As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame
There's a story they tell in Sri Lanka about the baby Krishna, born to a human mother who didn't know she had a god for a son. When he was about three years old he put some sand in his mouth as three-year-olds are wont to do, and as mothers are wont to do, she tried to make him spit it out. After mighty efforts on both sides the boy-god finally opened his mouth; his mother looked in and saw the universe.
Last weekend at Carpenter Center the devil spit the universe out of his mouth and laughed. A sign of recognition went up from the audience: Ah, another origin-of-the-universe cartoon." It was an Italian movie, FantaBiblical, good news for post-Sputnik man, the fallen Catholic's Chariot of the Gods, the ten commandments as the fallout of a mid-space collision. Nothing is sacred; everything is permitted.
The universe out of the mouth of a babe or a devil is no shock to anyone familiar with the metamorphoses of animation, where anything you can draw is true. Any effect can follow from any cause, and we accept those vibrating colors and lines as alive. Who needs Disney? The colors don't have to be solid or stay inside the black lines. We'll believe it.
Who needs Disney, indeed. These eight weeks of animation--this weekend is the third--were kicked off by the auspicious "Thirteenth International Tournee of Animation." Center Screen's showings at Carpenter Center of independent films are matched only by the Whitney Museum and Film Forum in New York. Here in Cambridge the Off the Wall Theater in Central Square screens the only other on-going series of short movies, animation included, around metropolitan Boston. As Barry Levine, program director for Center Screen, put it, "It is appropriate that Center Screen be the largest independent animation showcase in the country, because Harvard is known for having one of the finest animation departments in the country."
Bet you didn't know that if you make a good movie at Carpenter Center it means something in the art-school, art-business world. Bet you didn't know that Harvard has a $60,000 Oxberry animation stand in the basement of Carpenter Center. Bet you don't even know what that is.
Harvard is an amazing place. Your senior thesis in animation can win a prize at Toronto's annual animation festival, and almost no one around Harvard will ever hear about it. Harvard's only response to Joanne Freeman's 1976 success Toilette was, in effect, "Mazel tov, and we'll keep the royalties."
But Harvard provides the hardware, and Carpenter Center has the equipment most animators and fledgling studios improvise or do without, like the Oxberry. The Oxberry is an electric dream machine: it lights your drawings from below or polarizes the light from the sides; it fades or dissolves on command. It has sets of pegs on chain-treads, like tanks: hang your hole-punched transparencies or paper on the pegs and it will roll them steadily in any direction, your background stage left and your Mickey Mouse stage right. Ordinarily, each consecutive drawing is recorded on two frames of film; with a few dissolves, which require backtracking, you might not get a minute's worth of film shot in a day.
One of the films being premiered this weekend is by Carpenter Center's animation teacher, Kathy Rose, featured in argument with her characters in her film pencil Bookings. Much of the recent independent animation in the U.S. has been done by one-time VES 153 teachers and students. George Griffin taught it last year, Mary Beams Phillips the year before. Frank Mouris, who won an Academy Award, Eliot Noyes, famous for his sand film Sandman, and Caroline Leaf, whose experiments have been so numberous and noteworthy the last Center Screen showing will be devoted to her work--all are old friends of Carpenter Center. The movies in the New Personal Animation that are not products of the National Film Board of Canada, the British Film Institute, CalArts, or an Eastern European studio probably acknowledge a Harvard Vis Stud alum in the credits. Last weekend's New Personal Animation Part I included a Harvard senior thesis (Eggs. by Ruth Hays), a ten-foot set built in one of the studios in Vanserg for Asparagus, Susan Pitt, and three short diary films by Susan Rubin, who seems to be the guardian angel of the animators at work in the basement in Carpenter.
This weekend, in the final half of New Personal Animation, Kathy Rose and Frank Mouris with his wife Caroline reinforce Carpenter Center's reputation. Frank Mouris' latest work is reminiscent of his landmark Frank Film, which which won the 1973 Academy Award for indpendent animation. Frank Film was an autobiography in cut-outs and double soundtrack, one of Frank's voices telling his story and the other counting as the years roll by. The cut-outs came from years of scavenging fellow animators' magazines looking for the same orange slices and TV's in the same advertisements, which he made into luscious photographic trails of his career. His new movie, Impasse, repeats the methods of Frank Film but recounts the battle of an arrow and a point which enlists armies of Avery Labels in its cause. The movie's best moment finds the arrow, like the audience, burrowing through advancing rows of color. You think I'm kidding about the labels. Watch the credits--always watch the credits.
