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Part I
Definitions, histories and legacies
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1
It is Alive if You Are
Defining experimental animation
Paul Taberham
To the uninitiated, experimental animation may seem willfully difficult. The artist Stuart Hilton observes that the field is aggressively uncompromising, difficult to fund, difficult to watch and difficult to explain. Yet when it is well executed, it can create ‘the right kind of wrong’ (‘Edges: An Animation Seminar’ 2016). As uncompromising as it may be, learning to appreciate experimental animation yields a world of provocative, visceral and enriching experiences. We may ask, what does one need to know when first venturing into this style of animation? What are the first principles one should understand? This chapter will outline some of the underlying assumptions that can serve as a springboard when stepping into this wider aesthetic domain.
The basic premises of experimental animation hark back to the early twentieth century avant-garde. Ad Reinhardt said the following of modern art in 1946: ‘[it] will react to you if you react to it. You get from it what you bring to it. It will meet you half way but no further. It is alive if you are.’ (Reinhardt, quoted in Bell and Gray [1946], 2013, 35).1 The same idea applies to experimental animation. The richness of one’s response will determine the value of the artwork, and so a willing and imaginative mind is a necessary precondition.
Experimental animation need not be understood as a ‘genre’ with its own set of iconographies, emotional effects or recurring themes like westerns, horrors or romantic comedies. Rather, it may be understood as a general approach with a number of underlying premises. A common assumption is that experimental animation is concerned with pushing boundaries, though within the boundary-pushing, there are norms and conventions which emerged that have been revisited and refined over time. Examples include the tendency towards evocation rather than the explicit statement of ideas; freely exposing the materials used to make the film; a staunch aesthetic and thematic individualism of the artist who produced the work; and on some occasions, the visualisation of music. All of these themes will be discussed in the course of this chapter.
Instead of offering traditional narratives like those found in the commercial realm, experimental animation typically offers formal challenges to the spectator. In commercial cinema, the spectator is ordinarily compelled to speculate on how the story will resolve, and it may invite viewers to reflect on the behaviour of the characters and themes raised by the story. The underlying question viewers must ask when engaging with an experimental animation is more likely to be how should they engage with the given material.
In the commercial realm, implicit assumptions about what determines a film’s value can go unnoticed. One may ask, what makes a movie compelling to begin with? A typical answer for mainstream filmmaking is that it needs an engaging plot, compelling characters and it should provoke an emotional investment on the part of the viewer. However, there is no all-pervading rule that says these are essential criteria a film must follow in order to provide a meaningful or valuable experience. A film might be appealing because it presents unique formal challenges, it might offer an intense visceral experience, challenge traditional standards of beauty, or it might frame a philosophical question in a provocative way. There are a variety of ways in which a film may be engaging or memorable. Thus, underlying assumptions about filmic experience are called into question when engaging with experimental animation.
A common misconception is that experimental animation, along with other artforms which directly challenge a spectator’s habits of engagement such as contemporary dance, atonal music or abstract painting, should be understood as elite, intended only for a specialised audience. Thanks to websites like Edge of Frame, the Experimental Animation Zone page on Vimeo and the websites for the NFB, the Iota Center and the Center for Visual Music, experimental animation is easy to discover and explore. It also need not be considered an elite art because of all types of film, it is the cheapest to produce – experimental animation has traditionally been created by a single artist without a team of staff members. High production values aren’t as important as original ideas, and thanks to home computers and online streaming, they can be produced and distributed inexpensively. In this sense, it is the most inclusive of all types of filmmaking.
Motivation for creating experimental film (and animation by extension) varies from artist to artist. Some think of the field as reactive, possessing an oppositional relationship to commercial filmmaking and the values of mainstream society. Malcolm Le Grice, for instance, offers a reactive model of experimental film, suggesting that its aesthetic challenges take on a political dimension by prohibiting the audience from being lulled into a passive state of reception, unlike commercial film (Le Grice 2009, 292). It serves as an antidote to the mainstream. Others endorse a parallel understanding of experimental film, in which the mainstream and avant-garde operate in different realms without influencing one another (Smith 1998, 396). Within this conception, the films may be enjoyed without the confrontational polemics sometimes implied by avant-garde filmmakers. Ultimately, the reason artists produce work in the way they do can be taken on a case-by-case basis, but both are legitimate motivations.
