Hallelujah, Snore & Guzzle Updates!!!

1. New Podcast — This one is dedicated to a bookstore in Sarasota, Florida. Content includes: Danish psyche, visionary new classical, 50s child pop, Indian brass band music, Italian rock & roll, Nambian dance music and a Japanese cover song of a certain American rap song, done in a bossa-nova style.

2. New Film Stills — Snaps from Hausu, The Great Moment, Buffalo 66, Fat City, Ace in the Hole and Palm Beach Story.

3. New Gossip Column — Considering the mêlée that was this past month, it’s little wonder the Society Page is nine days late in being posted.

4. Lastly, the rest of this post contains a set of photographs that I shot in Seatac, Washington, while visiting a reclusive, visionary filmmaker named Bruce.

Now You’re Hypnotized

 
Now you’re hypnotized?

Like all the best things in life, there’s a story behind this. If you look at the first photograph in this set, you’ll find a picture of a black piece of foamcore, with the interior cut out and decorated with four small figurines inside, set behind a plexi-glass window, like a diorama. On the exterior, there is a ghoulish face cut out of brown paper and the phrase, “Now You’re Hypnotized” written on the paper. This is Bruce Bickford’s so-called business card. Note the blatant absence of contact information exhibited here.

If you want to communicate with Bruce, you gotta go see him.

Bruce Bickford is a visionary, reclusive animator who has been holed up in suburban Washington state for the past couple decades. He’s been amassing an inventory of fantastic stop-motion and line animation and specializes in micro-miniature figures and creatures that endlessly metamorphosize into themselves. Sadly, his films lack any real distribution. However, he has a handful of devoted admirers who are trying to help him out. I visited Bruce along with Peter Burr, who has been one of these people, and issued some of Bruce’s work on his animation compendium DVD, Cartune Xprez.

Bruce’s workshop and archive is like no other. His office chair is a tiny trampoline. His archive is populated by thousands upon thousands of tiny clay figures, some no larger than the nail on your pinky. The workshop is inhabited by countless scraps and cut-outs of unidentifiable origins. Bruce himself is willowy and soft-spoken. He’s cat-like in his focus. If you’re paying attention to him, he seems distracted. But if you turn your attention elsewhere, he’s suddenly interested in you.

Bruce’s tale has been told before, in a number of articles, and even in a feature length documentary called Monster Road, so I won’t rehash it here. But I found his archive and workshop so inspiring that I wanted to share the experience here. Enjoy. Click any image for slide-show mode.