Devlin Crow Expelling The Demon UK, 1999, 6 mins, 35mm & video

Lawrence Jordan Our Lady of the Sphere USA, 1969, 10 mins, 16mm

Ann Course & Paul Clark Hunt Me UK, 2004, 3 mins, video

The LUX archive contains a huge variety of animated works. The films in this list cover almost every conceivable technique of animation – hand-drawn, stop-motion, computer-generated, collage, timeslice, etc. A few are narrative, while others are entirely abstract.

See also:
ABSTRACTION

RUTH ABRAHAMS
BEING OF THE BEGINNING
USA, 1973, sound, B&W, 3 mins, 16mm
Animated line drawings of people and objects are metamorphosed into other objects and/or abstract shapes, with musical accompaniment.

LESLEY ADAMS
POSTCARDS OF BELIEF
UK, 2001, 5mins, video
When the frame rebels and pain is the only option, the body artist gives up on speech. The picture is breaking up. This is the sound that collapse makes. Drawn out.

RUSSELL ADAMS
AN ANIMATED PICTURE SHOW
1972, silent, colour, 3 mins, 16mm.
This film is composed of three individual parts: The first, The Red Board, the second, Hard Edge The Way I Like It, the third, Beasties. The imagery of the film is animated. There is no particular story in any one of the separate parts. The images are just things that I wanted to see and make move. - R.A.

AL + AL
PERPETUAL MOTION
UK, 2004, 7 mins, digital video
James Brown is a retired engineer and inventor living in the north of England. The film re-fabricates his lifelong endeavours to break the law of physics and create a perpetual motion device. Free power for the people will produce a land flowing with milk and honey.

KATERINA ATHANASPOULOU
SWEET SALT
UK, 2005, 5 mins, video
A love story of obsession and sharp teeth between a woman left behind in a fairy tale gone wrong and a merman trapped in a reality that drowns him. A conundrum of fate and desire where the victim longs for the murderer’s tears.
An animate! Film

ANN BAREFOOT
THE OFFICE
UK, 5 mins, 16mm
Music by Rosemary Schonfeld
This is an animated film dealing with reality of working environments, power relationships between women clerical workers and male management. It is set during a monetary crisis. Women workers stamp ceaselessly and type fast, delivering cups of tea subserviently, taking pieces of typing work silently. Mainly male management play games with money. The situation overturns - management end up drowned in the boardroom. The women workers continue but the sound of the sea and wind is getting greater... - A.B.

BETTINA BAYERL
SATIRIKA
Germany, 1984, sound mag stripe, colour, 3 mins, 16mm.
Satirika is a grimly humorous satire on humanity. Drawn in a metamorphic style, men are transformed into toads, woman into buildings, bishops into fools, wives into dragons, Miss World into an ugly Mickey Mouse, and a shy bureaucrat into superman...Satirika plays a satirical game with our imaginations, wishes and dreams.

YANN BEAUVAIS
ENJEUX
France, 1984, silent, colour, 5 mins, 16mm.
'Based on the notion that 'history flows through monuments', Enjeux attempts to deconstruct a powerful symbol, the Arc de triomphe. By cutting photographs of the monument taken from various vantage points, reassembling them and animating them, the film restructures the architectural elements of the object. Through questioning the perceptual and the cinematic by working on both the visual and the symbolic, Enjeux creates a paradoxical play on power, representation and pleasure.' - Michael Maziere.

The main issue. Power and representation. Representation through a power symbol: an arch. Arc de triomphe. - Y.B.

RUTH BECHT
DER JOB
Germany, 1988, sound, colour, 6 mins, 16mm
An animated short, featuring the following,
The snake with an international tongue is a multicoloured whirl - there the dog escapes - in front of Rollmops alias Waffelherz a knife is flying through a square splitting a pear - coffee and cakes - bites heartily - tooth for tooth - but she don't like to talk about her job - deplorable the lid puts down. - R.B.

ROBERT BRADBROOK
END OF RESTRICTION
UK, 1994, 5mins, video
'End of Restriction' enters into the claustrophobic world of a teenage boy, growing up on an English village.
The film follows the boy's bicycle journey along country lanes, around his village and across the playing fields towards his home. On his journey we discover through his eyes, the general decay and conservative nature of the village.
AN ANIMATE! FILM

ROBERT BREER
REEL 1
'Since 1952 Robert Breer has continued to produce a cinema of the highest quality, fusing the best of the earliest abstract cinema with the dynamics of the American Avant-garde film. The liveliness of his films has restored the root meaning to 'animation' at a time when most animated films invoke deadly tradition. For his unique contribution to the language of cinema in the exploration of the thresholds of rapid montage, for his pioneering work in the collage film, for his enrichment of the formal cinema with works that are visually, rhythmically, and intellectually exciting, enduring new and clear, this award is presented.' - Film Culture 56/7, 11th Independent Film Award.
1952-57, 19 mins, 16mm.

ROBERT BREER
WHAT GOES UP
USA, 2003, sound, colour, 5 mins, 16mm
A volley of rapid visual associations from the mind of Robert Breer, animating collage, drawings and snapshots in a playful, but rigorous manner. What goes up must come down.

PAUL BUSH
DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE
UK, 2001, sound, colour, 6 mins, 35mm / video
Imagine that the camera is possessed with a psychosis similar to human schizophrenia; suppose that this disease subtly
changes every single frame of film of while leaving the narrative superficially intact. Then Imagine that these symptoms came on as a result of a trauma from recording bizarre or horrific events, for instance those of the 1941 film Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. - P.B.

PAUL BUSH
WHILE DARWIN SLEEPS
UK, 2004, 5 mins, video
More than three thousand insects appear in this film each for a single frame. As the colours glow and change across their bodies and wings it is as if the genetic programme of millions of years is taking place in a few minutes. It is a rampant creation that seems to defy the explanations of evolutionists and fundamentalists. It is like a mescalin dream of Charles Darwin’s.
The film is inspired by the insect collection of Walter Linsenmaier in the natural history museum of Luzern. As each insect follows the other, frame by frame, they appear to unfurl their antennae, scuttle along, or flap their wings as if trying to escape the pinions which attach them forever in their display cases. Just for a moment the eye is tricked into believing that these dead creatures still live . . .

