Paul Bush
1956 (70 лет)He has since made numerous short and medium length films including The Cows Drama (1984), His Comedy (1994), Rumour of True Things (1996), Furniture Poetry (1999), While Darwin Sleeps (2004), and many others. He has won prizes at animation festivals in the Netherlands, Barcelona, Zagreb, Hiroshima, Bombay, Chicago and other places throughout the world. His website contains extracts of many of his films.
His films "Furniture Poetry"(1999) and 'While Darwin Sleeps' (2004) closely resemble Jan Švankmajer's animation 'Historia Naturae, Suita' (1967)
In addition to directing and animating, Bush pioneered a technique seen in a number of his films, including The Albatross. The technique involves scratching frame by frame directly into the surface of colour filmstock over live action footage, creating an animated sequence which resembles traditional wood engraving. Since 2002 Bush has increasingly focused on time lapse portraits of people and more conventional animation including a collaboration with artist Lisa Milroy which produced Geisha Grooming (2003).
The Cow's Drama
Paul Bush
Drama, from the Greek, to do, act, or perform. A composition in which a story is related by means of dialogue and action and is represented with accompanying gesture, costume and scenery, as in real life, a play. The simplest story; a cow in a field, a day passes, articulated by a sequence of simple actions. Another day passes and the actions only vary with the chance events that make one day different from any other. Between the days three traditional songs about work, love and death are sung. These are stories too, but of generalisation, metaphor and myth, whereas the cow's drama follows only the surface pattern of events, the specific.
The Cow's Drama
The Albatross
Paul Bush
Julian Maynard Smith
A ship sets sail on an epic voyage through malignant natural and supernatural elements from which one man alone survives. An adaptation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner illustrated by19th Century wood engravings which are animated by scratching directly into the surface of color filmstock. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with its message of ecological redemption has a curiously contemporary resonance, but it is at the level of the mythic that the poem has lasting relevance; for this epic tale of extraordinary events simply mirrors the struggle that each human being faces on their own in his or her life. -VDB
The Albatross
The Rumour of True Things
Paul Bush
Most of the moving images produced for science, industry, commerce, and medicine are seen only by specialized audiences, and are then discarded soon after they are made. Rumour Of True Things is constructed entirely from such moving image ephemera, including computer games, weapons testing, production lines, monitoring, and marriage agency tapes. Rumour Of True Things is a remarkable anthropological portrait of a technologically-based society obsessed with imaging itself. -VDB
The Rumour of True Things
While Darwin Sleeps . . .
Paul Bush
More than three thousand insects appear in this film each for a single frame. As the colours glow and change across their bodies and wings it is as if the genetic programme of millions of years is taking place in a few minutes. It is a rampant creation that seems to defy the explanations of evolutionists and fundamentalists. It is like a mescalin dream of Charles Darwin's. The film is inspired by the insect collection of Walter Linsenmaier in the natural history museum of Luzern. As each insect follows the other, frame by frame, they appear to unfurl their antennae, scuttle along, or flap their wings as if trying to escape the pinions which attach them forever in their display cases. Just for a moment the eye is tricked into believing that these dead creatures still live . . .
While Darwin Sleeps...
Pas de Deux de Deux
Paul Bush
A parasitic presence has completely taken over the body of its host while allowing its movements and mannerisms to remain intact; a pas de deux from classical ballet has been restaged frame by frame with the two original dancers replaced by four new dancers. The movement remains continuous, but in each frame a different person occupies the dancers’ body spaces.
Pas de Deux de Deux
Jekyll and Hyde
Paul Bush
Imagine that the camera is possessed with a psychosis similar to human schizophrenia; suppose that this disease subtly changes every single frame of film while leaving the narrative superficially intact. A reworking of 1941 MGM version of Jekyll and Hyde in which the actors are replaced in every single frame.
Jekyll and Hyde
Elegy
Paul Bush
Stone and light, just stone and light. ‘Elegy is a form of poetry natural to the reflective mind. Sorrow and love became the principal themes of the elegy. Elegy presents everything as lost and gone or absent and future.’ (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
Elegy