Those who create experimental animation may be considered first and foremost artists in a more generalised sense, for whom animation fulfils their creative needs. They might also be painters, sculptors or multimedia artists. In this instance, why might an artist turn to animation instead of live action filmmaking or other forms of expression? Creative freedoms granted to animators include the ability to manipulate motion down to the smallest detail – movement (smooth and jarring) is an aesthetic concern for experimental animators, in addition to form, colour and sound. One may also create an entire, self-contained environment without real-life actors or locations. Conversely, one may also ‘coax life’ out of physical inanimate objects through stop-motion animation. Artists who express themselves through abstraction may also extend their craft to animation, bringing movement to their non-figurative imagery.
Major figures
There are major figures of classical experimental animation who have received a notable amount of critical attention within the field. These may be divided into four broad waves. The first wave featured European abstract painters working in the silent era who turned to animation, inspired by musical analogies to imagery. These are Hans Richter (1888–1976), who broke the cinematic image into its most basic components (darkness and light) with simple motions. Viking Eggeling (1880–1925) used more elaborate shapes than Richter, which would swiftly transform in a variety of permutations. Walter Ruttmann’s (1887–1941) abstract shapes were loosely evocative of figurative imagery, with triangles jabbing at blobs of colour, waves crashing across the bottom of the screen, and the like.
The second wave continued to work with sound-image analogies, but their work was also accompanied by (and sometimes synchronised with) music. The best-known artists of this era are Oskar Fischinger (1900–1967) and Len Lye (1901–1980). Both are comparable in their use of image-sound equivalents, but Fischinger’s style was shaped by classical music, traditional cel animation and a graphic formalism. Lye’s style was looser, making use of ‘direct animation’ (scratching directly onto the celluloid) techniques and up-tempo popular music of the time. Two other noted figures who emerged around the same period are Mary Ellen Bute (1906–1983), who pioneered the use of electronic imagery in her abstract films, and Jules Engel (1909–2003), a multi-disciplinary fine artist and teacher who was the founding director of the Experimental Animation program at CalArts.
The third wave began to pull away from direct musical analogies. Norman McLaren (1914–1987) was arguably the most varied and prolific of experimental animators, owing to his long-running employment at the National Film Board in Canada. McLaren worked with a wide range of animation techniques and produced films that both harked back to previous experimental animators and also innovated new approaches. John Whitney Sr. (1917–1995) initially collaborated with his brother James, and later went on to pioneer computer animation, combining his mutual interests in abstraction, mathematics and visual harmony. Harry Smith (1923–1991) produced cryptic collage animations, and also painted abstractions directly onto film strips that were reportedly made while under the influence of hallucinogens. Jordan Belson (1926–2011) drew inspiration from meditation and spiritual practices to create abstractions that were suggestive of macro-cosmic and micro-cosmic imagery. Robert Breer (1926–2011) developed a loose, sketch-like style whose steam-of-consciousness images sit on a threshold between abstract and figurative, moving and static.2
The final wave works more consistently with referential imagery instead of abstraction, and occasionally includes spoken word. Lawrence Jordan (1934–) creates phantasmagorial evocations with the use of cut-out animation, resembling the collages of Max Ernst. Jan Švankmajer (1934–) and is a self-described surrealist (though his work began after the heyday of the surrealist movement), who uses stop-motion animation on everyday objects to unsettling effect. Stephen and Timothy Quay (known together as The Quay Brothers (1947–)) are also stop-motion artists, who were influenced by Švankmajer, amongst other Eastern European artists. Like their Czech precursor, they also create unsettling film-poems, reanimating abandoned dolls and other detritus. Their films are notably pristine, with smooth motion and delicate layers of dust and grime.
This list of prominent artists is not intended to be exhaustive, nor does it lead us up to the present. It only covers artists which have been canonised in western texts and made (for the most part) commercially available. However, it covers some of the most widely cited figures who came to prominence between the 1920s and the 1980s. In part, this is because from the vantage point of the time in which this chapter was written, the domain of experimental animation has become more difficult to define and organise into canonical figures from the 1990s onwards. This may be due to the growth of the Internet and increased freedom for artists to share their work with the public. In any case, the artists listed above serve as exemplars when first discovering experimental animation.
Single-screen animations will be the focus of this chapter, rather than multi-screen works, gallery-specific animation rather than site-specific (e.g., projecting onto the side of buildings). Nor will the recent adoption of .gif files (brief, looped digital films) as found in the work of artists like Lilli Carré and Colin MacFadyen be considered, or David O’Reilly’s recent forays into videogame development. These are exciting new developments in the field however, which deserve vigorous discussion of their own.
Previous definitions
There are two seminal books from the field of animation studies which offer their own definitions of experime...
