中文名: 约翰与詹姆士·惠特尼动画作品
英文名: John & James Whitney
资源格式: DVDRip
版本: 美国实验动画师
发行时间: 1943年
导演: John & James Whitney
地区: 美国
语言: 英语
简介:
詹姆斯惠特尼 （12月27日 ，1921年 - 4月8日 ，1982年 ），年轻的约翰的弟弟，是一个电影导演普遍作为视觉音乐大师之一
两位抽象创作的拥护者，是约翰与詹姆士·惠特尼（John and James Whitney）两史弟，他们以一部《变化》（Variations, 1943）在1949年的Knokke实验电影展赢得一座奖项。约翰继而尝试电脑影像创作，而詹姆士则设计出一种点绘技巧，藉以创造出令人联想起欧普艺术（Op Art）的曼陀罗图形与运动模式。
Early life
James Whitney was born December 27, 1921, in Pasadena , California , and lived all his life in the Los Angeles area. He studied painting, and traveled in England before the outbreak of World War II. In 1940, he returned to Pasadena.
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Career - Early Works
James completed seven short films over four decades, two of which required at least five years of work. James collaborated with his brother John for some of his film work.
The first of the brothers' films was Twenty-Four Variations on an Original Theme . Its structure was influenced by Schoenberg 's serial principles.
James spent 3 years working on Variations on a Circle (1942), which lasts some 20 minutes, and was made with 8mm film .
James and John created their series of Five Film Exercises (John #1 and #5; James #2, #3 and #4) between 1943 and 1944, for which the brothers won a prize for best sound at the 1949 Brussels Experimental Film Competition.
In 1946, the brothers travelled to San Francisco Museum of Art to show their films at the first of ten annual "Art in Cinema" festivals.
Following this period, James became more involved in spiritual interests such as Jungian psychology , alchemy , yoga , Tao , and Krishnamurti . These interests heavily influenced his later work.
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Career - Later Works
Screenshot from " Lapis " by James Whitney
Between 1950 and 1955, James laboured to construct a truly astounding masterpiece, Yantra . The film was produced entirely by hand. By punching grid patterns in 5" by 7" cards with a pin, James was able to paint through these pinholes onto other 5" x 7" cards, to create images of rich complexity and give the finished work a very dynamic and flowing motion, but the film was not completed yet. It was first released as a silent film.
A short excerpt from an early version of Yantra was shown at one of the historic Vortex Concerts in San Francisco 's Morrison planetarium in 1959. Soon after, the film acquired its soundtrack, an excerpt from Henk Badings ' "Cain and Abel".
Analogue computer equipment developed by brother John, allowed James to complete Lapis (1966) in two years, when it might have taken seven years otherwise. James drew dot patterns again for this film, but the camera was positioned using computer control, allowing each image to be overlaid from multiple angles. In this piece, smaller circles oscillate in and out in an array of colors resembling a kaleidoscope while being accompanied by Indian sitar music. The patterns become hypnotic and trance inducing.
Dwija (1973), meaning "twice-born" or "soul" in Sanskrit . It is completely solarized , and much of the imagery is re-photographed by rear-projection to create a constant flow of hardly definable transformations of color and form.
Wu Ming (1977), meaning "no name" in Chinese , repeats a single action over and over - a particle disappears into infinity, and returns as a wave. James described the particle-to-wave action in Wu Ming as being "like throwing a pebble into water and seeing the ripples spread out".
His two final films, intended to form a quartet with Dwija and Wu Ming, were Kang Jing Xiang and Li , which were left incomplete when James died April 8, 1982, after a brief and unexpected illness. Kang was completed post-humously according to James' instructions. His short test for Li is believed to be lost.
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Filmography
Twenty Four Variations on an Original Theme (with John Whitney) (1939-1940) 5 min, 8mm
3 Untitled Films (with John Whitney) (1940-1942) 15 min 8mm
Variations on a Circle (1941 - 1942) 9 min, 8mm
Film Exercises #2 , #3 (1943 - 1944) 3 min, 16mm and #4 (1944) 8 min, 16mm
Yantra (1950 - 1957) 8 min, 16mm
High Voltage (1957) 3 min, 16mm, constructed by Jordan Belson from James' footage
Lapis (1963 - 1966) 10 min, 16mm
Dwi-Ja (1974), 16mm
Wu Ming (1977) 17 min, 16mm
Kang Jing Xiang (1982) 13 min, 16mm
Li (unfinished)
From his earliest experiments with the medium of computer graphic systems, John Whitney Sr. has balanced a cutting edge use of technology with a strong sense of artistic control and integrity. Considered by many to be the 'father of Computer Graphics', John Whitney, and other members of the Whitney family, have successfully linked musical composition with experimental film and computer imaging. Since his recognized works in the first International Experimental Film Competition in Belgium, 1949, to his masterpiece Arabesque in 1975, John Whitney remained a true pioneer until his passing in 1996 at the age of 78. – Siggraph.org
“In 1940 John Whitney, a filmmaker, composer and technical innovator and his brother James Whitney, a painter, began working with synthetic sound and a film animation language in order "to develop a unified bi-sensory relationship between film and music."Stimulated by the avante garde filmmakers of France and Germany in the early nineteen twenties these American artists created numerous films during the nineteen fourties and fifties that utilised unique machinery designed and realised specifically for their purposes. One example of their creative heritage are the slit-scan photographic techniques famous for such cinematic passages as the Stargate sequence of 2001 a Space Odyssey.
After many years developing mechanical techniques with his brother James, John Whitney found himself making use of analogue computers sourced from military surplus centres as tools with which to continue his development of a bi-sensory relationship between film and music. His animations completed using this primitive technology were of sufficient quality to secure him long time on-going support from IBM. With these tools he became a pioneer in the field of computer generated abstract musical animations.
In his book published in 1980, John Whitney states that. . . "Music, as the true model of temporal structure, is most worthy of study among prior arts. Music is the supreme example of movement become pattern. Music is time given sublime shape. If for no other reason than its universality and its status in the collective mind, music invites imitation. A visual art should give the same superior shape to the temporal order that we expect from music."Whitney goes on to describe differential motion patterns as one means by which, "would-be music/image innovators" may attempt to play color "musically" on a two dimensional field such as a monitor with time placed on the cartesian z-axisas the principal axis of construction.” - Sidney Visual Lab
