MARTHA and MARVO with RATS and PIGEONS
A programme of extreme animation with three of its best artists.
Martha Colburn’s animations charge the frame with such ferocity that it hurts. She uses filmmaking as a barbed and witty weapon to comment on popular culture, consumerism, politics and sexuality. Her work explores the guilt-haunted twisted history of the American soul.
Since the 1950’s, Breer has been making films that push aesthetic and technical boundaries. Incorporating variation, repetition, rhythm, and motion, his animations are moving collages, a mix of drawings, cartoons, photographs and ephemera from everyday life. Breer’s work varies from kinetic explorations of abstraction to poetic mediations on life and death.
Keen casts his friends in psychedelic celluloid romps – they dress up (and get naked) while acting out exaggerated comic book versions of themselves. There’s sex, nudity, cardboard ray guns, monsters, endless explosions of paint and other pyrotechnics.
What’s not to love?
Spiders In Love : An Arachnorgasmic Musical Martha Colburn
(U.S.A./1999 / 16 mm / 2.5 mins )
She-spiders dance and dash about with ghoulish and gorgeous expressions of lust and consuming hunger. Indications of death and life abound
Cartoon Theatre of Dr.Gaz Jeff Keen
(UK / 1977-1979 / 16mm
12 mins)
A compilation with 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.
Blazes Robert Breer
( U.S.A./ 1961 / 16 mm / 3 mins )
One hundred basic images, switching positions for four thousand frames. A continuous explosion.
Skelehellevision Martha Colburn
(U.S.A./ 2002 / 16 mm / 8mins)
Using found pornography and scratching skeletons over the footage frame-by-frame we see into a lust-filled Hell where the beauty of flesh is no more. Ass-licking bats, seething snakes, dancing lizards, and frightful females are the stars.
Trilogy Jeff Keen
(UK / 16mm / 10 mins )
Three films together :
MARVO MOVIE,
CINEBLATZ
, WHITE LITE
Swiss Army Knife With Rats And Pigeons Robert Breer
(U.S.A./1980 / 16 mm / 7mins )
A typically bravura display of simple forms flashing, rotating, and dissolving into abstraction; a Breer classic.
Cosmetic Emergency Martha Colburn
(U.S.A. / 2005 / 35 mm / 9 mins )
Adding breasts to soldiers and manipulating images of doll-faced women. This films’ creative vandalism deconstructs and anthropomorphizes typical images of macho and femininity.
Greg Pope. 