In one of the most famous and widely recounted definitions of animation in history, Norman McLaren says: “what happens between each frame is much more important than what exists on each frame; animation is therefore the art of manipulating the invisible interstices that lie between the frames.” Concealed in these invisible interstices, secret passages hidden in films made frame by frame, is the work of those who make animation, hidden from us to create these impossible moving images. Los pasadizos secretos. Apuntes sobre animación experimental, recently published in the CCCB’s Breus collection in the wake of the Xcèntric Archive catalogue, traces a history of animation cinema based on this idea, focusing on the manual work of the animators—people with a unique type of intelligence who see the infinite possibilities offered by these hidden moments.
Program:
Ko-Ko's Earth Control, Dave Fleischer, USA, 1928, 35mm to digital, 8’; Wall, Takashi Ito, Japan, 1987, 16 mm, 7’; Hus, Inger Lise Hansen, Norway, 1997, 16 mm, 7’; Persian Pickles, Jodie Mack, USA, 2012, 16 mm, 3’; The Dante Quartet, Stan Brakhage, USA, 1987, 16 mm, silent, 6’; Recreation, Robert Breer, USA, 1957, 16 mm, 2’; Frank Film, Frank and Caroline Mouris, USA, 1973, 16 mm to digital, 10’; Bang!, Robert Breer, USA, 1986, 16 mm, 10'; Selfportrait, Maria Lassnig, Austria, 1971, 16 mm to digital, 4'.
Program notes:
Max and Dave Fleischer set up an animation studio in the 1920s, applying unmatched imagination to their Out of the Inkwell series that featured a clown called Koko who escapes from the artist’s inkwell. This mix of real and animated world gave the brothers opportunities to develop their ingenuity. In Ko-Ko’s Earth Control we see how the cartoonist’s hand brings the animated drawing to life in a work that turns out to be unusually avant-garde: not only does it foreshadow a climatic end of the world, it also predates flicker films, offers an early example of collage animation and even uses pixilation, a form of animation that uses human beings. While the hand of the creator on screen allowed the Fleischers seamlessly to join real and animated image, in the case of Wall, by Takashi Ito, it serves to reveal the “trick” of film without destroying its magic. Ito creates impossible spaces by rephotographing, frame by frame, still photographs printed on paper, manipulating the geometry of streets and buildings at will.
Shaping the world on a grand scale, making it dance a new dance, is what Inger Lise Hansen does in Hus. Animating a full-scale log cabin in the California desert, Hansen introduces another element that reveals this invisible interstice: natural light, the movement of which makes us aware of the passage of time involved in animation. Also using elements of reality we embark on a journey towards abstraction. Jodie Mack creates strobe films using everyday household items such as lace, patterned fabrics, blankets and tie-dye. On this occasion, the “bacteria” or paisley print, a sixties’ fashion cliché, serves to create a rigorously visual work (that also plays with sound), at the same time reflecting on our culture of cheap goods, the waste produced by capitalism, and the division between Art with a capital A and the common or garden. This abstraction made with common materials has to do with painting, just like one of Stan Brakhage’s most important painted films: The Dante Quartet. In this case, the material work focuses on the strip of film that Brakhage paints, inspired by abstract expressionism and his research on the mechanisms of sight, with his technique further refined by later work with an optical printer.
Originally a painter, Robert Breer also experimented with perception, specifically with what happens with the rapid alternation of disparate frames. In the rapid flurry that is REcreation, Breer compresses pieces of cardboard, paint, tools, gloves and even pieces of bread that merge into a collage created in our own eyes. Abstraction returns to the real world and to the random possibilities of the combinatorics of frames on perception. Collage animation, in which Breer was a pioneer, is what Frank and Caroline Mouris use in the obsessive accumulation of cutouts of similar objects classified according to an autobiographical thread—Frank’s—that relates his encounter with animation while drawing a portrait of the post-war consumerist United States, using highly-coloured advertisements for objects that promise happiness and well-being.
Over the years, Breer’s rigorous experimentation gradually fused into a perfect alchemic combination with an almost diaristic personal component. In Bang!, Breer brings back his childhood drawings and obsessions in a film that includes moments of flicker, “discontinuous continuity”, rotoscoping, existential crises and phones with feet. And it is precisely this ability of animation to express the inexpressible that our last secret passage offers us: the very particular “cartoons” of Austrian painter Maria Lassnig, who in this self-portrait confides to us the particular and specific thoughts and feelings of a woman devoted to creative work.
