Subjects (or targets, depending on how you look at it) for Friedman’s pen on the political side include Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, John McCain, and George W. Bush (with an iconic “W. as Strangelove” image) and his gang. Entertainers include Tiny Tim, Barney Fife, Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, Oprah Winfrey, Barbra Streisand, Jerry Lewis, the Three Stooges, Ellen DeGeneres, and Conan O’Brien. And falling somewhere in the gray area between entertainers and political players (you make the call!) Rush Limbaugh (who blasted Friedman’s George W. Bush image as being of “low artistic quality”), Sarah Palin, and Michael Moore.
Animated by Gary Gutierrez, the first 7 minutes of The Grateful Dead Movie feature some of the trippiest visuals you’ll ever see. This is to cartoons what DMT is to psychedelics.
“The Grateful Dead Movie”, was largely the brainchild of Jerry Garcia. It was designed to be a memento for the fans, documenting five days of concerts at Winterland in San Francisco in October 1974.
Throughout history, a moustache has adorned the upper lip of many a great man. This November, we join their ranks by growing our moustaches to raise funds and awareness for prostate cancer.
Alan on Youtube has taken the ‘Strawberry Fields’ episode of the Beatles cartoon television series and added a stereo mix of the song to the video. Quite nice.
From 1967, with the song dubbed in a new stereo remix I made to expand the orchestral section! (...unlike the newly remastered “Magical Mystery Tour” CD!) This episode was inspired by the fact that the “Strawberry Field” of the song had been based on a real-life Salvation Army orphanage in Liverpool. When the Beatles stop by a dilapidated orphanage, the hostile attitude of the children (who are drawn in muted colors like the downtrodden Pepperlanders in “Yellow Submarine”) is explained by the Beatles’ driver, James, as being being due to their “sociological environment”. So the Beatles set about to create an Elysian playground with song! John’s “Musketeer Gripweed”, of his film “How I Won the War”, has a cameo!
Dimensions of Dialogue is a short animated film, made in 1982 by Czech Surrealist artist and film-maker, Jan Švankmajer. The film is split into three sections, ‘Exhaustive Discussion’, where Arcimboldo-like heads reduce each other into bland copies; ‘Passionate Discourse’ a clay couple merge and dissolve in love-making, only to eventually disown and destroy each other; and ‘Factual Conversation’ two heads fail to communicate with each, presenting various objects with their tongues, none of which match.
Švankmajer has been making animations for over forty years, and his work has been a major influence on Terry Gilliam, the Brothers Quay, Tim Burton, and others. Gilliam listed Dimensions of Dialogue as one of “10 best animations of all time”, stating:
Jan Svankmajer’s stop-motion work uses familiar, unremarkable objects in a way which is deeply disturbing. The first film of his that I saw was Alice, and I was extremely unsettled by the image of an animated rabbit which had real fur and real eyes. His films always leave me with mixed feelings, but they all have moments that really get to me; moments that evoke the nightmarish spectre of seeing commonplace things coming unexpectedly to life.
...instructional that it is everyday objects that are confronted, devoured, spat out and homogenised, through a series of metaphors of colonisation, to an endless repetition of cloning operations. This is our digital world laid out in 1982.
Perhaps. But it strikes me that Svankmajer is doing more than this and he is confronting the failings of human existence, in a darkly humorous and disturbing way, to fully connect with one other.
This month sees the release of Svankmajer’s latest and, what he has announced maybe his, last film, Surviving Life:
Eugene leads a double life - one real life, and another life in his dreams. In real life, he is married to Milada; in his dreams, he has a young lover called Eugenia. Sensing that these dreams have a deeper meaning, he goes to see a psychoanalyst, who interprets his dreams for him. Gradually we learn that Eugene lost his parents in early childhood and was brought up in an orphanage.
In the meantime, Eugenia is expecting Eugene’s child - to the dismay of a psychoanalyst, who believes Eugenia is in fact his anima. And getting your anima pregnant is worse than incest. Meanwhile Milada suspects Eugene is having an affair. She spies on Eugene’s ritual in his studio, and enter his dream-world. French Romantic poet, Gerard de Nerval, said: “Our dreams are a second life.” This films wants to prove his words.
Via Tara McGinley
Part 2 of ‘Dimensions of Dialogue’ plus bonus clips and trailer for ‘Surviving Life’ after the jump…
Tomfoolery unleashed the SNES game version of director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Academy Award-winning film, There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano.
This is pretty wonderful. Pogo composed ‘Wishery’ using “vocal syllables, musical chords and sound effects recorded from the 1937 Disney classic Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs.”
Pogo is an electronic music producer currently living in Perth, Western Australia. He is known for his work recording small sounds from a single film or scene and sequencing them to form a new piece of music.
Described by Milos Forman as “Disney + Bunuel,” stop-motion animator Jan Švankmajer is one of the few artists to truly translate the spirit of early-20th century surrealism for the present. Folks like Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam cite Švankmajer’s late-‘80s and early-‘90s feature films like Alice and Faust as classics in the art form.
But most of all, Burton and Gilliam point to Švankmajer’s early short films from the ‘60s through the early ‘80s. One of these, the 10-minute Kostnice from 1970—known as Ossuary—isn’t stop-motion at all. Instead, it’s a beautifully stylized study of the decoratively laid-out bones of 70,000 people in the Cemetery Church in suburban Sedlec in the Czech Republic.
Shot during the dire couple of years after the Prague Spring liberation of 1968 collapsed under an invasion by Warsaw Pact troops, Svankmajer made Ossuary a grim reminder of human fallibility.
As Jan Uhde wrote in his piece on the film for KinoEye:
Film-makers, particularly those of the “Czech New Wave,” were among the most severely persecuted. The fact that a non-conformist like Švankmajer was allowed to shoot in this atmosphere at all was in part due to the fact that he was working in the relatively obscure and inexpensive domain of short film production; this may have saved him from the crackdown that struck his more exposed colleagues in the feature film studios during the 1970s.
Moreover, Švankmajer’s remarkable tenacity and creative thinking enabled him to sometimes outwit the regime’s ideological watchdogs[…] The film was commissioned as a “cultural documentary,” a form popular with the authorities and considered relatively safe politically. But the subject Švankmajer chose must have been a surprise for the apparatchiks: on the one hand, the Sedlec Ossuary was a first-rate historical site which, at first glance, suited the official didactic demand. On the other hand, there was the uncomfortable subject of decay and death as well as religion, reflecting a subtle yet defiant opposition to the loud secular optimism of the communist officialdom.
