GO, GO, GO! Women in Experimental Animation – an Essay by Vicky Smith

GO, GO, GO! Women in Experimental Animation is a BEEF curated programme for The Cube Cinema, Bristol in May / June / July 2019

INTRODUCTION

BEEF presents three film screenings that reflect the breadth of practice of women working in experimental animation from 1954 to the present day, encompassing the USA, Europe and Australia.

This series raises several questions. Why focus on the work of women in experimental animation? Have women contributed to the field in ways that are distinctive to that of their male counterparts? What is meant by ‘experimental’ animation? What can be communicated through animation that is difficult to realise with live action and why have women been drawn to work in this discipline?

In many respects experimental animation shares the same concerns as experimental film, enquiring into the conditions of cinema itself, such as image reproduction, projection, duration and material, whilst also questioning specifics of animation, such as the single frame, image registration and the graphic.

It could be argued that all film practice operating outside the film industry is experimental in that it offers the freedom to take risks and to test new ideas. This series foregrounds work that engages formal qualities such as shape, colour, texture, light, materiality and movement and where questions of process and procedure are prioritised over the creation of character and narrative. However, certain films in this series do feature figurative imagery and narrative structures (albeit non-linear ones).

Women have played a major role behind the scenes in the animation industry for a long time, but it was not until the 1970s, with the emergence of the feminist movement and art colleges opening up to female practitioners, that women had opportunities to direct their own projects (Russett & Starr, 1976: 19–20).

Several factors militate against success in the art world for any female artist (Linda Nochlin essay in Maura, 2015). Some of the conditions that may inhibit sustained practice include fewer role models, scarce resources and lower levels of confidence. These factors have led to much work by female animators being overshadowed by male practitioners (Pilling, 1992; Carter, 2002). However, in spite of these odds, a number of determined and resourceful female animators have pushed on to build rich bodies of work with clear development and mature artistic enquiry.

It is remarkable that so many women have been attracted to practising in this area, as is the diversity of work that has been achieved. The rigours of experimental film [in which rules applying to form and material are applied] have been observed, yet shifting historical events and personal situations have also been responded to, broadening formalism towards ‘expressions of identity, gender, ethnicity’ (Curtis, 2006: 148). These works do not necessarily capture photographic imagery of the world, but they offer rich reflections on the sensuous and the observable stuff of life.

This series gives an overview of these tendencies, offering new context for works that have been overlooked and revealing connections between female makers working across similar modes whilst employing different means. At the same time, it situates these works alongside wider, inter-related feminist struggles and strategies, both political and personal. A further aim is to demonstrate the ways in which these filmmakers extend how animation can be thought about.

Programme #1 Animation for Live Action: Wednesday 8th May

Vera Neubauer (UK): Mid Air (1985)

Kelly Gallagher (USA): Pearl Pistols (2014)

Marie Menken (USA): Gogogo (1964)

Julia Parks (UK): Solway Film (2016)

Inger Lise Hansen (UK): Take (2018)

Mara Mattuschka (AT): SOS Extraterrestria (1993)

Jane Conger Belson (USA): Odds and Ends (1959)

Barbara Meter (NHL): Little Stabs (2012)

Barbara Hammer (USA): Endangered (1988)

The series begins with films that straddle filmic modes of live action and animated filmmaking, including works where the two approaches are combined alongside films that consist largely of the former, yet where the treatment of this material is so graphic it starts to appear closer to animation. It is possibly in this area that female animators have carved the most significant inroads due to the sheer diversity of their materials, methods and approaches.

Feminist theory helps us understand the motives for working between different registers of photography and drawing. L’ecriture feminine, for example, developed during the 1970s, proposes that dominant (patriarchal) language is insufficient for describing female experience. Julia Kristeva analysed the experience of loss in relation to the female body and the impact that psychic and physical severance has on speech. In this way, the normative, sense-making function of language is unsettled and opened out to a more polyvalent expression that builds multiple connotations around signs (Kristeva, 1987).

The role of the unconscious as it impacts upon the body and desire was explored in depth by a wave of women working in experimental animation during the 1970s and 1980s. These practices have been relatively well charted in theory (for instance in Pilling’s Animating the Unconscious: Desire, Sexuality, and Animation). Where female artists have had to juggle several roles in their day-to-day life, a polysemic mixing of registers of the drawn and the photographic lends itself well to describing fluctuations between subjective experiences of reality, desire and fantasy. Female animators experimenting with multiplicity and challenging sexist stereotypes through role-play and the use of different media were so prolific during the 1980s that the BFI packaged three VHS tapes entitled Wayward Girls and Wicked Women – a series in which many of these provocative contemporary animated films were included.

