ANIMATED FRAMES - VOL.07
Films by Red Grooms, Ed Ackerman, Daina Krumins, Zbigniew Rybczyński, and Suzan Pitt
FRAMES outdoes itself with this extra special program of personal favourites and outlandish oddities, among them some of the most memorably recognized and celebrated cult-favourites of experimental animation. DO NOT snooze on this exceptionally unique opportunity to witness these wonders projected on 16mm film.
PROGRAM
BABOBILICONS
Daina Krumins | 1982 | USA | 16 minutes
It took her nine years to create this remarkable animated short, yet her method is in line with the surrealist affinity for chance operation. She cultivated slime molds on Quaker five-minute oats in her basement, planted hundreds of phallic stink-horn mushrooms, and put her mother behind the camera to film them growing. The results are sexual and bizarre… Anyone who orders 10,000 ladybugs from a pest control company to film them crawling over a model drawing room definitely possesses a sense of the surreal. — Renee Shafransky, The Village Voice
ASPARAGUS
Suzan Pitt | 1979 | USA | 18 minutes
Suzan Pitt's animated short throws open the doors of perception onto a shape-shifting vision of polymorphous sexuality. A landmark in the history of independent animation, ASPARAGUS is a mesmerizing exploration of the artist's inner world, and a viewing experience like no other. — Criterion
TANGO
Zbigniew Rybczyński | 1980 | Poland | 8 minutes
Thirty-six characters from different stages of life - representations of different times - interact in one room, moving in loops, observed by a static camera. I had to draw and paint about 16,000 cell-mattes, and make several hundred thousand exposures on an optical printer. It took a full seven months, sixteen hours per day, to make the piece. The miracle is that the negative got through the process with only minor damage, and I made less than one hundred mathematical mistakes out of several hundred thousand possibilities. — Z.R.
PRIMITI TOO TAA
Ed Ackerman | 1988 | Canada | 3 minutes
The film is a playful sound poem, where the text jumps to life through animated typing on paper. Visually the film is a concrete poem in motion: choreography. Aurally the film is a sound poem with a printed text: typography. Constructivist poetry meets literal choreography. Primitive sounds meet their typed representation. The film is based on a 45-minute sound poem "Ur-sonate (Sonata for Primitive Sounds)” by Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948). — E.A.
FAT FEET
Red Grooms | 1966 | USA | 19 minutes
A city symphony, with living comic strip characters and sound, pixilated and animated. — R. G.
Artist Bios
Daina Krumins (b. 1947) was born in a refugee camp in Germany to Latvian parents escaping Stalinist purges, emigrating to the United States in 1950. She studied psychology at Rutgers University before pursuing filmmaking at NYU & CalArts where she specialized in optical printing and special effects. She worked as a rotoscoper and optical printer operator at Lookout Mountain Films in Los Angeles (Pat O'Neill's company). She remains an active artist, creating digital photo-collages and videos.
Suzan Pitt (1943-2019) was an internationally acclaimed artist, animator and fashion designer. In the 1980's she also designed avant garde sets for live opera. She taught animation at Harvard University, Minneapolis College of Art & Design, and CalArts. Her films have earned a devoted cult-following, though she found more financial success with her paintings.
Ed Ackerman is a Canadian animator who explores cinematic language using the materials he finds close at hand: plasticine, photocopiers, 5-year old children let loose in a village with disposable cameras and, most famously, typewriters. He resides in his hometown of Winnipeg where he is a much loved member of the community.
Polish filmmaker Zbigniew Rybczyński (b. 1949) won an Academy Award for TANGO in 1983. He's gone on to pioneer numerous innovative technical achievements related to High Definition television technology and author several US patents for motion control, optics, and image compositing. Since the early 1970's, he's made dozens of short films and music videos for artists such as Lou Reed, Yoko Ono, Pet Shop Boys and Supertramp.
American visual artist Red Grooms (b. 1937) is known primarily for his site-specific sculpture and installation art; elaborately detailed life-sized mixed media "sculpto-pictoramas" depicting outlandish street scenes and caricatures. He's also a prolific painter, printmaker and made zany short films throughout the 1960's & 70's featuring his artwork.