The Quay Brothers--The Calligrapher

They reside and work in England where they moved in 1969 after studying illustration at the Philadelphia College of Art, now the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, to study at the Royal College of Art [1] There, they made their first short films, which no longer exist after the only print was irreparably damaged.[citation needed] They spent some time in the Netherlands in the 1970s and then returned to England where they teamed up with another Royal College student, Keith Griffiths, who produced all of their films. The trio formed Koninck Studios in 1980, which is currently based in Southwark, south London.

The Quays' works (1979-present) show a wide range of often esoteric influences, starting with the Polish animators Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica and continuing with the writers Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Robert Walser and Michel de Ghelderode, puppeteers Wladyslaw Starewicz and Richard Teschner and composers Leoš Janáček, Zdeněk Liška and Leszek Jankowski, the last of whom has created many original scores for their work. Czech animator Jan Švankmajer, for whom they named one of their films (The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer), is also frequently cited as a major influence, but they actually discovered his work relatively late, in 1983, by which time their characteristic style and preoccupations had been fully formed.[2]

Most of their films feature dolls, often partially disassembled, in a dark, moody atmosphere. Perhaps their best known work is Street of Crocodiles, based on the short novel of the same name by the Polish author and artist Bruno Schulz. This short film was selected by director and animator Terry Gilliam as one of the ten best animated films of all time[3], and critic Jonathan Romney included it on his list of the ten best films in any medium (for Sight and Sound's 2002 critics' poll).[4] They have made two feature-length live action films: Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life and The Piano Tuner Of Earthquakes. They also directed an animated sequence in the film Frida.

With very few exceptions, their films have no meaningful spoken dialogue—most have no spoken content at all, while some, like The Comb (1990) include multilingual background gibberish that is not supposed to be coherently understood. Accordingly, their films are highly reliant on their music scores, many of which have been written especially for them by the Polish composer Leszek Jankowski. In 2000, they contributed a short film to the BBC's Sound On Film series in which they visualised a 20-minute piece by the avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Whenever possible, the Quays prefer to work with pre-recorded music, though Gary Tarn's score for The Phantom Museum had to be added afterwards when it proved impossible to licence music by the Czech composer Zdeněk Liška.

Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) Dir: Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid. Screenplay: Maya Deren. Cast: Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid. Music: Teiji Ito. B&W. "This film is concerned with the interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience." - Maya Deren on ''Meshes of the Afternoon''

Honestly I found this video very bizarre. I thought it was interesting to show her out of body experience and most of the film is the progression of a nightmare. The whole key thing makes me think that he wants to escape from something, the knife makes me think that it is bad enough for her to consider suicide and then the appearance of the man made me realize that she wanted to escape from her life as a wife and that she wanted something more. I thought it was interesting how her dream combined with her real life and caused her death in the end.

Harry Smith and Early Abstractions

Harry Smith was born May 29, 1923, in Portland, Oregon, and his early childhood was spent in the Pacific Northwest. Smith's father, Robert James Smith, was a watchman for the local salmon canning company. His mother, Mary Louise, taught school on the Lummi Indian reservation. Robert Smith's grandfather had been a prominent Freemason who was a Union General in the Civil War. Harry's parents were Theosophists, who exposed him to a variety of pantheistic ideas, which persisted in his fascination with unorthodox spirituality and comparative religion and philosophy. By the age of 15, Harry had spent time recording many songs and rituals of the Lummi and Samish peoples and was compiling a dictionary of several Puget Sound dialects. He later became proficient in Kiowa sign-language and Kwakiutl. In addition to developing complicated systems for transcription, he also amassed an important collection of sacred religious objects, one of a number of museological endeavors that occupied Smith throughout his life.

Smith studied anthropology at the University of Washington for five semesters between 1943 and 1944. After a weekend visit to Berkeley, during which he attended a Woody Guthrie concert, met members of San Francisco's bohemian community of artists and intellectuals, and experimented with marijuana for the first time, Smith decided that the type of intellectual stimulation he was seeking was unavailable in his student life.

It was in San Francisco that Smith began to build a reputation as one of the leading American experimental filmmakers. He showed frequently in the "Art in Cinema" screenings organized by Frank Stauffacher at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Smith not only became close with other avant-garde filmmakers in the Bay Area, such as Jordan Belson and Hy Hirsh, but traveled frequently to Los Angeles to see the films of Oskar Fischinger, Kenneth Anger, and other Southern Californians experimentalists. Smith developed his own methods of animation, using both stop motion collage techniques and, more uniquely, hand-painting directly on film. Often a single film required years of painstakingly precise labor. While a few other filmmakers had employed similar frame-by-frame processes, few matched the complexity of composition, movement, and integration in Smith's work. Smith's films have been interpreted as investigations of conscious and unconscious mental processes, while his fusion of color and sound are acknowledged as precursors of sixties psychedelia. At times, Smith spoke of his films in terms of synaethesia, the search for correspondences between color and sound and sound and movement.

Early Abstractions is comprised of six films that vary in length from 2 to 5-1/2 minutes. The works were produced over a 7-year period from 1946 to 1952. As Jonas Mekas of Anthology Film Archives has said, "You can watch them for pure color enjoyment; you can watch them for motion—Harry Smith's films never stop moving; or you can watch them for hidden symbolic meanings, alchemic signs. There are more levels in Harry Smith's work than in any other film animator I know." Inspired by Native American cultures, jazz, the Kabbala, and surrealism, Smith assembled his own cinematic universe of shape, color, light, and time.

I can see how this film is heavily influenced by the Native American culture. Even though the film is very abstract in the way that it only uses shapes but not actual objects there is some symbolism in this. For instance the most common shpae throughout this clip is a circle. Which I take to be the sun as it sets and rises since the Native American culture depended on the sun's heat for crops. The clip is very colorful like nature and patterned like Native American art. But if I didnt know the information behind the film I would have no idea what it is about because it is very abstract in the use of color and shapes and movements.