Category / WRITING
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CAMERA OBSCURA Ian White
This text was commissioned to accompany the release of Richard Squires’ film PROGRAMME which premiered at New Work UK at Whitechapel, 2007. Pornography is like silent film. Both share a formal drive that turns action into a demonstration of itself for the sake of entertainment. When a door is opened in a silent film we…
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LET ME FEEL YOUR FINGER FIRST: MEET THE FAMILY Esther Leslie
It is all a matter of reproduction. Cartoons and comics are often populated by families, little bands of somehow-related squabblers and jerks: from The Katzenjammer Kids through The Kin-der Kids, The Flintstones to Family Guy. Families are products of reproduction (the biological, genetical sort), as are comics and cartoons (the technological sort). The adventures of…
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DOOZY: THE TRIUMPH OF FAILURE Benedict Morrison
About forty minutes in, just past its halfway point, Richard Squires’ Doozy (2018) explicitly raises the issue of failure. In this unconventional documentary on the life and work of American actor Paul Lynde, the issue is a key one. John Airlie and Paul Wells, two of the film’s academic talking heads, comment that failure defines…
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ACTING DUMB & PLAYING DEAD Let Me Feel Your Finger First in conversation with Angela Kingston
Angela Kingston: Ontologically Anxious Organism is an episodic series of animation and comic strips. How did you settle on the rock as a ‘character’ – and eponymous ‘hero’? Let Me Feel Your Finger First: The idea for the charactercame about partly because of seeing these comic rocks in European graphics novels like The Smurfs and…
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FRANCIS Esther Leslie
Often cited as the first fully animated film, Emile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) opens with the animator’s hand drawing into life his character, a clown, who immediately mutates into a man in a top hat. The next 80-odd seconds are a continual whirl of transformation, turbulence, disturbance, dislocation, indecorous responses and illogic: a mini-narrative that is…