BUTLER BROTHERS
THE CITY IS NO LONGER SAFE
UK, 1994, 2 mins, video
The Butler Brothers parody the utopian vision of home shopping and entertainment on the digital superhighways of the 21st century. From city to suburb to cyburb, The City Is No Longer Safe questions the suggested potential for virtual reality as the final retreat from the material world. Satirical cartoon capers meet overstated 3-D computer graphics to create bunnies trying to survive in a consumer cyberworld. Instead of a bright future of freely available information, the Butlers suggest that the prospect for cyberspace is a dark mirror of the society it wishes to supercede.

GARY CARPENTER
MILES FROM ANYWHERE
UK, 1997, sound, colour, 5 mins, 16mm/video
An exploration of surface and enviroment, releasing latent energies from inanimate objects, Miles from Anywhere employs hand-held, frame-by-frame photography.
An animate! Film

VANDA CARTER
MOTHFIGHT
1985, sound, B&W, 8 mins, 16mm
In conventional visual symbolic language, light represents good, order, truth and life. Dark represents evil, chaos and death.
The moth in the film, fighting to escape the light, is a metaphor for personal feelings which contradict this set of accepted symbolic 'meanings'. The light bulb and the candle flame are deadly for the moth, darkness is safety and life. Often in the darkness I have been frightened of the light, frightened of being overwhelmed by the assault of visual impressions, scared of the responsibilities of the daytime, tied down by the assumption that what is 'seen' must be what is 'real', scared of hurting my eyes in the brightness if I strike a match. In the dark I feel more free to imagine, maybe altogether more free.
The ending, however, is perhaps inevitable. Everything was fine, then God said 'Let there be light', the interfering bastard, and nothing has been quite the same since. There seems to be no escaping it.

A moth just flew right into my face while I was typing the paragraph above, which proves that nothing under the sun is random.- V.C.

The soundtrack is an improvisation on cello, performed and recorded by Stuart Jones at the LFMC. Stuart Jones records with Kahondo Style and British Summer Time Ends on NATO label.

'Stunning black and white animation'.-Jo Comino, 'City Limits.'

TIM CAWKWELL
SIX SHORT PIECES
UK, 1979, 15mins, 16mm
Six Short Pieces assembles a number of experimental works, principally made with line drawn directly on film. The titles are: Shoreline / Scarlatti at Work / Waterline / Little Greek Alphabet / Skyline / Looking on Glass.

Six Short Pieces (and Art of Prophecy).. two different sets of images are juxtaposed, either simultaneously within the same frame, by superimposition, or serially by means of editing.

(The Films).... employ the technique of drawing directly on film and explore the relationship of these passages to material filmed in the camera, in an endeavour to bring animation - or composition frame by frame - more into the mainstream of film language. A refinement of this research into the 'chemistry' of film editing has been the incorporation of written texts into film to grant the same status to word and image. - T.C.

PETER COLLIS
EXPOSURE
UK, 2003, 6 mins, video
A curious coastal research site becomes a vibrantly graphic testament to impermanence. The film weaves two kinds of exposure – physical exposure to weather and photographic exposure to light and processing chemicals.
Documented on 35mm still and cine film, then digitally combined with markings on raw film and re-photographed back to 35mm negative on a home-built optical printer/rostrum.
An animate! film

ANN COURSE & PAUL CLARK
HUNT ME
UK, 2004, 3 mins, video
Girls like to get it. Hunt me was a performance I wanted but was too scared to play. The island was somewhere I wanted to go but was too frightened to visit.

SARAH COX
3 WAYS TO GO
UK, 1998, sound, colour, 5 mins, 35mm/video
An illustrative animation of the imagined last moments of three lives; a drowning man, a woman leaping from a building and a violent car crash. A range of filmic techniques such as hand exposed film, drawing on film, conventional animation and live action are employed to represent the different endings.
AN ANIMATE! FILM

SARAH COX
DEAR NELSON
UK, 2001, 5 mins, video
Algren and no De Beauvoir makes Nelson a sad boy in these letters from America. An affair to remember, with distance - initially - no object (plane mailing in fact) in these continental correspondences, monochrome messages that style the times and texts of greats.
AN ANIMATE! FILM

IAN CROSS
SCRUTINY
UK, 1995, sound, colour, 8 mins, 35mm/video
While mixing photographic and computer generated images (printed directly onto 35mm film) and interspersing them with live action, Scrutiny questions the accepted 'nature of things' - birth, sex, marriage, death and DIY.
The rapid fire, black and white animation, fidgeting on the film's surface, challenges us to make sense of familiarity. Depicted is a journey that begins in a bleak coastal landscape and ends amidst the seemingly chaotic life of the city. The journey can read as a personal one, describing a passage from birth to adulthood and explores the decisions that are faced in-between and the communication needed to make them.
AN ANIMATE! FILM

DEVLIN CROW
EXPELLING THE DEMON
UK, 1999, sound, colour, 6 mins, 35mm / video
The story takes place in a bedroom where, following an embarrassing sexual encounter, it shows a naked man's disaffection with his own tongue. Tongue being the articulator of the man's voice, has been his lifetime proxy. But it is beginning to brazenly assert itself and fly in the face of its owner. The man can tolerate this no more and a power struggle ensues during which we learn something of the tongues dubious nature. With music by Nick Cave.
AN ANIMATE! FILM

GINA CZARNECKI
MORAL JUDGE
UK, 1987, sound, colour, 5 mins, 16mm
The guilt nurtured by Catholicism, a furnace of contradictions.

And from this judge/vicar/devil/man/conscience there is no escape

And Then.................

You question the instinctive protection with which it seems you imprisoned your sins and your desires within your senses and you criticise everything you have had to do simply to go on. Animation.

