Dear Chris Cunningham: please come back to us. The commercial you recently created for Gucci Flora is hypnotic, and we’d never dream of calling you a sellout because we know that you need to make rent, just like us. We know that the music industry is not what it used to be, and that the budgets you had to make your legendary music videos (Bjork’s All is Full of Love, Madonna’s Frozen, Aphex Twin’s Windowlicker) aren’t easy to come by these days. Still, we implore you: come back to us. Make something new, something weird!
Any Cunningham-inspired tidbit helps the withdrawal. Your incredible shoot with Grace Jones for Dazed and Confused, a Nubian companion to your character Rubber Johnny, certainly helps to ease the longing. More images (NSWF) at Dazed Digital, the original Rubber Johnny below, and some Chris Cunningham classics after the cut.
In 1980, artist and filmmaker Bill Brand installed 228 panels in the abandoned Myrtle Avenue station in Brooklyn. Lit by fluorescent lights, the panels are viewed through carefully spaced slits cut in a special housing. Based upon the principle of the 19th century zoetrope, passengers looking out the right side of a Manhattan-bound B or Q train would be able to watch a short animation. Brand’s original idea was to change the panels on a regular basis to make one, epic film comprised of 20 second clips, but soon realized that this would be unfeasible.
In the intervening years the display had fallen into disrepair, the lights broken and the panels covered in graffiti, despite Brand himself regularly going down into the station with a key someone had slipped him to clean the panels. However, over the summer of 2008 Mr. Brand, with the help of volunteers and the transportation authority’s Arts for Transit program, restored the installation and in November of that same year restarted it without any announcement or fanfare; another hidden little gem inside the vast metropolis.
Manhattan-based 1stAveMachine produces lush, hyperreal short videos that glisten with bleeding-edge CGI. The clip above, a music video for Alias made in 2006, is considered their breakout masterpiece: a succulent garden of bio-electronic cyberflora. Describing the clip, director Arvind Palep told CGISociety, “we were looking at a merge between synthetic biology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and what could spawn from them.”
Since that clip, 1stAveMachine, helmed by Palep and Serge Patzak (the former turned down a job from Industrial Light & Magic to join the startup), has produced short commercials for the likes of MTV Japan, Samsung and HP. But no matter how corporate their clients roster becomes, 1stAvenue keeps it weird, inviting comparisons to Chris Cunningham and Patricia Piccinini. Consider the below ad for Saturn, which 1stAveMachine describes as “a haunting hyper-sexual and stylized vision for the future”:
Shown above is the director’s cut, which features a naked lady. NSFW!
There are many more clips to be seen on 1stAveMachine’s site. Some favorites clips and image stills, after the cut. [via Paul Komoda]
A young boy is trapped in an abusive home. As his parents become increasingly detached, demeaning, and violent he finds sanctuary in the attic. There, he plants magic seeds from which a grandmother grows.
David Lynch made Grandmother in 1970 on a total budget of $7,200. This incredible film [David's third] was shot in Lynch’s house in Philadelphia, where he painted the walls black and the actors white. The lack of dialogue, with everything conveyed through guttural noises, barking, and a score from a local group, Tractor, compliments the stylized, stripped down atmosphere that’s since become the Lynch standard.
This depiction of childhood escapism yanks us away to that special place where everything is very, very WRONG. No one is better than David at evoking that sense of creeping dread, that beautiful paranoia! But there is love here too, unconditional and pure, as the grandmother provides everything the boy’s parents deny him. A dream, a nightmare and a slow attack on the psyche - watch all 5 parts below when you have a quiet hour to spare.
Young German filmmaker Jeff Desom graduated from the Bournemouth Arts Institute in 2007. His senior project featured the experimental pianist Volker Bertelmann, a.k.a. Hauskchka. That partnership has led to this flawless collaboration:
Music video for the song “Morgenrot” off Hauschka’s latest album, Ferndorf. (Via Siege, thanks.)
