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Monday, December 19th, 2022
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| 9:00a | The Avant-Garde Animated Films of Walter Ruttmann, Still Strikingly Fresh a Century Later (1921-1925) Though regarded by many as near-impossibly difficult to judge, avant-garde art can be put to its own test of time: does it still feel new ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years later? Now that most of Walter Ruttmann’s short animated films have passed the century mark, we can with some confidence say they pass that test. A few years ago, we featured here on Open Culture his Lichtspiel Opus 1, the first avant-garde animation ever made. Now, with this playlist, you can watch it and several of its successors, which together date from the years 1921 through 1925. “A trained architect and painter,” writes Cartoon Brew’s Amid Amidi, Ruttmann “worked as a graphic designer prior to becoming involved with film. He fought in WWI, suffered a nervous breakdown and spent time recovering in a sanatorium.” It was after that harrowing experience that he plunged into the still-new medium of animation, and he evidently brought the combined aesthetic refinement of architecture, painting, and graphic design with him. His four-part Opus series (top) shows us “how abstract animation doesn’t become dated as quickly as representational animation because its creation is not predicated upon the stylistic trappings of its era.”
This also holds true for Ruttmann’s advertising work, including the three-minute Der Sieger just above. Portraying “the struggles of a durable Excelsior tire that climbs entire buildings and wraps itself around the sun to protect it from triangular shapes with mean-looking faces,” as this summary of a talk by film scholar Michael Cowan puts it, the short “is a perfect example testifying to how a lot of avant-garde artists — contrary to popular belief — never lost sight for a certain applicability of their art in that their concepts of form also implied a certain idea of ‘forming’: the potential to take different shapes through morphing, to find ordering principles, or even to communicate the ideological impetus of forming a national body.”
That last holds especially true for Ruttmann’s “later work within the context of National Socialism”: an unfortunate-sounding context, though it must be noted that he displeased Adolf Hitler enough to be personally removed by the dictator from the project that would become Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. His artistic philosophy may have been compatible with selling tires, but it seems not to have served the much more bombastic and literal form of Nazi propaganda. That is, of course, to Ruttman’s credit, as is the freshness his early animations still exude these hundred or so years later. As Amid writes, “the graphic forms used in his film are the same building blocks — raw and unadorned — used by artists today.” But how many artists today use them with such elegance? Related content: The First Avant-Garde Animation: Watch Walter Ruttmann’s Lichtspiel Opus 1 (1921) Optical Poems by Oskar Fischinger, the Avant-Garde Animator Despised by Hitler, Dissed by Disney The Experimental Abstract Films of Pioneering American Animator Mary Ellen Bute (1930s-1950s) Spheres Dance to the Music of Bach, Performed by Glenn Gould: An Animation from 1969 Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. |
| 12:00p | NYC’s Iconic Punk Club CBGBs Comes Alive in a Brilliant Short Animation, Using David Godlis’ Photos of Patti Smith, The Ramones & More
Attention young artists: don’t let your day job kill your dream. In the mid-70s, David Godlis kept body and soul together by working as an assistant in a photography studio, but his ambition was to join the ranks of his street photographer idols – Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander, to name a few. As Godlis told Sergio Burns of Street Photography, “the 60’s and 70’s were great for photographers:” The 35mm camera was kind of like the new affordable technology of the day. Like having an iPhone you couldn’t talk on. Cool to look at, fun to use. Photography was only just beginning to be considered an art form. Which left plenty of room for inventing yourself. The movie Blow-Up showed off the kind of cool lifestyle that could be had. Photography seemed both adventurous and artistic. There were obviously a million career paths for photographers back then. From the sublime to the ridiculous. But plenty of opportunities to experiment and find your own way. Still, it’s a tough proposition, being a street photographer whose day job gobbles all available light. Or rather, it was until Godlis blundered into New York’s late, great punk club, CBGB’s, and resolved to “take street pictures at night without a flash, and make all these people look as interesting as a Ramones’ song sounds.” In brothers Lewie and Noah Klosters’ wonderful hybrid animation, Shots in the Dark with David Godlis, we see things fall into place as Godlis experiments with exposure times, darkroom chemical ratios, paper grade, and the streetlights lining the Bowery. He wound up with a bracing personal style…and some of the most iconic shots in rock history. The Klosters, who were granted full access to Godlis’ digital archive (a request Lewie Klosters likened to “asking the president for the nuke codes”), breathe extra life into this bygone scene by hand-cutting and puppeteering images of such stalwarts as The Ramones, Patti Smith, Television, Richard Hell, Talking Heads, Alex Chilton, and Blondie. Those who inhabited the scene in an offstage capacity are also given their due, from the door attendant and the bartender with the Dee Dee Ramone haircut to owner Hilly Kristal, his dog, and the cool kid patrons packing the legendarily filthy establishment. This seems to be a reflection of the irrepressible, and endlessly curious Godlis’ world view. As Lewie, who had 16 hours of audio interview to draw from, told the Vimeo blog’s Ina Pira: Ken Burns could make his next 20 hour documentary on Godlis alone. If you ever bump into him, and you will – he’s everywhere all at once in the Village, ask him about some of our favorite stories that hit the cutting room floor: Jager at the Revlon Bar, the bum pissing out the window, when he was held at gunpoint in Boston, about Merv and the Heinekens, and seeing Bob Dylan window shopping. Just to name a few. The final moments of Shots in the Dark with David Godlis are bittersweet. The filmmakers’ subject sums it up best: Nothing lasts forever, but you also have to know what will be of interest when it’s gone.
Related Content AC/DC Plays a Short Gig at CBGB in 1977: Hear Metal Being Played on Punk’s Hallowed Grounds – Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday. |
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