I’m introducing this matinee screening of 𝘈𝘭𝘪: 𝘍𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘌𝘢𝘵𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘭 (1974) at VIFF Vancity Theatre (June-15-2025) and moderating a post-screening discussion of the film. Looking forward to discussing its portrait of tenderness and human connection against a backdrop of social isolation and xenophobia. Since the screening takes place on Father’s Day, it’s fitting to acknowledge (a content warning, of sorts) its historic place in the German New Wave, popularized at the time under the slogan “Papa’s cinema is dead.” Tickets can be purchased here.
My short monograph Graphite: Animated Traces (Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 2024) profiles the material and cultural history of graphite as a creative medium, with close attention to its important role in contemporary art and animation. The book highlights the medium’s temperament and significance by turning to the unfolding and provisional status of the drawn moving image, considering graphite as a medium of emergent thought, contemplation, tender intimacy and impermanence.
Continue reading “Book Publication – “Graphite: Animated Traces””
The culmination of my curatorial residency at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre, this is the first major exhibition dedicated to the reciprocal relationship between animation and textile art. Transforming the centre into a series of gallery and cinema spaces, Interlaced: Animation and Textiles brings together moving-image works fashioned from textile forms and materials alongside fibre works inspired by animation. Artists featured in the exhibition explore ways of embroidering with projected light, quilting celluloid films, and weaving digital tapestries.
ARTISTS:
Faig Ahmed (Azerbaijan), Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (UK), Jon Michael Corbett (Canada), Kelly Egan (Canada), Sione Faletau (Aotearoa, Tonga), Footprints Studio (UK), Sabrina Gschwandtner (USA), Marguerite Harris (France), Len Lye (Aotearoa), Aubrey Longley-Cook (USA), Jodie Mack (USA), Huw Messie (USA), Lindsay McIntyre (Canada), Miracle de Mille (France), Ng’endo Mukii (USA), Kate Nartker (USA), Ishu Patel (Canada), Pathé Studio (UK), Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof (Canada), Harry Smith (USA), Caitlin Thompson (Canada), Vaimaila Urale (Aotearoa, Samoa), Jennifer West (USA), Jordan Wong (USA), Shaheer Zazai (Canada), Studio Zeitguised (Germany)
This public talk (August-18-2023) is featured in VIFF Centre’s summer 2023 series Back to the 80s.
After decades of postwar decline, the early 1980s seemed to spell the end of feature-length animation in the United States, and Walt Disney Studios considered shuttering its animation division. Yet by the end of the decade, Who Framed Roger Rabbit was released to immense box office success and wide critical acclaim, marking the beginning of an American animation renaissance. Why did a studio synonymous with wholesome family entertainment take a risk on a technically daring film crammed with slapstick comedy and sexual innuendo? Following the film’s detective protagonist, this public talk investigates the mystery of how Hollywood animation went from the brink of collapse to one of the world’s top theatrical attractions. Toontown will never be the same!
Fruit of All is one of three short films produced as part of my joint Master’s degree at York University / Ryerson University. During my graduate studies I was especially interested in experimental animation, including connections or fissures between analog and digital animation. With this film, I explored my computer’s flatbed scanner as a digital “direct animation” device by scanning and rendering the flesh of fruit. The scanned images were paired with hand-drawn animation made using a digital drawing tablet. Making this film really transformed how I understand the concept of “indexicality,” which throughout the 20th century was often misleadingly used to separate photography from drawings, or live-action from animated cinema.
Continue reading “Fruit of All (2008), 2:20min”
Still Moving is one of three short films produced as part of my joint Master’s degree at York University / Ryerson University. During my graduate studies I was especially interested in experimental animation, including how different hand-made animation processes foster different relationships between a filmmaker’s body and filmmaking technology. This particular film was sparked by Oskar Fischinger’s wax experiments (1921-1926), which were produced by slicing through pillars of multicoloured wax (using a kind of custom guillotine) and photographing the slices one at a time [decades later a variation on this method would be known as “stratacut animation”).
Continue reading “Still Moving (2008), 2:50min”
City Body was one of three short films produced as part of my joint Master’s degree at York University and Ryerson University. During my graduate studies I was especially interested in experimental animation, particularly “direct animation,” in which the image is produced directly on a film celluloid strip by scratching, painting, manipulating light and otherwise using the celluloid as a direct canvas. The direct animation experiments of Norman McLaren, Len Lye, and Harry Smith were very important to me. Why did their films affect me in a certain way, and to what extent did specific materials (celluloid film projection) or specific filmmaking gestures (hand-drawing and scratching) play a role in their sensory and rhythmic effects?
Continue reading “City Body (2008), 4:30min”
Meryl Strip a short film (gallery installation) exhibited at Brock Gallery in Evanston, Illinois. The film dissects the body of Meryl Streep in her cinematic incarnations, looking for traces of a single skeleton beneath the diverse landscape of her personas and narratives. Behind decades of comedies, dramas, and musicals, behind the film bodies of Jews, Italians, and Americans, I sought an always recurring and familiar set of gestures and movements that could only belong to Meryl.
Continue reading “Meryl Strip (2011), 6:30min”
Alla Gadassik: Media Scholar and Animation Curator 