmische; Fathom Tides by Werner Dafeldecker & Lawrence English; rust/wave by Tewksbury.

• At Public Domain Review: Animal, Vegetable, Lamb: Thom Sliwowski on the history of the mysterious Vegetable Lamb of Tartary.

• At Door of Perception: Wistman’s Wood, Dartmoor, as photographed by Neil Burnell.

• Anne Billson selects 20 of the best corridors in film.

• More corridors: Scificorridorarchive.

• Ukrainian animation.

• RIP Sonny Rollins.

• Current Rothko

• The Black Corridor (1973) by Hawkwind | Corridor (2018) by Steve Jansen | Spectral Corridor Part 4 (2021) by The House In The Woods

Gilgamesh, a film by Pavel Aujezdský

The Epic of Gilgamesh isn’t a natural choice for the subject of a short animated film, but that’s what we have here, the first directorial effort by Czech film-maker and TV director Pavel Aujezdský. I’ve never read the Sumerian saga so I’m in no position to judge the success of Aujezdský’s adaptation, but given the strange and confusing nature of the opening scenes I’d guess it helps to be acquainted with the story. The scenes that follow are more straightforward, depicting a journey by the hero in which various powerful beings have to be confronted and either evaded or defeated.

This is one of those animated tales where the form emulates the content to some extent, in this case presenting the deeds of Gilgamesh in the manner of the tableaux found on Sumerian stone carvings. It wasn’t the first animated short based on The Epic of Gilgamesh. The Quay Brothers made This Unnameable Little Broom in 1985, two years before Aujezdský’s film, although in the Quays’ case they only dramatised a single incident from the saga. You’ll find that one on their DVD/blu-ray collections.

Doodlin’ – Impressions of Len Lye

Finally, finally, Keith Griffiths’ documentary about Len Lye (1901–1980) turns up on YouTube. Doodlin’ – Impressions of Len Lye was made in 1987, and is one of several films that Griffiths made about avant-garde film-makers. There’s some slight crossover with his later history of abstract cinema—Stan Brakhage turns up in both films—but Lye was always much more than a film-maker despite his pioneering work of the 1930s. Doodlin’ charts Lye’s progress from his youth in New Zealand, where his earliest artistic impulses were oriented towards painting, to his travels through Samoa and Australia, and from there to London where almost by accident he ended up making short, semi-abstract films for the General Post Office’s promotional division. The single constant in Lye’s life was a restless creativity, something he later brought to kinetic sculpture after he moved to America in the 1940s. Lye is justly celebrated for his short films: Free Radicals (1958/79) is an extraordinary piece of abstract cinema, white lines and marks scratched onto the emulsion of a strip of unprocessed film that jump and flash in time to a recording of African drums. Griffiths’ documentary is a reminder that Lye was also an artist who was never constrained by a single medium.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive

Weekend links 827

Dante in his Study with Episodes from the Inferno (1978) by Tom Phillips.

• “This set, featuring two of the surviving members of Cabaret Voltaire, is as clear and powerful as any of the live albums the group released while Richard H. Kirk was alive.” Derek Walmsley, reviewing what we’ve been told will be the last ever Cabaret Voltaire album. I can also vouch for its excellence but then I’m not what you might call an impartial listener. My copy arrived in the post only a couple of hours before Boards Of Canada made the announcement they’d been teasing for the past two weeks—the new BOC album, Inferno, will be released at the end of May—a coincidence that felt vaguely significant. “How random is random?” as William Burroughs used to say. It’s tempting to describe the moment as the passing of a creative torch but I doubt either of the groups would agree. Boards Of Canada’s approach to electronic music has always been very different to that of Cabaret Voltaire: less aggressive, more melodic, more pastoral, more concerned with memories and the past than with the present or the near future. But the promotional videos for Inferno are reminiscent of the scratch videos that Cabaret Voltaire were creating in the 1980s: degraded VHS assemblages collaged from TV broadcasts and home-movie footage, visual equivalents of a tuning dial running through the shortwave radio spectrum. Then there’s the latest BOC album art which, when taken with details from the teaser video, foregrounds the same fascination with American bastardisations of Christianity that the Cabs were referring to in Sluggin’ Fer Jesus and The Covenant, The Sword And The Arm Of The Lord. I’ll leave it to others to play with the interpretations that can be brought to an album title like Inferno. We’ll no doubt be seeing a great deal of journalistic musing around this and related issues before and after the end of May.

• Jiří Barta’s Expressionist animated adaptation of the Pied Piper story, Krysař (1985), has turned up in high definition at YouTube. Ignore the credit for Wilfred Jackson, an American animation director who had nothing to do with Barta’s film.

• At Public Domain Review: Magic by return of post: Allan Johnson explores the history of those mail-order occult outfits whose ads fill out the pages of the early American pulps.

• Visual Music: a lecture by Simon Reynolds describing the use of electronic music as a soundtrack for abstract cinema.

• At the BFI: Anton Bitel selects 10 great Brazilian horror films.

• There’s more intermediate eyeball fodder at Unquiet Things.

• Your Name in Landsat

• FruitierThanThou

• Disco Inferno (1976) by The Trammps | Inferno (Main Title Theme) (1980) by Keith Emerson | Om Riff From The Cosmic Inferno (2005) by IAO Chant From The Cosmic Inferno

Three short films by Piotr Kamler

Telemann.

The DVD of Piotr Kamler’s animations released by aaa a few years ago contained almost all of the director’s works, comprising a handful of short films together with the 50-minute Chronopolis. The most recent film in the collection was Une mission éphémère, made in 1993, but this wasn’t the last of Kamler’s films. He was still active in the 2000s, and exploring new animation methods using computer graphics. Four shorts resulted from this period: Telemann (2006), Continu-discontinu 2010 (a reworking of one of his earliest films), Five Visual Pieces for Solo Computer (2013), and Perpetuum Mobile (2015). Continu-discontinu 2010 turned up on Vimeo a few years ago, and still seems to be there although you now have to be logged in to see it. The other three films were uploaded recently to the Internet Archive, and together form a distinct quartet in the Kamler filmography.

Five Visual Pieces for Solo Computer.

All four films are exercises in abstract animation, where shapes and colours evolve and change in time to a musical accompaniment. This is a very old cinematic form yet one that still seems fresh because of its scarcity. Telemann, which harks back to the “visual music” of Oskar Fischinger, pairs a dancing group of vertical lines with a piece by Baroque composer Georg Telemann. The animation isn’t as strictly choreographed as Fischinger’s films or Lejf Marcussen’s Tone Traces but it functions well enough as another abstract rendering of musical transcription. The other two films are closer to Kamler’s earlier shorts in the restless motion of their separate elements, with music by Beatriz Ferreyra and Polish group Kwadrofonik.

Perpetuum Mobile.

I thought for a while that the Kamler DVD was out of print but the aaa website still has a page with an active purchase link. A high-definition collection of all of Kamler’s films would be the ideal but for now the DVD is the best you can get.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The abstract cinema archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Continu-discontinu 2010, a film by Piotr Kamler
• L’Araignéléphant
• Le labyrinthe and Coeur de secours
• Chronopolis by Piotr Kamler