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Director: Julian Antonisz
Release date: 1970
Rating: ★★★½
Review:
Told by a little girl ‘How Learning Came Back Out of the Woods’ is an educational film for children on how books are made.
Julian Antonisz’s animation style, however, is highly avant-garde. The animator uses a light table to illuminate his drawings and a multitude of household objects from below. Antonisz’s style is very rough and graphic. There’s motion, but the cut-out animation itself is limited. Human movement, for example, is only suggested by using two key frames, rather than animated fully. Nevertheless, this children’s film is a good example of the sheer creativity of the Polish animation industry of the seventies.
Watch ‘How Learning Came Back Out of the Woods’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘How Learning Came Back Out of the Woods’ is available on the DVD-set ‘Anthology of Polish Children’s Animation’
Director: Norman McLaren
Release Date: 1959
Rating: ★★★
Review:
‘Serenal’ is a film made directly on film and set to a Caribean score by the Grand Cunucaya String Orchestra Trinidad.
The images consist mostly of purely abstract shapes flashing on a black screen. The shapes are very rough, but surely colorful (the film was hand-colored), and the end result is a nice piece of abstract expressionism, if still one of McLaren’s less engaging films.
Watch ‘Serenal’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Serenal’ is available on the DVD-box set ‘Norman McLaren – The Master’s Edition’
Directors: Walerian Borowczyk & Jan Lenica
Release Date: 1958
Rating: ★★½
Review:
‘Dom’ is an avant-garde film with strong surrealistic images. The film consists of six unrelated ‘scenes’ connected by the image of a woman looking into the camera.
It’s as if Borowczyk and Lenica explored the possibilities of experimental cinema, trying out several techniques in a row. Thus we watch cut-out images of a strange contraption, a pixillated scene of two men fighting, an octopus-like wig destroying a still life setting, a man repeatedly hanging his hat on a coat rack, a sequence of old family pictures and postcards, and a live action scene in which a woman caresses a plaster male head.The film’s weird atmosphere is greatly enhanced by Włodzimierz Kotoński’s modern music, which uses electronics and percussion only.
It’s hard to make sense of it all, but it’s clear that with this film Borowczyk and Lenica proved to be strong new voices in avant-garde cinema.
Watch ‘Dom’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Dom’ is available on the DVD-set ‘Anthology of Polish Animated Film’
Director: Oskar Fischinger
Release Date: December 1933
Rating: ★★★★★
Review:
‘Kreise’ is most probably the first full color film made in Europe.
Made with ‘Gaspar Color’ it certainly makes clever use of color’s new possibilities. ‘Gaspar Color’ required too much exposure time for live action, but for Fischinger’s animations it was perfect.
Color certainly added a great deal to Fischinger’s films. ‘Kreise’, for example, literally explodes with color. As its title implies, the film is composed of circles, only, which move and grow in various ways on an instrumental excerpt from Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser.
The film ends with a slogan: “Alle Kreise erfasst Tolirag” (Tolirag reaches all circles [of society]), revealing that this totally abstract film is actually a commercial for an advertising agency. This was Fischinger’s trick to get the film past the Nazi censors, who in 1933 had come to power, and who were strongly opposed to abstract art.
Later the film also advertised other companies, like the Dutch Van Houten chocolate company. The film clearly shows that Walt Disney was not the only one who knew how to deal with color, but one wonders whether Tolirag (or Van Houten for that matter) did get a lot of new customers out of it.
Watch an excerpt from ‘Kreise’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Kreise’ is available on the DVD ‘Oskar Fischinger: Ten Films’
Director: Oskar Fischinger
Production Date: 1930-1931
Rating: ★★★★★ ♕
Review:
In Fischinger’s study No. 7 , made in 1930-1931, the shapes of Study No. 6 move to the 5th Hungarian dance by Johannes Brahms.
Like Study No. 6 Fischinger made this film with charcoal on paper. In this short the synchronization of music and movement is even better than in Study No. 6. Fischinger uses less diverse shapes than in No. 6, making the film more consistent. Some of them look like fluttering and folding pieces of paper.
According to William Moritz this particular film prompted four film makers into animation: Norman McLaren, Alexandre Alexeieff, Claire Parker and Len Lye. These four all became major players in avant-garde animation. This fact makes Study No. 7 one of the most important animation films in history.
Watch ‘Studie nr. 7’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Studie nr. 7′ is available on the DVD ‘Oskar Fischinger: Ten Films’
Director: Oskar Fischinger
Production Date: 1930
Rating: ★★★★★
Review:
In this short study we watch white shapes moving on a black canvas to upbeat dance music (‘Los Verderones’ by Jacinto Guerrero).
Made with charcoal on paper, the result looks like a filmed sketch by Wassily Kandinsky. The only recognizable shape is an eye, which reoccurs a few times.
The twirling shapes are elegantly drawn, their movements match the jolly music perfectly, and there’s a feeling of gaiety that transcends the film’s abstraction.
In 1931 Oskar Fischinger’s friend Paul Hindemith and some of his students made new scores for this film, but unfortunately they were all lost in World War II.
Watch ‘Studie nr. 6’ yourself and tell me what you think:
http://www.tudou.com/listplay/R8qsaMltb9Y.html
‘Studie nr. 6′ is available on the DVD ‘Oskar Fischinger: Ten Films’
Directors: John Halas & Joy Batchelor
Release Date: 1948
Rating: ★★★★
Review:
‘Magic Canvas’ is rather pretentiously introduced as “something different (….), new and exciting”.
Luckily, the film is rather original and exciting: using a rather abstract score by Hungarian composer Mátyás Seiber, it consists of associative images with a strong sense of surrealism. It loosely tells the story of man struggling to be free. Even though it has to pay its debts to Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ (1940), ‘The Magic Canvas’ surely is one of the most avant-gardistic films of its time, and a testimony of Halas & Batchelor’s animation ambitions.
Watch ‘Magic Canvas’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Magic Canvas’ is available on the DVD inside the book ‘Halas & Batchelor Cartoons’
Dr. Grob's Animation Review 