For Vera Neubauer, whose earlier Animation for Live Action (1976) was instrumental in establishing the genre, the combined modes of live action/animation parallel her dual occupations as animator and housewife. Mid Air (1985) casts the animator as a witch, thereby proposing that central to both occupations is the ability to cast spells so as to imagine and construct different worlds. The film references the political situation of this period where, in the UK, women were given the means to enrol on inexpensive educational courses offered by further education colleges, and feminists were conducting direct interventions at the Greenham Common nuclear military base. Through ephemeral and crafty actions, such as decorating fences and dancing on silos, the women ridiculed the dominant ideology of belief in the destructive power of the missiles. Using creativity, humour and transformation, the protestors effected a reversal of military might; likewise, Neubauer deploys rebelliousness and humour as potent measures through which to resist and defy destructive patriarchal regimes.

A similar juxtaposition of objects and actions associated with the feminine and the violence of weaponry is found in Kelly Gallagher’s Pearl Pistols. The film’s choreography of different objects contrasts the delicate beauty of flowers and pearls with the violent potential of guns and uses this as an analogy for women fighting racism.

Both of the above films are largely constructed under the animation rostrum camera, [a table-top platform traditionally used in the animation industry] where objects and materials are manipulated by small degrees under a downward-facing camera. In the next set of films, the camera is placed outdoors to capture landscapes and city scenes, animating the whole environment by compressing time and natural rhythms. Phenomena such as weather, vehicles and humans appear altered and more animate.

In these methods, known as pixilation and time-lapse, objects are not moved in front of the camera by the animator, but appear to possess their own agency and are seen to animate themselves. With pixilation, things that are already visibly in motion appear to be more mobile. Scenes and beings are filmed in single frames such that a fraction of a gesture stands in for the whole. It is possible to synchronise human movements to pixilated sequences so that superhuman feats, such as flying, can be depicted. If the frames are sampled randomly, human actions can appear jerky and robotic.

In Gogogo, Marie Menken wilfully misapplies the pixilation method. Animation is just a small part of Menken’s oeuvre and it is probably due to her wider work in live action that she gained recognition. Favoured by US avant-garde authority P.A. Sitney, primarily for her innovation with the ‘somatic camera’, Menken found a place within this canon. Ordinarily, the hyper-condensed movement accomplished by pixilation is grounded by fixing the camera onto a tripod to take frames of moving environments from a steady place. As Sitney observes, Menken took the radical risk of handholding the camera whilst taking single frames of the moving world (Sitney, 2008: 38). In this way, two fields are in a constant state of jitteriness. These levels of extreme motion between seer and seen are hard to watch and could, for this reason, be dismissed as amateurish. However, Melissa Ragona links Menken’s pixilation method to a ‘feminist’ irreverence for formal techniques and conventions, and the effect of her acceleration approach to a wider modernist sensibility (Ragona, 2007: 29).

The misapplication of the pixilation method is also evident in Julia Parks’ Solway Film. This work seems to reference Menken’s Gogogo, in that forms of transport appear to be massively accelerated. Unidirectional objects, such as boats and ships, have the appearance of gliding smoothly at super speed when the pixilation technique is employed. The effortless and rapid progress of these vessels is enhanced by Parks’ use of the BBC Radio 4 Shipping Forecast jingle Sailing By, with its soothing lullaby quality. Humans seen onshore mooring boats are out of sync with the single frame and appear to move abruptly in fractured and wrong gestures. The overall effect is that the seagoing vessels seem to be volitional while humans look machine-like, with no self-possession.

Where pixilation tends to refer to movement and the object that is affected, in time-lapse the animator calculates a formula in which frames are taken less frequently. For time-lapse to be effective, the filmed object has to move, even if at an extremely slow rate, such as with a seed growing and blossoming. What time-lapse must manifest is change either in position (perpetually moving clouds) or in state (usually aging and decay) in what are often relatively stable, unchanging objects. This animation method has been exploited by Inger Lise Hansen, whose Take goes to the limits of the perceivable by materialising otherwise invisible atmospheric conditions. Hansen achieves this breath-taking visualisation of random physical forces through keen observation and the careful application of the time-lapse technique.

