[The] Insinuation of accidentally spilled ink that would be running across the paper in random, aleatory oozes displaces the graceful liquidity of the careful animated choreography. - William Moritz
A horse goddess gives birth to three powerful brothers who set out into the Underworld to save three princesses from three evil dragons and reclaim their ancestors' lost kingdom.
Borrowing its title from a treatise by Aristotle, the latest film by Makino Takashi is an abstract work that finds its drive in the clash between light and darkness. Entirely composed of superimposed images of Tokyo’s landscape and water sites, the film takes its rhythm from the cycles of repetition that are the pillars of life and civilisation. As light emerges from the chaos, Jim O’Rourke’s ambient drone sets the tone for what is to come.
An abstract animation with a motif of a dragonfly, and a complex multi-exposure landscape of a field and a woman's naked body overlap.
Sketch Film #3 (Tomonari Nishikawa, 2006, min., super 8, silent, 18/24fps, b&w, USA/Japan) The third film in the series, which starts with a sequence of paired images: a focused image and a blurred image of the same subject, which was caused by a diagonal camera movement. Later, it shows an experiment to produce an apparent depth by rotating an apparent shape. It was edited in camera and hand-processed afterwards.
Mamori transports us into a black-and-white universe of fluid shapes, dappled and striated with shadows and light, where the texture of the visuals and of the celluloid itself have been transformed through the filmmaker’s artistry. The raw material of images and sounds was captured in the Amazon rainforest by filmmaker Karl Lemieux and avant-garde composer Francisco López, a specialist in field recordings. Re-filming the photographs on 16 mm stock, then developing the film stock itself and digitally editing the whole, Lemieux transmutes the raw images and accompanying sounds into an intense sensory experience at the outer limits of representation and abstraction. Fragmented musical phrases filter through the soundtrack, evoking in our imagination the clamour of the tropical rainforest in this remote Amazonian location called Mamori.
Len Lye usually timed his films with great care to match their soundtracks, but for All Souls Carnival, he and composer Henry Brant worked separately, preferring to see if the score and visual track would synchronise by chance. Lye also experimented with a new Direct Film technique, drenching the filmstrip in colourful paint and marker pen.
Three books: a film festival catalogue, a dictionary, the Bible. Three works whose materiality has become obsolete by the digital dematerialization. A commentary on the fragility of culture.
A deep dive into a snowstorm of structural chaos and a blizzard of exploding gestural animation.
An exploration of the relationship between sound and picture inspired by the two lights (twi-light) found inside film projectors.
Channelling Lye and McLaren, de Bruyn continues his explorations of ‘direct-to-film’ inspired artwork barely contained within the frame.
A swarm of forms, reminiscent of alien spaceships or mechanical bats suspended in space.
The function of the wrestler is not to win. It is to go through the motions that are expected of him.
This animation can be watched in 2D or using Chromadepth Glasses in 3D.
Abstract 2D hand-drawn animation using jazz music
A unique journey across a topography created entirely from a form of digital light and shadow—a bristling terrain of poles bending the light in every direction. This film is the remake of Barcode, an abstract road-movie about light and shadows.
The fourth film in the series, for which I focused on colors and shapes. It was shot on Kodachrome, all edited in camera, and processed at Dwayne’s Photo.
A trip towards abstraction, as an hypothesis on how mountains might have been formed.