Wild Things / Wild Scenes

A screening of animation with OneHouse Arts and Smokehouse Films at the Velaslavasay Panorama.

Sunday, May 21, 2023 - 4:00pm

 

Wild Things / Wild Scenes
Sunday May 21, 2023 4-6pm

$12 General / $10 VPES Members

A screening of animation with OneHouse Arts and Smokehouse Films at the Velaslavasay Panorama.

Featuring an arrangement of stop motion animations made in 2023 by artists and apprentices of OneHouse Arts and a selection of historic 16mm animations from the archives of Smokehouse Films, Wild Things / Wild Scenes brings together contemporary explorations of experimental animation with the 100-year history of 16mm filmmaking.

In 1923, Eastman Kodak introduced the first commercially successful amateur movie camera in America, the Cine-Kodak, consisting of a camera, projector, tripod, screen and splicer, for US$335. Artists like Mary Ellen Bute began using 16mm to tell unconventional stories in wild animation, starting a tradition of creation still very much alive today.

 

The Hoarder (Evelyn Lambart, 1969)

About the films

OneHouse Arts will present a selection of films inspired by a session of nature field drawings observing plants and animals, made at a farm located in the eastern region of Los Angeles earlier this year. Through this practice, the students decided to make what Mary Ellen Bute calls Absolute Film (light, form, movement, sound).

OneHouse Art’s films resemble the early stop motions acquired by artist John Cannizzaro of Smokehouse Films, works by creators like Jan Lenica, Terry Gilliam, Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart, and the first animation Cannizzaro made himself was a wild cut-out stop motion animation called The Human Race. With the Velaslavasay Panorama, Cannizzaro is curating ageless animations like Evelyn Lambart’s The Hoarder (1969) and Witold Giersz’s Fire (Pożar) (1975), and weaving them between filmic explorations of wild nature by OneHouse Arts students. Films will be projected digitally with a 16mm projector demonstration.

Fire /Pożar (Witold Giersz, 1975)

OneHouse Arts (Led by Guan Rong)

OneHouse Arts is an experimental art school. Contemporary artist Rachel Rong created a unique concept of art education, combining the spirit of active research, art experiment and self-expression with the cognitive development process of children, establishing an intimate relationship between people (aged 4 to 12 years old) and art, improving people's aesthetic ability and image communication skills.

Smokehouse Films (Led by John Cannizzaro)

The Smokehouse Films archive consists of approximately 4000 prints – mostly in the areas of Ethnographic films, stop motion animated films (both foreign and American), and experimental or Avant Garde works.  Many of these films never made the transition to video or DVD, and so constitute a vast area of knowledge and history that needs to be “preserved” for future studies and enjoyment.  To that end, Smokehouse Films has opened its archives over the last few years to multiple screenings and workshops. Although most of them have been in Los Angeles, they have also branched out to screenings as far as San Francisco, Texas, Vermont, and New York.

 

 

This event and workshop are sponsored in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency, and by the Velaslavasay Panorama Enthusiast Society.