I got hung up on the “Straining Towards the Limits” chapter, also covered in posts 12 and 13, where Vogel discusses the elimination of: reality, the image, the screen, the camera, the artist.
Paul Sharits:
N:O:T:H:I:N:G (1968)
Color fields flicker and fade. Would be a different experience in the front row of a screening, swallowing the colors with your eyes, but if you can see the whole frame on TV your lasting impression is Square, like a flipbook of colored post-it notes. Our only figures among the fields were titles and lightbulb, and I figured this was silent so I put on the new Animal Collective live album, but a chair appeared halfway through with a buzzer noise that was pretty much absorbed by the music.
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T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1969)
A guy having his face clawed off in two-frame flicker-motion, the soundtrack repeating the word “destroy” – then he’s cutting off his tongue with scissors Ichi-style. The flicker motion changes speed and intensity, reds and purples prevail, and the single letters appearing on occasion spell out the title. Pretty annoying! I’m missing the point as usual by watching a good video of this at home in 2025 with an IPA instead of at an underground film screening in 1969 out of my mind on hallucinogens.
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Peter Kubelka:
Arnulf Rainer (1960)
Simply square black-or-white flicker patterns with stuttering static noise. I would have proposed swapping the titles of the flicker-film (Arnulf Rainer) with the mini-doc of Arnulf Rainer (Pause!) but that’s why Kubelka had a significant influence on the European and American avant-garde and I did not. Vogel: “This is the first frame-by-frame abstraction that entirely dispenses with the image and consists solely of carefully orchestrated alternations of blank black or white frames.”
Unsere Afrikareise (1966)
Germans on safari, blasting every wild creature they see and staring at nude women, a travel doc with sound, re-edited into more interesting structure than these things usually are, but not interesting enough to make it worth watching these dudes shoot zebras and elephants.
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Robert Breer:
Inner and Outer Space (1960)
I think he’s animating airplanes (over Germany) in a very abstract way, all dots and lines, bombers and skywriting. Explodes into new subjects: red ball in obstacle course, brief sketch of people on the subway. Cool one.
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Horse Over Tea Kettle (1962)
Opens with a frog then introduces a whole range of objects and creatures (no horses or tea kettles that I noticed). These things will eventually fall down on the scene like rain, then fly back up into the sky. In between, everything transforms into something else, because why even work in animation unless you’re gonna transform things into something else?
Sitney:
he directly attacked the conventions of the cartoon while working within it … he transforms and moves these conventional figures within an intricate orchestration of expectations and surprises involving changes of scale, direction, virtual depth, and above all movement off the screen at all four edges
PBL 2 (1968)
The year 1968 got to Breer, who turned away from abstraction to make a one-minute two-part social issues parable, craving the oscar nomination that Windy Day got instead.
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Rubber Cement (1976)
Captioned scenes of the dog playing in the yard, animated in different styles, becoming more complex and intense, with periods of strobing. Focus turns to the means of production (xerox machine and rubber cement), aircraft are introduced, the whole scene melts into pure shape and color.
