Animation http://anm.sagepub.com/ 'A Curious Chapter in the Manual of Animation': Stan VanDerBeek's Animated Spatial Politics Suzanne Buchan Animation 2010 5: 173 DOI: 10.1177/1746847710368325 The online version of this article can be found at: http://anm.sagepub.com/content/5/2/173 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Animation can be found at: Email Alerts: http://anm.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://anm.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://anm.sagepub.com/content/5/2/173.refs.html >> Version of Record - Sep 2, 2010 What is This? Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by S Buchan on April 24, 2012 article ‘A Curious Chapter in the Manual of Animation’: Stan VanDerBeek’s Animated Spatial Politics Suzanne Buchan Abstract This article aims to flesh out how Stan VanDerBeek created what Time magazine in 1964 rather glibly described as ‘a curious chapter in the manual of animation’. The main focus is on his pre-computer painted and puppet animation and collage animation works. After considering relevant terminologies, the author explores VanDerBeek’s own writings to see how and why his artistic and cultural philosophy could be expressed using animation techniques. After a discussion of a stop-motion puppet film and a painted film, she introduces, via Modernist contexts of collage and photomontage, some of VanDerBeek’s many collage and cutout animation films, proposing how his visual neologisms bear comparison with James Joyce’s portmanteau technique. She then undertakes an aesthetic and sociopolitical analysis of his praxis within found footage genres and techniques, and suggests viewer strategies for watching his works. The article concludes by describing some of VanDerBeek’s manifold poetics and aesthetics as ‘a curious chapter’ within the continuum of political photomontage and independent animation production. Keywords additive animation, anticontinuity, collage animation, found footage, James Joyce, Robert Breer, spatial politics, Stan VanDerBeek, visual portmanteau animation: an interdisciplinary journal (http://anm.sagepub.com) Copyright © The Author(s), 2010. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journals/journalsPermission.nav Vol 5(2): 173–196 [1746-8477(201007)]10.1177/1746847710368325 Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by S Buchan on April 24, 2012 174 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 5(2) Animation occupies and informs many public and private spaces; it has long had a constitutive role in disseminating ideologies.As a technique that can combine a wide variety of graphics, abstract forms, indexical photography, text and other visual materials within a single frame, animation can create a density of juxtaposition, visual metaphor, satire and other effects to support and visually underpin political agendas. Stan VanDerBeek was an artist concerned with cultural and social change; the multimedial scope and cultural and political impact of his work are vast, and this article addresses a number of animation films that form part of his opus. Visually defined by painting, image usurpation and recombination of visual contemporary culture of his times, they remain highly topical in today’s political climate and crises. VanDerBeek’s first encounter with animation was while working on Winky Dink and You in the 1950s, a children’s television series with live action and rudimentary drawn cutout and object animation that had an interactive element (that may have sown seeds for VanDerBeek’s later ‘participatory’ projects).1 Wheeler Winston Dixon (1997) describes how he was ‘fired from the show’ and ‘came back at night for several months afterward, using the 35 mm camera and animation stand to create his first independent film works’ (p. 167). An article in Time (1964) described him and his works somewhat naïvely as ‘a tireless man with scissors. He cuts pictures out of magazines – all kinds of magazines – and stirs them into film clips in a kind of stiff puppet action that writes a curious chapter in the manual of animation.’ This article focuses on a number of VanDerBeek’s shorts that use animation techniques to create satirical, ironic, cautionary and sometimes very funny films. My investigations are based on screening a dozen of his animated films I have been able to access. I am not making overarching claims for other works, and the concentration here is on the visual surface of his films. (I will reflect only briefly on his meticulously composed sound tracks.) Terms, terminologies and manifestos VanDerBeek had an embracing concept of media that is evident in his multimedial (or intermedial, to use Dick Higgins’s term of the period that emphasizes the dialectic between media)2 works that combined TV broadcast, animation and computer graphics, performance and media art. Although rarely invoked in animation studies, a notion of blending media that I am working with that relates to intermedia is implicit in animation filmmaking outside conventional hegemonic commercial entertainment canons (see Quendler, forthcoming). This kind of filmmaking – also called ‘experimental’ or ‘mixed media’ animation – has always been blended media because, while its pre-digital forms share film’s photochemical base and projection processes, with few exceptions, it is visually and materially constituted by other artistic Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by S Buchan on April 24, 2012 Buchan ‘A curious chapter in the manual of animation’ 175 media, including photography, theatre, painting, sculpture, fine arts, graphics and text. Animation – much like the term ‘experimental film’3 – is an unsatisfying, fuzzy ‘catch-all’ that heaps an enormous, historically far-reaching and artistically diverse body of works into one pot, and its medium specificity is being debated (see Darley, 2007). VanDerBeek (1961) also addresses this issue: ‘Is the label “experimental film” to say that we cannot deny the cinema is still an unknown, only hinted at by hindsight, fantasy, dreams, hallucinations, comedy?’ (p. 15). Blended media animation can usurp and expand fine arts and performance practice to create radical new forms of moving image expression and viewer experience, using the forms of fantasy, hallucination and comedy that VanDerBeek proposes. Although a considerable corpus of animation films by VanDerBeek is now available, he is not strongly situated within existing canons of (experimental) animation film, nor in the context of expanded cinema and canonical histories of the avant-garde. Mark Bartlett (2008) suggests VanDerBeek’s body of work ‘remains poorly understood, evaluated on his body of stop-motion animated films’ and describes ‘three main reasons for his erasure’ from these histories and canons: (i) he abandoned, for political and aesthetic reasons, the experimental film tradition he helped to found; (ii) he was opposed to the political strategies of the social movements of the time because they were too narrowly conceived; and (iii) he was opposed to the media essentialism that was so central to the avant-garde’s identification with modernist dictates of formalism. In other words, VanDerBeek ran afoul of the three most central ‘aesthetic ideological’ preoccupations of the period. (p. 268) Recent multidisciplinary research and efforts by Bartlett and others are engendering new debates and reviving dormant ones, and with few exceptions, writings on his films have tended to originate in the fields of experimental and avant-garde film and multimedia (Wheeler Winston Dixon, P.A. Sitney, A.L. Rees, Gene Youngblood) and his films screened in these contexts. A few animation festivals have featured retrospectives of his work, most recently not least due to the efforts of VanDerBeek’s surviving family members (and some of his films’ availability on a 2009 RE-Voir DVD release, on ubuweb, the Tate Modern Intermedia art website [http://www.tate.org.uk/intermediaart/] and YouTube). In the animation festival community, Amid Amidi (2009: 40) refers to visiting the incisive 2008 Guild & Greyshkul Gallery exhibition in New York that led to him being commissioned to curate a screening of VanDerBeek’s films at the 2009 Ottawa International Animation Festival. It is useful, and insightful, to explore VanDerBeek’s own writings on how he situates himself, and how he sees the techniques as offering remarkable potentials for both his own and other filmmakers’ creative practice.