muldoonelder's reviews

This was only the second movie that I had produced so I was terribly flattered that it won the 1969 Oscar for Best Live Action Short. The film follows Robert Gilbert speaking about and displaying his kinetic sculptures and his thoughts about our culture. It is rare event when a serious artist creates art that is truly amusing but Robert Gilbert has done just that.Of course the most famous master of kinetic sculpture is the great Swiss artist, Jean Tinguely,whose famous moving-sculpture at the Museum of Modern art was created to destroy itself (which almost got Peter Selz, MoMA's curator who organized the Tinguely exhibition fired), but Gilbert's absolutely charming works take off in a rather different direction, that of a very gentle delightful whimsy.