» Experimental Narratives & Avant-Garde Shorts

Through her short film work, the artist occupied a unique position within the world of experimental animation. She drew upon the surrealist tradition of artists like Leonora Carrington, Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop cartoons, and underground comics. She was an inheritor of the animation tradition of Winsor McCay, especially his comic strip series Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend (1904, which was later made into a film by the Edison Co. in 1906), in which he probed the inner world of dreams as sites for whimsy, imagination, wit and nightmares, depicting human fears and delusions. Most significantly, though, Pitt relied upon her interior world, through which she vividly displayed her female psyche on the film canvas. As renown author and animator John Canemaker has observed, “She put her undiluted, unadulterated, uncensored dreams on screen.”

Pitt’s most famous film was ASPARAGUS, a hypnotic, wordless, erotic and jarring visual poem about a faceless women. While exploring the creative process, the character enters a theater, where she opens a suitcase and unleashes a hodgepodge of items — a lamp, a chair, balloons, insects, and a phallic asparagus — that waft above a fascinated audience of animated clay figures. Unusual for an experimental animation film, ASPARAGUS achieved wide commercial success when it was shown at midnight screenings together with David Lynch’s ERASERHEAD (1977).

In the throes of a deepening depression, the artist/filmmaker found solace in the rain forests of Mexico and Guatamala; the hallucinogenic paintings she made there inspired the scenes from JOY STREET (1995). EL DOCTOR (2006), set in Mexico, concerns an old doctor who encounters a miracle on his last day on earth. In VISITATION (2012), the monochromatic images encompass dark visions of the Spanish inquisition and witches in the forest. Set to Georges Antheil’s score of BALLET MECANIQUÉ, the mostly abstract images in PINBALL ricochet against the film frames. About this film, Pitt wrote “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.”

As a bonus, this DVD edition includes a documentary on Suzan Pitt and her creative process, entitled PERSISTENCE OF VISION (2006), which was made by her son and daughter-in-law Blue and Laura Kraining. Pitt also created animated film images for operas, public work projects, and even outerwear! She was also a professor at Harvard University’s famed Carpenter Center.

“ASPARAGUS clearly represents a major achievement of contemporary animated cinema. It is a measure of its audacity, profound honesty, and uncompromising personal vision that it begins with an act of defecation and ends with fellatio, metaphors in this instance of spent and renewed creative impulses.”

-Amos Vogel - Film Comment