‘The Cinema Delimna: Films from the Underground’ published in Film Quarterly in 1961 is itself a text and image collage (the first Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by S Buchan on April 24, 2012 176 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 5(2) page includes the words ‘collage by VanDerBeek’ at the bottom). The word play in the title – a rhyming portmanteau word of delimit, liminal, delirium and dilemma – gives a flavour of the concurrent playfulness and urgency in the document. VanDerBeek (1961: 6) outlines a word and image manifesto for how artists can and could use film’s experimental and animation techniques (it is important to note he makes no distinction between these terms) to create a new visual language. But now the most revolutionary art form of our time is in the hands of entertainment merchants, stars, manufacturers. The artist is preposterously cut off from the tools -of production. The vistavisionaries of Hollywood, with their split-level features and Disney landscapes, have had the field to themselves. Besides the desire to regain tools of production from commercial hegemonies, the text can also be read as a history lesson in animated cinema. It includes imagery as wide-ranging as Egyptian hieroglyphs, single frame human motion studies, a phenakistiscope, an Odilon Redon painting. Artists VanDerBeek cites or includes imagery from are also wide-ranging: Salvador Dalí, Len Lye, Robert Breer, Stan Brakhage, Norman MacLaren, Antonin Artaud, Carmen D’Avino, Eadweard Muybridge and Ed Emschwiler. VanDerBeek was breathtakingly productive, making 17 live-action, multi-screen, documentary and blended media animation films during 1957–60 alone. His own description of his filmmaking process conveys a sense of his working methods: ‘I often make my films without too much conceptual preparation, using the film process of animation as a means of note-taking. Thus in the making of one film, a process or idea for another film often comes about’ (VanDerBeek, 1966: 337).This explains in part the shared themes, drawings and imagery that visually interlink the films that I turn to now. Tactile and additive animation Two stop-motion films (a ‘sequel’ to the first was uncompleted) are isolated moments in VanDerBeek’s otherwise graphic, painterly and collage animation, but they use assemblage, a three-dimensional form of collage; Dance of the Looney Spoons is a 5-minute black and white film made by VanDerBeek and his wife Johanna VanDerBeek in 1959. It is a non-narrative performance of metal puppets, light and shadow Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by S Buchan on April 24, 2012 Buchan ‘A curious chapter in the manual of animation’ 177 that occasionally makes use of negative and positive film strips. The dance is a violent one, made more anxious by sharp metallic forms, points and blades that are enhanced by Jay Watt’s noise and soundtrack sound that includes percussive drums and metallic objects that clack, ting and grate. The ‘looney spoon’ puppets, singly and in pairs, move through interior and urban settings: a white space, a sidewalk on a street. A longer sequence alternates between dark and brightly lit spaces and dissolves, and double exposure shots introduce both simultaneity of action and a questioning of temporality. The Neo-Dada bricolaged puppets – cutlery, can openers, corkscrews, eggbeaters, tools and other kitchen paraphernalia – are mostly non-anthropomorphic and have kinship with Charles Bowers’s wacky mechanical contraptions. More like insects or ornithological forms, they move through the frame with an unsettling urgency, and occasionally pair off in fighting stances to clash metallically. The jarring tactility of these forms is comparable to the third segment (‘Factual Conversation’) of Jan Švankmajer’s Možnosti dialogu (Dimensions of Dialogue) (1982), in which different exchanges between paired objects fail to communicate as they should (a pencil sharpener sharpens a tongue instead of a pencil, a shoelace interweaves a piece of bread instead of a shoe, etc). As the sound effects lessen, a short sequence follows of explorations in chiaroscuro. A shifting light source reveals and occludes puppets’ parts, form and location, and creates movement – of the shadow, not the puppet – that are ghostly distortions of form (Figure 1). While somewhat jerky and simplistic, the mechanical nature and this play with light and shadow has affinities with László Moholy-Nagy’s film of his kinetic sculpture the Light-Space Modulator (that also included kitchen paraphernalia), Ein Lichtspiel Schwarz, Weiss Grau (1930).While it is not known if VanDerBeek had seen the film, there are obvious affinities with Moholy-Nagy: a painter and photomontagist among other things, he was also a key member of the Bauhaus, noted for its pedagogic philosophy and social vision. This play of light is also part of the ‘dance’ of the title (besides the obvious allusion to Warner Bros’ Looney Tunes cartoons). Alternation between light and dark, under- and overexposed film material continues to the end of the film, as do jerky movements of the puppets that increase in speed and urgency and are sometimes repeated in sets of loops of the same movement. Two puppets have distinct proportions of a human form (head, arms, torso, legs) with a kind of decorative armour, one with what looks like a horned (Viking?) headpiece, the other with a Maltese cross on top of its head. These figures recall artworks from the Middle Ages onwards in the allegorical tradition of the Dance of Death, specifically of Hans Holbein the Younger’s 16th-century Danse macabre series of woodcuts: besides skeletal forms, frightening assemblages of non-human parts allude to a deathly vitalism of non-organic forms. The overall effect of Dance of Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by S Buchan on April 24, 2012 178 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 5(2) Figure 1 One of Looney Spoons’ ornithological puppets dancing with its shadow, from Dance of the Looney Spoons (Stan and Johanna VanDerBeek, 1959). © The Stan VanDerBeek Estate. Reproduced with permission. the Looney Spoons is closer to Švankmajerian themes of materiality, tactility and the unconscious than the cartoons its title alludes to. VanDerBeek was not concerned with preserving a medium specificity; on the contrary, his call is to use all the potentials of film and techniques for his larger project. Roger Cardinal has suggested ‘the whole ideal of animated film is to suppress the categories of normal perception’ (quoted in Hames, 1995: 89) and the logic of animation, in his view,‘might even be to suppress all differential categories, and annihilate the very conditions of rationality’. These two ideas are useful when thinking about concepts of cinematic experimentation that VanDerBeek pursued in ‘The Cinema Delimna’ (1961): It is possible that after nearly 400 years of art that has been preoccupied with artificial realism (growing directly out of the theory of perspective and its effect on the senses) the preoccupation has at last reached its ultimate form in photography and in particular motion photography. It is part of the interesting intrigue of art that at this same juncture in the crossroads of art, with the perfection of a means to exactly capture perspective and realism, Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by S Buchan on April 24, 2012 Buchan ‘A curious chapter in the manual of animation’ 