03.28.06
Amazing Experimental Animation Classics at NWFF This Weekend
Run, don’t walk, to the NW Film Forum this Saturday and Sunday (April 1 & 2) — 7pm only both nights — for a program of extraordinary short films dubbed Pioneers: Historic Shorts, 1930 -1950. It features very rarely shown works by some of the very best experimental animators ever; any one of these would be worth making tracks, so a whole program of this stuff is cause for lighting your butt rocket.
Visit the link above for a full listing, but there will be no less than five films by Oskar Fischinger (all but one of which I’ve never seen — and I’m a big fan), two films by the phenomenal Len Lye (including one of my personal favorites, Trade Tattoo [1937]), several films by pinscreen animators Alexander Alexeieff and Clare Parker that are pretty much literally never shown (including Sleeping Beauty [1934] and a number of their commercials from 1952-1961), and two films by Mary Ellen Bute (including her second work, Rhythm in Light [1935], for which she employed cellophane, ping-pong balls, sparklers, egg beaters, bracelets and barber poles…among other things).
See what I mean? Butt rocket, I’m tellin’ ya.
This program is part of NWFF’s annual special series ByDesign, co-presented with AIGA-Seattle, which explores “the intersection of graphic design and moving image.” It starts this Friday and runs through the weekend, and really I recommend all of the programs. But this one…say it with me now…butt rocket!