In SOS Extraterrestria, Mara Mattuschka employs a hybrid method that includes pixilation combined with stop motion, found footage and performance. In her grotesque costume (itself a work of art) Mattuschka auto-pixilates, and with this conveys a sense of otherness and estrangement. The method lends to her movement a broken, robotic, alien quality. The film is a hilarious, outrageous, queer and iconoclastic epic spoof of the sci-fi fantasy/disaster genres.

In Little Stabs by Barbara Meter, the artist scrutinises terrestrial disasters using studio animation on a small, close-up scale. Through Meter’s ‘lyrical’ camera (Sitney, 1974: 160), small zooms are her response to what she sees and reflect a need to look and bear witness. Using a montage of numerous colour images such as cities reduced to rubble, mass migrations, forced exile and other atrocities, juxtaposed with images of human resourcefulness and survival strategies, the constant and agitated back and forth views of these still photographs powerfully reanimates them.

Finally, the programme also includes works representative of a different tendency, in which found photographic film is repeatedly reworked manually to the point where it becomes graphic. Jane Conger Belson Shimane reworks filmic fragments in Odds and Ends. A male voiceover describes the non-commercial sensibility of the jazz age and Belson draws an analogy between this form of music, filmmaking and modernist expression.

The programme closes with Barbara Hammer’s Endangered. As with Neubauer’s work, this film is highly reflexive and employs numerous methods and processes for making film and for performing the procedures of filmmaking. Exploiting analogue film’s tactile potential, the work oscillates between handmade overlaid graphic forms on the film stock’s surface and filmed photographic imagery. Marks and stains left on the film’s surface show the body as a visible entity and communicate a sense of interiority.

Programme #2 Handmade Animation: Thursday 13th June

Lauren Cook (USA): Handmade (2004)

Vicky Smith (UK): Noisy Licking, Dribbling & Spitting (2014)

Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof (USA): Light Magic (2001)

Jeanne Liotta (USA): Loretta (2003)

Lis Rhodes (UK): Dresden Dynamo (1971)

Margaret Tait (UK): Colour Poems (1984)

Courtney Hoskins (USA): Gossamer Conglomerate (2001)

Charlotte Pryce (UK): Looking Glass Insects (2012)

Kayla Parker (UK): Sunset Strip (1996)

Jennifer Reeves (USA): Landfill 16 (2011)

Emily Scaife (UK): Attraction (2018)

Jo Law (AUS): Virtual Memory is Running Low (1999)

Stephanie Maxwell (USA): Ga (1984)

Rose Bond (USA): Gaia’s Dream (1982)

The method of ‘direct’ or ‘handmade’ film dates back to 1910. Made with no camera and solely graphic, it lies at the extremity of cinema and includes marking straight onto clear film with various substances, including paint, stickers, bodily fluids, stains and make-up, or scoring into, etching and perforating the film itself, or generating imagery through darkroom processes such as contact printing. This direct-on-film method yields a great range of animated imagery, from in-frame markings to dynamic motion across the filmstrip. The colour in a handmade film is a palette of both brilliant ‘non-natural’ hues (Curtis) and ‘iridescent colours’ (Schlict, 2010: 34).

For the great part of the twentieth century, handmade animation was dominated by male artists who found ways of working with discarded film. Len Lye’s scratched energetic lines exploited the kinetic possibilities of scoring directly into black film, while Norman McLaren and Harry Smith responded to music and to the psychedelic and jazz ages.

During the 1970s, female filmmakers began to pioneer a range of new direct-on-film methods. Lis Rhodes applied graphic design ‘letratone’ material to film and its mass-produced manufactured geometric shapes give the film a quality that lies between the mechanical and the manual. Rhodes pioneered new directions for composing handmade sound by allowing the uniform graphic dots and lines to cross both the picture and soundtrack area. The even lines of the letratone transfer can be controlled to a greater degree than the hand drawn, translating into a clear set of musical notes.

In contrast to Rhodes’ relatively hands-off approach, in which imagery is entirely flat and repetitious, Rose Bond’s early work is highly manual and constructs a deep perspectival space, whilst marking only the film surface. Drawing on a minute scale with very fine pens directly into the film, she renders Celtic and other archetypal forms as continually metamorphosing crosses and knots.

