Scratchatopia

https://vimeo.com/191084066

The Short and the Sweet! Indeed! 

Steven Woloshen 1960-ban született a kanadai Lavalban. Több mint harminc évvel ezelőtt kötelezte el magát a absztrakt filmek készítése mellett, továbbá számos időalapú installációt készített már fesztiválok, galériák és múzeumok részére. A filmkészítés mellett tanárként, filmrestaurátorként, animátorként és iparművészként is dolgozik, valamint két kötet szerzője. 2010-ben jelent meg a „Recipes for Reconstruction: The Cookbook for the Frugal Filmmaker” (Rekonstrukciós receptek: A takarékos filmkészítő szakácskönyve), amely olyan kézműves, analóg filmtechnikák gyakorlati kézikönyve, mint a filmnyersanyag bomlasztása és felújítása. 2015-ben látott napvilágot a „Scratch, Crackle & Pop! A Whole Grains Approach to Making Films without a Camera” (Krsz, ropp & pukk! A kamera nélküli filmkészítés átfogó módszertana). Scratchatopia („Karcotópia”) néven a világ számos országában tartott már retrospektív vetítést a munkáiból, valamint vezetett mesterkurzusokat és kézműves filmes műhelyeket, így hazáján, Kanadán túl eddig többek között Argentínában, Marokkóban, az USÁ-ban, Szlovéniában, Ausztráliában, Franciaországban, Nagy-Britanniában, Görögországban, Portugáliában, Spanyolországban, Szlovákiában, Lengyelországban és Mexikóban. Kétszer jelölték Kanadai Kormányzói díjra, eddigi munkássága során számos kutatói és alkotói ösztöndíjban részesült, legutóbb, 2015-ben megkapta a Wiesbaden Kulturális Életműdíjat, valamint 2016-ban az ismert kanadai filmes emlékére alapított René Jodoin életműdíjat.. A BABtérben egy Steven Woloshen által vezetett mesterkurzus és egy beszélgetéssel egybekötött vetítésen ismerhetjük meg a kanadai alkotó egyedi életművét. A mesterkurzus és a beszélgetés angol nyelven zajik! Program 15.30–16.45: Mesterkurzus 17.00–19.00: Válogatás Steven Woloshen filmjeiből és beszélgetés az alkotóval (moderátor: Lichter Péter filmrendező) PRIMANIMA masterclass with Steven Woloshen Steven Woloshen was born in Laval, Canada in 1960. For more than 30 years, he has passionately created over 50 award-winning, abstract films and time-based installations for festivals, galleries and museums. He is a teacher, film conservationist, animator, craftsman and the author of two books, “Recipes for Reconstruction: The Cookbook for the Frugal Filmmaker” (2010), a hands-on manual for decay, renewal and other handmade, analogue film techniques, and “Scratch, Crackle & Pop! A Whole Grains Approach to Making Films without a Camera” (2015). Under his own banner, Scratchatopia, Woloshen has hosted solo retrospectives and taught handmade filmmaking techniques at workshops and master classes in Argentina, Morocco, USA, Slovenia, Australia, France, Great Britain, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Slovakia, Poland, Mexico as well as across Canada. Twice nominated for Canada's Governor General's award, he has received numerous research and creation grants and, most recently, was awarded the 2016 René Jodoin lifetime achievement award, and 2015 Wiesbaden Lifetime Achievement Award. Program 15.30–16.45: Masterclass 17.00–19.00: Film selection of Steven Woloshen followed by a Q&A moderated by Péter Lichter film director 

I am pleased to announce the official signing of “Scratch, Crackle & Pop!” the world’s only complete hand-made filmmaking manual, will take place at the 2017 Annecy International Animation Festival at 11:00 am on Saturday, June 17, 2017. Please join me at the Centre Bonlieu  – Boutique Festival @ bd fugue.

The signing session will run from 11:00 am to 12:30 pm. I look forward to seeing you there. Click book signing details for more details.

Canada on screen: TIFF essential 150 films;

In an extraordinarily restless and productive 40-year career as an independent filmmaker, Montreal native Steven Woloshen has extended and advanced the legacy of direct animation pioneers such as Len Lye and Norman McLaren with his remarkable body of “cameraless” animations — that is, animation etched directly on to the film surface using inks, scratching, overlays and other treatments.