Painstakingly animated, composited and rendered, “Morgenrot” features a flaming piano falling in slow motion through a series of vintage black and white photographs of NYC. Desom talks about the process:
The finished animation is mostly made from early twentieth century photographs that I found while browsing through the vast collection of the U.S. Library of Congress. I also used old postcards from New York that I purchased at a flea market in Paris. Most of the time I would only zoom into a tiny portion of the picture and utilise that as my frame.
The hardest part was to make it look as if it had been pasted together from a lost reel depicting this curious experiment where they’d [lit] up a piano and thrown it off a building only to see what would happen. The kind of unnecessary crash test executed [for] the sole purpose of drooling over the beauty of slow motion.
Mission accomplished. One can only imagine what Desom is going to come up with next.
Howdy! How about a lively morning cartoon to go with your fruity pebbles? Zoetica’s recent post on the lamentable declension of MTV’s programming reminded me of this little gem:
Created as a senior project by animator and RISD legend, Christy Karacas, “Space Wars” aired internationally on a charming, offbeat MTV show called Cartoon Sushi back in 1997. The content and mood of Cartoon Sushi was sort of a cross between Liquid Television and Spike & Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation. Sadly, it barely lasted a year on the air. Suprise, surprise.
A couple of years later, Karacas joined forces with Stephen Warbick to unleash BAR FIGHT upon an unsuspecting world. The film “was rejected from every festival it was ever entered in” and it’s a bit… well, let’s just say it’s more a Better Than Beer experience –or possibly Better Than Dimethyltryptamine– than anything else. Still, it’s under the cut if you think you’re feeling up to graphic, color-saturated gore and toilet humor this early in the morning.
Nowadays, we have no shortage of psychedelic, stream-of-consciousness mindbuggery from Karacas/Warbick; their show Superjail! premiered on Adult Swim last year. (Bless you, Cartoon Network, for picking up where Liquid Television left off.)
Charley Bowers ain’t even half as widely known as Ray Harryhausen, Georges Méliès, Winsor McCay, Buster Keaton, Jan Švankmajer, Ladislaw Starewicz or Willis O’Brien, but damn it, he should be! WACK-A-DOODLE-DOOOO:
It’s a Bird, featuring Charley Bowers and a scrapyard metal-eating, proto-Seussian “Metal Bird.” Directed by Harold L. Muller. (Thanks to longtime Coilhouse friend Mark P. for the heads up on this one!)
Once championed by the likes of Andre Breton, quite possibly an early inspiration to the likes of Theodor Seuss Geisel and Chuck Jones, this gonzo animator and comedian had fallen into obscurity by the time of his death in the mid 40s. Bowers’ work didn’t resurface until decades later, when a French film archivist sleuthed him out. Via mediascreen.com:
Raymond Borde of the Toulouse Cinemateque began the search after discovering a collection of rusty canisters simply labeled “Bricolo.” After discovering that Bricolo was the name given to an American comic named Charley Bowers, Borde began to scour the world archives for Bowers films. As usually the case in film preservation, Bowers films were located throughout the world in the archives of France, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia and only one film found in Bowers’ own native country of the United States. Eleven of Bowers’s twenty shorts are still considered lost films.
Bowers’s original claim to fame was as the animator and producer of hundreds of “Mutt and Jeff” animated films from 1915 until the early twenties. In the mid-20s, Bowers switched from pure animation to a hybrid mixture of live action and animation… comedy shorts starring himself as an obsessive inventor of gadgets, gizmos, contraptions, and crazy machines. Bowers continued with these shorts until after his first talkie short — “It’s a Bird” from 1930 (much admired by surrealists like Andre Breton). After “It’s a Bird,” Bowers dropped off the map, heading to New Jersey, working in advertising and industrial shorts, and drawing cartoons for local New Jersey newspapers. He reemerged in the late thirties as the animator for a short subject about oil for the New York World’s Fair (the film was also the first film produced by Joseph Losey). But after a few other animations in the early forties, Bowers contracted a debilitating illness and died in obscurity in 1946.