179 that the artist’s visions are turning more to his interior, and in a sense to an infinite exterior, abandoning the logics of aesthetics, springing full blown into a juxtaposed and simultaneous world that ignores the one-pointperspective mind, the one-point-perspective lens. (p. 11) VanDerBeek’s proposal of a juncture in art that offers pathways other than realism, considered together with his intermedial and film practice, is a proposal to evade categories that includes rethinking how the moving image can explore preverbal thought and imagination, as an alternative to what Cardinal calls ‘normal perception’. This now leads us towards exploration of how he creatively demonstrated his abandonment of the ‘logics of aesthetics’ to serve his larger project. William C. Wees (1992) lists a number of film-specific avantgarde techniques that could also be understood as methods for suppressing the normal perception of art forms in the moving image: 4 superimposition, prismatic and kaleidoscopic images, soft focus, unusual camera angles, disorienting camera movement, extreme close-ups, negative images, distorted and totally abstract images, extreme variables in lighting and exposure, scratching and painting on the film, slow motion, reverse motion, pixillation, time-lapse photography, quick cutting, intricate patterns of montage, single-frame editing and flicker effects. (pp. 3–4) VanDerBeek made use of almost all of these, and often in combination in a single film. Astral Man – An Illuminated Poem (1959) is one that uses direct animation, pixillation and painted animation – his background as a painter is obvious here. Except in a few brief segments, the movement in the frame and over the course of the two and a half minute film is not animated in a conventional sense – movement and progression of a form or figure within the frame is created by drawing separate and distinct new frames – instead, VanDerBeek employs what I call additive animation, that also has an effect of collage.5 An example of additive animation that works in a similar fashion is Oskar Fischinger’s Motion Painting No. 1 (1947), with a soundtrack of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in which single frame shots of individual brushstrokes of paint on a transparent surface accumulate over time to result in a dense and rich abstract painting. VanDerBeek’s film is less a continuous flow and more a progression of eight discernible segments: after an introductory sequence, additive animated coloured variations on an eye follow – some with clean thin lines, some drawn, others in runny watercolour painted on different coloured, sometimes with visibly wet backgrounds, sometimes with scratched film lines, and also reductively, i.e. shot in reverse. These are then interspersed with black frames like ‘blinks’ and versions of a man’s stylized head are developed in painted additive lines, then more complex multicolour brushstrokes on top of a wash background that fluctuates with colour changes. VanDerBeek doesn’t appear to use multiple transparent layers; once a face has been treated with layers of colour and lines, it is replaced in a following frame with a new drawing Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by S Buchan on April 24, 2012 180 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 5(2) or image that is then treated with layering on top.This sequence comes closest to Fischinger’s additive complexity and richness of colour, elements and form. The next short segment is direct method: scratched lines and circles and paint on film forms are followed by the introduction of a painted hand (similar in style to the head) that changes and takes on different forms (Figure 2). The fourth segment features a vertical hand with its palm to the camera in varying levels of abstraction and on changing backgrounds. There are brief glimpses of a rudimentary animation of form in the frame in this sequence: over a staccato series of images, a hand of fine black lines on a dark blue background shifts around and splays its fingers. Immediately after, a pale blue hand on a black background is additively and reductively altered to an outline increasingly dominated by strings of white dots.The outlined hand ‘slips’ away from ‘under’ the dots and some other decorative embellishments disappear off left frame, and then the group of embellishments ‘exits’ frame right, leaving behind pearl-like strands of dots. Another design of lines and circles, an abstractly stylized hand, additively forms in the frame ‘beneath’ the dots, and then the strands appear to float in front of it, Figure 2 Production artwork for Astral Man: An Illuminated Poem (Stan VanDerBeek, 1959). © The Stan VanDerBeek Estate. Reproduced with permission. Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by S Buchan on April 24, 2012 Buchan ‘A curious chapter in the manual of animation’ 181 shift in the frame and successively disappear, and a new design is formed of blue lines and curves. This brief set of movements appears to have been made using multiple layers of transparent material to enable separation of the different animated forms. In segment five, blue lines on a black background sketch out a torso with curves and circles that seems to build a skeletal, then muscular mass of circles, almost like an x-ray, followed by variations of form in different techniques, styles and colours. The next segment starts with a blue circle on a black background, followed by the blue painted words ‘astral man’, followed by a painted eye, then ‘an illuminated poem’ that changes to red painted words and a stylized circle turns into a yellow-rayed sun that is invaded by wide, semitransparent reddish bars, then overlaid with ‘by S.VanDerBeek’ in shifting pale blue and yellow that remains as the background changes to red. The final few seconds are of wavy vertical lines in various shades of blue that waver and move right, then reappear on each side of the frame, meeting in the middle like curtains, followed by an itchily jumping ‘end’ scratched into coloured emulsion. In both this film and Fischinger’s, the movement that the viewer perceives relies exclusively on the changing shape and developing form of the painting, rather than conventionally animated movement. The intention of Fischinger’s 10-minute film is to show development of a ‘single’ painting’, yet there are a number of moments where the painting is saturated with form and colour and a new transparent sheet is superimposed above it. These ‘breaks’, whether Fischinger intended them to be visible to the viewer or not, subtly suggest a new phase in the painting. Astral Man is not a continuous development and it has little, if any, animation that fits the convention of a minimum of 12 different drawings per second needed to create an illusion of movement and metamorphosis. In this film, and in Blacks and Whites, Days and Nights (1960) and Oh (1968), the additive technique does not create animated movement per se, but the increase in complexity of the image as it grows frame by frame is a form of metamorphosis over time. Disjunctive collage and anticontinuity Moving from the minimalism and abstraction of pure painting and drawing to another set of techniques that create a barrage of imagery originating in photoindexicality, I now turn to one that persists in many of VanDerBeek’s animated films: collage. One of the central techniques in the many ‘-isms’ of early 20th-century Modernist art movements, including Surrealism, Cubism, Futurism and Dada, collage (and the related techniques of bricolage and assemblage) allowed artists to explore other media and develop new languages of art that reflected and commented on the radical changes evolving in society, industry Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by S Buchan on April 24, 2012 182 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 5(2) and capitalism. Collage aligned with Modernism’s interest in flux and deconstruction, with its