Bru Ha! Ha! - Short Takes

2002 2m, p/d/an Steven Woloshen, mus Eric Satie.

Montreal-based experimental animator Steven Woloshen is, like his West Coast contemporary Richard Reeves, keeping alive the artistically vital and often cinematically thrilling non-representational animation style established in Canada by Norman McLaren. Bru Ha Hat. Woloshen's latest offering (he has created a body of remarkable work that now numbers 12 films in two decades), is a lively dance of shapes and scratches on film. Shot in 35-mm wide-screen, no less, the film is a taut, accelerated assemblage of bursts of scratch-on-film images that include both abstract shapes and brief sketches of a camera, fish, insects, plants, humans, numbers, letters and blocks of colour. As with most non-figurative animation, it is concerned more with rhythms of perception and the possibilities of vision than with narrative order and flow. Bru Ha Ha!'s propulsive power comes from Woloshen's spirited combinations of light and darkness, recognizable forms and the suggestion of others, and strategic blasts of colour in an otherwise starkly black-and-white palette. Set to a jaunty, startling music score by Eric Satie performed by the Vienna Art Orchestra. Bru Ha Ha! is a kinetic marvel of abstract animation.

Tom McSorley is the head of the Canadian Film Institute and a contributing editor to Take One.

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