Film Notes: AN EVENING WITH FRANK AND CAROLINE MOURIS
AN EVENING WITH FRANK AND CAROLINE MOURIS
7 p.m. Friday, November 4, 2016
53 Wall Street Auditorium
Post-screening discussion with Brian Meacham and Frank and Caroline Mouris
Introduction and Film Notes by Brian Meacham
PDF
QUICK DREAM (Dir. Frank Mouris, 1967, 16mm, 3 mins)
Preserved by the Yale Film Study Center through a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation
When he arrived at the Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1967, Frank Mouris found that more than half of his small cohort of graphic design students also had an interest in film. Led by Alvin Eisenman, their “Machiavellian graphic design chairman … [with] far-reaching ambitions,” and Prof. Irving Kriesberg, a Painting department instructor with animation experience, Mouris and his classmates were assigned the following project: shoot one roll of 16mm Kodachrome II color film in half a day without any post-production editing or sound. QUICK DREAM is the result of this first assignment. Using a homemade animation stand in the university’s Chemistry department, Mouris created, as he describes it, “...a series of visual experiments with magazine photograph cutouts that make moving collages; coloraid paper; Avery labels; whatever I could think of that might animate. It became the seedbed for everything that followed,” most notably FRANK FILM.
CONEY ISLAND EATS (Dir. Frank Mouris and Peter Schlaifer, 1967, 16mm, 3 mins)
Preserved by the Yale Film Study Center
Mouris’s “first attempt at ‘capturing’ Coney Island in home-made images” illustrates the sights of Coney Island with animated paper cutouts. “A classmate, Peter Schlaifer, who had split the day of filming with me on that first experience at the Chemistry department, joined me in doing a silent animated film rather than doing yet another two-dimensional poster for a graphic design class assignment. Thus was born CONEY ISLAND EATS.”
YOU’RE NOT REAL PRETTY BUT YOU’RE MINE... (Dir. Frank Mouris, 1968, 16mm, 6 mins)
Preserved by Yale Film Study Center/NFPF
Mouris’s next film, YOU’RE NOT REAL PRETTY BUT YOU’RE MINE…, built upon the strongest elements of QUICK DREAM, and added a pop music soundtrack. Mouris says, “I shot another 100 foot roll on classmate Jerry Strawbridge’s home animation stand, and edited that into the best sequences from QUICK DREAM. The whole film was a tongue-in-cheek series of odd couples/couplings, which the title suggested. The FRANK FILM photo collage animation evolved here.”
CHEMICAL ARCHITECTURE (Dir. Frank Mouris and Peter Schlaifer, 1968, 16mm, 3 mins)
Preserved by the Yale Film Study Center/NFPF
Created for a show at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York, later to become the American Craft Museum, and now the Museum of Arts and Design, CHEMICAL ARCHITECTURE documents the creation of an exhibit structure created by Yale architecture students for a show entitled “Plastic as Plastic” that surveyed furniture, industrial design, kitchenware, clothes, jewelry, and more.
FRANK FILM (Dir. Frank & Caroline Mouris, 1973, DCP, 9 mins)
Preserved by the Academy Film Archive
Winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Short and added to the National Film Registry in 1996, FRANK FILM is a kaleidoscopic, autobiographical trip that plays out in multilayered visual and audio collage, a breathtaking collection of commercial, religious, political, artistic, and gastronomic imagery strung together by non-stop wordplay and endlessly inventive visual connections.
CONEY (Dir. Frank & Caroline Mouris, 1975, 16mm, 5 mins)
Preserved through Women’s Film Preservation Fund
A stop-motion visit to the irresistible attractions of Coney Island, CONEY presents the amusement park in many forms, from beachgoers and boardwalks to neon signs and the lights of the ferris wheel. Through audio collage and layered imagery, the film conveys the sensory overload of Coney Island.
FRANKLY CAROLINE (Dir. Frank & Caroline Mouris, 1999, 35mm, 9 mins)
Print courtesy Frank Mouris
A self-conscious counterpoint to FRANK FILM, FRANKLY CAROLINE focuses on Caroline Mouris and her story, but also examines the collaborative process and the creative roadblocks that can arise in a working relationship.
DID YOU KNOW: In an article by Yale Film Study Center director Michael Kerbel, in the September/October 1975 issue of Film Comment, Mouris described his fascination with magazines. "All my life I have been obsessed by magazines... It was an entrancement with the magic world displayed in all those colorful photographs... I couldn't undestand why anyone would ever want to throw a magazine away—It wasn't as if you could use up or digest all that fantasy and color in just a couple of viewings, so I saved magazines..."
Presented in the Treasures from the Yale Film Archive series with support from Paul L. Joskow '70 M.Phil., '72 Ph.D. Printed Film Notes are distributed to the audience before each Treasures screening.