For those in the Portland, Oregon area, the Northwest Film Center is hosting “An Evening with Joanna Priestley” on Saturday, January 28th. The event is part of the Center’s Northwest Tracking series celebrating its 40th anniversary.  Priestley is one of my favorite filmmakers who I’ve written about before. (See my article I wrote for Skwigly here and here.) 

The program includes world premieres of two animated films, Out of Shape and Eye Liner, previews of which are embedded below.

Priestley says Out of Shape is the result of a “two month collaboration with terrific sound designer Marc Rose.”

“Eye Liner,”  she notes, “explores archetypes of the human face, patterning and cultural effigies that echo facial features.”

For more information on the screening and Priestley visit the Priestley Motion Pictures website, where you can also order DVDs and even one of her flipbooks.

This Tuesday, October 20th, at 7:30 pm,  in conjunction with ASIFA-Atlanta, C. Martin Croker returns to the Plaza Theatre, in Atlanta with the second of his Bizarro Sat Morn! shows this season, featuring a program of cartoons on 16mm, which has been described as "An oddball mash-up of nostalgia and bits of o’ weird-o coolness," featuring films from the 20s through the 90s. This Halloween show will feature films by Ub Iwerks, Paul Julian, Bill Justice, Max Fleischer, Hal Seeger , Jack Davis and others.

While you’re at it, check the theater’s website on how to make a tax-free donation to help restore "Atlanta’s oldest continuously operating cinema," which dates from 1939.

Meanwhile, if you’re the Los Angeles area, on Monday, October 26th, the CalArts Downtown Center for Innovative, Performing and Media Arts, at 8:30 pm, will present the world premiere of Christine Panushka and Beto Araiza, Mosca and the Meaning of Life. 

It is described as

a groundbreaking multimedia piece in which animated characters leap off the screen and join up with a live performance crafted by award-winning filmmaker and animator Christine Panushka and theater and spoken word artist Beto Araiza.

Mosca and the Meaning of Life questions our belief systems, customs, and social values, the truths and lies with which we live out our lives, motivated as much by misinformation and desperation as by hope. The program also includes The Sum of Them, Singing Sticks and other films by Panushka, as well as an excerpt of Biting the Pillow, a performance by Araiza.

Christine Panushka is a valued colleague, whose is not only a leading independent animator and educator, but an unsung pioneer of Internet animation with her groundbreaking (and much missed) Absolut Panushka website.

On Friday night, July 10th, ASIFA-Atlanta put on a screening of locally-made animated films at the Woodruff Art Center’s Rich Auditorium. The event, which was made possible by the High Museum of Art, was put on as part of the 21st Annual Society for Animation Studies Conference being held that weekend at the Atlanta campus of the Society for Animation Studies. It was curated by ASIFA-Atlanta President Brett W. Thompson, who has now posted his introduction  to the screening (see above) as well as the question and answer period that followed with some of the artists who worked on the films (posted below).  Unfortunately, because of technical problems, there is a gap between parts 1 and 2, and the end of part 2 is missing.

The final program included the following films:

Animation Draw 1 — ASIFA-Atlanta; Happy and Strickly in “Fuzzy Business” — Robert Paraguassu / Bark Bark; Vice Versa — Jacques Khouri; White Cow — K.A. Callahan / Kristin Jarvis; Avery Matthews — Richard Ferguson-Hull / Steve Vitale, Turner Studios / Cartoon Network; Blossoming Flower, Smooch, Lick — Bradley Bailey; They Must Be Very Hungry — Bryan Fordney; Mouse and Cat — Joe Peery; As Seen on TV! — Lee Crowe; Traveler of the Horizon — Hamid Bahrami; Cornpopalypse — Graham Shirley; Death of a Matriarch — Takuro Masuda; Animation Draw 2 — ASIFA-Atlanta; A Day at the Beach — John Ryan; Fluidtoons — Brett W. Thompson; Stubbe Peter — Kristin Jarvis; Curtains — Amanda Goodbread; Juxtaposer — Joanna Davidovich; I Will Enjoy — Theodosia Burr (Em Kempf); Code Monkey — Jennifer Barclay; Animation Draw 3 — ASIFA-Atlanta; Get Got — Bryan Fordney; Busted — Matt Maiellaro.

