Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation 2016

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The Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation returns to the Block Cinema for its seventh annual festival. Founded in Chicago in 2010 by filmmakers Alexander Stewart and Lilli Carré, Eyeworks is a curated annual festival that exhibits classic and contemporary experimental animation. Showcasing abstract animation and unconventional character animation, Eyeworks combines a love for animation, avant-garde cinema, and alternative comics.

The festival focuses on animated films that express singular creative vision, personal dedication, and imaginative technical approaches. Past years’ festivals have featured animators David O’Reilly, Lori Damiano, Nancy Andrews, Caleb Wood, and Takeshi Murata as guests.

The 2016 Eyeworks screenings at the Block will feature two programs of short films, with classic and contemporary films programmed side-by-side. In addition, this year the festival will include Habfürdő, a dazzling 1979 Hungarian feature by byGyörgy Kovásznay. Festival directors Alexander Stewart and Lilli Carré will introduce the programs in person.

Habfürdo

Friday, November 11, 2016 7:00 PM
(György Kovásznay, 1979, Hungary, DCP, 75 min.)

Hungarian artist, writer, and editor György Kovásznay was a prolific painter and animator, working primarily in the 1960s and 70s. He made a couple dozen shorts, but Habfürdő (variously translated as “Foam Bath” or “Bubble Bath”) is his sole feature, and his magnum opus. The plot is slight—focused on a studious nurse, her sexy nurse friend, and her friend’s hypochondriac fiancé—but the animation is a roiling, dynamic tapestry of ever-shifting styles. Kovásznay considered his films to be extensions of his painting, and brings to them a kinetic, kaleidoscopic energy and a visual style that Eyeworks co-curator Alexander Stewart has likened to Ralph Bakshi. Habfürdő is a modernist-infused cartoon, with musical numbers, that reflects on social and personal relationships in a communist society in flux. It might just be the strangest film you see this year.

 

Shorts Program 1

Saturday, November 12, 2016 1:00 PM

A showcase of classic and contemporary experimental animation curated by the festival directors. This program features a blend of abstract animation and unconventional character animation, and includes a new abstract science fiction piece by Peter Burr, and a stop-motion jaunt featuring a ceramic cup by Karen Aqua. (70 min.)

 

Shorts Program 2

Saturday, November 12, 2016 3:30 PM

A showcase of classic and contemporary experimental animation curated by the festival directors. This program features a blend of abstract animation and unconventional character animation, and includes an ethereal psychedelic film from the 1980s by Sky David, and a disturbingly literal depiction of a chapter of the Book of Genesis by Martin Sulzer. (70 min.)

Contact The Block Museum of Art for more information: (847) 491-4000 or email us at block-museum@northwestern.edu