aesthetic and political manifestos and its aim to break with classical visual narrative traditions. The photo and graphic collages of Georges Bracque, El Lissitsky, Kazimir Malevich, Hannah Höch and Alexander Rodchenko and other artists had multiple purposes: to challenge traditional art forms, to generate social and political change (also in the service of propaganda) and to demonstrate communicative possibilities of mixing media. The technique was also an abandonment of (entrenched) aesthetics of painting and of representation, central to the Modernist rejection of tradition to create radically new forms of art. VanDerBeek was also interested in exploring new forms of expression outside the straitjacket of medium-specific moving image aesthetics. Collage’s integration into moving-image practices during the Modernist period was undertaken most notably by artists whose works are considered avant-garde and are firmly entrenched in both animation and experimental film canons. In Hollywood Flatlands (2002), Esther Leslie has pointed out that political revolutionaries and Modernist theorists, such as Dziga Vertov, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, took the visual strategies of animation seriously, recognizing a politics of animated propaganda and public information films in conventional animation. VanDerBeek himself was inspired by Dada but also, notably, by Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Early Cinema film trickster Georges Méliès, whose technological and formal innovations of stop-motion and in-camera special effects were groundbreaking in generating new ways of seeing cinematic ‘worlds’ of the imagination that were embraced by later filmmakers. More recent artists in the animation canon who could be drawn into a discussion of VanDerBeek, but whose collage works follow a more narrative, illustrative or thematic line, include Len Lye, Frank Mouris, Harry Smith, Larry Jordan and Virgil Widrich, as well as the less narrative and more political and socio-critical works of Hanna Nordholt and Fritz Steingrobe, Paul Vester, Janie Geiser and Martha Coburn (whose Spiders in Love: An Arachnogasmic Musical, 2000, could be regarded as an homage to VanDerBeek’s radically colliding stylistics in Science Friction, 1959). His collage films also bear commonalities in technique and aesthetic of commodity culture with Jeff Sher, Lewis Klahr and Jeremy Blake, but his works are less concerned with preserving the collaged images’ aesthetic and are not sentimentalizing an era. Collage and photomontage in the moving image – a layering technique that usually remains on a single profilmic plane – allows manipulation and combination of actuality and photoindexical still and moving imagery with graphic intervention in the same frames. The collage technique has a long tradition in pre-digital animation and typically involves the composition of image fragments and materials spanning a wide range of media from fabric, consumer packaging and photographs to cutout images, typography and newspaper clippings; Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by S Buchan on April 24, 2012 Buchan ‘A curious chapter in the manual of animation’ 183 it can include objects as well, and many works serve narrative or fiction. It is distinct from layering that is often used in animation, that is the very principle of cel animation, and from multiplane setups.6 One of the appeals of collage is that it can be a ‘low-tech’ form of animation as it often relies on extant imagery rather than each image being generated by the artist drawing or painting. Animated collage can create a dense and complex overload of visual information that can overwhelm the spectator because the images change, transform and develop relational properties as they are presented in a linear projection. Besides collage within the frame, animation can achieve extreme compression and condensation through diametrically opposed single images strung together in single frame technique. A good exemplar of this is Robert Breer’s Recreation (1957). Instead of combining different elements within a single frame, Breer chose to string together disparate images on the filmstrip: for example, a frame of text, an image of an object, geometric forms, a photograph. In projection, this barrage of 24 dissonant images per second creates a linear, time-based collage. George Griffin (2004) suggests that it ‘represents [Breer’s] effort to construct a stacked collage in time, a series of “unrelationships”‘. Like VanDerBeek, Breer, who continues to oscillate between the worlds of animation and fine-art practice, produced a remarkable body of work, animated and otherwise, that embraces painting, kinetic sculpture, minimal line drawings and collage. A representative example of VanDerBeek’s collage animation that echoes some of Griffin’s description of Breer is A La Mode (1959),7 a ‘Visible Seven’ subtitled ‘an attire satire’ that combines fashion and other culturally and consumerist determined representations of women.8 The following selection of sequence descriptions aims to reveal the barrage of associations and juxtapositions both within and between frames that create new meanings and relationships between the images.The title already has multiple meanings: in American vernacular ‘with ice cream’ (in relation to pie), in French ‘in the manner of’, and it also means current fashion or style. Its sound track varies widely and is also a collage, from jazzy horn music and military snare drums to sound bites including dialogues from Hollywood films. In the opening sequence, the film (literally) cheekily starts with its theme: two food tins – one collaged with the rear view of a woman in semiopaque underwear, out of which rises a naked woman on the phone – sets the tone for what is to come. The credits that appear in the following segments are made of capital letters in single white squares. A series of still photographs of naked and dressed women are followed by a late 19th- or early 20th-century erotic photograph of a woman’s full buttocks decorated with additive graphic lines: the image rotates and we see two moustachioed male faces (Figure 3). A large eye is followed by a photo of a doctor with an eyepiece (letters spelling ‘Visible Seven’ appear, the two letters ‘i’ of the word Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by S Buchan on April 24, 2012 184 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 5(2) Figure 3 Still from A La Mode (Stan VanDerBeek, 1959). In the film, the image rotates 180 degrees, and the additive drawings look like finger puppets of collar-buttoned men with moustaches. © The Stan VanDerBeek Estate. Reproduced with permission. being the doctor’s eye and a cutout eye), then ‘By VanDerBeek’ in a wide, smiling mouth, falling behind the teeth, with the last three letters – a ‘girlish’ ‘eeek’ hesitating on its own for a second. A zipper struggles to unzip itself, followed by remaining credits. A contemporary beauty portrait is intercut with a fragment of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa – her muchdiscussed, elusive smile – and cutouts of familiar faces from politics and culture ‘sprout’ from her mouth, then cutouts of a jock-strapped muscleman and a naked woman strike poses in front of the face. Then a cutout of a leaping naked woman travels through different backgrounds including a river canyon, a stately home and the landscape of a reclining torso’s belly and breasts, to leap into a black frame with the muscleman that she kicks off frame. He rises from the bottom of the frame, to be knocked out again by an animated hammer cutout. Another leaping human form and a lop-wheeled jalopy with a different muscleman travel back across the naked torso landscape, then two more cutout men are draped on the landscape breasts. In the next longer sequence, movement and animation are created by the passage of objects in front of a black background through frame from right to left, starting