Ed Emshwiller (1925-90)
Filmography (partial)
Dance Chromatic (1959), 7 minutes
Transformation (1959), 5 minutes
Life Lines (1960), 7 minutes
Time of the Heathen (with Peter Kaas, 1961), 75 minutes
The Streets of Greenwood (1963), 20 minutes
Thanatopsis (1962), 6 minutes
George Dumpsons Place (1964), 8 minutes
Relativity (1966), 38 minutes
Image, Flesh, and Voice (1969), 77 minutes
Film With Three Dancers (1970), 20 minutes
Carol (1970), 5 minutes
Sunstone (1979), 3 minutes
Skin Matrix (1984), 17 minutes
Emshwiller came to film from a background of painting and science fiction illustration. Though he brought with him the themes that appear in those static media, he embraced cinema for its non-static properties. His first two films, in l959, can be described as action painting "in action." Certainly by Thanatopsis (l962), he had stepped wholly and unmistakably into the realm of pure cinema, and the light of transcendence. Carol (l970) is very interesting both as a cinematic portrait but also as a fond recollection of one of Emshwillers favorite images in science fiction. In the film we see Emshwillers wife Carol walking through a wooded glade, with sunlight alternately penetrating the trees, and masked by them. The tempo of this on/off lighting increases as the film develops, until at its climax, Carol is consumed by a torrent of this alternating illuminationan image directly reminiscent of some of Emshwillers best science fiction covers when women plunge into a sky full of stars (and those women often were modeled on Carol). (RH)
Emshwiller in l965 (in Berlin):
Most films, as you all know, are word-oriented. That is, based on verbal concepts, and the tradition has been that, actually, its probably the easy way to solve the problem of making a filmthe very fact that language is the most versatile of our means of communications. And the perimeters of our understanding generally are defined by our language.
However, I think that a great deal can be accomplished in film-making [which] is not based on words. And some of the vision of my friends up here ... are not based on story or a drama or something didactic or the conventional form of film. Its that sort of thing that excited me and stimulates me, gives me experience that I dont get another way. I think thats one of the most dynamic things about film, and that excites me and draws me to it.