Science Friction

when you see many (experimental) movies made by Stan Vanderbeek, you can easily categorize them, or as we say, find the similar elements between them to find a way to understand the meaning of his films, or at least try to do so. Science Friction definitely is not his best one, but it affirmed what I was thinking about him: that mister Vanderbeek uses images like eyes and hammers to make his point. but what is his point actually? in Science Friction, he shows us many known faces from around the world, and plays with them as he always does. most important here are the references to authority and the universe. if, and this is a personal approach toward Vanderbeek, Stan uses eyes to make us see we are watching while being watched (I know how strange this may sound) and hammers as a metaphor for violence in the society we live in, we can conclude we are watching violence that is violating us in an artistic way. in effect, it may represent our way of living with, near and close to each other. this way we forget we're just a little spot in the endless universe, which was created by violence and constantly uses that violence to change in little bits we can't see with our own eyes, but maybe we could by viewing a Stan Vanderbeek movie. it's all about representing life as we know it in an artistic way, nothing more, nothing less. this may not directly be science fiction, but because of his frictional approach, this sure is rightly called Science Friction. to conclude, I didn't like this one, but all the other Vanderbeek experimental pictures I saw already, I really adored. long live Stan Vanderbeek, even if he's passed away a long time ago. but maybe this could be a nice topic for one of his movies: contacting from the afterlife to give us messages hidden in everyday objects mutilated on the small screen.

This short is a collage of photo clippings from various newspapers. Most of them is of then-President Eisenhower. There are also landmarks of not only the Statue of Liberty but also of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Eiffel Tower. There's also some recorded music and many sound recordings from the real things as opposed to effects. I discovered Science Friction from YouTube as linked from Cartoon Brew by Amid. It had this and other Stan van der Beek shorts that are not listed in IMDb. Amid wrote that Terry Gilliam may have been influenced by these when he became the animator on "Monty Python's Flying Circus" and you can see how true that could be when watching this short. Perhaps a little long but I was fascinated by almost the whole 9-minute thing. Certainly worth a look for anyone wanting to see something a little unusual.

Portions of "Science Friction" were shown during the documentary on art films, "Free Radicals". So, when I say that this film by Stan Vanderbeek looks like a Terry Gilliam film, I am not being original--the folks in the documentary described it this way--and it's a very appropriate description. I am awfully sure that this film led Gilliam to use the art style he used in the "Monty Python" animations, though Gilliam's animations seemed much less random and were meant to make us laugh. As for Vanderbeek, you might chuckle lightly but the film isn't meant as a comedy exactly--as, at times, it seems to be commentary about science and the bomb.

The film consists of hundreds and hundreds of different cut out images being animated in addition to some drawing on these images. It's all set to music and is kind of hypnotic and watchable because it is pure whimsy--making it different from many art films. Worth a look and certainly NOT a film for the average viewer.