with a series of women’s faces (including Jacqueline Kennedy). A series of cutouts of material and consumer culture follows the same pattern of tumbling movement: an erotic Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by S Buchan on April 24, 2012 Buchan ‘A curious chapter in the manual of animation’ 185 postcard, a pipe, a plate, a house, rubber underwear, increasing in pace as a woman’s face in profile enters from the left. Some of the objects collide with the face as a systematically changing background of early fashion photography is introduced. The next sequence has dialogue fragments from popular television and films that continue over a series of collaged cutouts: two ostrich-like collages of smiling women’s heads on high-heeled calves have a ‘conversation’ via symbol-filled balloons: a shoe, glasses, eyelash curler, perfume, beauty cream, dollar signs. More collages follow, then in front of head shots of two men’s faces, scantily clad pinups and bathing beauties cavort and freewheel to the sound of Chipmunks cartoon-style speeded-up singing. To a trilling piano, a woman’s face is ‘pulled off’ her head by huge manicured fingers passing fan-like through the frame and replaced with photographs of an architectural plaster design, an audience in a theatre, a pan through a contemporary dining-living room (perhaps to suggest this is literally what is ‘going through her head’) (Figure 4). Another set of collages and cutouts using additive animation set to two longer ‘women’s weepie’ film sound bites follows as bizarrely juxtaposed composite figures move through the frame. A series of cutouts of men, some with animated parts, pass behind a woman’s face reclined in profile like a landscape, followed by a series of a mix of photographs of women combined with or set in architectures and interiors. Two upside-down strongmen rise from the bottom of the frame, the head of each balanced on a naked woman’s outstretched hands as she also rises. In a photo of Picasso seated in Figure 4 What Is on a woman’s mind . . . Still from A La Mode (Stan VanDerBeek, 1959). © The Stan VanDerBeek Estate. Reproduced with permission. Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by S Buchan on April 24, 2012 186 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 5(2) front of a canvas, additive animation develops a cubist-like torso that is then topped with a photographed face. A woman’s face fills the next screen, and additive black lines create a Venice canal view replete with gondola. A numeral series of five sets of years (1900–20, then 10-year decades to 1960) scrolls on top of a woman’s mouth, each decade in a different typography stylistically suited to the era it represents. The mouth is then covered by a butterfly that flutters its wings – a rare example of dimensional animation – casting shadows on the planar surface, then the zipper from the beginning of the film zips itself up, followed by a naked woman cyclist whose buttocks are covered by the end credits ‘The End’. On the biography section of the Guild & Greyschkul website, VanDerBeek’s own description of the film is ‘“A montage of women and appearances, a fantasy about beauty and the female, a fomage, a mirage. An attire satire.” S.V.’ [www. guildgreyshkul.com/VanDerBeek/_PDF/SVbio42008.pdf]. A La Mode trawls a history of fashion, interpolates this with women’s sexual objectification and male voyeurism and, via clever combinations and influxes of images from commodity and luxury material culture, pokes fun at fetishism of both sexes. Time-based collage works like Breer’s and VanDerBeek’s include both thematically related and disparate groupings of imagery (also counterpuntal, juxtapositional and oppositional) that can polarize viewers (Coté, 1962/3: 18). Although their works follow different creative and aesthetic principles, a concept of constant transformation and a complete work being shown over time is also a way of understanding VanDerBeek’s conceptual notions of how he structures and arranges his films. It also explains why it is difficult to analyse both artists’ works in terms of formal cinematic parameters.Viewers seeking causality, narrative and coherence can be stumped, irritated and overwhelmed; others are stimulated by the poetry of the work, and still others revel in sensory overload, discovering varying themes, links, visual alliances and associative linkage in each viewing, or metaphorical and political allusions in the disjunctive combinations. VanDerBeek (1966): ‘In my opinion the audience cannot be considered as the final target for [filmmakers’] work, but it may be implicated’ (p. 337). While there can be a consensus of an underlying tenor of argument, contemporary viewers of these films can be additionally thwarted by their own lack of knowledge of these often ephemeral images from magazines, newspapers and adverts, ephemera that have an embedded cultural currency obvious only to those with cultural and historical expertise in still and moving image and popular culture that VanDerBeek drew on. Yet this does not detract from the films’ enjoyment because his collages also work at a more fundamental level of gender, power, politics and consumption. Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by S Buchan on April 24, 2012 Buchan ‘A curious chapter in the manual of animation’ 187 Visual portmanteau VanDerBeek worked with an eclectic mix of images of popular culture and politics from his own and earlier times: Stalin, the Cold War, commercial adverts and newspaper clippings, classic Greek sculpture, architectural photos and drawings, technology and equipment, Roosevelt, automobiles, Early Cinema actualities. Yet the visual surface of his collage films is notably Modernist: a non-narrative, non-realist condensation of inner vision, hallucination, metamorphosis, flux and disorientation. His montage systems within and between frames are analogous to another Modernist whose creative techniques greatly influenced almost all other art forms. VanDerBeek’s cut and paste collages create neologisms that are visual equivalents of James Joyce’s portmanteau words – a mix of two or more word fragments combined that create a new meaning – in Ulysses and more rampant in Finnegan’s Wake.9 While Joyce did not create this literary form (Lewis Carroll first described the term and used them in his texts), there are many portmanteau words in Joyce’s Ulysses where as Fritz Senn (1983) suggests, ‘the language itself becomes an object’ (p. 33): ‘contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality’ (3.51), ‘pornosophical’ (15.109), ‘shis’ and ‘hrim’ (15.3103) are portmanteau words that evoke multiple meanings and require a complex exegesis.10 (Try saying these out loud.) Like the lexeme fragments of different words, the different meanings implicit in the fragments mean the reader must engage in a co-creational form of play to discover the artist’s or author’s intent of meaning in the particular combination of fragments. Moholy-Nagy (1947) described James Joyce’s writing techniques as ‘the new literary construction analogous to Cubist collage where different elements, fragments of reality, were fused into a unity of new meanings’ (p. 341). Some of VanDerBeek’s collages in A la Mode and in the other collage films are images made using an additive system of cutouts (a version of additive painting animation) and fused into visual portmanteau.11 The portmanteau technique VanDerBeek uses also resonates with Eisenstein’s montage of attractions. In his discussion of this kind of montage, André Bazin (1967) describes the common trait ‘which constitutes the very definition of montage, namely, the creation of a sense or meaning not objectively contained in the images themselves but derived exclusively from their juxtaposition’ (p. 27). If we can draw an analogy between collision of textual semes and visual texts – of lexemes that create new words and meanings and image fragments that create new meaning – the visual