November 2 (Thursday) 7 pm
During a career that has
spanned six decades and a wide range of endeavors—including major studio
animation, the production of Air Force training films, a number of
excellent art documentaries, and his own celebrated paintings and graphic
art—Jules Engel has become one of our greatest living film artists.
Among his earliest accomplishments are the direction of the Russian and
Chinese dance sequences from Disney’s Fantasia and the supervision of
color continuity for Bambi. One of the key figures in abstract animation,
he has created a singular body of work that playfully explores the limits
of visual representation and the rhythmic potentials of color. Engel’s
contributions include not only his own remarkable films (Accident, Train
Landscape, Rumble), now classics, but training provided to at least two
generations of American animators through the production program he
founded at the California Institute of the Arts in the late 1960s.
November 11 (Saturday) 7 pm
Beirut-born, Paris-based
artist Christian Boustani has gained international recognition both for
his video installations and for his innovative work in computer animation.
For the past decade Boustani has been engaged in a series of highly
cinematic reworkings of painting—work that has culminated in a trilogy
of animated films entitled Cités Antérieures (Cities of the Past). In
the first installment of the series he mixes details of cityscapes from
historical paintings with contemporary imagery to create a dreamlike
portrait of the Italian city of Siena. In his striking Cités Antérieures—Brugge
(on the ancient Belgian town of Bruges), Boustani uses fiction for the
first time and vividly creates a potent evocation of the lived experience
of the Renaissance. He is currently working on Cités Antérieures—Toledo,
the final work in the series.
Harvard Film Archive is a division of Fine Arts Library of the Harvard College Library.
Copyright © 2006 President and Fellows of Harvard College.