A new DVD release of interest from Facets The Animation of Alexeïeff  featuring  the pinscreen films of Alexeïeff and his wife Claire Parker, including such famed shorts as Night on Bare Mountain (1933) and The Nose (1963), along with commercials and documentaries, including The Pinscreen (Norman McLaren, 1973), as well as Jacques Droulin’s Mindscape, a National Film Board of Canada film made using Alexeïeff and Parker’s pinscreen (which ended up at the NFB). The set, in English and French, appears to be the same as now out-of-print ones previously available in the UK (Animation Works of Alexander Alexeieff ) and France (Le cinéma épinglé), which are both now out-of-print.

Film historian Kristin Thompson, in reporting on the screening of Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues at this year’s Eberfest (Roger Ebert’s Film Festival hosted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s College of Media), includes a transcript of a discussion with Paley and animation scholar (and old buddy) Richard Leskosky  (seen above). In it she makes an interesting aside about the way the film was projected (digitally, which is how it was created):

By the way, I want to mention that what you saw was not 35mm. You saw HD-cam, and there are actually 35mm prints of this, and seeing it here was very strange. It was unusually solid, rock solid, a little bit troublingly solid, although that is the ideal that film technology has been striving for. But 35mm prints have all these scratches and splices, and grain and a kind of warmth that moves around, which is almost like a kind of very desirable filter that really warms up the film. So watching it in 35mm is different. I was noticing how computery it looked on the HD projection at this particular size, because I was looking for imperfections that simply weren’t there.

Anyway, do take a look.

Nina Paley‘s Sita Sings the Blues, the highly-acclaimed animated feature whose distribution has been hampered by copyright problems, will have a special screening sponsored by ASIFA-Atlanta at the Plaza Theatre (1049 Ponce De Leon Ave. Atlanta 30306. 404 873-1939), Wednesday, March 11th, at 7:30 p.m. Prices are $8 for ASIFA-Atlanta members and $10 for non-members and can be bought online through ASIFA-Atlanta’s website.

Paley, an independent filmmaker and comic strip artist, who does not have the resources of even a minor studio behind her, has been raising money to help clear up the rights problem. In the meantime, the film can be seen for free online (as well as downloaded, also for free) coutesy of WNET, the New York public TV station, at channel13.org. For more information on Paley’s plans for the film, check out her blog, or her new Sita website.

This is the title of an interesting story in yesterday’s New York Times about independent, adult-oriented animation, which notes that,

Serious animation is not unknown in the United States, although the market situation might be comparable to that of California wine, pre-1976. “Waltz With Bashir,” the coming Sony Pictures Classics animated release about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s, is as serious as film can get. “Persepolis” and “The Triplets of Belleville” were major examples of a post-Looney Tunes approach and a maturity of subject matter, if not necessarily technique. But all three are imports. To get their work seen, most animators in the United States have to move their work the other way.

It includes interviews with Bill Plympton (those are images from his short, Hot Dog, above), Don Hertzfeldt, and Signe Bauman, as well as Henry Selick.

(Thanks to John Ryan for the link.)

The Madness of Being, a striking short film  Hal Miles made last year, recently finished doing the festival circuit. Its about a character (a stop motion armature) trapped in a situation right out of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit; Miles describes the story as being about a “character … confined in an extremely small and isolated room for all eternity, [who] confronts its madness of being by witnessing a series of agonizing situations about itself.” The fact that the character is essentially the skeleton of a stop motion puppet (modeled on one used in Mighty Joe Young), might be considered a meditation on the madness of filmmaking.

Hal Miles is someone I had the pleasure of getting to know when I worked in the Savannah campus of the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he teaches stop motion animation and visual effects. Early in his career, he worked under Tex Avery and later befriended Ray Harryhausen, who he claims as major influences. His credits include working on the visual effects of such films as The Abyss, Terminator II and Titanic, as well as animating the Pillsbury Doughboy and directing several of his own short films.

