New Animation

Soul City, by M. Henry Jones, is in the filmmaker's own words intended to: “Visually counterpoint the music of a subculture.” Punk rock group FLESHTONES perform the song “Soul City” as tiny black & white cut-out figures (with hand-tinted flesh tones), against a flickering background of brilliant color.

• (1979, 2 mins, color, Print from Serious Business)

A Tasteful Romance, by Clint Colver, employs cell animation in the old-time tradition as two lips meet and fall in love in candyland to the music of Tommy Dorsey.

• (1978, 5-1/2 mins, color, Print from Serious Business)

107-1/2, by John Nelson, is computer-animation generating fireworks!

• (1979, 2 mins, color, Print from Serious Business)

Lives of Firecrackers, by Sandy Moore, covers the very brief lives of several firecrackers, including the political, erotic and schizophrenic firecracker. It is also about the creative process: one firecracker reads from Wittgenstein.

• (1979, 11 mins, color, Print from Serious Business)

Animation for Live Action, by Vera Neubauer (Great Britain), uses both live action and animation techniques (cut-out, line drawings, pixilation) to create a tart, rapid-fire film on the thousand-and-one perplexities facing Eveywoman today.

• (1979, 25 mins, color, Print from Museum of Modern Art)

Mirror Animations, by Harry Smith, “...‘mirror' the intricate subtleties of Thelonius Monk's musical performance of ‘Misterioso' with a rarely achieved felicity. Harry Smith's prodigious knowledge of mythologies and mystic arts and the voraciousness of his image-gathering eye allow him to populate the screen with a dazzling array of unexpected figures - Grecian-robed priestesses and juggling skeletons, prodigious frogs turning into postmen and giving chase to Indian dancers, cabalistic symbols and children's dolls, ladies in bathtubs and men in toy wagons.... a fusion of utter unpredictability and inexorable logic.”
-Marie Nesthus, Programmer, “Film as Art,” 21st American Film Festival.

“In this version, the film is projected forward, then reversed, and forward once again. “Although studies for this film were made in the early 1960s, the non-existence of suitable printing equipment until recently, my inability to locate the original camera footage until 1979, and particularly the lack of an audience ready to evaluate L. Wittgenstein's ‘Ethics and Aesthetics are One and the Same' in the light of H.C. Agrippa's earlier, ‘there is no form of madness more dangerous than that arrived at by rational means' have all contributed to delaying until now the availability of a print in the full mirror-reverse form originally envisioned....”
-Harry Smith

• (1962-79, 11 mins, color, Print from The American Federation of Arts)

Freefall, by John E. Haugse, has its Bay Area premiere with tonight's screening. Some 10,000 cels and 40 painted backgrounds went into this work of three years, which the filmmaker describes as the pictorializing of the “patterns of our lives.” Its three parts (Earth, Sea & Shore) each begin with the transformation of rock, water and clay, respectively, into a creature which participates in a series of adventures. The style and imagery is surrealistic.

• Music compositions by Allen E. Smith. Electric Drone performed by Jon Lazell. The UCSB Orchestra directed by Michael Moores. (1979, 16 mins, 35mm, color, Print provided by filmmaker)

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