juxtapositions created in VanDerBeek’s collages resonate with Gilles Deleuze’s (1990) understanding of portmanteau. He suggests: it seems the portmanteau word is grounded upon a strict disjunctive synthesis. Far from being confronted with a particular case, we discover the law of the portmanteau word in general, provided we disengage each time the disjunction which may have been hidden. (p. 46) Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by S Buchan on April 24, 2012 188 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 5(2) Deleuze continues to say that each lexeme of a portmanteau is thought with the other lexemes. In our examples of ‘shis’ and ‘hrim’, male and female gender attributes ‘she’ and ‘his’, or ‘her’ and ‘him’ are disjunctive, but the reader thinks about them together.The viewer undertakes a similar co-creative activity watching VanDerBeek’s collage images: in A la Mode, huge fragments of women’s faces are integrated as part of interiors to create a personification of interior design (Figure 5); elsewhere a beautiful woman’s head on a plate is a double ‘dish’. In a 1964 statement, VanDerBeek declared: In [Science Friction] and other [films] I am trying to evolve a ‘litera-graphic’ image, an international sign language of fantasy and satire. There is a social literature through filmic pantomime, that is, non-verbal comedy satire; a ‘comic-ominous’ image that pertains to our time and interests which Hollywood and the commercial cinema are ignoring.12 Figure 5 An example of VanDerBeek’s ‘tireless’ work with scissors; a portmanteau collage production artwork for A La Mode (Stan VanDerBeek, 1959). © The Stan VanDerBeek Estate. Reproduced with permission. Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by S Buchan on April 24, 2012 Buchan ‘A curious chapter in the manual of animation’ 189 This desire to create an international language runs through much of his works, from the Émile Cohl-like high contrast drawn figurations and metamorphoses in Blacks and Whites, Days and Nights (1960) to the recurring shapes and forms in the painted films and collage films. VanDerBeek’s ‘litera-graphic’ language is ideologically cognate with Viking Eggeling’s aspirations to create an abstract visual language that could be understood by all. His collaborator Hans Richter (1965) summarized this as a thesis that abstract form offers the possibility of a language above and beyond all national language frontiers . . . with careful analysis of the elements, one should be able to rebuild men’s vision into a spiritual language in which the simplest as well as the most complicated, emotions as well as thoughts, objects as well as ideas, would find a form. (p. 144) VanDerBeek’s paintings can be abstract, yet they often tend more towards stylized figuration and, unlike Eggeling’s forms, the collages are rooted in representational photorealism. VanDerBeek’s combination of specific painted elements and his meticulously and intelligently combined portmanteau images create his unique visual language that communicates social critiques and concerns. While Eggeling’s project was unfinished and perhaps unfulfilled (not least due to an early and untimely death), VanDerBeek’s international sign language found a form that continues to resonate almost 50 years on. Political collage and found footage The politically topical images VanDerBeek makes use of are shared by another kind of filmmaking: found footage. In Recycled Images, Wees (1993) suggests the ‘nature and degree of “complexity and layering” [a reference to Craig Baldwin] depends on two factors: the kinds of images found by the filmmaker and the way those images are juxtaposed’ (p. 12). Wees provides a long list of such material, including documentaries, industrial films, stock shots, archival footage, early silent and Hollywood feature films, TV ads, to suggest the rest of the detritus of the film and television industries supply the images for montage constructions that range from loose strings of comic metaphors and analogies . . . to critiques of the media’s visual codes and the myths and ideologies that sustain them. In every case, the film’s montage exploits the discrepancies between the image’s original and present function. (p. 12) Wees distinguishes between three types of found footage films: compilation, collage and appropriation, proposing collage ‘has the greatest potential to criticize, challenge, and possibly subvert the power of images produced by, and distributed through, the corporate media’ (p. 33). He assigns an ‘aesthetic bias’ of Modernism to collage found footage (while compilation found footage’s bias is realism, and appropriation’s is postmodernism). VanDerBeek’s work with found footage Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by S Buchan on April 24, 2012 190 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 5(2) is mainly collage, although there are examples of compilation and appropriation as well. VanDerBeek attains what Wees describes as exploitation of discrepancies between images’ original and present function in a number of ways that specifically play with time and temporality. First, he uses ‘real time’ found footage as a background for superimposed cutouts and portmanteau collages. An example of this is in Skullduggery Part II (VanDerBeek, 1960–1), in which a cutout of a woman is superimposed in front of found footage of a car rally; as the car speeds along the track, the woman, situated in location and perspective like a sideline spectator, is ‘hit’ and knocked out of frame by the passing car as it overturns and crashes. And in Achooo Mr. Kerrooschev (VanDerBeek, 1960) a cutout of Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev’s head is collaged onto real-time footage of a plane in the air and landing on water, and onto the head of a domo major leading a marching band. This play with mixed temporality within the frame concurrently highlights and removes the discrepancies between moving and still image. Second, it is notable that cinematic film motion – film time as representational of real time – in found footage or historical documentary footage is minimal or absent in many of VanDerBeek’s films; instead he tends to work with still and single frame images using stop-motion animation and collage. For example, in A La Mode, found footage elements in VanDerBeek’s films are not edited together in a successive montage, as is mainly the case with compilation or appropriation; instead, single images – a scene from contemporary culture or a photograph – are shot single frame over a period of time as cutout elements are additively layered on this background. This temporal collage that accumulates in-the-frame collage over time creates a different viewer experience than the temporal connections between montaged sections of found footage. Often an illusion of movement is created within the frame by layering of still photographs and moving image sequences with animated collage and graphic drawn or painted interventions. Instead of montage of film strips to create ‘discrepancies between the image’s original and present function’ in sequential time, in VanDerBeek’s collages the discrepancies occur at the level of the image combination of fragments. A third technique in Wees’s list of avant-garde techniques that VanDerBeek makes use of is superimposition. Gene Youngblood (1970) suggests: the pure art of cinema exists almost exclusively in the use of superimposition. In synaesthetic cinema they are one total image in metamorphosis.This does not imply that we must relinquish what Eisenstein called ‘intellectual montage’. In fact, the conflict-juxtaposition of intellectual effects is increased when they occur in the same image. (p. 87) In some films, VanDerBeek uses an abundance of superimposition and dissolves in combination with collage within the frame that Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by S Buchan on April 24, 2012 Buchan ‘A curious chapter in the manual of