A Garden of Neo-Gothic Surrealist Delights

"Test film for an experimental stop motion animation of gothic surrealism (work in progress). The main puppet(video thumbnail) is hand made from Sculpey polymer clay, cheese cloth, cotton balls,and an Armaverse phase 4 humature frame. The other objects (Angels, ect.) are from my collection of props.

This film was shot with a Nizo 561 camera and Tri-X film. Soundtrack by NIN."

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Brothers Quay animated video for "Are We Still Married" by His Name is Alive.

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The Artist: Seth Michael Harden

Jan Svankmajer: Dimensions of Dialogue

We're human. Inevitably, and all too quickly I might add, it just gets messy.

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Part deux of a 12 minute long stop motion animation, created in 1982 by the Czech surrealist artist Jan Švankmajer.

Portrait - Louise Gluck

One of my fovorite poets.


Portrait

A child draws the outline of a body.
She draws what she can, but it is white all through,
she cannot fill in what she knows is there.
Within the unsupported line, she knows
that life is missing; she has cut
one background from another. Like a child,
she turns to her mother.

And you draw the heart
against the emptiness she has created.

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First Four Books - Louise Gluck

Of Rain and Flowers: Two Poems by Robert Creeley

The Rain
ROBERT CREELEY

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

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The Flower
ROBERT CREELEY

I think I grow tensions
like flowers
in a wood where
nobody goes.

Each wound is perfect,
encloses itself in a tiny
imperceptible blossom,
making pain.

Pain is a flower like that one,
like this one,
like that one,
like this one.