BtZ42

[ish mailian]

Dr Seuss's The 5000 Fingers of Dr T is an extraordinary film by any
standards. But its most striking feature is its design. Jonathan Jones
on the tradition of painted cinema

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2002/mar/22/artsfeatures

On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 6:31 PM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> Paint on Film.
> The first Expressionist films made up for a lack of lavish budgets by
> using set designs with wildly non-realistic, geometrically absurd
> angles, along with designs painted on walls and floors to represent
> lights, shadows, and objects.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Expressionism
>
>
> The Absolute Film
> The most unique thing that cinema could do is present a visual
> spectacle comparable to auditory music, with fluid, dynamic imagery
> rhythmically paced by editing, dissolving, superimposition, segmented
> screen, contrasts of positive and negative, color ambiance and other
> cinematic devices. Already in the 1910s, the Italian Futurists Arnaldo
> Ginna and Bruno Corra made at least nine films, painting directly on
> the filmstrip not only non-objective pieces (the gradual takeover of
> the all-green screen by a red star, playing with afterimage) but also
> taking a divisionist painting by Segantini (a girl lying in a field of
> flowers) and re-painting it on frame after frame of the film to allow
> the colored dots to vibrate even more brilliantly than on the canvas.
> Unfortunately these films are all lost, as is the German Hans
> Stoltenberg's film painted directly on the filmstrip about the same
> time. Other artists made plans for abstract films that were never
> realized: Leopold Survage (Parisian-based friend of Picasso and
> Modigliani) painted several hundred sequential images, Colored Rhythm,
> in full color on paper, with the hope that they could be filmed, but
> he was unable to find an adequate color process before World War I put
> an end to his project. Likewise the Polish artist Mieczyslaw Szczuka
> drew numerous sequential images on scrolls of paper, and published two
> fascinating samples in 1924, just a couple of years before his death,
> but was apparently not able to get them filmed.
>
> http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/library/WMAbsoluteFilm.htm
>
> The surprise at the end of the film is our discovery that the tale we
> assumed to be one of horror and of superhuman powers is really the
> product of the imagination of a subhuman brain, a paranoid’s fantasy,
> a mad man’s hatred of his doctor. The world of the film is the product
> of Francis’s subjective vision, not of the director’s objective one.
> Robert Wiene,Caligari’s director, has intentionally used the decor of
> that film in a perpetual war against nature. The striking effect of
> the film’s design (by Warm, Röhring, and Reimann) is not just the
> unnatural feel of it. Walls, floors, and ceilings bear a structurally
> impossible relationship to one another; buildings so constructed could
> never stand. Skin, that soft and flexible material of nature, becomes
> hardened and frozen with paint. Windows are painted in distorted and
> impossible shapes. And most unnatural of all, the world of Caligari is
> a world without sunlight. Shadows of light and dark, light beams where
> sun would normally cast its shadow, have been painted on the sets. By
> using paint to make shadow where the sun would normally make, the fact
> that no sun exists was emphasized. The outdoor scenes feel as if they
> were shot indoors and they were. Here was the perfect use of the
> studio film. The intentional unnaturalness of the film is so
> remarkable that it is difficult to tell if the acting is intentionally
> or unintentionally stilled. It is expressionistically appropriate.
>
> http://cinecollage.net/weimar.html
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l