TONY DONOGHUE
BODY PROJECTIONS
UK, 1998, 5 mins, video
Inside Out uses the human body painting, sound and pixillation, in a personal examination of the relationship between the decorated body, the biological body and the social body.
AN ANIMATE! FILM

SARAH DOWNES
WINTER TREES
UK, 1993, 7 mins, video
Sylvia Plath's poem 'Winter Trees' is translated line by line into a personalised visual language. Computer aided collage juxtaposes live action with animation to create a surreal and beautiful landscape where femininity and fertility are explored. The central anthropomorphism of the poem is illustrated in dense animation.

FRED DRUMMOND
PHOTO FILM
UK, 1967, silent, B&W, 16 fps, 10 mins, 16mm
A re-animation of selected figures from Muybridge's studies of the human figure in motion. Also contains some original material of a model shot as a series of stills and again animated.

CHRIS ELLIOTT
MUSEUM OF STOLEN SOULS
UK, 1993, 7 mins, video
From missionary madness to museum piece, the 'history' of rainforest peoples goes under the lens. Time to give it back... Model, 2D and photo animation.
An ANIMATE! Film.

ISABELLA EMSLIE
LOVE AND THE DOMESTIC APPLIANCE
UK, 1990, 7 mins, video
Using 3-D animation Isabella Emslie creates a bizarre world in which household objects explore their space. Driven by a pulsing and percussive soundtrack the tape is a narrative of the love/hate relationship between a woman and the daily chores.

SIMON FAITHFULL
13
UK, 2004, sound, B&W, 6 mins, video
A melancholy journey along the A13 trunk road. Created from pixillated Palm Pilot drawings, the film conveys an elliptic and fantastical journey through a parallel universe.
An animate! film

MARIE-ANNE FERRAL & DAMON BARR
VISITATIONS
UK, 1995, 11 mins, video
In a blasted, post-apocalyptic landscape, a priapic alien voyeur writhes in a demented frenzy. Two women grapple in a slime-ridden dungeon. To the throb of a grungy, techno soundtrack the film builds to climax; the image disintegrates in a welter of scratches. This stunning and original film is an attempt to evoke modern myths of abduction and abuse by extra-terrestrials, lulling the audience into the trance-like state between sleep and consciousness. The startling images were filmed on black-and-white Super-8, hand-processed and luridly dyed. This is true alchemical erotica.

'Our film making is a continuous, ongoing project with themes, ideas and images often interchangeable from one film to another. A common thread throughout our 26+ films is representation of the human body. The body is often viewed from a distant, almost alien perspective. The flesh is presented as fascinating and erotic but prone to invasion and corruption by disease. In some of our films the body becomes dehumanised to a point where it may actually be alien. This is particularly apparent in Visitations.' - D.B. & M-A.F.

LOUISA FITCH
BAD DAY
UK, 1997, 3 mins, video
This computer generated animation containing all the sad, ugly, bad vibe, neurotic, paranoid underbelly of inner shit chilled and served cool like revenge. Bad Day is an emotional documentary revealing, in inspirational style, the heroine as she barbecues herself from the inside out. Spit roast psychoanalysis is the order of the day but don't think it's all good news; the ending is really quite depressing.

PETRA FREEMAN
JUMPING JOAN
UK, 1994, sound, colour, 8 mins, 35mm & video

SERA FURNEAUX
ANXIETY, REST
UK, 1991, 12 mins, video
In Anxiety, Rest, Furneaux appears to have relinquished the ravishing aestheticism of her earlier works, attending instead to an expressive, multi-layered and often humourous collage.

DAVID GARCIA & JAAP DE JONGE
CHARISMATIC IMAGES
Netherlands, 1988, 12 mins, video
An accomplished and absorbing work, opening with computer-generated shapes and symbols swarming onto the screen, resembling multiplying cells. A cascade of kaleidoscopic, hypnotic images follows, accompanied by fragments of voice-over from some strange, mystical ideology of media. As the work progresses, it becomes clear that this is a meditation on the alchemies of video and television.

DAMIAN GASCOIGNE
HOW TO GET RID OF INFORMATION
UK, 1998, 6 mins, video
A weery man is drawn into an escalating battle with a recurring nightmare of intrusive images.
AN ANIMATE! FILM

JANIE GEISER
LOST MOTION
USA, 1999, 11mins, 16mm
Lost Motion uses small cast metal figures, toy trains, decayed skyscrapers, and other found objects to follow a man's search for a mysterious woman. From an illegible note found on a dollhouse bed, through impossible landscapes, the man waits for her train which never arrives. His wanderings lead him to the other side of the tracks, a forgotten landscape of derelict erector- set buildings populated by lost souls. Dream merges with nightmare in this post-industrial land of vivid night.
'Lost Motion is the sumptuously told tale of a failed search...In her most visually lush film to date, Geiser superimposes images and drapes her scenes in moving shadow patterns. She depicts the train"s arrival by superimposing images of dolls exiting model trains over the searching man"s figure... Ultimately the film's fragmentary constructions become more than modernist denials of illusion and assertions of materiality.: essential to the film"s tone, Geiser's obviously illusory images evoke strong feelings as the mundane drama of a failed meeting' - Fred Camper, Chicago Reader (May 25, 2000)

GERD GOCKELL
CROFTON ROAD SE5
Germany, 1989, sound, colour, 5 mins, 16mm
directed by Gerd Gockell
still photographs by Gerd Gockell
postcard paintings by Ute Heuer
edited by Bernhard Synovatz
produced by Homeless Filmproduction International.
Hundreds of photographs combined to form an animated Film exploring the reality of movement.

DRYDEN GOODWIN
HOLD
UK, 1996, 4 mins, video
Hold exploits the fact that film is made up of separate frames. The majority of the piece features a new person in every frame, or every eighteenth of a second. For certain periods of the video two or three people are held longer, by using consecutive frames to jump back and forth between people, the sound and the mechanism of the film are relentless; no resolution is reached; we continue to move forward.

Awarded Outstanding Achievement in a Video Production at the Melbourne International Film Festival 1997

NICK GORDON-SMITH
BIRD XEROX
UK, 1983, sound, B&W, 8 mins, 16mm
Xerox ink transferred directly onto film to create wild and deconstructed images, the grain as big as footballs and milling like thousands of Starlings flying home to roost and more. And birds, 'hello, my name's Hector.'. - N.G.S.

