Ryszard Czekala

Quite honestly, all I have been able to dig up regarding this amazing Polish animator is that he was born in 1941, and these three films. This is brilliant work, unlike any cut-out animation I have seen before, especially due to the acute use of focus in the last two. But I'll let the films speak for themselves. Enjoy.

Ptak (Bird), 1968

Apel (Roll-Call), 1971

Czlowiek i Chleb, 1997

Just Another Saturday . . .

Optical Poetry - Quite some time ago I stumbled upon an amazing animated silhouette film - and now I’ve rediscovered the work!

Oskar Fischinger was a German painter, illustrator, and animator. In the late 20s he worked at the gigantic Ufa Studios in Germany, at one point working on special effect rocketry for Fritz Lang’s Frau Im Mond. The above film, which was made some time before 1930 and the original score for which is now lost, is called Seelische Konstruktionen, and contains some of the most captivating animation I have ever seen. As stated, the music put to it obviously isn’t the original music. It’s by the band Liquid Liquid from the early 80s, and it seems to fit quite nicely. It adds an equivocal tribal semblance; raw and mantra-like. The last couple seconds of animation seem to end abruptly, perhaps the copy it was taken from had the very end missing, or the person who uploaded it cut it off. But for some reason those last two or three seconds sent a shiver down my spine the first couple times I saw them. It has the same effect on me as do the most powerful moments of Kafka's diary; a nebulous sense of expurgated tragedy.

The Maniacal Satire of Phil Mulloy

This guy is the contemporary William S. Burroughs of hand-drawn animation! A brilliant satirist employing a genuine syntax of over-the-top violence, eroticism, and societal criticism all wrapped up in a turgid editing style. You gotta’ love it.

The Sound of Music, 1992

Anamorphosis

A distorted or monstrous projection or representation of an image on a plane or curved surface, which, when viewed from a certain point, or as reflected from a curved mirror or through a polyhedron, appears regular and in proportion; a deformation of an image.
- Webster’s, 1913.

I’ve decided this is a subject too interesting too pass up. I was first introduced to the phenomena of Anamorphosis through a short Penn & Teller informational video on the mechanics of artistic perspective in an art class, but it wasn’t until some time later when I discovered the work of the Brothers Quay in the form of a Kino Video release, fully-loaded with slightly grainy, but still beautiful films that I was properly introduced to the fascinating subject.

Anamorphosis is a technique of optical distortion to create an image which, at first glance, is either completely hidden behind groupings of anonymous lines or various images created atop it, or appears to be something else completely. Yet, when viewed at a certain angle, or through a particular means of reflection to reverse the distortion, the initial image becomes clear. The first known example of Anamorphosis, a sketch from Leonardo Da Vinci’s diaries, dates back to the late 1400s. Hans Holbein the Younger, an early 16th century German artist most known for his woodcuts of the Dance of Death, was very interested in the process, and went on to paint perhaps the most well-known example of Renaissance Anamorphosis, the 1533 painting ‘The Ambassadors.’

During the 19th century the technique became more of a novelty feature, and dropped from the realm of fine art. Yet, not only did Anamorphosis see new life during the 20th century, from artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dali, it has also become the basic principle behind such film formats as CinemaScope and Panavision, employing anamorphic lenses on motion picture cameras and projectors; ‘squeezing’ the image horizontally to fit into the film frame, and then ‘stretching’ it while being projected through a complementary lens during projection.

Anamorphosis
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De Artificiali Perspectiva (Anamorphosis), 1991, by the Brothers Quay.