On Friday nights in June MMoCA screens experimental films on the rooftop .
If you’ve had enough of summer’s assembly-line blockbusters, head up to the top of the city for Madison Museum of Contemporary Art’s Rooftop Cinema series for a breath of fresh air.
The screenings, which roll after sunset on Fridays in June, treat audiences to artisanal animated short films, displaying idiosyncratic approaches to the moving image, such as the short films of Naoyuki Tsuji and Karen Aqua.
Naoyuki Tsuji’s films on June 10 alternate between puppet animation and charcoal drawings. The puppet films are not as pristine as those of the Brothers Quay, but Tsuji’s character designs and art direction create an equally brooding fairytale world. The hand-drawn films use an “additive” technique, not completely erasing the charcoal lines from the previous frames. This creates a ghostly trace of movements, adding a dreamlike quality to physical transformations.
Tsuji repeats and transforms scenes from a personal mythology across his work. The strongest film in Rooftop’s screening is the 2003 charcoal film A Feather Stares at the Dark, which landed Tsuji an invitation to the Cannes Film Festival. The kernel of his vision from earlier films germinates into a personal journey (with mild erotic imagery) within an elaborate and imaginative cosmology.
Audiences might be familiar with Karen Aqua’s work even if they don’t recognize her name. She animated more than 20 segments for television’s Sesame Street between 1990 and her death in 2011. On June 17, Rooftop will showcase 11 of her independently produced animated shorts, which were celebrated at experimental and animation film festivals around the world.
Aqua’s films explode with visual energy driven by beat-heavy soundtracks. Abstract shapes and colors fluidly transform into stylized human figures, or animals, vegetables and minerals in the case of her last film, 2011’s Taxonomy. Her quick fluctuation between shapes and figures synchronized to music places her work in the tradition of an accessible avant-garde.
Aqua’s Kakania (1989) is a pure delight, as movements match a lively jazz fusion composition with a chorus that shouts out the title. Aqua’s childlike joy in using simple repetition and variation made her a natural match for Sesame Street.
