Ed Emshwiller was a visual artist who made amazing 16 mm films in the 1960s, mostly shot in color, and some of these included double exposures created simply by rewinding the cameras. He was one of the earliest video artists. In the 1970s he began his experiments in video, combining computer animation with live-action.

Films

Dance Chromatic (1959) 7’
Transformation (1959) 5’
Lifelines (1960) 7’
Thanatopsis (1962) 5’
Totem (1963) 16’
George Dumpson’s Place (1964) 8’
Relativity (1966) 36’
Carol (1970) 6’
Film With Three Dancers (1970) 19’

About Transformation: The pointillist score accompanies changing line, form, and color to create an animated film painting, achieved through the exploration of spontaneous abstractions. Utilizes evolving changes style, technique …

About Lifelines: A combination of animated line drawings with movements of a live model.

About Thanatopsis: This was Emshwiller’s first film, featuring brother Mac Emshwiller and sharing the title withWilliam Cullen Bryant’s 1817 poem.

About Totem: A filmic interpretation of a modern dance ballet by Alvin Nikolais. Earth, fire, water and primordial mysteries in a cine-dance.

About Relativity: “..a complex, metaphoric statement of man’s place in the universe, from a modernist perspective. Significantly, this draws on both science and metaphysics. The most accomplished craftsman of the American avant-garde, Emshwiller uses his handheld camera as if an extension of a dancer’s body, for sensuous tracking shots and intricate movements. Combined with his complete control over tools and technique, this creates a visually dense and mysterious work that comments on man’s evolution, the relativity of his striving, his slightly ridiculous persistence, sexual drives, and possibly hopeful future.” (Amos Vogel)

“What Emshwiller really wants is to become a camera himself! Strange images, strange thoughts must be going through the head (body) of this man. He knows that the camera is blind. All cameras are blind. It’s Emshwiller who makes the camera see the world that way, it’s he who needs to see the world that way, it’s he who twists and turns it and leads it into all the strange and unseen ways, it’s Emshwiller’s body that is vomiting out its existential memories and suspicions.”
— Jonas Mekas

Format DVD Interzone
Original format 16mm
Language: English / Subtitles in French
Booklet 44 pages (French, English)
Total runtime 109 min