5 things that may or may not be about avant-garde cinema

[pryor15]

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(Excellent piece, sir.)

Has anyone actually sat through an Andy Warhol film such as "Empire"? That's a static shot of the Empire State building lasting some 4 hours, which I understand is edited end to start, in order to last twice that. Has anyone seen it?

I don't suppose anyone actually has. Neither have I. But not so fast. Have we not watched a reality show where we watch other people sitting around "doing nothing"? Or a live immobile camera shot from the scene of a crime "as it happens"? A bank robbery is televised and we are glued watching a white blob in a dark background for two hours, because it's the bank's besieged entrance. I'm saying Warhol's films made a lot of what followed in our visual universe, not in the sense that Warhol created techniques which were copied, but that he, genius that he was, foresaw the zeitgeist of mass consumerism and mass culture and threw it to us before its time as some kind of sardonic flash-forward.

That's being there first. Avant garde.

Mickey Brausch

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i saw part of "Empire", but i didn't really care to see much more.

an interesting play on the whole bank robbery footage was Andrew Horbal's entry where he talks about a NCAA tourney game where they zoom in on a guy's foot and how that relates to the famous "back, and to the left" line in "JFK"

there's a ton of interesting stuff out there.

[OrigamiSensei]

Some light info on Ralph Bakshi.

I can't claim to have been part of the hip set or counterculture in the '70s and '80s growing up in a very Wonder Bread environment - but Ralph Bakshi was a seminal player in the growth of "hip" animation. This was a down time for feature animation as Disney was in a pretty severe dry spell at the time, at least creatively. Bakshi became famous in the '70s for movies like the X-rated Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic and Wizards, all of which broke animation ground in animation subject matter and technique. The techniques of combining live action and animation had already been done before but he was taking things to a new level. However, as the thrust of the discussion relates to rotoscoping it whould be noted that none of his first movies used rotoscoping.

The landmark in rotoscoping was his late-'70s animated version of The Lord of the Rings, which was supposed to be a two-part film. However, the second film never got made. LOTR was filmed first in live action, then heavily rotoscoped. However there were limitations in the technique. Because rotoscoping involves slowing down the rate of movement detail is lost and movements become more jerky. This is to a large extent intentional but as later practitioners have found certain details are important. Bakshi's early rotoscoping work was more purely sampled from live frames and what was in the sampled frames made it, what was in other frames was lost. The latest efforts like Linklater's utilize the cool herky-jerky rotoscope look while doing more careful animation on dialogue, facial expressions and key details. Certainly Linklater's work must be heavily influenced by the work of Bakshi.

Bakshi has continued to work, with Cool World from the 1990s continuing on the theme of combining live action and animation. He has also done more recent animation projects although he's not really in the spotlight anymore.

As an aside while thinking about the subject I notice the influence in other places. Although I think it is completely animated rather than rotoscoped, the famous music video Take on Me by A-ha appears to be heavily influenced by the rotoscope style of animation combined with live-action realism.

Anyway, this is what I have after going through the memory archives and doing a little Googling. Just Google "Ralph Bakshi" if you want more details on this ground-breaking animator.