For me, Hal is the go to person on questions on puppet animation; his passion for his history and technique is reflected in his wonderful collection of stop motion artifacts (which naturally supplied the armature used in The Madness of Being). His long-term plan is to open a stop motion museum. (Interestingly, his new wife, Nancy, is herself a collector of animation art, though it’s obvious that theirs is not a marriage of convenience.)

The dark mood of The Madness of Being seems out of character for such a lively person; as his wife Nancy says, who knew that such a funny person could make such a film. Well, he did and did a pretty good job of it too.

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The following was originally written in December 2004 for Skwigly Animation Magazine, a British online journal that subsequently went out of business; though parts of the magazine’s site can still be seen on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, this article cannot It was written on the occasion of the release of Priestly first DVDs: Relative Orbits and Fighting Gravity and is an update of an piece I wrote in 2001 for Animatoon (issue 30). The film about menopause she mentions eventually turned into the recently completed Streetcar Named Perspire, which I recently wrote about on December 20, 2007.

“I really love Flash,” Joanna Priestley gushes. “It’s so easy to use and I rarely have problems. It’s phenomenally fast, I can change things right away and rarely lose things. It’s not for everything, but it suits my style. It has totally changed the way I make films. Best of all, using Flash reminds me of what filmmaking used to be like; and once again, I can do everything myself.” This endorsement is unusual only in that Priestley, one of the leading lights of American independent animation, has traditionally relied on jerry-built techniques that seem primitive even compared to those used when Winsor McCay was starting out.

Priestley used Flash for Dew Line (2004), a delightful abstract film which she compares to “Henri Matisse’s cutout technique of his last years, which was very flat and used solid colors. But Flash is only one many techniques and I like to use many techniques.”

Dew Lines is one of two recent films — the other being Andaluz (2004), co-directed with Karen Aqua — which is included in her first set of DVD releases, Relative Orbits and Fighting Gravity. The former includes eight of her classic films, including Voices (1984) and She-Bop (1988); the latter includes Dew Line and Andaluz, as well as The Rubber Stamp Film (1983) and Jade Leaf (1985), a rarely seen computer animated student film made at the California Institute of the Arts. Both discs also include documentaries in which Priestley describes how she works and other bonus material.

“One of my main goals in making films,” Priestley says, “is to try to push the boundaries of what I know, as far as I can. In every film, I try to do something new and different. I try new techniques, new subject matter, new styles, or new color palettes.” The one constant, though, in all her work is their deeply felt and often humorous exploration of her life and personality.

This is clearly seen in Voices, another CalArts student film which remains one of her signature pieces. She has described it as, “A humorous exploration of the fears we share: fear of the darkness, of monsters, of aging, of being overweight and of global destruction.” It features a rotoscoped image of Priestley talking to the camera, whose appearance constantly changes to reflect her fears and anxieties.

This type of personal exploration of her life is also seen in such films as All My Relations (1990) [above] and Grown Up (1993) [below], which deal with relationships and the perils of becoming middle-aged respectively. Her films also reflect a strong feminist instinct, as seen in the poetic She-Bop, which mixes puppets and drawings to examine human frailties, and After the Fall (1991), which examines the isolation of men in modern Western society. This tendency to personalize her films is even evident in her recent turn toward abstraction, including Surface Dive, inspired by her experiences diving in an underground river in Mexico.

Discovering Animation

Born and raised in Oregon, Joanna Priestley began experimenting with animation very early in her life. “One of the first toys I was ever given,” she recalls, “was a zoetrope, which worked on a little turntable and it had little zoetrope strips with it. I loved it! I’m sure I became an animator because of that toy. Then I started drawing on the corners of my textbooks in grade school, and later studied art in high school and college, where I specializing in painting and printmaking.”

