As Human As I'll Ever Be

Silent cartoon.

Silent cartoon.

This hand-painted and elaborately step-printed work begins with a flourish of reds and yellows and purples in palpable fruit-like shapes interspersed by darkness, then becomes lit lightning-like by sharp multiply-colored twigs-of shape, all resolving into shapes of decay.

Multiple thrusts and then retractions of oranges, reds, blues, and the flickering, almost black, textural dissolves suggesting an amalgam approaching script.

Dark, fast-paced symmetry in mixed weave of tones moving from oranges & yellows to blue-greens, then retreating (dissolves of zooming away) to both rounded and soft-edged shapes shot with black.

It might not take you long to cotton on to the trick of this film, but the results are still impressive. Though the various strings, wools and embroideries if this film are certainly animated in one sense, it is not through stop-motion animation. The time-consuming process of manipulating threads frame-by-frame is avoided by simply using reverse film techniques.

Shows masked mental patients enacting various schizophrenic symptoms as they were understood at the time. A disturbing film that raises questions about the condition and treatment of its subjects. (archive.org) “Abstract: This film describes and demonstrates four types of schizophrenia. Filmed at various New York institutions, it shows patients singly and grouped in large, outside recreational areas. Some patients are blindfolded. Symptoms shown include: social apathy, delusions, hallucinations, hebephrenic reactions, cerea flexibilitas, rigidity, motor stereotypes, posturing, and echopraxia.” (Guide to Mental Health Motion Pictures)

Taken from The ABCs of Death; a man arrives at the beach to surf with bricks, in an attempt to end his life.

Sergei, an aspiring musician, accidentally meets a deaf-mute girl, Natasha, and falls in love with her. He has to change a lot to prepare himself for a new relationship with a different and very vulnerable person. Natasha is like an alien or an alieness with whom Sergei has to find a completely new language to speak. Natasha tries hard to understand his musical world. The problem is that Natasha lost her hearing during the war and associates sounds with fear and pain. Even a symphony concert is torture for her.

From the 17th floor of an office building, Pierre is staring out a colleague that is here for hours.

A rare spoof. With the success of the 1925 film, The Lost World, it is common that when something is popular and successful, it is bound to be a subject for parodies and cash-in attempts. One of them was The Lost Whirl. This film featured stop-motion animation by Joseph L. Roop, who worked on the original classic, The Lost World.

Elaborate petal-like and multicolored flowers rising in white space until the whole field is as if crushed by floral designs in madly-swift mixtures of every conceivable previous shape from the Persian Series.

Buster Keaton gets involved in a series of misunderstandings involving a horse and cart. Eventually he infuriates every cop in the city when he accidentally interrupts a police parade.

A. Knutt, a crack-brained chemist, discovers an elixir that will endow dolls with life. He does not know that it will change living persons to dolls. He shows his invention to the Toy King and his lovely daughter, and Ruby is overcome by the fumes and is changed into a doll, eloping with a doll lover and undergoing many strange adventures.

A contemplative, seemingly timeless record of the years Hutton spent in Southeast Asia while working as a merchant seaman. Jon Jost writes, "The film is rich with truly wonderful visions: a thick, white porcelain cup perched on a ship's rail, the tea within swaying gently in sync with the ship while the sea rushes by beyond…the faces of crewmen posing awkwardly but also movingly for the camera; a cockfight on ship; scenes from a bucolic pre–Pol Pot Phnom Penh. Images has the haunting elegiac resonance of Eugène Atget's Paris, the echo of a time and place that was." - MoMA

Silent World War I (WWI) romantic melodrama (based on the novel by William Dudley Pelly) .

Two girls spend the evening together. You'll never believe what happens next!

Florence is a contemplative study of light and shadows, textures and planes, that makes beautiful use of the tonal qualities of black and white film. (mubi.com)

At the center are takes which do not change - a tree in a field in Vermont, U.S.A. Since the film was shot over a period of fifty days, the single frame shots create a storm of pictures.

Phemie, an avowed man-hater, marries Joe, the village blacksmith.