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iotaCenter website, 2005.
The Synesthetic World of Baerbel Neubauer
Victoria Meng
Los Angeles animation lovers recently enjoyed an opportunity to meet acclaimed animator Baerbel Neubauer at a screening of her abstract works on October 23, hosted by the Los Angeles Filmforum and the Goethe-Institute, Los Angeles. The program included a selection of direct-on-film and digitally animated shorts as well as an extended extract from Neubauer’s current project, Morphs of Pegasus. During breaks in the screening Neubauer introduced her films and answered questions regarding her animation approaches.
The evening presented a rare chance to be immersed in Neubauer’s synesthesic world. While Neubauer’s works have consistently garnered international accolades in festival screenings since the 1980s, they are not as yet commercially available in collected volumes. Neubauer’s oeuvre embodies a strong and personal sensibility for the resonances between color and sound, scale and speed, formal rigor and aesthetic ardor. Each film offers unique pleasures; viewed in succession, they outline the flowering of an artist at the height of her powers.
The first part of the program featured five of Neubauer’s direct-on-film shorts. Neubauer began experimenting with direct animation techniques when she saw some Len Lye films in Vienna in the late 1980s. Compared to Lye’s exuberance, Neubauer’s touch appears more relaxed, even meditative, despite the technique’s inherent energy. In Algorithm and Roots, painted, drawn and stamped figures wheel and dance through the frame. The individual elements seem simple: geometric or generic forms, streaks and washes of bright colors, mostly lateral and metamorphic movement, accompanied by jaunty but gentle tunes. Together they induct viewers into a sensational world where verbal logic dissolves: the bold is also delicate, the infinite and intimate coexist, and colors ring while sounds glow.
Neubauer distilled her materials even further in Moonlight. In both palette and pitch, this scratched film luxuriates in a cool, jazzy register. The technical virtuosity in consistently making shallow scrapes such that only the green layer of the emulsion is exposed is staggering; the result, of course, looks as breezy and effortless as a nighttime stroll. Firehouse, on the other hand, thrums with threat – against a relentless techno soundtrack bright and dark figures pulse over a ground littered with afterimages. The flickering Ray-o-grams of bits of feather and flora, tinted in the pure hues of a live flame, transfixes even as it agitates. Passage returns to the unhurried whimsy of the earlier films, concluding Neubauer’s period of intense direct animation.
The second set of films, Flockenspiel I, II, III, and IV, were digitally animated starting in 2000. Neubauer explored digital techniques the way she taught herself to compose and perform her own soundtracks: with attention to detail and an appreciation for serendipity. While Neubauer does not consider digital and analog animation to be radically different, she notes that the digital medium can sustain slower actions. Digital animation also offers Neubauer a new sense of space, particularly in terms of depth perception.
The Flockenspiel series fully demonstrate Neubauer’s mastery over digital materials. Kaleidoscopic forms permute, morph, slide, and fade without pause or hurry. Pixel by pixel, color-textures grow and melt like living frost. Each film in the series explores a different visual-aural terrain; for example, Flockenspiel III couples orthogonal designs with the ethereally percussive sound of a synthetic choir. The 25-minute series simultaneously absorbs and liberates one’s attention; its dazzling complexity again showcases Neubauer’s inexhaustible invention.
The program culminated with a preview of an extended extract from Neubauer’s current digital animation, Morphs of Pegasus, whose majestic imagery and soundscape evoke sub-atomic, galactic, and cosmic reveries. Neubauer also played a 10-second spot she created for the Absolut Panushka website and clips that illustrated an article published in Animation World Magazine on the influence of sound and music on images, co-written with William Moritz. Whether one is familiar with or new to Neubauer’s work, the evening offered the extraordinary pleasures of exercising our capacity for audio-visual imagination.
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