TERRI HANLON
WAY DOWN TOWN
USA, 1985, 8 mins, video
Fast-edited montage of computer animation with a speed soundtrack composed by R. Chatham.

INGER LISE HANSEN
STATIC
UK, 1996, colour, sound, 6 mins, 16mm
In Static, Hansen uses her startling animation techniques on a panoramic scale. In a series of elegaic tableaux, ranging from motorway flyovers in San Francisco to boggy Norwegian moorland, items spontaneously twitch and disintegrate; these artefacts remind us of the ephemerality of the human condition as they are returned to the elemental forces of the landscape. A stunning piece of work.

OLIVER HARRISON
LOVE IS ALL
UK, 1999, sound, colour, 4 min, 35mm/video
Winter bound, a snow queen dreams of love and the blooming of spring. Through frosted rococo cartouches she sings about the virtues of true love accompanied by miniature animated sequences. Originally recorded by Deanna Durbin in 1940, the lyrics are reinterpreted to portray universal ideas of love:- good overcoming evil, warmth melting the snow, spring following winter. Love is All was shot entirely in camera and took over two years to complete: all optical effects and sets were created by hand. The film is made up of multilayered sequences; sometimes 20 or more exposures on the same piece of film.
AN ANIMATE! FILM

AGNES HAY
ANIMATED FILMS
UK, 1972-78, silent, B&W, 28 mins, 16mm
These animated improvisations (plasticine, mosaic, faces, objects, people etc.) were made in the 70's by Agnes Hay in Hungary.

Her films are not particularly good but they do make all other films look bad. (Why doesn't everyone make films like hers? Why do Agnes Hay's films have the force of novelty, making one feel that it should be forbidden to watch anything else? It is because the content of her films plants certain transcendental intimations in the human consciousness, confronting one with time and motion, challenging evidence. Those of a meditative disposition will not go to see any other kind of film because her kind does not smack of illusion, rather it highlights the fact that all things are illusory. -Miklos Erdely.

STUART HILTON
6 WEEKS IN JUNE
UK, 1999, sound, B&W, 6 mins, video and 35mm
A roadtrip across America captured in a rough mix of animated sketches, text and snippets of sound. Landscapes, people and objects fly past and become more and more subjective as the journey progresses, perfectly capturing the moods and pressures of being on the road.

HY HIRSCH
AUTUMN SPECTRUM
USA, ?, sound, colour, 8 mins, 16mm
The late Hy Hirsch was a visual artist of the stature of Len Lye or Norman McLaren, and no less entertaining. Since he lacked the publicity or a large organisation his films are correspondingly unknown, but have long been fascinating to connoisseurs of the 'pure' visual film - and delighting unsuspecting members of the ordinary public who had the rare treat of stumbling onto his movies.

In Autumn Spectrum, the wavering reflections of buildings, bridges, trees and raindrops, seen in Amsterdam canals, are woven by imaginative editing into colour patterns of hypnotic fascination.

ELIZABETH HOBBS
THE EMPEROR
UK, 2001, 5 mins, video
Comic colour capers as we learn the tabloid tale of Bonaparte and his not so bony part. A sensual wash from Waterloo to auctioneers as his pickled portion goes under the hammer. History was never this persuasive. History was never this.
AN ANIMATE! FILM

JONATHAN HODGSON
FEELING MY WAY
UK, 1998, 5 mins, video/35mm
What goes around comes around - the daily cycle of home-work-home illuminated in collage, Hi-8 and paint. Layered and luminous with in-sight.
AN ANIMATE! FILM

TIM HOPE
MINEMA CINEMA
UK, 2005, 22 mins, video
A collection of bizarrely original animated stories from scripts written by young children. Emulating the approach of New York’s 52nd Street Project and London’s Scene & Heard theatre groups, the film is voiced by professional adult actors and directed to render the children’s dramatic intentions as sincerely as possible.
Three short films within one film:
Revenge Is Cold – Woody the box of matches dreams of becoming a lighter.
Love Then First Fight – Bob Brakinlot the crowbar is a reformed criminal, determined to give himself a second chance.
Keep Going – A young egg, Stuart, escapes from his fridge in Scotland on a mission to meet his hero, Michael Jackson.

BRENDA HORSMAN
THE WIFE
UK, 1981, sound, colour, 12 mins, 16mm
The subject of this animated film is a wife whose husband leaves her for a younger woman, possibly his secretary. Her world collapsing about her, she sets out on a journey of self discovery, realising eventually the true nature of her relationship with her husband. At this point she is seized upon by women anxious to implement their liberating theories, and she and a group of similar women are subjected to these ideas. They subsequently leave, but the wife returns to her husband. He has in turn been left by the younger woman and is by now full of remorse and self-doubt. He is overjoyed to see her, but the resumption of their relationship produces the resumption of their old roles.

The music sound track is original and was composed for the film. It anticipates and reflects the moods and actions of the visuals, and together they are intended to treat a serious and contentious subject in a visually attractive and entertaining way.

MATT HULSE
HALF LIFE
UK, 2004, sound, B&W, 6 mins, video
Isolated office workers perform gruelling and surrealistic routines in this intense, neurotic study of the desk-bound being, pushing Super 8mm filmmaking to new extremes.
An animate! film

RICCARDO IACONO
PLAY
UK, 2001, 4 mins, video
A light-hearted and rather spectacular exploration of the relationships of eye vision, laughter, proprioception and drop-out. Formed through a collage of intensely coloured abstract digital animation, live video and music.

KAREN JOHNSON
HANDS
USA, 1971, sound, B&W, 3 mins, 16mm
Still photos of hands animated into a fast speed funny film.

LAWRENCE JORDAN
OUR LADY OF THE SPHERE
USA, 1969, sound, colour, 10 mins, 16mm
The mystical Lady with the orbital head moves through the carnival of life in a Surreal Adventure. A classic. Show it to anyone who likes movies.

"A beauty…a genuinely mystical exercise." - Howard Thompson, New York Times.

