Moving Art as Cinema
Many creative and passionate people live in Ashland, and
often this leads to unique events promoted by a single artist, actor, musician
or film-lover. Last night we went
to the Meese Auditorium in the art building at Southern Oregon University to
see a range of 15 or 20 short experimental animated films, produced between
1935 and 2012. A local film collector offered the event, free to all. These are
not your Disney-type productions, but are more intriguing to watch because of
their range of image, the mystery of wondering how they were filmed, and the
impressionistic mating of music and image. Among the subjects was an old IBM animation formed of moving
atoms, a charming 1935 German
animated shadow story about a birdman made with images cut on thin tin, a weird city of malformed cats in
"Cat City" with many variations, (such as no legs, or multiple
heads), a mesmerizing movement of kaleidoscope images based on the mathematically created Mandelbrot Cactus or Square, and
thousands of sliding collages with a life journey attached. Some of the films were like a moving
modern art (think Picasso) on steroids, merged with music. Others had a tale implied, but not
explicit. One film was done
entirely by hand painting on film instead of using a camera. What is interesting to me about viewing
events so out of my normal experience is seeing the great diversity of passions
followed by fellow humans. We each
follow unique patterns and drives. William James wrote about "The
Varieties of Spiritual Experience", which are clearly correlated with the immense varieties of human expression. There
is vitality in broadening the mind to explore unfamiliar territories, and enjoying
the diversity of human creativity.
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