Manipulating psychosexual imagery within a surrealist and tricky bestiary, Suzan Pitt is one of the first great American animators. Between suggestive metaphors and grinning black humour, she makes a multitude of techniques coexist in the plan and infuse them with an always seductive love of the hands. Making available on MUBI a series of shorts of her creation is the opportunity to return, at the discretion of a few titles, to the career of this notable director.
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Suzan Pitt, brief biography
1943, Kansas City, bottom of the American Midwest. That's where it's born. Suzan Pitt, in a family whose only artistic fibre lies in her grandmother, a chapelière. Passionate about drawing, her parents will push her to continue in this direction.
Thus she graduated in painting, asserting her taste for the work of Francis Bacon, Richard Lindner or David Hockney. From the age of 26, she began to produce her first films (a number of which will be excavated below), which will soon become coveted by various American museums. It's Asparagus in 1979, which brought him a wider consecration, both in the world of cinema and in contemporary art.
She will pursue a life of constant creation, creating an art of striking feminism and total freedom. Shared between teaching, fashion and drawing, it will end up in 2019 following a cancer of the overwhelming pancreas. She goes away by legging us a gallery of films that have been able to mark the history of the seventh art, now preserved by The Academy Film Archive In the USA.
Crocus (1972)
One of the first achievements of Suzan Pitt, DIY here with bric and broc: animation of paper cut out (cutout animation), home music and noise, drawing with visible features... Everything smells like craft in this Crocus, and that's what makes this court of seven minutes charming.
History? A woman seems to want to give herself pleasure. Yet, a riddle of elements of domestic life accumulates until the surreal explosion... One Jeanne Dielman under psychotropic, as much fun as visually charming, which is an excellent entry into the career of the American plastician.
Jefferson Circus Songs (1975)
A few years later CrocusSuzan Pitt offers us with Jefferson Circus Songs a strange freakshow mixing as much stop-motion in pixilation, animation of cut papers and real shots.
Then begins a procession sometimes dissonant and disturbing, sometimes playful and amusing (slapstick sometimes), created with the same love of a hand that obviously reflected on the screen. A short defeat of any need for narration that simply sinks more and more into this strange burlesque carnival quite fun!
Asparagus (1979)
A suggestive leg around which a decidedly phallic snake wraps invites us to penetrate, rhythmic by notes of jazz, a psychedelic and (of course) surrealistic antre. The burrow of a rabbit with a gossip? Not so sure... Rather the den of a repressed female desire, lacking or unspeakable, whose impulses explode on the screen in an erotic bazaar bulking the plans. Societal norms, impulses that one does not even confess to oneself, power of art, Asparagus a truly exciting bestiary during its 18 minutes.
Still mixing techniques, 2D and 3D, Suzan Pitt creates with Asparagus an extremely dense thematically and visually richly. Scheduled in a midnight session with a certain David Lynch and no less experimental sound EraserheadOne can feel the influence that the two American artists, artists and filmmakers could have, one for the other. In short, an absolutely amazing and important short in the history of cinema that took no less than four years of creation for Suzan Pitt! An unmanageable, just...
Joy Street (1995)
A chilly wind sweeps through the bleak Joe Street. At the window, a gloomy woman lets her look at the cold and dead macadam. A deep melancholy simmers her, gradually pushing her to suicide. Yet, a strange visitor, after having taken him through a decidedly macabre Styx, will take him to a country otherwise more joyful...
Opening on a dull and cold imagery, Joy Street he will explore the meanderings of depression on the background of a (magnificent) B.O. jazzy, before Suzan Pitt will inject in his short a madness of which she-only has the secret. At the same time there will be an explosion of techniques superimposed on depressing imaging from the beginning (from watercolour to flats of color sometimes turning almost to abstraction, photographs, a game with colors and black and white...). A powerful short, always crossed by a thousand visual ideas, whose theme brings him closer to the next film we are about to discuss, El Doctor, created 11 years later.
El Doctor (2006)
An anglophone alcoholic doctor, lost in the middle of Mexico, gets pulled off a night of drinking for an emergency at the Hospital. Between quasi-horrific visions and situations marked by a humor decidedly dark, Suzan Pitt shoots us with El Doctor in a strange cabinet of macabre curiosities, where the hospital is portrayed as a real factory with machabies.
Less than Asparagus, El Doctor It is more about its narration, but it does not prevent some surrealistic drifts. A dark short film, doped by the Mexican imagination, always oscillating between pure nihilism and disturbing comic shifts. We feel a certain turn taken in the filmography of Suzan Pitt, which will be confirmed with the following short film...
Visitation (2013)
A narrator gets overwhelmed at night by the creatures of his own mind. They wake up to search the circumvolutions of his brain and dissect his thoughts. Then come visions that have enough to give him good insomnia...
One El Doctor but amputated with his black humour, moving traits and granulosity of Visitation brings him closer to the experiments (also in court) of a certain David Lynch. Desperate film, mingling with pure abstraction on the narrator's voice-off as much as the spectral appearances of disarrayed beings, soon tortured, which make it the most tormented short of selection. A short film that goes to the os and drags us into ice abyss in just 9 minutes!
Thanks for the beautiful discovery, I had never heard of this woman.
Hehe cool with pleasure 😉
... constant narration of nihilism and sexual impulses. We were talking about Suzan Pitt, here is another genius cartoonist to discover thanks to several simultaneous [...]