"Our Lady of the Sphere - perhaps Jordan's most exquisitely perfect creation - is a colour collage of rococo imagery juxtaposed with symbols of the space age. The images metamorphose, transmute, interpenetrate and otherwise change with the fluid effervescence of bubbles rising out of water, punctuated by sudden flashes of light, alarm buzzers and abrupt visual surprises. It is a mystical jewel-like creation, like a Joseph Cornell box come to life." - Thomas Albright, San Francisco Chronicle.

"A sense of mystery and adventure, Jordon is in his own distinct way, a magician." - Donald Miller, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

LAWRENCE JORDAN
ENID"S IDYLL
USA, 2004, 17 mins, 16mm
Animation. Jordan has used 46 engraved Dore illustrations to Idylls of the King as settings for his extravagantly romantix saga. As Enid, the protagonist, is seen in a vast array of scenes from deep forests to castle keeps, her champion is sometimes with her, sometimes away fighting archetypal foes. She dies and through the magic of Gustav Mahler"s resurrection symphony lives again.

JEFF KEEN
THE CARTOON THEATRE OF DR GAZ
UK, 1977-79, sound, colour & B&W, 12 mins, 16mm
Animation and live-action. Across the screen at 24 f.p.s.: fragments of G-A-Z/indelible stains/ plastic BLATZ! With dr GAZ, Babyjelly, Madam heX, The Breathless InVestigator, DirtyDog, & ARt Ace the painter of History. - J.K.

LESLEY KEEN
INVOCATION
UK, 1985, sound, colour, 5 mins, 16mm
An animated film on the ancient Greek creation, myth, tracing the beginnings of the world from Time, Necessity and the Greek Gods through to the origins of mankind. The film manipulates abstract concepts in terms of stunning visual images. Made in association with Channel Four.

The screen explodes in a Bonfire Night display of brilliant images...- The Times.

LEWIS KLAHR
ALTAIR
USA, 1994, sound, colour, 8 mins, 16mm
Altair offers a cutout animation version of color film noir. The images were culled from six, late forties issues of Cosmopolitan magazine and set to an almost 4 minute segment of Stravinsky’s “Firebird” (looped twice) to create a sinister, perfumed world. As in my 1988 visit to this genre In The Month of Crickets the narrative is highly smudged leaving legible only the larger signposts of the female protagonists story. The viewer is encouraged to speculate on the nature and details of the woman’s battle with large, malevolent societal forces and her descent into an alcoholic swoon. However, it is important to note that all of the above was only discovered on the editing table. What motivated me during the shooting of this film, which was largely improvisatory, was a fascination with the color blue and some ineffable association it has for me with both California and what I imagined to be the great sense of relieved openness of the post war 1940’s.
Altair received much attention when it was included in both the 1995 Whitney Biennial and the New York Film Festival. It has been purchased by New York’s Museum of Modern Art for their permanent collection. - Lewis Klahr
“Lewis Klahr’s gorgeous animation Altair evokes the pleasures and dangers of film noir.” - Amy Taubin, The Village Voice
“Checking out the Biennial top to bottom, I stuck my head in the film-and-video gallery midway through Lewis Klahr’s Altair, a noirish collage animation evoking the heavy hand of fate with giant playing cards and marcelled blonds clipped from 1950-ish magazines. Klahr’s films (his magnum opus, The Pharoah's Belt,  is also in the show) have so much presence as 'visual art' that I wished they could have their own screening booth, right next to Christian Schumann’s paintings. Of the 35 film or video makers in the Biennial, only a dozen would hold up to such scrutiny.”  -- Amy Taubin,The Village Voice on the 1995 Whitney Museum’s Biennial of American Art.

DAINA KRUMINS
THE DIVINE MIRACLE
USA, 1973, sound, colour, 5 mins, 16mm
A bizarre animation based on the crucifixion theme. The Divine Miracle is amusingly sacrilegious and visually delightful.
"Daina Krumins, 16mm' first film, The Divine Miracle, was a tour-de-force of special effects that left one amazed and mystified by its beauty, originality and quirky sense of humour." - Karen Cooper, Film Forum.

JOHN LATHAM
SPEAK
UK, 1968-69, sound, colour, 11 mins, 16mm
Is his second attack on the cinema. Not since Len Lye's films in the thirties has England produced such a brilliant example of animated abstraction. SPEAK burns its way directly into the brain. It is one of the few films about which it can truly be said, "it will live in your mind". - Ray Durgnat.

WILLIAM LATHAM
BIOGENESIS
UK, 1993, 6 mins, video
Survival of the most aesthetic in a synthetic digital universe of constantly evolving coral forms. From cell to psychedelic, this is DNA with attitude, and a reply to all those who did not think there could be life in the machine.
AN ANIMATE! FILM

RUTH LINGFORD
WHAT SHE WANTS
UK, 1994, 5 mins, video
A humorous 2-D computer animation which echoes the symbolism of the Surrealists. Ruth Lingford explores the economy of sexual signs all around us.

LEN LYE
TUSALAVA
New Zealand, 1929, silent, B&W, 9 mins, 16mm
Tusalava, Len Lye's first film, is a pioneer example of experimental animation. It is a unique combination of modern art and tribal art. After its first screening in 1929, art critic Roger Fry warmly praised Tusalava for its originality and strong feeling for motion.

For two years between 1926-8, Len Lye completed more than 9.500 drawings for this nine-minute animated film. He had interested the newly-formed London Film Society in his project, and they provided him with some money. The film was screened, once, at the Society, in 1929. Until it was screened again in 1967, Tusalava had become a forgotten part of film history.

LEN LYE
PARTICLES IN SPACE
USA, 1979, sound, B&W, 4 mins, 16mm
Particles in Space grew out of the same calligraphic material as Free Radicals. As with its companion film, "Particles" is concerned with energy and movement - of shaping light in darkness, by scratching on the film surface. In this film, Len Lye focuses on 'a smaller, more compact zizz of energy that I'd never got before on film'. The rhythms of African drums again provide the musical counterpoint.

"I thought Free Radicals as "definitively revised" an almost unbelievably immense masterpiece (a brief epic) and that Particles In Space was its contemplative equivalent. Colour Cry as great as I remembered it..." - Stan Brakhage, 1980

ANNE MCGUIRE
I LIKE MEN
USA, 2000, 1 min, video
Does she ever! A tiny gem that utilises paper animation and a snippet of sound to humorous, kitschy effect.

