JAZZ AND ANIMATED FILM: A LASTING ADVENTURE
Friday, 8th November 2019
CCNS, Art Salon, 7pm
JAZZ AND ANIMATED FILM: A LASTING ADVENTURE
(A power point presentation)
Project author: Milen Alempijević
Close ties between jazz and animated film were established as early as the 1930s, at the time when jazz was American pop music. Who was Stepin Fetchit? Did Disney like jazz? What is a jazz-frog cartoon? Was Mickey Mouse a minstrel? Was Bugs Bunny a bopper? What do the Harlem Renaissance and Betty Boop have in common? Who’s a square in character and who’s hipster? What is the Hays Code and who were the Censored Eleven? From wacky gags of early cartoons and negative racial stereotypes, to censorship and turbulent social changes in the 20th century, this presentation brimming with interesting documentary photographs and film stills as well as attractive movie clips reveals a treasure trove of interesting details about the common history of jazz and animation films spanning several decades, from the works of the classics like Dave Fleischer, Bob Clampett, Fritz Frilling, Tex Avery, George Pal, to innovators like John Hubley and Norman McLaren. Although the role of jazz as a progressive social phenomenon is no longer so significant today, at the beginning of the 21st century, especially in Europe, there is a constant influx of directors and animators who have high expectations of this music. The new generation authorial films and the occasional jazz stream penetrating popular culture (TV and video games) chart the road towards a new understanding of the music idiom and a lasting spiritual adventure.
MILEN ALEMPIJEVIĆ
Milen Alempijević (1965), a writer and publicist, is the author of a dozen of books of various genres from the field of fiction, as well as the collection of essays on animated film Umetnost preterivanja: Beleške jednog gledaoca (The Art of Exaggeration: Notes of a Viewer, 2014) and film study Dan kada je nestao Miles Evans: Jazz i filmska naracija (The Day When Miles Evans Disappeared: Jazz and Film Narration, 2016). He has prepared the double-issue 183-184 of the magazine for art and culture Gradac dedicated to jazz (2012). Milen writes about film, jazz and animation for dailies and periodicals from the field of culture and is the editor of the DVD edition After the Year 2000: Contemporary Serbian Animation. He has given the multi-media lecture entitled Džez i animirani film (Jazz and Animated Film) at international festivals of animated film in Serbia, Slovenia, Romania, Portugal, Slovakia and Spain. Milen works at the Cultural Centre in Čačak as a Film and Video Programme Editor and as the Artistic Director of the International Animation Festival ANIMANIMA.
