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2 items from 2013

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Cannes Short Film: Trick Your Eyes with Norman McLaren’s Trippy ‘Blinkity Blank’

15 May 2013 12:00 PM, PDT | FilmSchoolRejects.com | See recent FilmSchoolRejects news »

Why Watch? For starters, today begins the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and this trippy short won the short film Palme d’Or back in 1955. Blinkity Blank is one of Canadian animator Norman McLaren‘s more charismatic experimental works, designed to play with persistence of vision. He scratched all of these strange little images directly onto black film leader, and accompanied them with scratches he added to the film’s optical soundtrack. Those odd noises were then added to Maurice Blackburn‘s experimental jazz soundtrack. The colorful shapes resemble abstract forms as well as the occasional bird, a favorite subject of McLaren’s. There also a number of blank frames, which he described as “sprinkling on the empty band of time.” Sometimes the shapes combine and grow, sometimes they erase one another. This fluid and immaterial rhythms of light grab fleetingly at the eye, and haunt your vision quite literally for the slightest of instants. Turn off the lights »

- Daniel Walber

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SFotD: A Musical Arms Race Blows Up in ‘Piccolo’

3 April 2013 12:00 PM, PDT | FilmSchoolRejects.com | See recent FilmSchoolRejects news »

Why Watch? Because Dušan Vukotić is your new favorite old school Croatian animator, I promise you that. Piccolo is a gleefully ridiculous exercise in allegory, poking fun at the Cold War at its peak. Two neighbors share a house, split down the middle. They lead a quiet, friendly existence until one of them buys a tiny (piccolo) harmonica. His refusal to put the damn thing down, even in the middle of the night, kicks off an arms race in miniature as they try to out-blast each other with an endless progression of instruments. In a way, this is a musically-minded remake of Norman McLaren’s Oscar-winning Neighbours (1952), but without its bleak sense of humor. Piccolo‘s comedy is beaming, taking advantage of the dynamic character of Vukotić’s style. A pair of cymbals turns into a bicycle. The walls of the house are punctured by pizzicato. There’s a particularly clever gag involving a bottle of gin »

- Daniel Walber

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2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2005

2 items from 2013

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