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Absolut Panushka, Jan-Apr 1997.
A Meditation Story
James Whitney returned to filmmaking in the 1950s, partly because of a resolution of a post-war ethical crisis from having unknowingly drawn plans associated with the atomic bomb project (see The Whitney Brothers),
and partly because of his friendship with Jordan Belson, with whom he shared artistic and mystical interests. The Indian Sri Ramana Maharshi had repeatedly told Whitney that abstract films could be a significant spiritual vehicle for him, and so for several years, Whitney prepared elaborate richly colored paintings and drawings that charted trajectories of movements. The paintings and drawings were meant as choreography studies for a film, Yantra, which was to have served as a vehicle for meditation.
The animation itself in Yantra consists entirely of dots, painted by hand with black ink on 4" X 5" index cards. Some of these cards contain full-field dot patterns, repeated on hundreds of cards to produce a complex movement within the field, while others represent only a part of a geometric shape -- an outline of a circle or a cluster of dots twisting in a spiral.
Whitney (always working at home) shot the cards on black-and-white film, which he then optically printed onto color film using a variety of color filters to give different hues to various configurations. He also developed the film in his bathtub so that he could "solarize" some scenes -- a technique of flashing the film to light during developing that he had learned from Edmund Teske, who used it in still photography to give an irregular, organic texture to images.
Whitney finished the film in 1955, but did not know what to do with it, as there were not many distribution sources for experimental films -- and he rather liked it as a silent meditation piece, which made it even more "unsalable." This would change a few years later, however, thanks to Jordan Belson and the Vortex Concerts.
Moritz, William. "History of Experimental Animation." Website. Absolut Panushka, curated by Christine Panushka. (Jan-Apr 1997).
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