Blogging Tribeca 2009: Interview with George Griffin of "The Bather"

A still from "The Bather"

George Griffin's experimental film The Bather incorporates a woman showering, text across the screen, and a flipbook that comes to life through animation. Griffin, who grew up in Tennessee and now lives in New York City, has an impressive body of work including cartoons, narratives, docs, and musicals. Here he talks with The Independent about his short film The Bather which screened at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival and can currently be seen online.

What inspired you to make the film -- was it an image or a message? What was your initial idea?

I made a one-minute film in 1973 the year I began living with my wife who among other things introduced me to modern dance. Trikfilm 1 used a flipbook of line drawings of a nude dancer; it was looped and printed in primary colors; and the music was a short harpsichord prelude from Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier." In my youthful hubris I planned to make a suite of animated films based on the whole Bach cycle (over 4 hours long). I got as far as Trikfilm 4 which I retitled Head and that was the end of that. But I always felt the original film wasn't quite right and that some unfinished business still lurked.

Cut to 2008. I had seen Pere Portabella's wonderful, beautiful, moving Silence Before Bach about Bach's music as a catalyst for universal ideals, e.g. the idea of modern Europe as a cosmopolitan network. It also contained enough incidental nudity to suggest that the octogenarian filmmaker was no prude. There had also been a major exhibition of flipbooks in Dusseldorf which renewed and re-oriented my interests (e.g. I constructed a digital mutoscope to exhibit my 1976 film, Viewmaster by re-compositing my original drawings in After Effects).

So I retrieved the tiny wrinkled flipbook, scanned the drawings and began playing with sequencing and layering.

The live scene of my wife in the shower dates from 2004. I assured her that the image was impressionistic, that she wouldn't be identifiable, and that she looked really sexy. Using your bathing wife as a model of course is well-worn trope (think of Bonnard) and has for me an additional link to the dancing figure in the flipbook which was based indirectly on her. The other layer consists of water drops which have a kind of mesmerizing, almost random, kinetic quality. The tension lay in the contrast between the casual, neutral observation of everyday (real) beauty and the self-conscious performance of the (unreal) dancer energetically pushing herself to the fore.

Why did you choose to have the wording across the screen?

The text acts as a reminder that the event of watching the film is similar to the analytical context of making the film. I wanted to fold material memory and emotional memory into the facts of the film.

How long did it take you make?

As I've indicated, about 35 years. But the crucial rumination and digestion happened last year over the course of a few disconnected weeks puttering on the computer.

What prompted you to send it in to Tribeca?

I happened to run into Jon Gartenberg who asked what I was doing. He knew my work from the '70s and programmed it into the experimental group with a number of very interesting pieces by contemporary artists, a recent film by Ken Jacobs and Helen Levitt's classic In the Street.

Tell me about the Tribeca Film Festival screenings -- did you attend?

Unfortunately I was able to attend only the first screening because after that I had to have a medical procedure that left me cranky and sore.

What's the future of the film?

On May 6, it opens a two week run at Film Forum as a short before Carlos Sorin's The Window, a film about an old man's memories. Other festivals may show it. Maybe it will also work as part of a package of my four recent films which includes the other film made last year, You're Outa Here, a cartoon music video based on music by Fats Waller with voice and lyrics by Lorraine Feather.

Any other projects in the works?

More flipbooks and interactive players. I am also researching, writing, designing a half hour film about John Kasper, an anti-Semitic rabble-rouser who was a follower of Ezra Pound.

Link to this page: http://www.independent-magazine.org/