Morph Man — iota

Absolut Panushka, Jan-Apr 1997.

Morph Man

Like Frédéric Back, Lejf Marcussen was a graphic artist who joined a government agency as a venue to make his art skills pay. Since 1972, Marcussen has worked for Danish national television and created a number of interesting films, making a time-lapse of the changing weather and seasons over a landscape, tracing the "faces" hidden in rugged rock cliffs, and illustrating music and legends.

Significant ideas surface in all of Marcussen's films. His biting Babylon Blaster, for instance, charts the excesses (including a pop-rock Handel's Messiah) of the very broadcast media that supported the making of the film.

His 1983 film Soundtrack represents one of the most perfect examples of "visual music." Taking a movement from a Carl Nielsen symphony, Marcussen draws a colored line for each of the instrumental voices, and plots them so that they appear with a sharp, bright attack and then decay in a long fading line, just as musical tones do.

Appropriate inventive variations in direction and configuration follow the melodies and counterpoints for seven minutes and lead to a thrilling climax. Marcussen's great masterpiece, The Public Voice, starts with a painting by Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux and appears to zoom in on a detail, but the zoom continues into imaginary space, finding impossibly complex images hidden inside the smallest spot of each passing figure, until finally the zoom pulls out again, revealing a completely different set of details.

These include a portrait of Salvador Dali and a portrait of Marcussen himself. The dazzling transformations often bear a satirical or marvelous surprise in the suggestion that such a thing might turn into or conceal another object. Today when viewing the film, one thinks, perhaps, of computer morphing, but Marcussen accomplished his transformations entirely by hand, and rather more subtly and intricately than the later electronic effects -- above all with a complexity of ideas usually missing from "special effects."

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