Animation

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“JEFFERSON CIRCUS SONGS alternates and sometimes combines life-size cardboard animations with live performances by children and the effect is entirely unified and delightful.” – Edgar Daniels, Filmmakers Newsletter “Suzan Pitt [Kraning]’s films possess an absolutely cosmic sense of patience, of things happening at their own speed and with their own logic. Made with children, JEFFERSON CIRCUS SONGS is a string of puzzling little episodes, some using cut-out animation, some featuring a pixilated cast clad in moppet wigs with stockings stretched over their faces. After its screening at the 1973 New York Filmmaker’s Expo, critic Rex Reed noted that ‘most of it is quite sophisticated and brilliant. It’s likeable because it’s perfect for what it is – a fantasy – and such things, if done well and with talent and vision, need no outside logic … like looking into a Faberge egg.’ ” – Ron Epple, Media and MethodsRead More »

On Christmas Eve, a young boy builds a snowman that comes to life and takes him to the North Pole to meet Father Christmas.Read More »

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“This new medium of expression is the Absolute Film. Here the artist creates a world of color, form, movement, and sound in which the elements are in a state of controllable flux, the two materials (visual and aural) being subject to any conceivable interrelation and modification.” – Mary Ellen Bute

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An epic cycle created on the tiny, domestic medium of Super-8, the film combines the intimacy of its chosen gauge with the evocative sweep of Freudian dreamwork. It’s a moving collage clipped together out of photos and illustrations from the Atomic Age, reconfigured into a private visual language that speaks of both Klahr’s own childhood and a greater strangeness: how images from another era stand as uncanny evidence for a very different stage of development in the American psyche.Read More »

not recommended for people sensitive to flashing lights and colors,

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This film further indicates that computer animation — once a gimmick — is fast becoming a fully-fledged art; the complexity of its design and movement, its speed and rhythm, richness of form and motion — coupled with stroboscopic effects to affect brain waves — is quite overpowering. What is even more ominous is that while design and action are programmed, the ‘result’, in any particular sequence, is neither entirely predictable nor under complete human control, being created at a rate faster (and in concatenations more complex) than eye and mind can follow or initiate. Our sense of reality is thus disturbed not only by the filmmaker but also by the machines we have produced.
– Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive ArtRead More »

A young man grows up in exile in a world overrun by demons and monsters.Read More »

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A tone poem [in which] two woodland sprites dance about, atop power lines and among flowers and leaves, while being pursued. Everyone spends some time pulling levers to switch trains, too.
“Anthony Gross is best known as a printmaker and painter. The animated films he made with American Hector Hoppin reflect his distinctive graphic style, but add a sophisticated choreography of lines and space. The escapist theme of the film developed from an earlier suite of etchings called SORTIE D’USINE (1931).” – David CurtisRead More »

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When you’re a bored teenager looking for thrills, sometimes the only thing you can turn to is rock ‘n roll. Having no skill, money, or even a full set of drums, a feared trio of high school delinquents nevertheless decide they are destined for musical glory in a quest to impress their only friend Aya, avoid a rival gang, and – most importantly – jam out. Animated almost entirely by director Kenji Iwaisawa, and featuring a lead performance by Japanese alt-rock legend Shintaro Sakamoto, ON-GAKU: OUR SOUND brings its own sound and vision to the Hiroyuki Ohashi manga from which it was adapted. With pitch-perfect deadpan humor, the film presents a highly original take on the beloved slacker comedy: a lo-fi buddy film with a blaring musical finale that will leave you wanting an immediate encore.Read More »

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“One of the livelist of Mary Ellen Bute’s abstract films, DADA was intended to be part of a Universal Newsreel segment, showing Bute and her partner Ted Nemeth at work in their tiny New York studio. No copies of the newsreel itself are known to exist at this time.” – Cecile StarrRead More »