In the Abstract

Absolut Panushka, Jan-Apr 1997.

In the Abstract

Abstract animation flourished in the 1970s. Artist Robert Breer began making animated films in Paris in the 1950s as an extension of his painting, but he radically considered each frame of film a separate image and made each totally different. In his film A Man and His Dog Out for Air, however, Breer used simple abstract line drawings that hinted at the title figures, allowing the viewer's eye to put them together as a conventional cartoon.

In 1972, Breer began using a rotoscope device, but again traced his figures loosely and modulated their sequences so that the viewer still had to participate in the creation of the film. Gulls and Buoys and Fuji (a train ride past the famous mountain) lend themselves to linear interpretation, but the 1980 Swiss Army Knife recaptures the anarchy of his earlier films.

Jules Engel worked at Disney on Fantasia and at UPA, but only began to make personal animation in the 1960s as an extension of his abstract painting. His 30 abstract films display a diversity comparable to that in his canvases and sculptures. Landscape consists of pure color frames dissolving and flickering into one another. Shapes & Gestures and Wet Paint contain sharp drawn forms and looser painterly gestures.

Engel's 1975 film Rumble is all hard-edged black-and-white geometric forms that collide and flicker. But his later work Villa Rospigliosi, a walk through an imaginary museum, contains a great variety of imagery, including a looped homage to cinema with Eadweard Muybridge figures, and a bird seen out the window that metamorphoses into an abstract composition. Engel's films are characterized by both dynamism and wit, as in the black-and-white computer-graphic Silence which intercuts the words of the title with sparkly dot patterns that suggest the light phenomena that occur when one closes one's eyes.

Ed Emshwiller was the painter of astonishing "realistic" images that defined the look of science fiction films from 1950 until the 1970s with his cover art for Galaxy magazine. In 1978 he animated one of the classic computer-graphic images, a luminous "happy face," in his Sunstone. And Peter Foldes managed to overcome the limitations of computer graphics in his 1974 film Hunger by choosing a grotesque subject, gluttonous over-consumption, and rendering it entirely in black-and-white line drawings -- which could just as easily have been done by hand with ink on paper.

Larry Cuba solved many of the early problems of computer graphics by learning programming for himself and then making sound aesthetic decisions based on what he knew he could do. Limiting his imagery to black-and-white dot patterns in his 3/78 and Two Space, Cuba made use of irridescent after-images to yield color sensations. In Two Space he orchestrated positive and negative space to give the sense of the dynamic interaction between two dancing forces, one visible and one invisible. These vivid, satisfying films also make fine use of their soundtracks -- a Japanese flute to parallel the cascading flows of light in 3/78, and lush, repetitive gamelan music to counterpoint the intricate patterning of Two Space. In his subsequent film Calculated Movements, Cuba again explores complex movements by simple forms, intercutting two contrasting configurations and musical scores. He is currently an artist-in-residence at the Institute for Visual Media of the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, where he is using their computers to render a new film.

Moritz, William. "History of Experimental Animation." Website. Absolut Panushka, curated by Christine Panushka. (Jan-Apr 1997).