PST ART + Science Family Festival: Color Experimentation in Animated Shorts, 1933–1987
PST ART + Science Family Festival: Color Experimentation in Animated Shorts, 1933–1987
For almost 100 years, color has inspired artists to experiment and push the boundaries of the moving image with dazzling musical abstractions created through a variety of techniques. Inquisitive, trippy, and rebellious, these moving image works challenge narrative conventions, influencing popular culture and Hollywood. Beginning with films directed by Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye, and Mary Ellen Bute, all of which are featured in the Color in Motion exhibition in the Experimentation gallery, this program unfolds chronologically to present eight shorts that remind us of the wondrous places visual music and color abstraction can take us. Suitable for all ages, this program is presented in conjunction with PST ART + Science Family Festival weekend and is presented for free.
Programmed and note by K.J. Relth-Miller adapted from Color in Motion exhibition text.
Some films contain elements that may trigger seizures for visitors with photosensitive epilepsy.
Circles (Kreise)
DIRECTED BY: Oskar Fischinger. 1933–34. 2 min. Germany. Color. Sound. Digital. Courtesy of Center for Visual Music.
Rainbow Dance
DIRECTED BY: Len Lye. 1936. 4 min. UK. Color. Sound. Digital. Courtesy of the Len Lye Foundation and the British Postal Museum and Archive. Originally 35mm, Gasparcolor, sound. Digital version from material preserved and made available by Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision.
Color Rhapsodie
DIRECTED BY: Mary Ellen Bute. 1948. 6 min. USA. Color. Sound. Digital. Courtesy of Center for Visual Music.
Color
DIRECTED BY: Lidia Garcia Milan. 1955. 4 min. Uruguay. Color. Sound. Digital. Courtesy of Laboratorio de Cine FAC.
Catalog
DIRECTED BY: John Whitney. 1961. 7 min. USA. Color. Sound. Digital. Courtesy of the Academy Film Archive and John Whitney Jr.
Notes on a Triangle
DIRECTED BY: René Jodoin. 1966. 5 min. Canada. Color. Sound. Digital. Courtesy of National Film Board of Canada.
Samadhi
DIRECTED BY Jordan Belson. 1967. 5 min. USA. Color. Sound. Digital. Courtesy of Center for Visual Music.
The Dante Quartet
DIRECTED BY: Stan Brakhage. 1987. 6 min. USA. Color. Silent. 16mm. Courtesy of Canyon Cinema.
Color in Motion: Chromatic Explorations of Cinema is curated by Jessica Niebel, senior exhibitions curator, with Sophia Serrano, assistant curator, Alexandra James Salichs, research assistant, and Manouchka Kelly Labouba, former curatorial assistant, Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Special thanks to the project advisory group: Barbara Flueckiger, Ranjani Mazumdar, Kirsten Moana Thompson, and Joshua Yumibe.
The PST ART + Science Family Festival is presented by Getty, hosted by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County at the La Brea Tar Pits, and produced by Edinburgh Science Festival. The Family Festival is part of PST ART. The latest edition of this landmark regional event, PST ART: Art & Science Collide explores the intersections of art and science, both past and present. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit pst.art.
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Education Program
November 9–11, 2024
Color Theory in Motion Family Workshops
Families will create short, stop-motion animated clips of abstract and experimental images created by mixing and painting with watercolors.