In this extraordinary short animation, Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren painted colours, shapes, and transformations directly onto their filmstrip. The result is a vivid interpretation, in fluid lines and colour, of jazz music played by the Oscar Peterson Trio.
A playful exercise in intermittent animation and spasmodic imagery. Playing with the laws relating to persistence of vision and after-image on the retina of the eye, McLaren engraves pictures on blank film creating vivid, percussive effects.
A ship sets sail on an epic voyage through malignant natural and supernatural elements from which one man alone survives. An adaptation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner illustrated by19th Century wood engravings which are animated by scratching directly into the surface of color filmstock. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with its message of ecological redemption has a curiously contemporary resonance, but it is at the level of the mythic that the poem has lasting relevance; for this epic tale of extraordinary events simply mirrors the struggle that each human being faces on their own in his or her life. -VDB
Lye created a series of scratched images in the 1950s – more regular or geometric than his usual style – to accompany Rock ‘n’ Rye, a track by jazz guitarist Tal Farlow, but he did not get far with the editing. He returned to the material in 1980 but died before it was completed. His assistant Steven Jones finished the film under the supervision of Lye’s widow Ann, who had been closely involved with all of Lye’s American films. - Harvard Film Archive
A short avant-garde film from Finnish director Eino Ruutsalo.
A hand-made, scratched-on film experiment in intermittent animation. The images are a group of twenty-four visuals, all non-representational, which arrange and rearrange on the screen in many combinations. The result is a changing pattern of sound and image that has its own rhythm for eye and ear.
A parable of fire and grace, hand-scratched on 16mm, frame-by-frame.
In Scratch both the animation and the soundtrack are abstract. The movie is a conversation of sounds and images. Soundtrack and animation are scratched directly on 35 mm film.
A beautiful woman screams at something unseen off camera. Paul Newman appears eating salad and soon the famous sequence of Paul Newman closing a car door cut with a helicopter takes place. Absence of Satan is probably one of George Barber's best Scratch works and is a deft reworking of cinematic narrative and cliché. George Barber is one of the pioneers of Scratch Video which emerged in the UK during the mid-1980s. Scratch video makes use of found images from films and television, cutting seemingly incongruous imagery together to make a new meaning; it has been compared to the record-scratching techniques of hip-hop music, hence the name. (lux.org.uk)
The enduring romance of the lines. A visual exploration of Dave Brubeck's jazz classic "Take Five".
An essay in colour harmonics and visual overtones. Conceived and produced as part of the Images Film Festival's Minute Movies.
Film artist Jennifer Reeves and musician Anthony Burr collaborated to make this live film and music performance, which mixes and subverts symbols of science, industry, medicine and madness. Up to 4 screens and 4 channels of multi-layered music immerse the audience in colorful rhythmic molecular forms, morphing frequencies and visual textures, which are broken down to the particle. Found images from the 20th century educational films are sewn together with melted down pharmaceuticals affixed directly to the film, and form a concentrated fusion with pulsating electronic sounds and an acoustic multi-tonal bass clarinet. Illustrations of brain dendrites, synapses, waveforms and assembly lines personify the movement of frequencies and light as they envelop the audience. As the performance ensues, the intensity builds to a point of irresistible danger and rupture.
This little film, which juxtaposes animated sand and scratching on 16mm film, was made during studies at the Royal College of Art. The starting point of this film was the sentence "but it's always when you're asleep that I want to talk to you", read on a wall in the underground... a phrase actually taken from a Mano Solo song.