NORMAN MCLAREN
SYNCHROMY
Canada, 1979, sound, colour, 7 mins, 16mm
I can discern 4 influences. First of all Oscar Fischinger, with his Hungarian Dance No. 5, because this film gave me the courage of my convictions. I wanted to make abstract films - not necessarily abstract films - but to compose abstract images based on music, and at that time I did not know how to go about it. At home I constructed coloured lights and moved them by hand over paper. But when I saw Oscar Fischinger's, I told myself the solution was to make abstract films. Then there was Emile Cohl. I saw DRAMA AMONG THE PUPPETS (1908), and was struck by the purity, the simplicity of line, and the wonderful metamorphosis. I am not forgetting Alexandre Alexeieff and his NIGHT ON A BARE MOUNTAIN (1933). What gripped me was the fertile imagination, not so much technique as the creative imagination, the bold metamorphosis and the surrealist thinking. For surrealism had made a great impression on me. Finally Len Lye and his techniques of drawing directly onto the film. That is all. But I add two general influences: Pudovkin and Eisenstein. - N.C.

TIM MACMILLAN
FERMENT
UK, 1999, 5 mins, 35mm, video and DVD
A quiet city square, people strolling by, children running around. An old man sits having a sandwich with his granddaughter on a bench. He has a heart attack and falls to the ground as time stands still. We travel away from the square and across the town, down streets, through buildings, into rooms and along corridors, catching glimpses of people and snatches of sound as they exist in that one instant. Gradually the human condition unfolds before our eyes. We finally arrive in a street of terraced houses, where, in an upstairs bedroom we discover a baby being born. Time starts again. Ferment is a stunning animation film utilising Macmillan's unique time-slice camera technique
AN ANIMATE! FILM

JO MAGEE & ALISTAIR GENTRY
HYPNOMART
UK, 2001, 4 mins, video
It's a digital day out and the mall just got madder. Repeat to fade and trance away the heartache in a mirror world of mass production. I'm not a human being, I'm a number. Whitewashed? Absolutely. (Colour-) saturated? Sure. See you tomorrow.
An animate! film

SAMANTHA MOORE
DOUBLED UP
UK, 2004, sound, colour, 7 mins, video
A short autobiographical animated film about the chaos that a multiple pregnancy and birth can bring, and the filmmaker’s bewildered response.
An animate! film

ROZ MORTIMER
SAFETY TIPS FOR KIDS
UK, 2003, 5 mins, video
An ironic look at the way newspapers report children's deaths... accidents, bad mothers, angry fathers and the bogeyman. Based on the filmmaker's archive of newspaper clippings, these are horribly good stories that make great copy.
The film is mainly made up of hundreds of manipulated photographs, and was shot on a range of formats from huge 6x17cm negatives down to a tiny digital camera attached to a keyring.
An animate! film.

PHIL MULLOY
COWBOYS - SLIM PICKIN'S
UK, 1992, sound, ?, 3 mins, 35mm
A series of six three minute shorts which comment on contemporary values through a reinterpretation of the myths of the Old Wild West
AN ANIMATE! FILM

JAYNE PARKER
I CAT
UK, 1980, sound, colour, 10 mins, 16mm.
An animated film. You think everything is alright, then a fish bites a bird and everything turns red.

KAYLA PARKER
SUNSET STRIP
UK, 1996, 4 mins, 35mm & video
A dazzling expression of the visual music revealed by 365 setting suns, observed across southern Britain from Norfolk in the East to Land's End in the far South West. Over 4500 time-lapse drawings were painted directly onto a continuous strip of 35mm film leader using a variety of materials such as nail varnish, hair, bleach, net stocking and magnolia petals.
An animate! film

JOHN PARRY
SALVAGE
UK, 1998, 5 mins, video
Commercial animation by-products were collected over five years. As a cathartic process, the rejected was reclaimed, and then rejected, finally. The result is the residue of the salvage that stuck, that simply felt and looked right.
An animate! Film

ROSIE PEDLOW
TULIPS AT DAWN
UK, 2002, 4 mins, video
Diagrams of chemistry apparatus and educational film footage react and combine in this quirky interpretation of the poem 'Modes of Representation' by Nobel Laureate chemist Roald Hoffmann. The film illustrates how technology changes the way we represent the world, with results that prove ironic and inconclusive.

The film combines and manipulates archive footage, rostrum camerawork and 2D computer animation.
AN ANIMATE! FILM

SARA PETTY
FURIES
USA, 1982, sound, colour, 3 mins, 16mm
Two cats, on the prowl, animated with fluid movement and shifting perspective. The elements of movement and balance are as much the subject as the cats. One of Matt Groenig"s favourite films.
Shown on Channel Four TV, 1984.

RUTH PEYSER
ONE NATION UNDER TV
USA, 1985, sound, colour, 2 mins, 16mm
"One Nation Under TV borrows conventions from traditional animation while using contemporary music and animation techniques. Hand coloured and manipulated sequential photographs set to discordant music tell the story of Bob, a hopelessly bored and depressed TV addict who undergoes a series of nonsensical self-destructive acts while glued to the tube. True to cartoon tradition in which characters cannot die, Bob lives on in front of the box despite being burned to a cinder, falling out of a 20 storey building and other usually fatal mishaps. Because the animation technique renders the character closer to reality than say, a mouse, these incidents appear particularly violent and absurd, as do the TV images they are intercut with, to create a claustrophobic and disturbing environment.

The action is closely synchronised with an angry, fast moving musical soundtrack." - R.P.

ROBERT PIKE
A LITTLE FABLE
?, sound, colour, 4 mins, 16mm.
Award winning stylized cartoon film dealing with racial prejudice.

KEITH PIPER
GO WEST YOUNG MAN
UK, 1996, 4 mins, video
Man hands on misery to man. Father and son resist the stereotypes of their race and gender in this personal / historical survey of bias and prejudice. Montage and masculinity meet in an analysis of the black experience.
An animate! Film

LIZ POWER
STRANGE PLANET
UK, 1987, 2 mins, video
Liz Power's short, charming pieces aim at children as well as adults and are funny, allegorical and immediately accessible. The apparent naivety of the work functions as an effective contrast to the male-defined and over-determined narratives of conventional space fantasy in film or television.

