4 reviews
Another odd little short from Mary Ellen Bute and Ted Nemeth.
This is an art film from a collection entitled "Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941". It consists of lots of art films that are of probably little interest to the average viewer--art lovers and cinemaniacs excepted! "Tarantella" is a dance named after the spider. However, this film isn't about spiders. It consists of piano music (not the pleasant kind) as objects flash and appear on the screen. The commentary on the films indicated that Mary Ellen Bute and Ted Nemeth were influenced by Kandinsky--and you can see this through their use of geometric shapes (particularly circles). It's really impossible to give this film a numerical score--it's weird and hard to put into words.
- planktonrules
- Oct 29, 2011
- Permalink
Not too bad for an experimental movie
- Horst_In_Translation
- Mar 12, 2016
- Permalink
Glorious!
Abstract animation illustrates Edwin Gerschefski's modernist composition. Two dots - one blue and one orange - appear most often, sometimes large, sometimes small, sometimes overlapping. When the sounds become more staccato, so do the images: wavy lines become squiggles, short nail-like lines go across the screen in rows. The result is a visual representation of abstract music, lively and spirited in spite of its link to a dance composed to sweat out the poisons of a spider bite.
I really enjoy what is called "avant garde" cinema. It seems that much of what cinema was for much of its earlier years (and by that I mean the first five or six decades) was largely just a stage show captured for film. And that is not a bad thing, but really doesn't allow film to become its own medium -- the camera must be used in new ways to make us see what we could not with just watching a play.
This short, although animation, does that to some extent, in making us see sounds and hear colors. And we are given a mental image -- this music is to help us shake off the bite of a tarantula! We never really see the dance or the tarantula, but are left to envision it for ourselves.
I really enjoy what is called "avant garde" cinema. It seems that much of what cinema was for much of its earlier years (and by that I mean the first five or six decades) was largely just a stage show captured for film. And that is not a bad thing, but really doesn't allow film to become its own medium -- the camera must be used in new ways to make us see what we could not with just watching a play.
This short, although animation, does that to some extent, in making us see sounds and hear colors. And we are given a mental image -- this music is to help us shake off the bite of a tarantula! We never really see the dance or the tarantula, but are left to envision it for ourselves.
Strange and Surreal Short
Tarantella (1940)
*** (out of 4)
When one thinks of animation they think of Walt Disney or perhaps the Looney Tunes from Warner. There's another sort of experimental animation that ran through the underground during the 30s and 40s and this film here, seen on the UNSEEN CINEMA collection, features no story or typical types of characters. Instead of any real characters, instead we see lines, circles and dots and they dance around to the music score. The main "characters" are the two dots, a orange and blue one, and we see them grow in size depending on what the music score is doing. This type of experimental animation isn't ever going to be overly popular but if you give it a chance you'll notice that it's quite catchy and entertaining. There's no rhyme or reason as to why anything happens here but that's okay because the way directors Mary Ellen Bute and Ted Nemeth keep the images flowing you can't help but be sucked up into their addictive quality.
*** (out of 4)
When one thinks of animation they think of Walt Disney or perhaps the Looney Tunes from Warner. There's another sort of experimental animation that ran through the underground during the 30s and 40s and this film here, seen on the UNSEEN CINEMA collection, features no story or typical types of characters. Instead of any real characters, instead we see lines, circles and dots and they dance around to the music score. The main "characters" are the two dots, a orange and blue one, and we see them grow in size depending on what the music score is doing. This type of experimental animation isn't ever going to be overly popular but if you give it a chance you'll notice that it's quite catchy and entertaining. There's no rhyme or reason as to why anything happens here but that's okay because the way directors Mary Ellen Bute and Ted Nemeth keep the images flowing you can't help but be sucked up into their addictive quality.
- Michael_Elliott
- Apr 30, 2011
- Permalink