After college, she moved to Paris “to study printmaking with intaglio master Bill Hayter at Atelier 17.” Returning to Oregon, she settled in Sisters, “a little tiny cowboy town in the center of the state, where there was almost nothing to do in the evenings.” With no commercial cinema around, she helped start a film society, which became a huge success.

“We then had some money left over and decided to invite Bob Gardiner, who had won an Oscar for Closed Mondays with Will Vinton. He was funny and charming and showed a whole program of animation; and that was when I really discovered animation. I immediately saw the possibilities of transferring over [from painting and printmaking] to animation. So, I went to a store, bought a pack of index cards and started experimenting with them.” It was a very inexpensive way to work which she continues to use.

Working as a film librarian for the Northwest Film Center, in Portland, enabled her to see new work and meet filmmakers like independent animator George Griffin, whose work Priestley “just fell in love with” and who became a big influence. Other animators who have had a great influence include Norman McLaren, Len Lye and Jane Aaron.

“However,” she says, “the one film that’s influenced me the most is La Jetée by Chris Marker, [which consists entirely of still photos]. I saw it in college in 16mm; I was so astounded by it that I insisted I be able to take the film and look at it myself, and was able to look at it four times in a row. At that point, I was supporting myself doing commercial slide shows with three or six projectors. And there’s such an interesting overlap between slide shows and La Jetée and animation, because movement occurs between the dissolves between these still images.”

Rubber Stamps & CalArts

In the late 70s, Priestley began work on her first film, The Rubber Stamp Film. She recalls, “It took me five years to do it. I literally knew absolutely nothing about filmmaking. I bought my own equipment from flea markets.”

The first festival she entered the film in was Telluride, where she met André Tarkovsky, “one of the directors I most admired in the world, and I just thought I died and gone to heaven. And I got a very good response to the film, including positive notices from several major film critics such as Leonard Maltin and Roger Ebert.”

Despite this success, she decided to go back to college and enrolled in the Experimental Animation Program at CalArts. “The time I spent at CalArts,” she says, “was one of the most exciting times in my life. I was worked incredibly hard and did four or five films. I was able to collaborate with my mentor, Jules Engel, on a couple of films done on the computer. It was a time when computers first arrived at CalArts, so we were the first people doing computer animation there. My desk was next to the wall adjoining the Indonesian Music Room, so all day long I would hear the gamelan rehearsing. I was also able to take African dance, study acting and stage design, helped live-action filmmakers with their projects, and did lots of wild experiments.”

“After I left CalArts,” she says, “I went back to what I had been doing. And that turned out to be extremely helpful, because what I was doing was sitting with a pile of index cards and animating away. I think sometimes when people are at a school like CalArts, which has wonderful equipment, they become paralyzed after they leave because they don’t have access to the equipment. So, lots of people don’t continue on in filmmaking or in animation. But I just went back to my studio and started working.”

On Her Own

Since then, Priestley has largely made her living making independent short films, usually depending on government funding or foundation grants to support her efforts — supplemented by workshops and teaching at the Art Institute of Portland. One of her more creative efforts at fund raising was for Pro and Con (1993), an animated documentary on prison life she did with Joan Gratz , that took advantage of a law allocating a small percentage of money for public projects to arts funding.

She had worked together with Gratz several years earlier on the joyful Candyjam, an anijam in which 10 filmmakers from around the world did segments featuring animated candy. (The filmmakers included David Anderson, Karen Aqua, Craig Bartlett, Elizabeth Buttler, Paul Driessen, Tom Gasek. Marv Newland, and Christine Panushka, as well as Gratz and herself.)

“It was very thrilling to organize a film like that,” she said, “because what you do is put an idea out there. Joan and I had just traveled in Japan and seen all this amazing candy, which I thought, I’ve got to animate this, it’s so incredibly beautiful. But I couldn’t imagine doing an entire film with candy all by myself. So, I talked to Joan about it and the more we talked the more we thought, Wouldn’t it be amazing to ask different people from all around the world to do something with the candy from their area? So, we did and they said yes. That’s one of the really amazing things about our international community. People are very open. They’re very willing to share their talent and their time and, in this case, their money, to work together.”

