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# The Creativity of Pre-Digital Animation in the 1970s and ’80s
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/independent-frames-american-animation-quad-cinema/
- Published: 2018-02-02T22:13:23.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:11:01.000Z
- Description: A program of experimental American animation at the Quad is a gift, and a riotous romp through a pre-digital creative movement.
- Author: Steve Macfarlane
- Tags: Film, Quad Cinema, Review, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-18 14:37 (2018)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/02/desirepiesingleframe.jpg)

Lisa Crafts, Desire Pie (1976) (all images courtesy Quad Cinema)

Having already played at the Tate Modern and International House Philadelphia, this weekend’s too-brief [Independent Frames: American Experimental Animation in the 1970s and 1980s](https://quadcinema.com/program/independent-frames-american-experimental-animation-in-the-1970s-and-1980s/?ref=hyperallergic.com) program at Quad Cinema is an unmissable opportunity. Assembled by Herb Shellenberger, it’s a trip into a moment straddling the avant-garde heyday (including works by Stan Vanderbeek, Paul Sharits, and [Bruce Conner](https://hyperallergic.com/333217/the-early-life-of-bruce-conner-and-his-rat-bastard-bohemia/)) and the rise of DIY animation in the 1980s and ’90s, much of it made by artists with little formal training and a decidedly noncommercial agenda. Shellenberger’s lineup traces the influence of breakthroughs in optical printing and collage, while filmmakers attempted to wrench the art form back from the corporate-produced, brain-pureeing Saturday morning cartoons of yesteryear. The resultant survey, divided into five themes, is a gift, and a riotous romp through a pre-digital creative movement.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/02/circles-of-confusion2_1.jpg)

Bill Brand, Circles of Confusion (1974)

Featured in the “Exploded View” section, [Bill Brand](http://www.billbrand.net/?ref=hyperallergic.com)’s 1972 short *Zip-Tone-Cat-Tune* reanimates 8mm home movies of a house cat through a “zip-a-tone” overlay, a gradient that Brand used to pull additional negatives and positives of the original image. Inspired by Baroque musical compositional structure, the film is a thrilling glimpse at the analogue processes available at the time to isolate filmed matter from negative space, and to create the illusion of texture from a fundamentally two-dimensional image.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/02/new_fangled.png)

George Griffin, New Fangled (1992)

Independent Frames includes a few works (including 1975’s cheeky, phallocentric cartoon *The Club*) by animator and designer [George Griffin](http://www.geogrif.com/?ref=hyperallergic.com), who will be at Quad to present his two-minute short *New Fangled*, from 1992\. It’s a play in metaphors structured around an audio recording of three “creatives” sussing out an unspecified ad campaign: Griffin uses shapeshifting visuals to track the maddening fluctuations in jargon and, duly, the interplay between the stale and the fresh. More than a few animators doing contract work in the ’80s and ’90s would find themselves in this position; while the kind of artistic innovations programmed here remain niche, more than a few of these artists would go on to make work for mainstream TV and advertising platforms.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/02/milk_of_amnesia.png)

Jeff Scher, Milk of Amnesia (1992)

In the “Introspection” section, we have the rare chance to see rotoscope artist [Jeff Scher](http://fezfilms.net/?ref=hyperallergic.com) present his hypnotizing daydream *Milk of Amnesia* (1992) on a celluloid print. While Scher’s aesthetic is technically more “pop art” than some of the other artists featured, *Milk of Amnesia* is among the most psychedelic shorts on offer. Hand-painted and rotoscoped to match film shot on 16mm, Scher’s frames are vibrantly colorful and meticulously detailed, but the mirage is exploded whenever he slots in a two-dimensional photograph or shaded pencil drawing, rescaling the dimensionality of the pictures. Scher is also a master at using rotoscope to slow down and speed up the audience’s perception of time.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/02/01glass-gardens-3000px.jpg)

Lisa Crafts, Glass Gardens (1982)

There are two seminal works by artist [Lisa Crafts](https://www.lisacrafts.com/?ref=hyperallergic.com), who will also be in attendance. The final program, “Bodymania,” includes 1976’s cel-animated *Desire Pie*, a very funny Second Wave response to the glut of male-centric erotic cartoons that followed the putative liberation of the 1960s. And there’s *Glass Gardens* (1982), a graphite-on-paper vision of a woman wandering a post-consumerist dystopia. Crafts’s wordless manifesto packs a lot of emotion into six minutes: from the first plucks of [Laraaji](http://laraaji.blogspot.com/?ref=hyperallergic.com)’s harp-centric score, *Glass Gardens* is a sad-eyed reflection on the future that faces a society stuck in the interminably souped-up present.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/02/lisa-draws-desire-pie.jpg)

Lisa Crafts draws Desire Pie

Famous for commissioned murals that decorate Boston’s MBTA Green Line, artist [Mary Beams](https://vimeo.com/user56879876?ref=hyperallergic.com) gets a kind of miniature retrospective within Shellenberger’s program: her hand-drawn squiggle line animations are triumphs of simplicity, protoplasms that can be withholding and mysterious (*Whale Noises* more than delivers on its premise), but never less than human. A trio of short works between 1975 and 1980 animates footage that appears to be taken from the artist’s own life; she seamlessly moves from “camera angles” (such as when she looks down a pair of legs in the bathtub in *Tub Film*, or makes silhouettes of passengers on a bus in *Going Home Sketchbook*) to a simple line on a page. Like the best animation it doesn’t just please the eye, but also inspires: Beams points to a febrile world of experience that can’t be reduced to a mere sequence of moving pictures, but gives it her best shot anyway.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/02/beamshungrypoem.jpg)

Mary Beams, “Hungry Poem”

[*Independent Frames: American Experimental Animation in the 1970s and 1980s*](https://quadcinema.com/program/independent-frames-american-experimental-animation-in-the-1970s-and-1980s/?ref=hyperallergic.com) *is running at Quad Cinema (34 West 13th St, West Village, Manhattan) February 2–4.*