{animation} – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Winter Days: a renku

Winter Days is two things: a renku, or collaborative poem whose creation was initiated by Matsuo Bashō in Japan in 1684; and a 40-minute collaborative film from 2003 based on the same renku, with contributions by 35 animators from Japan and elsewhere, all under the direction of Kihachiro Kawamoto. The title of the poem provides the theme which the poets follow, with each poet repeating the last line of the previous stanza before adding a new of line of their own. The animators follow the same procedure, albeit much more loosely.

The results of this when transformed to animated sequences lacks the cohesion you’d get from a page or two of verse, especially when each sequence is self-contained. The moods of the individual sections also vary widely, from horror to broad comedy, but the film as a whole is a marvellous assembly of animation techniques, from simple drawings to clay animation, painting, puppetry, and computer graphics. The biggest attraction for animation aficionados will be the opening sequence which features a rare two minutes of film by the great Yuri Norstein. Among the other non-Japanese animators are Raoul Servais (whose piece appears to refer to Japanese ghost stories), Jacques Drouin with his pinscreen, and Britain’s Mark Baker. Wikipedia has a convenient chart that lists all the animators and the techniques they use. The Wikipedia page also notes the absence of any DVD release with English subtitles, but since all the sequences are wordless translation is only required for the intertitles and the readings that separate them. If you’re used to pairing video files with subtitles, however, you can download English subs here.

Given the allusions in some of the poem’s stanzas it no doubt helps when watching this to be familiar with Matsuo Bashō’s other writings, as well as the subtleties of Japanese poetry. But there’s more than enough artistry in Winter Days to warrant repeated viewing.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tokyo Loop
• Raoul Servais: Courts-Métrages
• Yuri Norstein animations

Wilfried Sätty and the Cosmic Bicycle

Listen, Sleep, Dream (1967), a poster by Wilfried Sätty.

Continuing the San Francisco theme, twenty years ago today I was visiting the city myself. Jay Babcock, Richard Pleuger and I had driven up there from Los Angeles to research some of the history of Wilfried Sätty (1939–1982), master collagist, psychedelic poster artist, record cover designer and book illustrator. We spent 24 hours driving around the Bay area: up to Petaluma, where we met Sätty’s friend and artistic collaborator, David Singer, a fine collage artist in his own right; then to Berkeley to talk to Walter Medeiros, custodian of the Sätty estate and one of the leading scholars of the psychedelic poster scene; finally to North Beach, where we found the house in Powell Street where Sätty was living and working in the 1960s and 70s.

Sätty and an unknown woman in the artist’s basement pad/studio at Powell Street, a place he referred to as “the North Beach U-boat”. This was from a magazine feature that I photographed at David Singer’s house. I forget the source, it may have been from a 1972 TIME article about San Francisco artists.

The trip was a dizzying experience, but fascinating for what it revealed about Sätty and his work. From David Singer we learned, among other things, that the name “Sätty” had been chosen as a pseudonym by the former Wilfried Podriech for its echo of Ancient Egypt; the pronunciation, when you pay attention to the umlaut, conjures the word “Seti”. Walter Medeiros showed us stacks of original Sätty artwork, including all the collages intended for the artist’s final book, Visions of Frisco, a visionary history of the city which was published in 2007. Medeiros later emailed me a few additional notes which I have filed somewhere, correcting my guesswork in the piece I’d written about Sätty for Strange Attractor Journal earlier in 2005. At the time the only information I had to hand was the scant biographical information in Sätty’s books, the interview that he gave to Man, Myth and Magic in 1970, and a few web pages devoted to the artist which someone had put together in the late 1990s then never updated.

The house at 2143 Powell Street as it was in 2005. Those trees have grown considerably in the past 20 years.

All of which had me looking last week to see whether Sätty had a more substantial web presence today. Happily, he does, with this dedicated site maintained by Ryan Medeiros, Walter’s son. I’m saddened to read that Walter Medeiros is no longer with us but it’s gratifying to discover his family continuing his efforts to preserve Sätty’s legacy. Sätty is often reduced to a minor figure in the history of San Francisco poster art but he was more than this: a book creator as well as an illustrator, and a collage artist who extended Max Ernst’s engraving collage into new dimensions, using printing presses to multiply and overprint his assemblages.

Sätty’s first book, The Cosmic Bicycle, was published in 1971 by Straight Arrow Books, the publishing imprint of Rolling Stone magazine. This is a collection of collages, a few of them in colour, in which the compositions have a distinctly Surrealist quality. Sätty’s subsequent work downplayed the wild juxtapositions in favour of greater compositional control. His subsequent collection, Time Zone (1973), is a wordless “novel” in the manner of Max Ernst’s collage books.