Kathy Rose's movie is an imaginary documentary of an animator at work. She strikes a bargain with her originally uncooperative characters: they will be in her movie if they are allowed to name it. They accuse her of heartless artistic license: "If you really want to make good cartoons you have to be in one first." When she walks away in frustration, the pencils join in the rebel cause and they all try to make their own movie, like the old "goofy groceries" of the 1930's and 40's who fight for love and glory that goes on after the grocer locks up for the night.
Rose's technique demonstrates two methods probably unfamiliar to the non-animator. She has drawn herself into the movie but her own portrait in the movie has an almost photographic quality while the characters are obviously hand-drawn. In fact, it is only when she passes her pencil over her face and becomes similar in style to her characters that her self-portrait begins. Until then, she has taken advantage of a trick called "rotoscoping", a painstaking process which involves tracing the projection of live-action footage, frame by frame, onto paper laid over frosted glass. The result is a strange breed of fantasy and reality, true proportions with great fluidity--trained nonchalance, like an architect's handwriting. It is a common technique and can be discerned in this weekend's Animation for Live Action, by Vera Neubauer, as well.
The other element of animation that illustrates for the uninitiated is the use of cycles. Cycles create the rhythm of a movie: when the same action happens several times in a row, that's a cycle; when there is no action but the lines stay "alive"--they vibrate slightly and move in their own subtle rhythm--that's a cycle, too. Even a figure standing still dies without a cycle. The illusion is not complete. in Pencil Bookings numbers sometimes appear in the lower right hand corner of the drawings. Watch them if you can, and you will see them repeat, marking the cycles.
Drawn animation is probably most common, but volition can be endowed to objects, to photographs, to silhouettes and collages--the weekend after this, Center Screen features a show of cut-out animation exclusively. All of these devices are represented in the New Personal Animation. For example, in Part II, pixillation, or accelerated live-action footage, constitutes Los Ojos, by Gary Beydler, and Stephen Weatherkill's The Walker employs the mysteries of the optical printer, too multifarious for this writer to relate, to fill the walker's silhouettes with different background and patterns than his rightful landscape.
Drawing styles themselves range from Jeffrey Hale's which in Blind Man's Buff veers as close to Saturday morning cartoons as Center Screen gets, to Maureen Sherwood's freehand pen-and-ink for her Sempre Libera. John Canemaker's Confessions of a Stardreamer has the quick sketch and metamorphos is that keeps the cliches of the jaded actress on the soundtrack alive.
Al Sens' Interview with Ivan Shusikov has his unmistakeable signature: Day At the Office shown last weekend used exactly the same background. It seems to be part of his protest against the Canadian bureaucracy. In this interview, a disembodied voice welcomes to Canada a Russian dissident filmmaker, who hides behind a desk throughout the interview. He is afraid to answer the interviewer's questions about the political reception of his films at home, and their commercial reception in Canada where distributors have refused it "because they might have to buy Canadian short films then too." Shusikov scuttles at last to the bathroom--and the movie ends with gunfire and a disclaimer from the interviewer.
The dig at Canada may seem wildly unfair to independent American filmmakers, because the National Film Board of Canada provides steady work, almost a federal subsidy to Canadian filmmakers. But some find a conservative, cute streak in the National Film Board productions, such as Poets on Film, which is a series of poems, presumably by Canadian poets, illustrated so that, as in sign language, metaphors become literal and facts metaphorical.
It is fortuitous that one of the animators for Poets on Film was Veronika Soul, whose own film in the show, How the Hell Are You?, gives the audience a chance to take in her fast, ironical style. Her addition to last weekend's program, Tales from the Vienna Woods, based on the letters of Sigmund Freud, was equally eerie and compelling and funny. Her films, like Vera Neubauer's Animation for Live Action, are disturbing collages of live action film, rotoscoping, photography, freehand drawing, and photography of photography, with radical feminism and black humor. Soul's How the Hell Are You? is also based on letters and postcards from a homosexual male on the cosmopolitan circuit to his friend Jane who stays home. He's on his way to key West, where he'll lie on Tennessee Williams' lawn until he comes out: "His doctors told him he should move to Key West and live like a crocodile." He loves London, even though that's where he finds out "you can't love two people at once, especially when they're married--to each other...If I don't violate everyone else's relationship then I have no function." All very arch, of course--"how the hell are you?"--Rolling Stones in the background, sarcastic and timely.
Animation, or animators, have a tendency to mix the perverse with the philosophical and to turn almost anything into the human body. Old Black Joe might have had animation in mind when he said, "Nobody knows what weirdness I've seen/On the trail of the brown buffalo."
We are so suggestible. It's not just that we cry at the ends of movies, and wonder what Dirty Harry will do now that he'd tossed his badge after Scorpio face down outside a potash mine. We'll believe circles that don't meet end to end. In the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT they can't figure out why we recognize a letter in almost anyone's handwriting, or why we abstract a smile-face as a face at all. Nobody knows why we believe animation.