A Visual Process iota

Absolut Panushka, Jan-Apr 1997.

A Visual Process

Basque artist José Antonio Sistiaga has specialized in painting abstract images directly on 35mm film. In 1969 he completed a feature-length cinemascope film with the Basque title Ere Erera Baleibu Izik Subua Aruaren. His 1989 Impressions in High Atmosphere, dedicated to Vincent Van Gogh, is only seven minutes long, but the film impresses with a grandeur and brilliance that derive from its vivid color sense and from the monumentality of a central circle that dominates most of the frames.

Welsh painter Clive Walley composed a set of six films, called Divertimenti, which extend his painting into time and space. Using layers of horizontal glass (as Lotte Reiniger and Berthold Bartosch had), Walley mixed paint with things like Vaseline and paraffin to give the brush strokes a more solid and enduring presence. For one film he even prepared a series of "puppet brush strokes" made of fiberglass which could be substituted one for the next to give a sense of motion. Each of the Divertimenti has a distinct style and mood. For instance, No. 5 ("Slapstick") uses the viscous oozes of thickened paint for their gooey comic value. But the Divertimenti films are also unified by their inquiry into the process of art and perception, the relationship of Space to Time and Time to Distance.

Born in 1946 in Britain, Robert Darroll studied at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg where he worked with Kurt Kranz filming Kranz's abstract film designs from his early years at the Bauhaus. Darroll works commercially in Hamburg in order to finance his abstract animations, which number five and last more than an hour. The Korean Trilogy (Dragon, Phoenix and Stone Lion) was inspired by his experiences in a Korean monastery. While they contain occasional references to visual elements and representational motifs found in Korean culture, they generate a hypnotic rhythm with their metamorphoses of geometric and linear forms.

While a visiting artist at the California Institute of the Arts in 1988, Darroll said of the Trilogy: "I am not interested in film as visual literature, in trying to communicate other information that could better be expressed in words. I am interested in film as a visual process which can evoke via physical awareness, also a metaphysical awareness. During concentrated perception, each pictorial area becomes a closed system which indicates the possibilities of seeing, experiencing, understanding the way in which things exist -- to understand what is experienced, rather than merely experiencing what is already understood." This statement also speaks for James Whitney, Jordan Belson and other abstract animators of a mystical bent.

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