The Cosmic Bicycle is also the title of a 4-minute animated film which brings to life some of Sätty’s pictures from the book. I linked to a copy of this years ago but that link is now defunct so here it is again, an odd little film which runs the artwork through a solarisation process then moves pieces of them around to the accompaniment of an electronic score. (As usual with Vimeo today, you have to log in to see it.) The film was directed by Les Goldman, an animation producer who was mentioned here recently in relation to The Hangman (1964), a short film he made with Paul Julian. Goldman’s own film seems almost amateurish in comparison but the music is by Moog pioneers Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause, credited here as Parasound Inc. Beaver and Krause’s Gandharva album features one of Sätty’s finest cover designs, with title lettering by David Singer. The film score isn’t the duo’s finest by any means—I’d even describe it as rather annoying—but it’s good to see their Sätty connection reinforced.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The original Gandharva
• The Occult Explosion
• Wilfried Sätty album covers
• Nature Boy: Jesper Ryom and Wilfried Sätty
• Wilfried Sätty: Artist of the occult
• Illustrating Poe #4: Wilfried Sätty

Karel Zeman film posters

A festival poster from 2022. Zeman’s films are popular in Japan.

Last week’s post about Czech film-maker Karel Zeman prompted me to see whether any more of his feature films have become available on disc. The international success of Zeman’s semi-animated adventures led to the production of more films along similar lines, although not all of these are as fantastic (or as popular) as Invention for Destruction or Baron Munchausen. A Jester’s Tale, for example, is a historical drama, albeit one which still makes use of Zeman’s skill with animation and special effects. The Karel Zeman Museum in Prague has been slowly restoring and reissuing the director’s features on DVD and blu-ray discs, the most recent title being The Stolen Airship, another film based on Jules Verne’s novels which I’m looking forward to seeing. The museum has also been increasing its production of spin-off products, including poster prints which include a couple of designs I hadn’t seen before. Browsing the poster sites revealed a few more attractive designs for international releases.

The Treasure of Bird Island (1953)

Czech, 1953. Art by Jindřich Cech.

I still haven’t seen Zeman’s first two features. The Treasure of Bird Island is wholly animated story based on a Persian fairy tale.

Journey to Prehistory (1955)

Poland, 1955. Art by Jan Młodożeniec.

Zeman’s second feature is his first film to mix live action and animation, with a story about a group of boys whose journey down a river leads to an encounter with prehistoric creatures. I like the way this poster reduces the narrative to its basic elements while also looking like a design for a Godzilla-themed postage stamp.

Invention for Destruction (1958)

Czech, 1958. Art by Karel Knechtl.

A film I’ve enthused about before, and an ideal place to start with Zeman’s fantasies.

Poland, 1958. Art by Jan Lenica.

“That looks like a Jan Lenica design,” I thought, and so it is. The human-headed fish vehicle has little to do with Zeman’s film but a character like this wouldn’t be out of place in one of Lenica’s own animations, especially Labirynt.

Continue reading “Karel Zeman film posters”

Inspiration, a film by Karel Zeman

I thought I’d written about this one before; I had but only a brief mention in a post about Czech film-maker Karel Zeman which links to a deleted YouTube copy of the film. More of a glass world than a crystal world, Inspiration (1948) is Zeman’s most celebrated short, one which predates his marvellous semi-animated features based on books by Jules Verne and others.

A creator of glass ornaments abandons his unsatisfying sketching to gaze at the rain running down a window pane. Outside the window the water gathered on a leaf contains an ice-like world of frozen surfaces, penguins, swans and skating figures. It’s an entrancing piece that makes glass figurines seem as pliable as creatures fashioned from clay or Plasticine. The film is also notable for a musical accompaniment by Zdeněk Liška, one of the composer’s earliest scores that sounds rather anonymous next to the idiosyncrasies of his later works.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Zemania

A Country Doctor, a film by Koji Yamamura

Writing about Koji Yamamura’s Parade de Satie a couple of months ago, I mentioned his adaptation of a Franz Kafka story, A Country Doctor (2007), and here it is. The Kafka adaptation was made a few years before Parade de Satie, and differs so much from the later film that you’d think they were the work of different directors. Where Parade is colourful, frivolous, and as lively as the ballet it was based upon, A Country Doctor is dark, disturbing and unpredictable. Yamamura says he chose the Kafka story from a collection of stories presented to him by a production company, only one of which appealed to him. This, coincidentally, is how Orson Welles came to direct The Trial, after producer Alexander Salkind suggested he choose a book to adapt from a list that Salkind gave him.

The events of Yamamura’s film—a country doctor is called out on a snowy night to attend to a young patient—are typical of Kafka in his shorter mode, in which absurb or dream-like situations have a tendency to slide into nightmare. Yamamura depicts the doctor’s visit in a sketchy hand-drawn style where the figures and their surroundings are continually subject to wild distortions and abrupt alterations of perspective. It’s the type of physical exaggeration that you see in the UPA cartoons of the 1950s but in those films the effect is almost always deployed for comic effect. When used in a more realistic context the distortions add to the dream-like quality of Yamamura’s film. The story is augmented by a fine score composed by Hitomi Shimizu which includes an Ondes Martenot among the instruments. If I’d have seen this in 2011 I would have included it on my list of notable Kafka film and TV adaptations.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kafka’s machine
• The Metamorphosis of Mr Samsa, a film by Caroline Leaf
• Kafkaesque
• Screening Kafka
• Designs on Kafka
• Kafka’s porn unveiled
• A postcard from Doctor Kafka
• Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka
• Kafka and Kupka