Pulses of abstraction: Episodes from a history of animation

This dissertation is a history of abstract animation in cinema that coalesces around four particular moments, beginning in the 1920s and ending in the early 1970s. While abstraction in multiple kinds of film production and genres appears throughout the history of film, these episodes were each important points in that history when artists and filmmakers interrogated the idea of abstraction in relation to the materiality of cinema. In short, they were not only attracted to abstraction as a particular aesthetic, but also to animation and synthesizing the aesthetics of motion and the dispositif of cinema with forms and issues surrounding abstraction. This combination of modernist aesthetic investigation and play with the technological origins of cinematic motion has largely been neglected by film studies. My dissertation fills this historical gap, which has theoretical implications on how both animation and the cinema are traditionally defined and discussed. Though not a catalogued history of abstract animation during these periods, one of the primary goals of this dissertation is to trace the forms and aesthetic strategies that were most prevalent within them. A second and interrelated goal of my dissertation is to make an argument about aesthetics in abstract animation and to provide both a critical vocabulary for its formal structures and a conceptual understanding of its modes of expression.;Drawing on extensive archival research, this project emphasizes the history of techniques and technologies deployed for the production of images within abstract animation by coupling materialist histories with formal analyses. I begin by describing this approach and also engage with theoretical debates about the nature of animation and how to situate it within the field of film studies. I argue for a new, more inclusive definition that is attendant to both the diversity of materials and technologies employed in animation and to the perceptual impact of the generated images. While previous accounts have tended to treat animation in isolation from broader currents in cinema, I take up these moments in this history of abstract animation to show that it can offer the material out of which a more inclusive, flexible and dynamic account of cinema can be built. Highlighting a rich array of graphic techniques---such as etching directly onto the filmstrip, generating rapid, discontinuous montage sequences, or using digital vector displays and programming technologies---I show that animation is and has been an especially privileged site for the investigation of technology, form, and aesthetic experience.;The motivation for such uses is embedded within a history of aesthetics and the avant-garde and I argue that the development of abstract animation in each of the episodes I have identified occurs through a dialectical relationship between two fundamental aesthetic aims: transcendence and immanence. I define these terms and show how artists engaged with this dialectic in different ways. I begin in chapter one with Thomas Wilfred and his color and projection experiments that led to his creation of the clavilux and his art form called lumia. I argue that his coupling of motion and color work within an occult tradition that attempts to visualize forces or intensities that lie behind sensations and launch spectators into a cosmic consciousness and mystical fourth dimension. Chapter two is an analysis of Len Lye's scratch animations that he made in late 1950s and through the 1960s. I argue that Lye's moving abstractions operate through a dialectical play between material form and phenomenological force, one that emphasizes a paradoxical reduction of form and explosion of vitality. When in motion, his lines' permutations take on an animism that no longer simply bares the afterlife of Lye's kinesis, the "action become visible," but become a source of their own vitality and transmission of movement in viewers. Chapter three focuses on Robert Breer's collage films and optical toys and argues that his formal manipulation of the interval allows viewers to inhabit new modes of temporality. Through radical juxtapositions of images that are generated at a rapid pace Breer creates impressionistic flows of motion while simultaneously opening spectators onto other regimes of time. Chapter four examines the development of digital filmmaking and animation technologies in the 1960s and 1970s through an analysis of John Whitney's and Larry Cuba's films. I argue that Whitney's and Cuba's engagement with new media is structured around a give and take between animator and machine, a constant negotiation with the machine and its own operational logic. The abstractions meant to produce pleasure in pattern recognition are in many ways limited to certain effects, an operation Cuba explicitly investigates in his later works. The conclusion focuses on the contemporary work of Lewis Klahr who, I argue, re-animates the history of abstract animation I describe and points to how many current artists routinely engage with that history.