THE BROTHERS QUAY
THE PHANTOM MUSEUM
UK, 2003, 12 mins, video
Sir Henry Wellcome (1853-1936) amassed one of the world's largest museum collections, capturing human culture and history through medical eyes. The Phantom Museum uses animation to imaginatively 'document' this extraordinary assemblage and simultaneously reveal an extremely beautiful yet odd inner cosmos of things.
AN ANIMATE! FILM

YASMIN RAMLI
NAKED
UK, 1990, ?, video
The inhabitants of a tower block are being observed as one of them awaits a mysterious visitor. And the guy in the gantry isn't just cleaning the windows... Puppets, photos and drawn animation come alive in 3d trompe l'oeil sets.
AN ANIMATE! FILM

BENITA RAPHAN
WITHIN WITHOUT
UK, 1995, 9 mins, video
'A search for his own identity. A man's relationship to his house which protects him and imprisons him, both at the same time.' - Benita Raphan
AN ANIMATE! FILM

LIS RHODES
DRESDEN DYNAMO
UK, 1974, sound, colour, 5 mins, 16mm
'This film is the result of experiments with the application of Letraset and Letratone onto clear film. It is essentially about how graphic images create their own sound by extending into that area of film which is 'read' by optical sound equipment. The final print has been achieved through three, separate, consecutive printings from the original material, on a contact printer. Colour was added, with filters, on the final run. The film is not a sequential piece. It does not develop crescendos. It creates the illusion of spatial depth from essentially, flat, graphic, raw material.' - Tim Bruce

PAUL RODGERS
WAXING THE BOOK
UK, 1989, sound, colour, 3 mins, 16mm
Waxing The Book is material that has collected me throughout my life, embedded into the pages of a book, using film as a transferring, alchemical tool. The birds fly, the candle is lit, the eyes open and the powers of pixillation brings active the dead. - P.R.

KATHLEEN ROGERS
THE RITES OF RECLAMATION
UK, 1996, 10 mins, video
In The Rites Of Reclamation, we trespass into a mind made of rooms. Multi-sensory virtual reality is represented as a haunted and unstable psychic void. A dreamer leaves her body and communicates with biological robots and other lost souls.

The work combines haunting imagery of thermally imaged humans and computer generated virtual reality fly-through in the form of spectral architectures with hypnotic sound compositions.

DANIEL SAUL
THE NUCLEAR TRAIN
UK, 2002, 10 mins, video
James and his family live by the railway tracks used to transport nuclear waste through the middle of London. Already disturbed, James begins to feel all his problems are related to the nuclear train and resolves to run away from home. Once outside he enters a dreamscape city falling apart at the seams. He ends up on the waterfront in a fractured wasteland piled high with rubbish.

Full of guilt James uses junk to make a pair of prosthetic arms for his disabled daughter. But he soon begins to fear that his family may never join him on the scrap heap by the river.

The Nuclear train combines video drama with animation to create a mutated world that reflects our fears about the future. It is perhaps a parable about what we should take with us and what we should leave behind.
AN ANIMATE! FILM

CHRIS SHEPHERD & DAVID SHRIGLEY
WHO I AM AND WHAT I WANT
UK, 2005, 6 mins, video
A scribbled, strangely funny but highly unsettling examination of the human condition. The story of a man who bares his emotions, history, hang ups and desires in all of their dysfunctional absurdity then leaves us to assemble not only his identity but to question our own.
An animate! Film

KATY SHEPHERD
FILM
UK, 2001, 4 mins, video
Time and motion studies that, by definition, are getting beneath the surface. Raiding the image bank for the heart of the matter in a four by four family enlivening of the snap. From model couple to model village via our front room. Hold it and...
AN ANIMATE! FILM

CHRIS SHEPHERD
DAD'S DEAD
UK, 2002, 7 mins, video
Through a series of ghostly reminiscences a young man tries to piece together fragmented moments from the past, memories being triggered by admiration for his best friend Johnno. As the story unfolds, hero worship turns to revulsion, as the web of deception and violence that Johnno creates is revealed, pulling narrator and audience in its destructive wake.
Manipulated live-action mutates and combines with ghostly digital animation. Narrated by Ian Hart.
AN ANIMATE! FILM

HARRY SMITH
EARLY ABSTRACTIONS #1-5, 7, 10
USA,1939/56, 23 mins, 16mm
The seven films that make up Early Abstractions are spliced together to be projected as a unit. "My movies are made by God; I am just the medium for them." Harry Smith

"Smith's films can be watched for pure color enjoyment, or for motion - Harry Smith's films never stop moving - or you can watch them for hidden and symbolic meanings, alchemical signs." - Jonas Mekas

"My cinematic excreta is of four varieties: - batiked abstractions made directly on film between 1939 and 1946, optically printed non-objective studies composed around 1950, semi-realistic animated collages made as part of my alchemical labors of 1957 to 1962, and chronologically superimposed photographs of actualities formed since the latter year. All these works have been organised in specific patterns derived from the interlocking beats of the respiration, the heart and the EEG Alpha component and should be observed together in order, or not at all, for they are valuable works, works that will live forever- - they made me gray." - H.S.

VICKY SMITH
MY MOON HER WORLD
UK, 1995, sound, colour, 7 mins, 16mm
'Animation is combined with live action which has been treated - pixillated, refilmed, slow motion - so as to emphasise its connection with the grotesque animated segments. Abstract and figurative are juxtaposed, as are black-and-white line with broad panes of colours, and spontaneously-generated images with pre-planned ideas. The loose theme is that of gravity becoming decentred - merging and spilling out, the dissolution of inner and outer. The organising principle behind the diverse techniques is to take the viewer through this journey from the minute to the infinite.' - V.S.