animation’ 191 animates the images by merging them in temporally as well as spatially. For example, recombined representational photography, graphic elements, drawing and painting in See Saw Seams (1965) that was made using computer programming, is comparable in concepts of spatio-temporal play to Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten (1977). But instead of a continuous travelling from the surface of the earth out to the galaxy and universe and back in again to sub-molecular levels, VanDerBeek’s film moves continually inwards through photographs and graphics in a series of transitions. Travelling through a mix of spatially perspectival and mixed sociocultural and historical planes, the viewer watches as the camera takes him or her on an journey into the cutout, drawn and photographic imagery that creates a sense of moving through time and space. As the camera moves closer to the images, their grain is exposed and they give way to new images. An example is the first few minutes of the film – an early photograph of men, horses and buildings.The camera moves in on the photo towards two men flanking a tree. A ‘jump cut’ dissolve to a closer image of the men speeds up this travelling (this is also used elsewhere in the film), and another takes us even closer (and faster) to one of the men’s faces, that becomes increasingly grainy as he camera travels closer. An additively collaged and painted landscape with a strongman body transforms the face, and the camera continues its inward path into the strongman’s body that then transforms into another additive landscape with a bird at centre, the camera continuing into the image eye (a new image of a bird having replaced the other one via a dissolve) to an extreme closeup of a bird’s eye. There are no ‘breaks’ in the film, and its continual inward movement (with a few exceptions of reverse movement) is speeded up by ‘jump cut’ dissolves and double exposures that alter the landscapes and images. Combined with metamorphosis of additive painting and collage, the film creates a kind of temporal animation. VanDerBeek exploited the double and multiple exposure and dissolve in his 1965 masterpiece of human life and emotion The Human Face Is a Monument (1965) that uses Magnum photographs. Conclusion VanDerBeek’s animation film poetics work with a fusion of photoindexiality and additive animation – whether collage, drawing and painting – to create a cinematic locus and time-scape that eludes analysis and interpretation.While a spatial coherence is often sustained by his use of photographic backgrounds that provide a perspectival context for the moving and changing collaged foreground items, the discrepancy between these and the collages and cutout images – a jalopy negotiating the hill of a breast, oversized women’s heads in dining rooms, the various interiors shots that replace a woman’s face Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by S Buchan on April 24, 2012 192 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 5(2) in A la Mode – is disjunctive. While close descriptive analysis can unpack his techniques, the films cannot be interpreted by single sequences – it is the overall effect of each of the films that communicates its thematics of gender, social critique, political satire and sometimes simply sheer exuberance of method. Joyce used over a dozen languages to create his portmanteau words and neologisms in Finnegans Wake (1939); VanDerBeek combined imagery from dozens of areas of visual culture and he was also a recycler of imagery across his films; recurrent elements include a hammer, strongmen, car parts, women’s body parts, eyes, hands, faces of politicians and public figures, various interiors and built architecture, classic statuary, nuclear bomb mushrooms, film stills, newsreel footage, newspaper text. Often a number of these are combined in a single collage (Figure 6). The images he uses are not just ‘found’; they exhibit a precision of selective recompositional combinations, perspectival and proportional relations and evidence of a keen intellect and artistic sensitivity that results in richly polysemic cultural imagery. The context within which VanDerBeek’s works discussed here perhaps fit best is when collage is put in the service of political and social satire; indeed, he was a pioneer of this in collage animation. His own thoughts on satire explain how manipulation of photographic imagery served another purpose: ‘That we take for granted much of our American life as it is reflected in photo-reality is evidenced by a lack of self-criticism and satire’ (VanDerBeek, 1966: 337); he then cites Paul Klee: ‘Satire is not an excess of ill humour, but ill humour resulting from a vision of something higher . . . ridiculous man, divine God. Hatred for anything stagnant out of respect for pure humanity’ (p. 337). While a mood of critique, satire or humour prevails in the films, there is another: an underlying sense of humanity, joy and play of the artist at work; in credits, VanDerBeek often thanks ‘S. Fried’ (aka Sigmund Freud). Figure 6 Conceptual collage artwork for Wheeeels #2 (aka ‘the immaculate contra ption’) that was filmed in black and white (Stan VanDerBeek, 1958–9). © The Stan VanDerBeek Estate. Reproduced with permission. Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by S Buchan on April 24, 2012 Buchan ‘A curious chapter in the manual of animation’ 193 Darryl Chin (n.d.) suggests that VanDerBeek’s collage films What Who How (1957), Breath Death (1964) and Science Friction ‘retain an enormous vitality, a bounding inventiveness, an incendiary wit which was shared by such other film collagists as Robert Breer, Bruce Conner and Dick Preston’. VanDerBeek’s playful visual barrage can also be approached through what Fritz Senn (1984) calls dislocution that describes, among other things, Joyce’s disruptions of space and time in his texts. He suggests the term could be used, after all, for redescribing . . . what was provisionally verbalized as metamorphosis, alienated readings, an auto-corrective urge, metastasis [rapid transition from one point of view to another], the disrupted pattern principle, or polytropy . . . it might even stand for all those effects that make us respond, spontaneously, with laughter. (p. 211) Senn suggests that ‘it is, of course, the reader who – potentially – executes all the mental shifts’ (p. 209) giving credit to the reader’s (viewer’s) own creative ability to work with the text (film). VanDerBeek’s visual spatial and temporal disruptions that break rules of linearity and collide disparate social and cultural contexts often provoke laughter as the viewer recognizes the humour at play in the collage (Figure 7). Figure 7 This artwork collage shows VanDerBeek’s humour at play while creating a woman’s version of the fantasy vehicles in the Wheeeels! series (Stan VanDerBeek, 1958–9). © The Stan VanDerBeek Estate. Reproduced with permission. Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by S Buchan on April 24, 2012 194 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 5(2) We have seen that VanDerBeek’s satirical films make heavy use of portmanteau images, visual equivalents of puns, a literary form that Derek Attridge (1988) suggests: remains an embarrassment to be excluded from ‘serious’ discourse . . . It survives, tenaciously, as freak or accident, hindering what is taken to be the primary function of language: the clear transmission of a pre-existing, selfsufficient, unequivocal meaning . . . The pun represents a trick of art, imposing duplicity and self-consciousness upon the singleness and simplicity of nature. (p. 189) Perhaps what Attridge describes as ‘an embarrassment’ is a reason for VanDerBeek’s exclusion from ‘serious’ canons. His visual puns and portmanteau collages deconstruct and reconfigure images to create ambiguous meanings much in the same way as Moholy-Nagy (1947) suggests that, in Finnegan’s Wake, ‘Joyce tried to avoid the limitation of a precise subject-rendering’ (p. 344). VanDerBeek’s filmic punctuation, his montage, both within and between frames and shots, comes close to what Moholy-Nagy described for Joyce, that he ‘telescoped nouns, verbs adjectives into forceful images, visual and sound projections . . . He took elements independent of space or time continuum when he needed them for the characterization of eternal human traits (p. 343). Understood in this context, the profoundly humanist orientation of VanDerBeek’s project becomes apparent; his characterization of human traits and behaviours in his precisely composed collages (and soundtracks).The last words of this article,VanDerBeek’s own that address other filmmakers, best summarize his unique contribution to ‘a curious chapter of animation’: They conjure what they hope will be explosives vivid enough to rock the status quo: weapons as potential as fusion, for art can be as important as politics, the artist’s hand more important than armament! They use any ingredient that comes to hand. (VanDerBeek, 1961: 6) Notes 1 A clever merchandising tactic, children were encouraged to buy the Winky Dink Kit that included crayons, a cloth and transparent sheet (Magic Window) that was placed over the television screen and drawn on according to the presenter’s instructions. The programme broadcast animation that was designed to incorporate these drawings. 2 ‘The intermedial approach [is] to emphasize the dialectic between the media’ (Higgins, 1995: 728). 3 The Library of Congress Moving Image Genre-Form Guide allocates animation as one of three Sublists (the others are Experimental and Advertising) that is classified in Subdivisions according to techniques and technologies. This is unusual in that other genres are described with Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by S Buchan on April 24, 2012 Buchan ‘A curious chapter in the manual of animation’ 195 historical, ideological, aesthetic or content-based terminologies [http://www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/migsub.html#Animation]. 4 The focus of Wees’ book is the North American post Second World War avant-garde, yet these techniques are not exclusive to them. 5 This would be a subset of what Maureen Furniss (1998) describes as ‘developmental animation’ but is more embracing and includes paint on glass, and other techniques. 6 Multiplane is distinct from collage film’s single plane technique because it creates the actual effect of depth in layered imagery by placing different elements on separate layers of glass vertically stacked and separated at varying distances, photorealistic space and shifting relational perspectives among these elements 7 There is disparity in the year the film was made, ranging between 1957–60 (the film itself contains a copyright for 1960 in the opening credits). 8 Vanderbeek made a number of films that included variations in the opening titles on the term ‘visible’: for instance ‘A Visible Fill’m’, (Breathdeath) ‘A Visible’ (Science Friction), ‘A Visible No 4’ (Wheeeels #2). 9 An extended discussion of animation and portmanteau will be published in my forthcoming book (Buchan, 2010). 10 References are to Gabler (1986) and indicate episode number and lines. 11 See Buchan (2010) for an extended discussion of visual portmanteau and its implications for viewers of the Quay Brothers’ films. 12 Unreferenced citation on the Motion Design website: URL (consulted Jan. 2010): http://motiondesign.wordpress.com/2008/09/15/stan-vanderbeek1927-1984/ References Amidi, Amid (2009) ‘Stan VanDerBeek’, ASIFA Magazine: The International Animation Journal 22(2): 37–43. Attridge, Derek (1988) Peculiar Language. London: Methuen. Bartlett, Mark (2008) ‘The Politics of Media in Stan Vanderbeek’s Poemfields’, animation: an interdisciplinary journal 3(3): 266–87. Bazin, André (1967) What Is Cinema?, Vol. 1. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Buchan, Suzanne (2010) The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Chin, Daryl (n.d.) ‘Down Memory Lane: Found Forms’ (Stan VanDerBeek Retrospective at Anthology Film Archives, 1977). URL (consulted Jan. 2010): http://www. guildgreyshkul.com/VanDerBeek/_PDF/ArtistInResidenceToTheWorldPDFLORES.pdf Coté, Guy L. (1962/3) ‘Interview with Robert Breer’, Film Culture 27,Winter: 17–20. Darley, Andrew (2007) ‘Bones of Contention:Thoughts on the Study of Animation’, animation: an interdisciplinary journal 2(1): 63–76. Deleuze, Gilles (1990[1969]) The Logic of Sense, trans Mark Lester. London: Athlone Press. Dixon,Wheeler Winston (1997) The Exploding Eye: A Re-visionary History of 1960s American Experimental Cinema. Albany: State University of New York Press. Furniss, Maureen (1998) Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics. London: John Libbey. Gabler, Hans (1986) Ulysses (Gabler edn). London: Penguin. Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by S Buchan on April 24, 2012 196 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 5(2) Griffin, George (2004) ‘Robert Breer: dadanimator’. URL (consulted Dec. 2009): http://www.geogrif.com/breer.html Hames, Peter (ed.) (1995) Dark Alchemy: The Films of Jan Švankmajer. London: Flicks Books. Higgins, Dick (1995) ‘Statement on Intermedia’, in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (eds) Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (California Studies in the History of Art XXXV). Berkeley: University of California Press. Leslie, Esther (2002) Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde. London: Verso. Moholy-Nagy, László (1947) Vision in Motion. Chicago: Theobald. Quendler, Christian (forthcoming) ‘Blending Media: The Quay Brothers’ Vital Machines’, contribution to a forthcoming publication from the University of Innsbruck. Richter, Hans (1965) ‘My Experience with Movement in Painting and in Film’, in Gyorgy Kepes (ed.) The Nature and Art of Motion, pp. 142–57. New York: George Braziller. Senn, Fritz (1983) Nichts Gegen Joyce ( Joyce Versus Nothing: Essays 1959–1983), German and English edn, ed. Franz Cavigelli. Zürich: Haffmanns Verlag. Senn, Fritz (1984) Joyce’s Dislocutions, ed. J.P. Riquelme. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Time (1964) ‘Cinema: In the Year of Our Ford’, 3 April. URL (consulted Dec. 2009): http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,939493–1,00.html Wees, William C. (1992) Light Moving in Time. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wees, William C. (1993) Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films. New York: Anthology Film Archives. VanDerBeek, Stan (1961) ‘The Cinema Delimna: Films from the Underground’, Film Quarterly 14(4), July: 5–15. VanDerBeek, Stan (1966) ‘RE: Vision’, The American Scholar 35(2): 335–40. Youngblood, Gene (1970) Expanded Cinema. London: Studio Vista. Suzanne Buchan is Professor of Animation Aesthetics and Director of the Animation Research Centre at the University for Creative Arts, England (www.ucreative.ac.uk/arc). Her work centres on interdisciplinary approaches to animation as a pervasive moving image form. She is the Editor of animation: an interdisciplinary journal, was a founding member and 1995–2003 Co-Director of Fantoche International Animation Film Festival, Switzerland. Activities and publications include the Trickraum: Spacetricks exhibition (Christoph Merian Publishers, 2005) Animated ‘Worlds’ (Libbey Publications, 2005) and the Pervasive Animation conference at Tate Modern, London, March 2007 (http:// channel.tate.org.uk/media/37995738001#media:/media/37995738001/2 4922396001&context:/channel/most-popular). Her forthcoming book The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom will be published in Winter 2010 by the University of Minnesota Press. Address: Animation Research Centre, University for the Creative Arts, Falkner Road, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7DS, UK. [email: sbuchan@ucreative.ac.uk] Downloaded from anm.sagepub.com by S Buchan on April 24, 2012