Fairly recently, Image Entertainment produced a lavish two-disc collection The Complete Charley Bowers: The Rediscovery of An American Comic Genius, which includes nearly all of his surviving films. They’re a frisky mixture of live-action slapstick, stop motion, uncanny SFX, talking cockroaches, Rube Goldberg shenanigans, and more.
In Now You Tell One, possibly Bower’s most over-the-top and mind-boggling film, a “gentlemen’s Liar’s Club” known as The Citizens United Against Ambiguity gathers for a storytelling contest. Wonky stop-motion animated cats and mice battle for dominance; bizarre botanical grafts yield impossible fruits; elephants and donkeys appear to stampede the Capitol building.
In Bowers’ world, a maternal Model T Ford hatches dozens of baby cars; a rapacious ostrich gobbles up inorganic matter and dances to a phonograph; a mad inventor labors to invent the world’s first “no-slip banana peel”; a sentient, white-gloved robotic creature runs amuck in what one reviewer refers to as an extraordinary “comical-bizarro poetic representation of the industrial age.”
The man’s talents as an actor/comedian may not have been on par with his idols Keaton and Chaplin, but his imagination certainly was. This is gloriously demented stuff deserving of far more cinematic acclaim.
The Matrix turned 10 last week. It debuted March 31, 1999, though us plebs had to wait til April 2 to see it.
It’s easy to forget, in the wake of two disastrous sequels and equally lackluster (except for the Animatrix) tie-ins, exactly how radical and groundbreaking a pop culture artifact the first movie was.
Try, for a second, to look at the original trailer. Imagine you know absolutely nothing about the movie inside:
Pretty f’in cool, no?
To date myself, I was 16 at the time and came out of the theater utterly energized. I wasn’t the only one. William Gibson dubbed it “an innocent delight I hadn’t felt in a long time.” Darren Aronofsky raved that it heralded a new age in sci-fi. Neil Gaiman and Poppy Z. Brite wrote stories to fill out the movie’s universe.
It became a phenomenon, immensely successful and influential beyond anyone’s expectation. Hell, conservative scolds even blamed the movie’s anarchistic heroes for the Columbine massacre.
The Matrix worked because it managed to blend philosophy, allegory, action and fashion into one glorious, fun package.
Apocalypse Meow is the Americanized title of Cat Shit One, a dark and befuddling manga series by Motofumi Kobayashi. Published in the late 90s, the book features a team of fuzzy wuzzy widdle bunny wabbits in an American special ops team battling the forces of cutesy wootsy wily Viet Cong kitty cats on a wide variety of historically accurate, often graphically violent recon missions. Characters are depicted as different species according to nationality; Yankees as rabbits, the Vietnamese as cats, Frenchmen as pigs, Koreans as dogs, Australians as koala bears, etc.
Yyyyeah. Cute Overload it ain’t. Or Watership Down, for that matter. And now, it would seem that Anima Studio has produced an equally gory animated trailer/short based off the manga. Only this time, special ops team Cat Shit One is in the Middle East, fighting… Taliban camels? Taliban camels wearing… turbans?
Oh god. Oh my god. Ohmygodwhatthefuckbarbeque, even.
Replete with M4A1 annihilation and bargain basement Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan-soundalike ululations. Keepin’ it classy.
Clip via Sean Dicken. Thanks for the nightmares, Sean.
For those of you who have yet to “taste the unko“, Kago has produced some of the most disturbing manga imagery you’ll ever see short of Suehiro Maruo’s or Keiji Nakazawa’s… only his output is as likely to give you a bad case of The Totally Inappropriate Giggles as make you gag. These new animations, while crude in comparison to his more elaborate illustrated work, will likely do both.
