Abstract art has been a concept that many artist explored since they started to question anything about space, colour or form and as soon as the potential to manipulate images was available, artists transformed their ideas into movements often they used this experimentation to go against the most traditional art forms. Artists in the early 1900’s from the avant grade movement worked with line, form, movement and rhythm as well as colour and light.

Animation is a technical medium and experimental works such as these remain central to the development of Animation itself since they are fuelled by technological advancements which will always happen and continue to motivate independent and ground-breaking work.

There are different aspect to explore when talking about and identify experimental films such as the approaches used, the concepts and models employed so it might be hard to categorise and define them: we need to understand which is the historical context where the experimental film is developed as well as determine the individual motivations and priorities of the artists (if it is commercial is not necessarily experimental).

An experimental film de-constructs the traditional cannons of films, so the term abstraction become very important. Abstraction does not aim to depict an object but composed with the focus on internal structure and form, is usually emotionally detached or distanced form something and also does not relate to concrete objects but expresses something that can only be appreciated intellectually. There are a number of abreaction to explore, for example there is a formative abstraction. A formative abstraction considers the formal aspects of film, image and manipulates its fundamentals such as line, colour, light, form space, texture, sound, dynamic, movement, sound. It usually combines two or every one of those aspects. The artist’s involvement is essentially investigative and may not have a predetermined outcome but must be grounded in the intellectual pursuit of applying a theory or initial objective.

There are some elements that may help when analysing and implementing Formal Experimental Animation:

• Categorisation– genre and sub-genre, what is the work background, settings, mood, theme or topic, how does it comment? Does it fit or is it unique?
• Form and Function- interpreting its meaning and relating it to the format, or presentational mode such as “what are the artist objectives, limitations…”
• Process– the techniques, materials and technologies applied within the work and the relationships between message and medium, (Does process, technique or tool become the message?)
• Formal Elements– use of space, composition, light & colour, movement, rhythm, timing, pacing, transition and audio relationships.( does his work investigate these or other formal elements?)

Is there a film that you know that classify as experimental animation?

Following the screenings consider an animated work you feel represents Formative Abstraction that meets the above criteria and provide a short explanation of how this is evidenced in the work.

Author/Artist Paul Jeffrey Sharits was a visual artist, best known for his work in experimental, or avant-garde filmmaking, particularly what became known as the structural film movement, an experimental film movement prominent in the United States in the 1960s.

“Dots 1 & 2”

Categorisation– An experimental film featuring a hypnotic illusion using two black-and-white sets of dots.

Form and Function- “Dots 1 & 2” relies entirely on a single gimmick used to create a fairly basic exercise, and a flicker effects, dabble in total abstraction. The imagery in this approximately forty-second exercise indeed relies its entire illusion on optical effects, yet in a more compelling and original way, this seems to be intended as more hypnotic.

Process and Formal Elements– “Dots 1 & 2” is titled as such because the short features two different sets of dots: white dots on a black background, and black dots on a white background. Both sets are combined in one of those complicated optical illusions (it is real since it was made on filmstock) as they merge and grow bigger, overlapping in a never-ending loop. 

Some examples of Formative Abstraction

Norman McLaren explains how he makes synthetic sound on film. With an oscilloscope he first demonstrates what familiar sounds look like on the screen; next, how sound shapes up on a film’s sound track; and then what synthetic sounds sound like when drawn directly on film.

Norman McLaren worked primarily on sound and image and worked directly in film. He used in this specific film bipacking. In cinematography, bipacking, or a bipack, is the process of loading two reels of film into a camera, so that they both pass through the camera gate together. Boogie Doodle is an artistic collaboration between renowned pianist Albert Ammons and animator Norman McLaren: they made the image moving according to the sound trying to express what the sound looks like. There is no predefined meaning anyone can apply their own sense to it.

Hans Richter was a painter in this experimental animation is looking at space a surface of a canvas, he explore the connection between screen and depth and how you can create illustrations through depth of the screen. Pioneering Dada work, Filmstudie was an early attempt to combine Dadaist aesthetics and abstraction. Made in 1926 Richter’s film presents the viewer with a disorientating collage of uncanny false eyeballs, distorted faces and abstract forms (none of these themes is treated constantly). It’s similar to Man Ray’s work in its ballet of motion which combines a playful tension between figurative and abstract forms, both in negative and positive exposure. FILMSTUDIE is essentially a transitional work of mixed styles. A number of devices drawing attention to the technical specificity of photography (multiple exposures and negative images) are also included and enter into a successful fusion with the remaining elements.

