Suzan Pitt
1943 - 2019In 1968 she began making animated films which were inspired by her paintings “My painted images seem to have a past and future and through animation I could imagine and dramatize their stories”. Her film "ASPARAGUS"'premiered in an installation at the Whitney Museum in 1979 and ran for two years with David Lynch’s ERASERHEAD in the midnight shows at the Waverly Theater and the NuArt theater in Los Angeles. A retrospective of Suzan Pitt’s prize-winning animated films was presented in 2017 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her paintings and films are in the permanent collections of the Walker Art Center, The Museum of Modern Art, The Stedeliik Museum Amsterdam and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Los Angeles. Her animated films have been featured at hundreds of prestigious venues around the world, including the Sundance Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the Ottawa International Animated Film Festival, the Morelia International Film Festival, and the Image Forum Film Festival in Tokyo.
El Doctor
Suzan Pitt
In a small Mexican town, a bitter, ailing, alcoholic doctor stumbles onto the street towards his car. In a flash he is whisked away by two approaching medical attendants to the nearby hospital to heal a patient with holes throughout his body. The doctor sees no hope and lets the man die. As he walks back towards his car, a talking gargoyle admonishes the old doctor and tells him he'd be better off committing suicide. In his car, the doctor's heart begins to give way. As he approaches death, the saint of emptiness appears to show the old man a new way of seeing life
El Doctor
Visitation
Suzan Pitt
Mark Bringelson
Surrealistic and strange, cast in grainy 16mm images, the film VISITATION allows an imaginary glimpse into the aura of 'an outer-world night'...the visions in the film are summoned from the filmmaker's imagining of a mythical eternity which is beautiful but fraught with pain, exposed by the ether voices and figures which inhabit the eternal ballet beneath our consciousness.
Visitation
Jefferson Circus Songs
Suzan Pitt
Alanna Fargo, Steve Clement
Created in the summer of 1973 in the basketball court of Jefferson High School in Minneapolis Jefferson Circus Songs uses both cut-out animation and pixilation to create a “circus” of surreal happenings. The actors are Minneapolis school children dressed in fantasy costumes- each child imagined the roll they wanted to play (princess, monkey, etc).
Jefferson Circus Songs
Twenty Cigarettes
James Benning
Sompot Chidgasornpongse, Francesca Sloane
Celebrated for his minimal, monumental landscape studies, James Benning turns to the intimacy of the portrait in his latest film, TWENTY CIGARETTES. Referencing Warhol’s screen tests, 1930s Hollywood glamour, and the disappearing cigarette break, the film captures 20 of Benning’s friends (including filmmaker Sharon Lockhart, cultural theorist Dick Hebdige, and book editor Janet Jenkins) satiating their smoke cravings. Each shot’s length is determined by the time it takes each subject to smoke a cigarette, and over the course of the film a dynamic range of personalities emerges out of an array of physical characteristics, distinctive settings, and personal relationships to the camera. (Amy Beste and Jessica Bardsley)
Twenty Cigarettes
Cartoon Noir
Jiří Barta, Paul Vester
Six animated shorts eschew traditional animation by featuring supernatural elements and darker themes, such as alien snatchings, life among mannequins and a spiritual rebirth. Among the films are "Ape," which features a couple fighting over a cooked monkey every night; "The Story of the Cat and the Moon," which is a tale of unrequited love; and "Gentle Spirit," which is based on a Fyodor Dostoyevsky story.
Cartoon Noir
Pinball
Suzan Pitt
Think of PINBALL as a spinning flying saucer which lands in your yard, performs, and then flies away to the sound of film flapping in a projector... The film visualizes George Antheil's 1952 revision of "Ballet Mecanique" using trigger fast cutting, painted imagery and sound effects. It might be described as "visual music." Let loose from narrative confines, PINBALL is an intense abstraction of animated paintings by Suzan Pitt.
Pinball
Whitney Commercial
Suzan Pitt
Commissioned by David Bienstock, creator of the New American Film Series at the Whitney Museum of Art to raise funds for the second season of the series. The film was projected at the end of each program and a box to receive donations was placed at the exit of the theater. Whitney Commercial ran for two or three years until the Museum agreed to sponsor the series on its own which has continued to the present season.
Whitney Commercial
