We’ll be up at Press Play in Newcastle this weekend, taking part in their closing do along with People Like Us and Warp Films. Seeking something playful to fit the bill we encountered the work of Al Jarnow, a self-taught animator who has been plotting his own special path from a Long Island attic for over thirty years. His first commercial gig was a ‘Y For Yak’ film for Sesame Street, and he went on to make over 100 films with the Childrens Television Workshop including this futuristic 1979 riff on Powers of Ten (please excuse the pixelvision):

Alongside the public TV commissions Jarnow continued to make his own work, informed by a deep fascination with maths and geometry, and like the best experimental films each one follows an idea to its natural conclusion. Celestial Navigation begins by charting the movement of sunlight across his attic wall, and winds up on Salisbury Plain exploring the shadows cast by Stonehenge. Shorelines creates visual music with hundreds of seashells, and Cubits is a head-spinning fugue for lovers of logic built around one rotating cube:

We’ll be showing some contemporary work in a similar vein as well as a couple of earlier films that helped to pave the way, including the mixed-media sketches of Robert Breer, and there’ll also be a flipbook competition on the night with a chance to win a fabbo dvd of Jarnow’s work recently put together by US label Numero Group.

Birmingham Jazz, who worked with us on the Sunrise score at Flatpack back in March, are presenting another live film treat at the mac in a couple of weeks. The Oyster Princess is a 1919 romp directed by Ernst Lubitsch, better known for his more sophisticated 30s comedies but here taking the mickey out of high society with lashings of slapstick and inventive camerawork. The music comes courtesy of 14-piece Belgian outfit The Flat Earth Society, and tickets are a snip at £7/£5.

[Info and tickets]

A couple of images from our summer travels – Paul Shallcross playing the piano at Green Man and a candle-lit 7inch at Islington Mill in Salford.

PS: There’s also 10 minutes of the Separado Q&A at Green Man up on youtube.

We lost two brilliant Japanese filmmakers within two days last month, one of them far too soon.

Kihachiro Kawamoto (born 11 January 1925, died 23 August 2010) made atmospheric puppet films. He was inspired by Eastern European animation and apprenticed with Jiri Trnka in the 60s, but his work was heavily immersed in the culture and mythology of his home country. One of my favourites is The Demon, a chilling five-minute short from 1972 based on an ancient folk-tale (below). A selection of Kawamoto’s work toured the UK in 2008, and if it doesn’t return it’s well worth hunting down one of the short film collections on DVD – either from Kino or the slightly more extensive Japanese release.

Satoshi Kon (born 12 October 1963, died 24 August 2010) was one of Japan’s most distinctive anime directors, steering well clear of the genre’s cliches to create elaborate but very personal films including Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress and Tokyo Godfathers. He tended to jump between gritty Tokyo reality and bizarre dream worlds, most notably in Paprika – one of the best things we showed at Flatpack no.2 – and was making robot fantasy The Dream Machine when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in May, aged only 46. He wrote a candid and very moving letter shortly before he died, published posthumously by his family.