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Short Circuit

Wise began experimenting with animation and live-action film at the age of seven, under the tutelage of several artists and experimental filmmakers, including Len Lye, Francis Lee, and Stan VanDerBeek. Wise created dozens of brief animations using cut-outs, scratch-on-film techniques, as well as conventional cel animation. In 1963, at the age of eight, Wise released a compilation of his experiments, titled "Short Circuit". Distributed by the Filmmakers' Cooperative, "Short Circuit" was shown throughout the world, won several awards, and was the U.S. entry in the "Child & the World" festival in Czechoslovakia. Writing in the Village Voice, filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas called Wise "the Mozart of Cinema."

Short Circuit

NR 1963
The Pudding Thieves

Bill (Bill Morgan) and George (George Tibbits) are still photographers, struggling to make a living any way they can. They decide they need a woman to pose for them so they can sell pornographic photos. While setting up yet another baby photo shoot, a couple of evangelists turn up, and Bill finds the younger one (Bernice Murphy) strangely attractive. When his new girlfriend discovers the business, she leaves him in disgust. Bill eventually betrays George to the vice squad, and then is consumed by guilt, heading off to the cinema, and a photographic exhibition The Family of Man …

The Pudding Thieves

7.0 1967
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

This is a film about the work of the young French Vorticist sculptor who died in World War I and his ties to London and to Jacob Epstein, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound. Much of the commentary comes from Gaudier's letters, his manifestos, and other writings by him. As with the Klippel films, the challenge was to bring the works in 3 dimensions to the film in 2 dimensions. If viewed in the context of a time when we were starting to specialize in art movies (we were trying to make a movie about the Vorticist movement), we noticed that we got bored with the documentary form, realizing that we didn't want to continue making movies this way. It was also around this time that we discovered the large amount of avant-garde cinema being made in America and Europe, at the 1967-68 edition of the Knokke Festival in Belgium, which confirmed our true interest.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

NR 1968
Shades and Drumbeats

"Dawn to dusk with a commune of young people on the Lower East Side, searching fulfilment through sex and drugs."–A.M. "...one of those remarkable films incensed with the values which man forgets, caught in the sedge flats which he calls his streets. It is these disowned values that [Meyer] obstinately and with the greatest of poise works with and surprises his film spectator...The world of SHADES AND DRUMBEATS has no need for sound; for the film frames speak and contain the word, the sentence which reveals to the engrossed spectator the spirit of Meyer's work."–Gregory Markopoulos, in a lecture at Idaho State University, 1964

Shades and Drumbeats

NR 1964
King, Murray

Characterized as a "fictionalized documentary" by the producer, this bizarre experimental drama is the story of three days in the life of a highly charged and successful Long Island insurance salesman who takes a filmmaker to Las Vegas. Though the protagonists really are a salesman and a director, the line between reality and fiction is hopelessly blurred as the story unfolds. . . The brash, loud and supremely confidant salesman shmoozes his clients in a way that is a game for him. He uses his powers of persuasion to acquire more and more sales. He and his cronies drink and feast over their success before embarking on the Las Vegas convention. The company even goes so far as to provide women for the married men, rewarding their career successes with amoral excesses in this film that concludes with a dream sequence on a beach.

King, Murray

7.0 1969
Bouncing in the Corner No. 1

For this videotape, Nauman turned the camera sideways and positioned it so that his head is cropped from the frame and his body is presented from neck to ankles. As he stands in the corner, his back to the wall, he appears to be lying down; falling backwards into the corner and then pushing himself off the wall again, he appears to be trying to levitate himself... As he performs these actions, his hands slam into the wall to break his falls, and the sounds become an integral part of the activities filmed. -- EAI

Bouncing in the Corner No. 1

NR 1968
Enantiomorphic Chambers

n 1964 Robert Smithson made a sculpture called Enantiomorphic Chambers that cleverly exploited our two-eyed nature to haunting metaphysical ends. Stepping between the two chambers, the viewer sees his or her image cancelled out by precisely coordinated mirrors, accomplishing Smithson’s task of “eliminating the consciousness that regulates binary vision.” Curators Kevin Regan and Christopher Howard have teamed up to turn NURTUREart Gallery into an entantiomorphic chamber of their own devising, though with a rather different aesthetic than Smithson’s. Noticing a simple iconographic trend in which a number of contemporary practices make use of reflected images, Regan and Howard have turned this underrecognized phenomenon into a full-scale metaphysical research project, complete with its own blog to document ongoing discoveries.

Enantiomorphic Chambers

NR 1965
Abstract animations from the 1960s - Part II

Pilař made the two surviving reels of animation experiments after his return from the 1963 Paris Biennale. The gestural brush painting over the surface of the originally black and white puppet film which he almost completely removed from the stock falls at the beginning of his programme works of expressive collage and assemblage. He returned to it repeatedly, as he did to the material he later reworked for Pink Floyd (ca. 1984) and Colours 1965 (ca. 1991).

Abstract animations from the 1960s - Part II

NR 1963