This experimental film is composed from squares, rectangles and other straight-edged forms animated in overlapping, kinetic compositions. The shapes in this film are not solid colors, but graduated tones, and the development of each sequence is built around asymmetrical compositions that break the frame into harmonious sections. The result is dynamic, active: the moving shapes suggest the rapid movement of machinery, pistons. Then in the middle of the film there is a shift towards a bifurcation of the frame and oscillating patterns that rotate around this central axis, before a return to the asymmetry of the machine-like motions.

This experimental film explored sound in image. An optical Poem is an abstract piece of stop-motion history, was made in 1938 by German-born Oskar Fischinger, an avant-garde animator, filmmaker and painter following the music is Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.  Oskar Fischinger’s work is all about dancing geometric shapes and abstract forms spinning around a flat featureless background. Circles pop, sway and dart across the screen, all in time to Franz Liszt’s 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody. This is, of course, well before the days of digital. While it might be relatively simple to manipulate a shape in a computer, Fischinger’s technique was decidedly more low tech. Using bits of paper and fishing line, he individually photographed each frame, somehow doing it all in sync with Liszt’s composition. 

Len lye was fundamental in the way we look at animation now. In Kaleidoscope Lye animated stencilled cigarette shapes and is said to have experimented with cutting out some of the shapes so that the light of the projector hit the screen directly. He developed a number of stencils such as a yin-yang, a diamond shape, a wheel, a star to complement his hand-painted images. The way these shapes spun and rolled across the screen anticipated the movements of his later kinetic sculptures. Inspired by the primitive imagery of South Sea island art and film’s power to present dance ritual and music, Lye’s experimental – and often revolutionary – camera-less techniques attracted the attention of John Grierson and Alberto Cavalcanti of the General Post Office Film Unit in London, which sponsored Colour Box and other films. This advert can be considered as an example of how experimental animations can also be commercial. 3 techniques stencilling (putting things on the film and after he painted it sung sprays, inks on those stencils), paint or ink onto the film and scratching and scraping (putting ink on the film and after scraped it).

A progression of this work, where he progressed these techniques with live action is this experimental film sponsored by imperial airways:

In this film he filmed live action film and after he stencilled on top of that and he was commissioned by the GPO (general post office) film unit. The GPO Film Unit was a subdivision of the UK General Post Office. The unit was established in 1933, taking on responsibilities of the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit. Headed by John Grierson, it was set up to produce sponsored documentary films mainly related to the activities of the GPO. 

Here is another ‘drawn on film’ abstract animation British film short. “Trade Tattoo” is a promotional short made by Len Lye in 1937 for the GPO. (‘General Post Office’). The film utilises live action footage, composited so that it blends in and out of Lye’s abstract animation.

Len Lyn was a very important practitioner in experimental film, he was head of the industry at that time

Stan Brakhage was one of the classic experimental animators since he was never sponsored by anyone and he never attempted to please an audience. He produced a series of film which explored elements of nature onto the film: he would place plants on a film and after another film on top of them and he would after print everything together.

A “found foliage” film composed of insects, leaves, and other detritus sandwiched between two strips of perforated tape.

He never used sound in his films because it emplaces a narrative on the image: by taking the sound off you can take the formal aspects of the images right to the viewers. However he did incorporated music on this film:

In this case also music is experimental, is very difficult to watch, discord, disharmony and this is the very intention of the artist.

John Hales Whitney, Sr. was an American animator, composer and inventor, widely considered to be one of the fathers of computer animation. He studied painting, and travelled in England before World War II. James completed seven short films over four decades and collaborated with his brother John for some of his film work. James Whitney’s LAPIS (1966) is a classic work of abstract cinema, a 10-minute animation that took three years to create using primitive computer equipment. In this piece smaller circles oscillate in and out in an array of colors resembling a kaleidoscope while being accompanied with Indian sitar music.He basically used an analog computer developed by his brother John – based on a gear-driven WWII surplus ballistics computer – to move many layers of hand-painted cels, frame-by-frame.

Everyone of these pieces is sensory is not about a narrative or characters. When watching an experimental film us as audience have to engage, figuring out what it is about bringing our interpretation into it, making us aware of something. However there must be a good reason behind the idea of the artist for experimental films, having intellectual reasons to do it, and references to.

Sound and image are very related and are major areas for experimentation and allow us to discuss which role sound has and the impact of it on image.