Word: film
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...white tap dancer's got to say a black man taught me or I watched a black man," says Bunny Briggs. In the film's finale--the freestyle event in the competition at Small's Paradise--he, Green and Sims prove his point. These are not blonde chorus girls spinning their heels on Broadway. These are not even Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly hoofing it with lampposts on Hollywood back lots...
Satiemania is one of the longest films in the 14th International Tournee of Animation. Its creator, Yugoslavian (Zagreb) Zdenko Gasparovic, fills the screen for 15 minutes with images drawn from the music of composer Erik Satie. Beginning with a bevy of streetwalkers, the film progresses to a vibrantly red evocation of early 19th century Paris, a world seamier even than Toulouse-Lautrec's. Here prostitutes bite men's heads off, delicately remove their clothing, and loll sexily on plush pillows...
...change styles, using strictly charcoal in some sequences, splashing on the reds and pastels in others; now he moves the camera, now the subject. Pianos eat, and heads move independent of bodies; this strange world defies definition, adding a new dimension to Parisian impressionism: the paintings can move. The film ends with a stunning reproduction of a Van Gogh wheatfield; a flock of ravens flies to the foreground and the frame freezes...
GASPAROVIC'S film raises many questions about animation and animators that even this two-hour festival cannot answer. Are these animators great artists? Certainly many of the drawings reveal the hand and eye of skilled painters. Yet many others do not appear to be more than moving New Yorker cartoons. If animation is art, why have no great artists attempted it? The possibilities seem extraordinary--a moving painting! The vitality in a work such as "Guernica" need not merely be conveyed but visually demonstrated...
...years of it--days of drawing the same tiny figures on the same background until the artist gives up and changes his mise-en-scene with the flick of his Bic. It is almost incomprehensible how many thousands of drawings must be transferred to celluloid for one short animated film. Michaelangelo might have preferred to paint the ceiling of Madison Square Garden rather than make an animated short...