Dispatches #5

Tickets now on sale for the next Edge of Frame screening, plus news + links

Tickets are now on sale here for the second Collision screening, which will be at 5.30pm on Saturday 5th April, at Close Up in London.

Collision is an irregular screening series presenting original, daring and sensorially revitalising animation from around the world. This second programme in the series features eleven new and recent films from some of the most exciting independent animators working today, with a wide range of styles and techniques, from mind-bending abstraction to heartfelt and intimate personal stories. Featuring science fiction narratives, Gene Wilder, a quest for comfy shoes, Soviet mirrors, Spanish trompe l’oeils, the invisible pleasure of wind on skin - and much more. You can see more info on the programme and book tickets here.

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All That Is Solid

In other news, the venerable Animate Projects wrapped up their third Animate Open exhibition of international experimental animation - entitled All That Is Solid - at Derby’s Quad gallery last month. Its a really precious and wonderful thing that a) Animate still exist in these brutally tough times for arts organisations, and b) that they have produced another great Open Exhibition. I had a film in the second Animate Open back in 2015 along with an amazing selection of other animators, many of whom I met for the first time at the opening. The event was a real inspiration for me to begin putting on Edge of Frame screening events and I went on to do the first Edge of Frame Weekend in 2016 in partnership with Animate. For that and many other things I owe a great deal to them.

Their All That Is Solid programme will be coming to some other venues around the UK in coming months so keep an eye out for a screening near you. To coincide with the exhibition they did an online event featuring three of the artists in the show - Meghana Bisineer, Case Jernigan and Emily Sasmor, in conversation with artist Katerina Athanasopoulou. Watch it here:

Also be sure to check out Case’s powerful and moving recent film Noggin (which was in All That Is Solid ) now online here. (He also has a great Substack too)

You can check out all of Animate Project’s previous online talks here including two I organised during the pandemic.

One final bit of Animate Projects related news - they have just announced a new commission for UK animation artists here. Another ray of hope in what is a pretty bleak landscape for the arts at the moment.

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Sounds Familiar

Recently I was struck by some very familiar tones emerging from my computer speakers. My unethical streaming service of choice had decided to play a track called Terminal Z by German electronic musician Skee Mask. But in fact what I thought I was hearing was the soundtrack to Andrea Gomez’s 1983 watercolour animation masterpiece Bus Stop. It sounds incredibly similar to my ears, too close to be a coincidence.

The hauntingly beautiful original music of Gomez’s film is by trombonist and composer (and co-founder of Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening band) Stuart Dempster. Whatever the story is behind Skee Mask’s ‘use’ of Dempster’s music, I’m happy to use this curious instance of appropriation as an excuse to post Andrea’s film here. And you can tell me if I’m hearing things!

Bus Stop is really one of my favourite animated films. Its such a unique and powerful work of art. The soundtrack is wonderful as I’ve mentioned, and the animation itself is just glorious. An endlessly roving ‘camera’ takes us on a dizzying tour around an American urban landscape of the early 1980s, all rendered in watercolour and ink. The image and soundtrack are completely unified, with Dempster’s deep breath-like tones perfectly matching Gomez’s extraordinary animated vision.

I first heard about the film in the ‘EA’ bible Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art by Robert Russett and Cecile Starr, a book which was a principal inspiration for the original Edge of Frame Wordpress blog and its continuation here on Substack. When I first got the book many years ago I was particularly obsessed with a subsection of the opening chapter entitled The Widening Circles, which mentions many experimental animators and films from the 1970s and 80s - which I subsequently set about tracking down. I was overjoyed when I eventually found Bus Stop online, and the film dramatically exceeded my hopeful expectations. In 2017 I included it in an Edge of Frame programme for London International Animation Festival, and it was of course a whole different thing to see and hear it in good quality on the big screen. Bus Stop really should just be playing on a loop in some major gallery somewhere for all time.

That Widening Circles section of the Russett / Starr book was like a road map to so much important stuff for me. It was one of the key additions to the original 1976 edition of the book when it was revised and reprinted in 1988, and signposts a plethora of incredible up and coming animation artists who were working around that time. I’m really happy to say that several of the animators mentioned there have since featured in Edge of Frame, so anyone interested in this truly golden era of independent animation should check out the EoF archive pieces on Al Jarnow, Karen Aqua, Amy Kravitz and Paul Glabicki, as well as the interview I did with curator Herb Shellenberger about his once in a lifetime treasure trove of a screening series ‘Independent Frames’ held at Tate Modern in 2017.

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If you’ve read this far chances are you have a real appetite for all things experimental animation related. If you haven’t already done so, do consider signing up for a paid subscription to the Edge of Frame Substack. You’ll get monthly interviews and articles on some of the most exciting and innovative independent animators around.

Since starting the Substack in December I’ve published member-only features on Amanda Boniauto, Jon Gillie and Ted Wiggin, and my chat with experimental animator Alisi Telengut just went out earlier this week. I’m pleased to say these interviews have had a really positive response, with Ted’s getting a nice shout out from no less than Animation Obsessive (the ultimate animation Substack) in February. It’s less than a pint of London beer per month to sign up, and in doing so you help sustain one of the very few platforms specifically focused on experimental animation.

Thanks for reading!