GEORGE SNOW
MUYBRIDGE REVISITED
UK, 1988, 5 mins, video
A tired man alone at night flips through a book of Muybridge stills and, through hallucination, their movement. The tape revels in computer-animated Muybridge figures dancing around a multi-layered backdrop.
With an Art of Noise soundtrack.

MARGARET TAIT
COLOUR POEMS
UK, 1974, sound, colour, 12 mins, 16mm.
Nine linked short films. Memory, chance observation, and the subsuming of one in the other. The titles within the film are: Numen of the Boughs, Old Boots, Speed Bonny Boat, Lapping Watter, Incense, Aha, Brave New World, Things, Terra Firma.
A poem started in words is continued by the picture, part of another poem is read for the last of the nine. Some images are formed by direct-on-film animation, others are 'found' by the camera. - M.T.

JOHN TAPPENDEN
DIE HEILIGE GEIST
UK, 1992, sound, colour, 4 mins, 16mm
Each element plays its own spectral tune. Mercury, known of since antiquity, is among those elements which offer the most illustrious visual displays. Using simple geometrical shapes the film explores this phenomenon. - J.T.

WALTER UNGERER
INTRODUCTION TO OOBIELAND
Part One of the Oobieland Series
USA, 1969, sound, colour, 9 mins, 16mm.
Using hand-painted film, animation and an inventive soundtrack, Introduction to Oobieland is an exploration of gateways: a repeated series of movements from the familiar and safe to the unknown and dangerous. Cycles are left incomplete. Chases are never consummated, the day ends with no promise of rebirth. In this way the film touches on our oldest instincts, leaving us saddened and scared by the knowledge of a world that will never know freedom through the completion of action, safety through the sanctification of place. - W.U.

STAN VANDERBEEK
MANKINDA
USA, 1957, sound, B&W, 10 mins, 16mm
An animated drawing done directly under the camera, combining painterly images and a drawn calligraphy, the works unfolds as you watch, permitting the viewer to see the process of the drawing. - S.V.

STAN VANDERBEEK
SCIENCE FRICTION
USA, 1959, sound, colour, 10 mins, 16mm.
Award of distinction, Creative Film Foundation. Highest award, West German and Bergamo International Film Festivals. Selected for special presentation at the Museum of Modern Art, NY. A social satire aimed at the rockets, scientists and competitive mania of our time.

MARIA VEDDER & BETTINA GRUBER
DER HERZSCHLAG DES ANUBIS
Germany, 1989, 5 mins, video
Playful soundtrack and evocation of death coexist in this animated piece.

TIM WEBB
15TH FEBRUARY
UK, 1995, sound, colour, 7 mins, 16mm and video
15th February mixes live action and animation to describe a symbolic rejection and its sadistic outcome, as related in the poem by Peter Reading
AN ANIMATE! FILM

TIM WEBB
MR PRICE
UK, 2004, sound, colour, 9 mins, video
A reflection on life from mid-life. Memory, expectation, disappointment, education, hero worship, all human failings. Mr Price is about illusions and representation – how we understand the world and people around us.
AN ANIMATE! FILM

JAMES WHITNEY
YANTRA
USA, 1950-57, sound, colour, 10 mins, 16mm
Complex animated film by the maker of Lapis designed as an instrument of Hindu contemplation and worship.

JAMES & JOHN WHITNEY
FILM EXERCISES 1-4
USA, 1943-1944, sound, ?, 12 mins, 16mm
"...one of the most radically original audio-visual manifestations ever devised... The sounds were composed with an elaborate pendulum mechanism invented especially to 'write' out in a controlled fashion synthetic sounds, which we have now come to recognize as electronic music, but which at that time, before the perfection of recording tape, seemed revolutionary and shocking. The visual images were equally astounding, for they recorded, for the first time, pure direct light (regulated, formed and transformed by mattes and masks) rather than the reflected light usually photographed from drawings or other objects... The visual composition, like serial music, is constructed of themes and variations, inversions and clusters, but the nature of the optical phenomena - flickers, alternating figures and reversing colour balances etc. allow unexpected (for the viewer!) subtleties and dynamics, so that a shrinking object may once evoke a deep-space perspective and a few moments later aggressively refuse to be perceived as anything but a shape decreasing in size on a flat pictorial surface. The soundtrack is equally complex and subtle, while the rapport between music and visual image is marvelously involved and continually intriguing - sometimes pulling into precise synchronization and other times interacting in dramatic counterpoint." - William Moritz, Film As Film.

BRUCE WOOD
ISLAND DESIGN
USA, 1976, silent, B&W, 7 mins, 16mm
"Bruce Woods films are among the most sensual of any 'abstract' animated work ever made. Projected, they generate a fluid stream of organic images in a carefully controlled post-cubist space comparable to the work of painters like Jackson Pollock. Viewed one frame at a time (which is the way much of the footage is shot), they recall the rich lines and textures of such master etchers as Rembrandt. Wood's use of camera movement during exposure of each individual frame - like drawing - together with the illusion of movement in projection make his films both beautiful and unique." - Bill Judson, Curator of Film, Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh.

RUN WRAKE
RABBIT
UK, 2005, 5 mins, video
A dreamlike but dark story of lost innocence and the random justice of nature, told with curious images from a distant childhood. When an idol is found in the stomach of a rabbit, great riches follow, but for how long?
An animate! film

RICHARD WRIGHT
CORPUS
UK, 1992, 6 mins, video
'This animation centres around the simulation of a body in a pool of water. The body is animated by strobing and dissolving to produce a jerky and subtly unnatural manner, relentlessly cycling through the same motions, like a dead frog twitching under electric shock. There is also an experiment in 'synthetic cinematography', in which many filmic effects such as hand-held camera, lighting changes and focusing are simulated.' - Richard Wright.

SUSAN YOUNG
THIN BLUE LIES
UK, 1982, sound mag stripe, colour, 6 mins, 16mm
An animated film made in response to the Toxteth riots of Summer 1981. The film follows no specific narrative, but is a series of observations drawn directly from life.

The uneasy truce that developed in the weeks following the riots is illustrated by a juxtaposition of images of reconciliation with a soundtrack that reflects the unchanging hopelessness of a situation which perpetuates misunderstanding and mistrust. - S.Y.