Visual Music Archive

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Jemapur: AANAATT 

(2008) 

is a music video by Max Hattler is a sublime stop-motion animation that hearkens back to 40′s and 50′s abstract films through its geneological exploration of shape and movement with music.

The music is a track from Japanese artist Jemapur In 2008 W+K Tokyo Lab commissioned 4 music videos for the then 21 year old music producer, and I imagine that this was the strangest. Using a static camera and zero digital effects, Max Hattler, whose previously celebrated films like Collision are definitely digital, adeptly moves into the arena of object stop-motion. In doing so he creates something as intricate and imaginative as I’ve seen in stop-motion’s modern renaissance. In the last year only the work of the Mixtape Club comes to mind that combines both AANAATT’s level of world immersion with an abstract intent.

The move to practical animation is not simply about method, but fits into the film’s story. I see Hattler’s compositions and materials tracing aspects of modernist art and industrial design through time, engaging with period styles, so refraining from digital effects helps the film stay true to those influences.

The film has toured the world for a long while, and this release has been long awaited. SotW-writer MarBelle discussed the film with Max Hattler way back in 2009.

 

Source: Short of the Week

 

 

Max Hattler's elegantly choreographed object animation tilts the camera so that the mirrored table surface seems to be the ceiling. In smooth stop-motion replacements, he explores the abstract logic of tubes, discs, cylinders and other shapes as they grow, shrink, slide, and change to the ethereal murmur of ambient music.

 

Source: CineSource

 

 

Jemapur: AANAATT, vierecke, handmade, Video Clip

Reading

Optical Poetry (2004) by Dr. William Moritz is the long-awaited, definitive biography of Oskar Fischinger. The result of over 30 years of research on this visionary abstract filmmaker and painter. In addition to Moritz's comprehensive biography, it includes numerous photographs in colour and black and white (many never before published), statements by Oskar Fischinger about his films, a newly created extensive filmography, and a selected bibliography. (John Libbey Publishing)

Kandinsky (2009) edited by Tracey Bashkof is the first full-scale retrospective of the artist's career to be exhibited in the United States since 1985, when the Guggenheim culminated its trio of groundbreaking exhibitions of the artist's life and work in Munich, Russia, and Paris. This presentation of nearly 100 paintings brings together works from the three institutions that have the greatest concentration of Kandinsky's work in the world, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; as well as significant loans from private and public holdings. (Guggenheim)

Links

 

SEE ALSO

Christian Ernest Marclay (*1955) is a Swiss-American visual artist and composer. Marclay's work explores connections between sound, noise, photography, video, and film. A pioneer of using gramophone records and turntables as musical instruments to create sound collages, Christian Marclay is, in the words of critic Thom Jurek, perhaps the "unwitting inventor of turntablism." His own use of turntables and records, beginning in the late 1970s, was developed independently of but roughly parallel to hip hop's use of the instrument. (Wikipedia)

Jan Švankmajer (*1934) is a Czech filmmaker and artist whose work spans several media. He is a self-labeled surrealist known for his surreal animations and features, which have greatly influenced other artists such as Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, the Brothers Quay, and many others. (Wikipedia)

© Center for Visual Music

 

Study No. 7 (1931) - original title: Studie Nr. 7. This short film by Oskar Fischinger was one of a dozen 'studies' spanning the 1920s and '30s. This one is a gorgeous visual tone poem with a few small, dynamic white shapes popping decoratively out of a sea of blackness. (Dr. William Moritz, Canyon Cinema)

Rhythm 21 (1921) - original title: Rhythmus 21. An early, abstract animation by Hans Richter composed solely of squares and rectangles that change shape. This another attempt by the artist to apply musical principles to screen images. (Glenn Erickson)

Michal Levy was born and raised in Israel and graduated from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, in 2001. She currently resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where she work as an art director. Since childhood, music, dance and painting have been an important part of her life and she has contributed to her passion for exploring the visualization of sound. (Michal Levy)