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In the fifteen years since the death of Hollywood's great cartoon studios the animated short has dwelt in limbo, with the UNESCO-cutesy films from Zagreb provoking only spasms ot rigor mortis. But in 1973, Frank Mouris's frank film gave the genre fresh new signs of life. It was perhaps the "major revelation" of the 1973 New York Film Festival; it won dozens of awards, including an Oscar; it has, deservedly, become something of a modern classic.
The nine-minute long animated work bombards the viewer with an endlessly flowing series of photo-collage images, which, together with an intriguing dual narration spoken by Mouris himself, tells the story of his life and paints an evocative portrait of middle-class America at midcentury. Behind the film lies an extensive tradition in art (including dada, surrealism, collage art, found objects, pop art) and cinema (Mouris acknowledges the influences of Vanderbeek, McLaren, Lye, Brakhage, Kubelka, Belson, and Borowczyk; but one could detect at least the indirect influences of Breer, Conner, and Harry Smith, and, further back, of Eisenstein and even Méliès). The complex soundtrack was created by Tony Schwartz, whose ideas about aural montage and sound environments were largely responsible for the film's emotional impact.
But frank film is eclectic only in the best sense of the word. Mouris synthesized everything into a completely original work-and I eagerly anticipated his subsequent projects. Now that I've seen his two new films (coney and screentest), and talked with him about his work, I'd like to offer some thoughts on Mouris's career thus far, and some speculations on his future.
Actually, Mouris had made several films before frank film, but he dismisses them as crude student experiments. His interest in film began about 1965, when he saw a program of Stan Vanderbeek's cut-out collage animation; Mouris realized that even though he didn't draw well, he could do animated films. Although he subsequently entered graduate school at Yale to study graphic design, it was there that he made several short Vanderbeek-style films; and upon graduation in 1969, he submitted, in lieu of a graphic design thesis, an ambitious animated film containing almostseventy experiments. Mouris says that he used "every trick in the book," including single-fra me filming, which has become an important element in his...