Professor Ragona Speaks on Panel About Stan VanDerBeek Organized by the New York Film-Makers Cooperative

Posted on October 26, 2020

On October 28 at 7:30 PM ET, Professor Melissa Ragona, filmmaker Martha Colburn, and artist Art Jones will discuss Stan VanDerBeek’s films in an event titled “Seven Animated Films (1957-65): Collage as Weapon and Whim in the Work of Filmmaker, Stan VanDerBeek.” Registration in advance is required here.

Ragona, Colburn, and Jones will discuss “Seven Animated Collage Films” by Stan VanDerBeek, 1957-1965, preserved through the National Film Preservation Foundation Avant-Garde Masters Grant through the initiatives by Film-Makers’ Cooperative and the Stan VanDerBeek Archive. A pioneer in the development of experimental film and live-action animation techniques, Stan VanDerBeek (1927-1984) achieved widespread recognition in the American avant-garde cinema. An advocate of the application of a utopian fusion of art and technology, he began making films in 1955. In the 1960s, he produced theatrical, multimedia pieces and computer animation, often working in collaboration with Bell Telephone Laboratories. In the 1960s, he constructed a “Movie Drome” in Stony Point, New York, which was an audiovisual laboratory for the projection of film, dance, magic theater, sound and other visual effects. His multimedia experiments included movie murals, projection systems, planetarium events and the exploration of early computer graphics and image-processing systems.

This program will be available through Vimeo on Demand October 19-27. Titles include VanDerBeek’s most popular and influential works and represent some of the most significant contributions to Twentieth Century Experimental Film.

Panel website

Image: See Saw Seems (1965). 35 mm film transferred to video. Courtesy of the © Estate of Stan VanDerBeek All rights reserved.