Do the motives for making film by direct contact differ between female and male practitioners? Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the handmade film was adapted and developed by female practitioners who approached it as though it were somehow equivalent to the body. It has been suggested that female artists have a relationship with technology that promotes a sense of the tactile. In discussing Carolee Schneemann’s work, Amelia Jones proposes that her physical treatment of film stock allies with a materialist enquiry into film as a medium, and where tactility is invested as a feminist gesture (Jones, 2006: 143).

In Handmade, Lauren Cook’s motif of the hand testifies to processes of physical contact and authorship. The handprint or fingerprint is the most direct form of human mark-making and possesses the quality of the index: a sign that points to the cause of how marks come into being. This film is rich with traces of filmic materiality: big rips, scratches, scores and grazes appear as the optical track and film’s edge numbers are pulled diagonally through the printer. In this highly reflexive work, the imprints of the hand refer to both the process and to the wider genre in which it sits.

Where the direct-on-film is typically constructed by hand, Vicky Smith’s Noisy Licking, Dribbling & Spitting is made with the mouth alone. The stained tongue is pressed onto the filmstrip as though it were a stamping pad. Licking, dribbling and spitting directly onto film generates image and audio alike.

Jeanne Liotta’s Loretta extends Man Ray’s discovery of the mysteries of the black ground of the photogram by relating that shadowy aesthetic to the genre of film noir. The recurring motif of a silhouetted female figure, hand outstretched and seemingly intruded upon by the materiality of light, adds to the evocation of the thriller genre.

Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof’s Light Magic continues the analogy of film as magic and sorcery; indeed, it is wondrous to behold. What is conjured here is the material of light itself. Bursting forth in discontinuous flashes, creaturely remains, such as feathers, husks and fossils, are briefly glimpsed, pressed in close contact with their tinted and toned filmic environments.

In Sunset Strip, Kayla Parker brings the diary directly onto 35mm film so that each frame, or small frame cluster, represents the end of a day. 365 ‘suns’ are constructed from the filmmaker’s sewing box and wardrobe: stockings, dyes, threads, stencils and nets form the fabric of this continuous filmstrip.

Emily Scaife’s Attraction is in equal measure cosmic and chthonic. A dark space is enlivened by bright, crusty, dusty sparkle that emits from upward-thrusting forms like pollen and attracts numerous creepy-crawlies such as butterflies, fireflies and other bugs. This study of the dynamic forces of attraction, entropy and growth appears to be influenced in part by Susan Pitt’s astonishing film Asparagus (1979).

The next two films reference the materiality of film and other related media whose ecological unsustainability comes starkly into view when the same materials fall out of general currency. Once these media become obsolete, we are left with plastics that won’t decompose. Jennifer Reeves explores this situation in her Landfill 16, where she temporarily buried the footage to let enzymes break down the image and subsequently painted onto the film to give it new life.

Jo Law engages the least technologically mediated method of handmade filmmaking to articulate issues relating to what, in 1996, were the most advanced media of the electronic age. In her Virtual Memory is Running Low, early versions of dial-up Internet are referenced through the soundtrack, where repeated attempts to get online are heard in the jangle of the external modem. The frustrations that come through our reliance on technologies to connect us is a key theme, as well as a sense of loss – both of memory and media itself. It is interesting that while technologies of the 1990s, such as ‘the portable phone’ and the Walkman, are mostly obsolete, 16mm film endures.

‘ In Ga, Stephanie Maxwell observes that contact between film and human bodies permits marks which correspond to the drives and energies of the body, the vibration of the fingers, the variations of pressure, and individual physical impulses’ (Takahashi 2005: 176).

Programme #3 The Crafty Animator: Thursday 11th July

With special guest Caroline Ruddell, who will be present to discuss some of the themes in this programme and in her book.

Jodie Mack (USA): Persian Pickles (2012)

Kayla Parker (UK): Measure (2017)

Sarah Pucill (UK): Backcomb (1995)

Kelly Sears (USA): The Body Besieged (2009)

Sandra Lahire (UK): Arrows (1984)

Ira Vicari (IT): Gardens (2018)

Daina Krumins (USA): Baobilicons (1982)

Mary Ellen Bute (USA): Abstronic (1952)

Sophie Michael (UK): 99 Clerkenwell Rd (2010)

Sabine Gruffat (USA): Framelines (2017)

Maria Lassnig (AT): Kantate (1992)

This programme is named after Caroline Ruddell’s 2017 conference (held at Rich Mix, London in 2017). Her forthcoming book of the same name interrogates the highly visible role of the maker/animator in craft-based practices, along with ideas that craft is a gendered practice. These concerns are very pertinent to this series.