In regards to Andaluz, her most recent collaboration, she says, “Karen Aqua and I started working on it when we were both, by coincidence, residents at an artists colony in Southern Spain, in the village of Mojacar. We fell in love with the place and decided to do a film about it. We had no idea what we were going to do. So, the first thing we did was go outside in a field and do a ritual, where we called to the four directions. And amazingly both of us seemed to know how to do this. It was like a miracle. You couldn’t know that about each other.”

“Out of that ritual came the idea of doing a film that would honor the landscape and the architecture and the plants and the culture of this area. That gave us the opportunity to do drawings outside and wander around the town and draw the architecture, study the plants, study the sky, go swimming and study the water. We did about 1200 drawings together.” The wonderful Moorish design motifs that populate the film, she notes, were based on tile patterns and architectural details of the Alhambra.

“The film took about four or five years to make, as a lot of things intervened: Karen was diagnosed with cancer and underwent chemo a few times, so there were a lot of emotional challenges.(She is doing fine right now.) We finished Andaluz at the end of 2003 and released it at beginning of 2004.”

Dew Line, Priestley notes, was “based on mechanical studies I did on a trip to Alaska for the Oregon Zoo. I was impressed by an abandoned dew line station in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. All the things that were there are still there, rotting in the tundra, including thousands of rusty barrels. In photographing many of the tiny little plants found there, I began thinking of about all the species we are losing. It was also the beginning of my current interest in botany and in being a medicinal herbalist.”

Currently, Priestley has two projects she is exploring. “One,” she reports, “is a very traditional character animation about menopause. The other is experimenting with complicated collages, and putting skwigly drawings on top. I don’t know if either will result in a film. But I love experimenting and seeing where it will go. I hope the menopause film will be funny. My husband [animator Paul Harrod] thought it was a terrible idea, which made me want to do it all the more. It’s an odd subject and have been working on it for six months, I’m not sure if a film is going to happen or not out of it, but I will stay with it another six months before making a decision.”

“But,” she says, “I’ve never done it for the money. I absolutely love what I do. I love coming to my studio and am never as happy as I am when I’m working on my films.”

Relative Orbits and Fighting Gravity can be ordered directly from Priestley Motion Pictures at http://www.primopix.com/.

Independent animator Joanna Priestley just sent me her most recent film, Streetcar Named Perspire, a whimsical “instructional” film about the roller-coaster ride that is menopause. Ever since her autobiographical Voices (1984), her CalArts thesis film which became her signature piece, every 10 years or so Priestley has attempted to keep viewers up-to-date on what’s going on in her life.

The 6½-minute film, done using Flash, reminds me of the comic strip she did for Animation Magazine, when I was editor almost 20 years ago, on “How to Make an Independent Animated Film” (see panel on right). (It’s included in her Fighting Gravity DVD.) After screening it, my wife immediately wanted to give copies to all her friends. I noted to Priestley that this must be some woman thing. She replied, “It’s definitely a ‘woman thing,’ especially women over 45.”

Streetcar Named Perspire is just beginning to make the festival circuit and she has begun work on her next film, Poof. She says, “Poof is about proofreading and spell checking. It is based on a poem by Taylor Mali. He has won the National Poetry Slam many times. I am animating it with Flash CS3.”

Priestley once told me that many of her fellow CalArts students were reluctant to make independent films on their own, having been spoiled by all the equipment and facilities they had at school. It was then she decided to use the least costly equipment and techniques she could, some of which seemed to harken back to the early days of Winsor McCay. Although she gradually started to use more complex equipment, she avoided going digital, sticking to 2D and stop motion. (She did play around with computer animation as a student.) However, she did use Flash for Dew Line (2003), for which she expressed considerable pleasure over how the it allowed her to work on a smaller scale again. At the time, she wasn’t sure if she would make her next film with it, but she obviously did and seems to be comfortable with it.

Anyway, look for Streetcar Named Perspire at your local animation/film festival, even if you are not a woman over 45.