Music has often been a starting point for Woloshen’s work, and he has drawn on a wide range of sources, some of them fairly obscure. For Cameras Take Five, however, he chose a familiar and beloved jazz classic: Dave Brubeck’s recording of Paul Desmond’s “Take Five,” so named because it is composed in the uncommon 5/4 time. If, as Paul Klee put it, “a line is a dot that went for a walk,” in Cameras Take Five Woloshen takes two lines for a dance across the plane of the movie screen, where they come together, break apart, multiply, merge, and divide again. Woloshen’s handmade original, drawn on clear film, is used as the negative, so that the original tones and colours are reversed when the film is printed and then projected in the widescreen CinemaScope format.

In many respects this concise, elegant and joyful film marks the culmination of Woloshen’s work in “pure” cameraless animation. The birth of Woloshen’s children in the mid-2000s seems to have coincided with the artist’s turn toward what have been, at times, markedly less accessible films, though ones that nevertheless exhibit a searching intelligence and a willingness to experiment. The 2001 film The Babble on Palms, which combines found footage from a commercial film shoot with Woloshen’s direct animation, signalled this shift, and in recent years he has further broadened his range of methods to include microscopic imagery and other experimental and conceptual approaches.

STEVEN WOLOSHEN: PLEASURE AND PROVOCATION

The films of Montréal-based filmmaker Steven Woloshen remind us what a pure pleasure animation can be, while at the same time opening the field up to ideas and methods that remain unexplored in most animation. Woloshen first made his presence known with a series of promising short 16mm films in the early 1980s. These introduced the fundamental techniques and stylistic traits that he would explore in later work: abstract “direct” or “cameraless” animation; a close parallel relationship between source music and image; the combination of abstract graphics with linguistic signs; the visual contrast of hard-edged shapes against more organic curvilinear forms; extremely brief visual phrases leading into longer, more stable ones; and intense splashes of colour set against neutral black or white lines and shapes. (“Direct” or cameraless” animation, the field out of which Woloshen’s entire practice grows, encompasses an open-ended set of techniques in which an artist works directly on the film strip, adding to it with inks, paints or dyes, adhesive tapes or transparent objects, or etching into the emulsion with sharp implements.)

Following a hiatus of more than a decade, during which he worked in various capacities in the film industry, on-set and in the laboratory, Woloshen returned to his own filmmaking in the late 1990s. It’s clear that his years working in the commercial industry were far from wasted: Woloshen’s films “post-hiatus” are extraordinarily assured, showing enormous progress in aesthetics, graphic technique and understanding of lab processes. In a series of extraordinarily accomplished 35mm Cinemascope films that quickly became worldwide festival favourites – including Get Happy (1999), Ditty Dot Comma (2001) and Bru Ha Ha! (2002) – Woloshen showed that he had honed his basic tools to a fine point. These films express the joy of music, movement, colour and shape, in the tradition of direct animation pioneered by Len Lye, Norman McLaren and Harry Smith.

Soon Woloshen began to explore new paths as well. Too restless and experimental a spirit to be satisfied solely with the creation of these delightful abstract entertainments, he began to develop hybrid forms combining his advanced direct animation techniques with other forms of filmmaking. Moving and mysterious films such as The Babble On Palms (2001) and Two Eastern Hair Lines (2004) marry animated graphics with traditional cinematographic images, while a recent “archaeological” series that includes Chronicle Re-Constructions (2008) explores the organic decay of film emulsion. The Cave (2001), a one-off experiment, attests to a conceptual interest in film as an object: unlike most films, The Cave exists only as a single hand-made original, subject to gradual deterioration through repeated projection. Phont Cycle (2006) returns to the use of arbitrary linguistic signs from early films such as Son of Dada (1982). Here, the Tibetan letter “AH” appears from a central point, the lines flowing down and outwards like lava flows, then retracting upwards to leave the screen black. This gesture, like breathing, is repeated over and over, but the colours and textures of the letter change with each iteration, so that the film’s insistent repetition is also inflected by differentiation.

As Steven Woloshen’s work has become more diverse, it has become clear that he is an artist concerned not only with abstraction and animation, but also with essential questions about different forms of representation and signification. To watch Woloshen’s films is, first, to experience the pleasure of filmmaking engaged in a virtuoso play with its most basic elements. But the range of his work, and the divergent paths along which it has moved, show an inquisitive mind, curious to see how fundamentally different modes of graphic expression can be brought into play, into meaningful tension, in a single work of art.