In my previous article, I gathered and examined the first, short experimental efforts (Bowl, Garden, Theatre, Marble Game and Crocus). Today, on our route, we have Cels, a small bridge where forms bend, and Jefferson Circus Songs, an uncanny carnival nightmare that combines stop-motion and reality, which will burn our brain cells. If you are ready, we open the cover of the broken music box. Cels (1972) Cels, which I won’t dwell on for too long, is a short transitional work in which Pitt tests his own animation limits.
As the name suggests, we can say that it is a small laboratory experiment on how forms and images can change shape in the mind, playing with the traditional celluloid (cel) animation technique. A sketch work where the director warms up his fingers while preparing for his big visions. Although its visual rhythm is impressive, the dark vortex that will really draw us in comes exactly one year from now. Jefferson Circus Songs (1973) Now we are at the point where Pitt’s pure surrealist genius begins to work at full speed.
Jefferson Circus Songs is not just an animation; A feast in which the “pixilation” technique (moving real people and objects frame by frame with stop-motion logic), one of the most arduous and strange sub-branches of the stop-motion world, is perfectly blended with cardboard animations. Masks and Childlike Terror If you remember, in our Asparagus review, we made a long psychoanalytical reading about the facelessness of the main character and the masks he constantly tries.
We clearly see that Pitt actually rehearsed this “identity and mask” obsession in this movie. The movie is shot in the basketball court of a high school in Minneapolis, but what emerges is a dream world where reality is completely reset. By dressing the child actors in the costumes they dream of and want to wear (monkey masks, gaudy princess dresses, strange figures), Pitt turns them from being actors into gears of the dream logic.
Childhood, which is pure in everyday reality, turns into an eerie, chaotic and disturbing circus in Pitt’s camera. Music Box in the Attic To describe the atmosphere of the movie; The director explained it as like watching an antique children’s music box you found in the attic, whose wind-up spring has broken and starts playing eerie melodies on its own. Here we breathe the feeling of constant disintegration of spatial integrity and dream fluidity in Maya Deren’s At Land, in an extremely colorful, childish, yet creepy carnival atmosphere.
This psychedelic circus, where life-size cardboard decorations and masked children mix together, completely refuses to present a logical story to the audience. Instead, it gives a visual hallucination in which colors and movement are intertwined. The artist’s mind bends the logical rules of the outside world and builds a brand new and frightening reality. Jefferson Circus Songs is one of the most important building blocks on which Suzan Pitt began to establish her unique “disturbing beauty” aesthetic.
After seeing this rawest, most masked form of Surrealism, it becomes much easier to understand how the artist reached a peak like Asparagus in the following years. So, in your opinion, why does the innocent and lawless dream world of childhood, combined with masks and the dull rhythm of stop-motion, leave us with such an uncanny feeling? Could the reason we are afraid of that music box actually be the chaos of our own lost childhood?
Our chronological journey will continue at full speed.
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