{animation} – { feuilleton }

Short films by Hideki Inaba

Berg.

One of Scotto Moore’s recent newsletters pointed to Flow , a short video by Japanese animator Hideki Inaba whose collection of similar works may be seen at YouTube. Inaba’s specialty is bewilderingly complex scenes of kaleidoscopic metamorphosis. His older films like Berg are populated by clusters of fungal forms or simple organisms that look like refugees from some of Haeckel’s zoological studies, writhing or dancing together in a manner and style that wouldn’t be out of place in an old Disney cartoon. His more recent works tend towards greater abstraction with a sharper edge, although the most recent one, Time Tides, takes an unexpected change of direction at its very end.

Tape, a music video for Canigou.

Flow.

Time Tides.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The teamLab experience

Weekend links 748

• In Tate Britain yesterday afternoon I finally got a proper look at Frederic Leighton’s An Athlete Wrestling with a Python (1877). It’s been part of the Tate collection for years but I never used to see it there, my only sighting being a view through a glass door into a locked gallery where the exhibits were being rearranged. I put the statue into my adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu in 1988 (see this post). Virgil Finlay also borrowed the pose for a Tarzan illustration in 1941.

• At Smithsonian magazine: See the first section of the largest-ever cosmic map, revealed in stunning detail by the Euclid space telescope.

• At The Daily Heller: Your Next Stop, The Twilight Zone. An interview with Arlen Schumer about the TV series.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine on Punch and the Surrealists.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – October 2024 at Ambientblog.

• New music: A House Where I Dream by Mattias De Craene.

• RIP Lillian Schwartz, pioneering computer animator.

• At Bandcamp: The Acid Mothers Temple Dossier.

• Where to start with Alan Garner.

• Jim Reid’s favourite music.

• The Twilight Zone (1963) by The Ventures | The Twilight Zone (1979) by The Manhattan Transfer | Twilight Zone (1998) by Helios Creed

Joy Street, a film by Suzan Pitt

Joy Street (1995) is an animated short whose title is ironic at first, you have to stay with its opening scenes of grim Expressionism to see how things develop. If you’ve seen Suzan Pitt’s uniquely strange Asparagus then you’ll be primed for the unexpected turns the scenario takes. To say any more would be to spoil things, and for once I’ve avoided my usual habit of posting shots that show moments throughout the film.

Suzan Pitt only made a handful of animations, three of which—Joy Street included—are on 35mm. Joy Street is also the longest at 24 minutes. I always find it admirable when animators are given the opportunity to work with superior resources yet still insist on making something this personal. Despite her small filmography there’s a lot of her work I’ve yet to see. This is a reminder to look for more.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Into the Midnight Underground

Weekend links 742

Thunderstorm (1959) by Blair Rowlands Hughes-Stanton.

• “To create a novel or a painting, an artist makes choices that are fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence,” says SF writer Ted Chiang. A New Yorker essay which has received a fair amount of attention over the past week, with good reason. As someone who found his name on the list of artists whose work was allegedly being fed into Midjourney, I suppose I have a vested interest in the arguments. (Good luck to any machine trying to imitate my “style”. I don’t have one.) Too much of the discussion, however, has been very poor which is why this is the first time I’ve linked to such a piece here.

• “After going their own way for much of the 20th century, mathematicians are increasingly turning to the laws and patterns of the natural world for inspiration. Fields stuck for decades are being unstuck. And even philosophers have started to delve into the mystery of why physics is proving ‘unreasonably effective’ in mathematics, as one has boldly declared.” Ananyo Bhattacharya on why physics is good at creating new mathematics. Having recently finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s final novel, Stella Maris, this was all very timely.

• “…our films obey musical laws. Of course, you can never tell people how they should watch a film. But the musical element provides a narrative of its own.” Thus the Quay Brothers, in the news again with their forthcoming feature film, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. The quote is from a recent interview with Xan Brooks. Meanwhile, Alex Dudok de Wit posted another interview from 2019, originally published in French, now made available in English for the first time.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine announces a new book of his essays, The Thunderstorm Collectors.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: 28 books that either faked ingesting LSD or did.

• At Public Domain Review: Antiquities of Mexico (1831–48).

• At Print mag: Kelly Thorn’s Tarot of Oxalia.

• USC Optical Sound Effects Library

• Strange Thunder (1987) by Harold Budd | Sweet Thunder (1991) by Yello | Studies For Thunder (2004) by Robert Henke

The Idea, a film by Berthold Bartosch

Having mentioned Frans Masereel in the previous post, here’s a short animated film based on one of Masereel’s wordless novels. Masereel’s The Idea (1920) concerns the birth and progress of radical thought in an illiberal society, with the troublesome conception embodied as a naked woman. When the idea escapes into the world the authorities try to cover her nakedness, but their efforts fail to prevent her image being disseminated by the printing press…

Berthold Bartosch was a Czech animator whose 25-minute adaptation of the book was released in 1932. Frans Masereel helped with the creation of the film in its early stages but he lost his patience with the slow pace of the animation process. Bartosch’s film is significant for being one of the first animated dramas to aim self-consciously at art rather than comedy or entertainment for children. Also significant is the score by Arthur Honegger whose use of the ondes Martenot is claimed as the first use of an electronic instrument for cinematic purposes. Bartosch’s animation technique brings to life cut-out figures in nebulous, layered compositions that anticipate the films that Yuri Norstein would be making decades later. It’s a shame that all the online copies of the film are so poor, it ought to be seen in better quality. Watch it here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Destiny, A Novel in Pictures by Otto Nückel
• Crime and Punishment, a film by Piotr Dumala
• Walls, a film by Piotr Dumala
• The Nose, a film by Alexandre Alexeieff & Claire Parker
• Yuri Norstein animations
• Gods’ Man by Lynd Ward
• Frans Masereel’s city