The emphasis on craft that runs throughout the series is in acknowledgment of the resourcefulness, manual dexterity and expertise with materials and tools exhibited across these works. The term also refers to the sheer range of media and methods that these practitioners bring into play, evident in all of these films.

Craft is also crafty, and in this definition methods are deceptive and evasive or underhand and devious. The positive application of witchcraft has already been seen in Programme 1 in Mid Air, where the animator casts herself as a witch concocting her potions in the middle of the night, commanding elements of bodily fluids and fire, all while her unwitting and infantilised husband sleeps.

In German, animation translates as ‘trick’. ‘Tricky Women’ is thus the name given to an Austrian-based animation festival and production team. The suggestion that sleight-of-hand is responsible for the illusion applies to all animation and harks back to early proto-cinema’s shared roots of animation and magic and crude tricks in the mechanisms of trapdoors and smoke (Crafton, 1999). That most of the films in this programme bring transparency to the process and procedures of constructing filmic illusions is one aspect that defines them as experimental.

Jodie Mack uses everyday materials, finding in them qualities that lend to movement. Her work is an example of inter-media, whereby patterns in the fabric retain their status as textiles, yet at the same time exist as animation. In her playful Persian Pickles, sheets of cloth are filmed in such a way that motifs, such as a paisley curl, appear to lift off and separate from their fabric and exist as independently morphing animated shapes.

With her film Measure, Kayla Parker contributes a variation on the handmade by strongly referencing the art of etching. Her film has the quality that Len Lye achieved but is based on landscape views. Giardini is similarly a landscape animation. In this beautiful abstract expressionist piece, Ira Vicari achieves the coexistence of smeary painted colour-field canvases with the suggestion of animated landscapes.

We then move onto films in which the body is directly or indirectly referenced. Because of animation’s special capacity to depict the body in imaginary ways, this aspect has been central to most animated film. These works do not seek to create sensationalised images of the body through cartoon-like imagery of distended or broken forms. Rather they employ montage and metaphor to suggest the experience of bodily discomposure and/or physical extremes. The following films explore the same topic – that of the ideologically driven quest for the perfectible body and/or the phallic female body – but they take very different approaches.

In Sarah Pucill’s Backcomb, the demonic is unleashed on a domestic space. It takes the form of two of femininity’s mildest tokens, hair and embroidery, that serve here in the creation of a sexualised surrealist experience. Within the claustrophobic space of a table-lay, a forceful and erectile mass of hair comes alive and slithers across its surface. (SP)

Using cut-out photos taken from yoga instruction manuals, Kelly Sears begins The Body Besieged with what appear to be a set of gentle exercises. The pace is accelerated to the point where the yogic practice becomes a hectic conveyor belt. In terms of its aesthetic and shape, the film reflects the increasing demands to self-regulate the body that developed during the 1980s.

Sandra Lahire’s Arrows approaches the issue of anorexia through animation. As though the rostrum table itself were a body, Lahire layers materials that are associated with the physical. These include cut-up photographs of bodies and crude mask-like drawings animated alongside real objects. Making the process transparent, Lahire’s hands are constantly visible animating these materials, delving into and prising apart the layers and then bandaging and stitching them back together. Lahire gives insights into why working with animation ‘click-by-click’ in experimental ways is important in explaining how documentaries on anorexia are not true to her own experience of living with the condition (Buxton, 12: 1996).

In Daina Krumins’ Babobilicons, slime moulds, along with hundreds of phallic stinkhorn mushrooms, were cultivated on oats and ordinary objects – wall sockets, candles and peeling paint – to create unnerving, dreamlike images. The Babobilicons – robot-like characters that resemble coffee pots with lobster claws – move through all this with mysterious determination’ (Renee Shafransky, The Village Voice).

The programme moves into examining ways in which abstract forms can be generated by the play of light and/or by innovative use of technology. Sophie Michael’s 99 Clerkenwell Rd animates an otherwise empty shop as she films the lights bouncing off the surfaces of the walls, generating a beautiful play of coloured circular shapes in motion. Abstronic is by the pioneer of electronic abstract animation, Mary Ellen Bute. As an early interdisciplinary artist, Bute enlisted scientific research by drawing with the controlled light from an oscilloscope. Through drawing with a beam of light, Bute creates a smoothness of animated forms that would be hard to achieve using the hand alone.

