Avant-Garde Personal Films
Celestial Navigations
- interested in unexplored possibilities of animation
- 3D shapes (CGI)
- found objects
- highly experimental
- Considered his magnum opus
- Tracks sun on wall of studio
- Complex meditation of time and space
- Questions existence and relationship to nature and its cycles, as well as
- How small our role is within much greater cosmic cycles
"In this complex blend of philosophical and technical enquiry, the filmmaker plots the seasonal procession of the sun from equinox to equinox using stop motion, time-lapse photography and drawn animation. Jarnow watches the shadows cross his studio wall and travels to Stonehenge to view the summer solstice. A film by a master animator which captures, first person, the experience of being, in the words of Buckminster Fuller, 'a passenger on Spaceship Earth.'"
-John Luther Schofill
Background
Excerpts from A Book of Waves, 1975
"a summer spent painting waves at Ocean Beach, Fire Island: high tides, low tides, storms, calm and moonlit. These watercolors are on 3" x 5" index cards,
occasionally awash in a rising sea."
"panoramic landscapes/architectural space/deconstructed small town stories/folds of private geologies/inside vistas"
Al Jarnow
- Premed student at Dartmouth, then architecture, then fine arts (painting)
- New-York based, early 70s
- Self-taught animator
- Created wildly successful animation with wife
- Breakthrough with film for Sesame Street
Personal Influence (i.e. Why I Love Him)
Interdisciplinary explorations of art and science
- Mature style appeared with Tondo (1973)
- Bridges "inane and groundbreaking"
- Difficult and time-consuming 3D effect
Sesame Street
Yakety Yak, early 1970s
- Application of fine art skills to animation
- Ability to translate complex ideas into easy-to-understand visuals (children)
- Motifs of natural objects (beach, waves, topology, etc.)
- Fun with randomness and experimentation
- Only values own opinion and opinions of those close to him
- Most importantly, his unabashed dedication to both knowledge and fun
- Concurrent with personal avant-garde explorations
- Obsession with cycles in time and space (and cats)
- One of the first proponents of live-action animation
Facial Recognition, 1978
Three Primary Colors with OK Go, 2013
Tondo, 1973
"Painter, filmmaker, software developer, exhibit designer, educator and tinkerer."
Cosmic Clock, 1979