Sabine Gruffaut’s Framelines is a scratch film for the twenty-first century made by laser-etching abstract patterns on the film emulsion of negative and positive 35mm colour film. Working in the tradition of artists who have hacked or detourned technologies for creative purposes, Gruffat has discovered an entirely novel process for making moving images. The inventors of the laser cutter did not have filmmaking in mind as an application for their technology. In these waning days of analogue filmmaking, Gruffat’s film therefore suggests an innovative approach, and one possible future for materialist image-making in the digital era (SG).

Ruddell et al. point out that the ‘presence of the artist’ is often highly visible in craft-based practices. This has been highlighted throughout this programme, as filmmakers depict themselves struggling with what have been the conflicting dual roles of female/artist and also while dwelling in the marginal space of being experimental film practitioners. The programme concludes with Maria Lassnig’s variation on the lightning sketch performance, as the artist appears alongside and making commentary upon her own moving drawings. In Kantate, Lassnig employs absurd humour to discuss painful personal matters. Attired in various costumes to perform stereotypical roles, she interacts with her cartoon self by relating a doleful autobiographical tale. The song narrates her experience of a childhood blighted by domestic violence and in Catholic school where she was bullied for her evident otherness, then as an adult exposed to the sexism of the art world. As she recounts, the struggle was transcended through her creative practice when, finally in her role as artist, she found a place and purpose and belief in the social importance of art.

By closing the screening with the work of Lassnig, this series aims to flag the significance of how experimental practice with animation has been meaningful for so many female practitioners. Lahire, Neubauer and numerous other artists in this programme affirm that working with film/animation through experimental approaches helps them to make sense of the challenges of living as a woman in a patriarchal society.

writing by Vicky Smith, 2019

REFERENCES

BFI VHS Series (1995) Wayward Girls and Wicked Women, BFI Connoisseur.

Buxton, Jo (1996), ‘Interview with Sandra Lahire: The Thin People’, in Harcombe, D. & Smith, V. (eds.) Boiling – Experimental Animation Journal, London: LFMC, pp. 12- 16.

Carter, Vanda (2002) ‘Not Only Animation’, in Danino, N. & Maziere, M. (eds) The Undercut Reader: Critical Writings on Artists Film and Video. London: Wallflower Press, pp. 168- 170.

Crafton, Donald (1999) Before Mickey: the Animated Film 1898-1928. US: University of Chicago Press.

Curtis, David (2006) A History of British Artists Film and Video in Britain, London: BFI.

Harcombe, David and Smith, Vicky (eds.) (1996) Boiling: Experimental Animation Journal, London: LFMC.

Jones, Amelia (2006) Self/Image/Technology: Representation and the Contemporary Subject. London: Routledge.

Kristeva, Julia (1987) Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press.

Pilling, Jayne (1992) Women and Animation: a Compendium, London: BFI.

Pilling, Jayne (2012) Animating the Unconscious: Desire, Sexuality, and Animation, US: Wallflower, Columbia University Press.

Ragona, Melissa (2007) “Swing and Sway: Marie Menken’s Cinematic Events,” in Blaetz, Robin ed. Women Experimental Filmmakers, Duke University Press.

Reilly, Maura (2015) Women Artists: The Nochlin Reader, London: Thames and Hudson.

Russett, Robert and Starr, Cecile (eds.) (1976) Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art. Boston, Mass, Da Capo Press Inc.

Schlict, Esther (2010) Celluloid: Film Ohne Kamera. Berlin: Kerber Verlag.

Sitney, P.A. (1979) Visionary Film: the American Avant-Garde, 1943 -2000. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sitney, P.A. (2008) Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Film-makers and the Heritage of Emerson. New York: Oxford University Press.

Smith, Vicky (2017) ‘Exploring the work of Sl’ in Animation Studies Online 2, Ocotber 16, 2017 https://blog.animationstudies.org/?tag=sandra-lahire . Accessed 24 April 2019.

Smith, Vicky & Hamlyn, Nicky (2018), (eds.) Experimental and Expanded Animation: New Perspectives and Practices, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Takahashi, Tess (2005) ‘Meticulously Worked Upon Direct Animation, the Auratic and the Index’, in Gehman, C. & Reinke, S. (eds) The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema. Toronto: YYZ Books, pp. 166-178.

This programme is curated and written by BEEF member Vicky Smith with input from Marcy Saude and support from Sam Francis and Cressida Williams. It is made possible by the support of Arts Council England.