The following was produced as part of the Avant Garde Blog-a-Thon. Links to other blog-a-thon entries can be found here.

When is the avant-garde not the avant-garde? Where lies the invisible line between putatively normative modes of cinematic discourse and the Other, a system of formal rigor whose visual and aural meaning lies outside? Questions like these trouble me when dealing with this absolutely vital blog-a-thon topic of The Avant-Garde issued by girish. Is The New World, a film so immaculately internal in its production of meaning as to be ‘difficult’ for most audiences, an avant-garde text, despite its overtures to narrative and representational figurature? What of music videos, often non-narrative outputs for formal experimentation, and yet in many ways a defining and easily decodable mode of cinematic language for modern viewers?

It was with this in mind that I chose to focus on a text that brings to the forefront the intersection of narrative and experimental work, Dumbo (1941, Ben Sharpsteen). A cheapie Disney production made to recoup losses for the financially disasterous Pinocchio, Dumbo was perhaps the least ambitious, but ultimately most successful, feature of the classic Disney era. With bold effervescent color and lighting that derives from German expressionism, a powerful storytelling voice deployed with intense low-angle forced perspective shots, and at its centerpiece the masterful character animation of Vladimir Tytla, who was in charge of all the elephants, Dumbo is magic, pure and simple, and maybe the most affecting work in the Disney canon. It’s certainly my favorite, in case it’s not obvious.

The show-stopping centerpiece of Dumbo comes approximately 46 minutes into this humble 64 minute feature. Drunk on champagne, Dumbo and surrogate father figure Timothy Q. Mouse experience an intense hallucination, the (in?)famous Pink Elephants on Parade sequence. The source of nightmares to multiple generations of children, Pink Elephants on Parade prompts an important question – is this the avant garde?

On a formal and stylistic level, the answer seems clear. Pink Elephants on Parade, hereby referred to as ‘Sequence 18’ (its structural placement within the film as well as code around the office for ‘the experimental part’), defies logical analysis, articulating innovatively rendered non-narrative imagery that confounds expectations to produce strongly emotional responses independent of narrative or representational identification. The diegesis of our elephant protagonist is imploded, replaced by a pure black background, a vestige of an earlier Disney production, the marvelous dancing mushrooms in Fantasia (notably, one of the only sequences in that film that maintained the influence of Oskar Fischinger, who had served as artistic advisor in development until he, unable to anticipate the wonder to come, grew weary of ‘dancing animals.’

Sequence 18, directed by Norman Ferguson, is structurally divided into two sections, each constructed and designed by two of Disney’s most iconoclastic animators. The first section, animated by Hicks Lokey, reflects a more traditional approach to animated representation than its counterpart, but nevertheless is undeniably experimental in its defiance of rationality and its abstraction of line and negative space. Elephants morph, march in hypnotically repetitive unison, form abstract shapes (circling around the poor drunkard elephant like figures from the work of a great avant-garde filmmaker, Busby Berkeley). They even march along the sides of the screen, foregrounding the apparatus in our understanding of the warped space of this hallucination.

The second, more adventurous half comes from the mind of Howard Swift, who dabbled both in special effects animation (for the Fleischer studio) and character animation (Swift was responsible for the dancing ostriches in the ‘Dance of the Hours’ that so greatly offended Fischinger). In this second section, color itself is no longer stable, and space-time is rendered invalid through elements that deny the viewer any contextual in. These Technicolor elephants are plaid, striped, polka-dotted. Elephants are no longer elephants here – they’re worms, they’re automobiles, snakes, and most horrifyingly, they are man. The single shot – it lasts less than ten seconds – of a humanoid figure constructed entirely of hollow-eyed elephant heads, is perhaps the single scariest moment in all of Disney animation. We are frightened not because it offers any narrative harm to our protagonist but simply because it suggests symbolically a hollow bestial quality to man. Morphing is no longer limited to elephants here – the belly of one dancing creature simply turns into a Dali-inspired eye, which stares at us unblinking. In what feels like a third section, also animated by Swift, line drawing is eschewed for extremely expressionistic three-color shading where contours are found through evocative negative space, followed by a brief finale - the interaction of the elephants with various special effects – lightning and snow among them.

It cannot be stressed enough how much technique contributes to the effect of this sequence – rather than using keyframes and handing off parts of the sequence to other animators, Swift animated the entire thing himself, in order, giving the sequence a free, loose feeling that he obviously borrowed from the extremely loose animation the Fleischers used. No, of course he didn’t make it up as he went along – this sequence was among the most intensely storyboarded in the entire film - but the anarchistic semi-improvisational tactic proved felicitious for Swift, who lived up to his name by churning out an incredible 100 feet of footage a week. Disney so loved early pencil tests he saw of Swift’s sequence that he upped Swift’s salary by $25, no small sum in Depression-era America.

And so we come to the question – why, Disney? Why did a man whose career largely banked on how lifelike his animation could be have such a studied intent on exploring the avant garde? Fantasia, Dumbo, and his aborted short with Salvador Dali are all testaments to Disney’s fascination with less-representational forms of animation. Ultimately, all three projects – the deemphasis of abstraction in favor of dancing animals in Fantasia, the failure of the Dali project, and the subjective context of abstraction in Dumbo – represent the difficulties of this tension, showing how abstraction is, respectively, mitigated, forced out, and rehabilitated in Disney offerings.

Sequence 18, for all its formal innovation and abstraction, is defined within the narrative as the subjective constructions of a drunk elephant whose emotional well-being is already jeopardized by his disjuncture from the maternal – in essence taking a conservative approach by relegating abstraction to a representational system of Otherness, the product of a diseased mind. We find the avant-garde rendered safe through textual insistence that it doesn’t hold the same weight as the (largely depressing) world of shadows and forced perspective shots that Dumbo endures – simply, it’s magic!

Notably, it would seem, a number of Disney’s animators thought this was a load of crap. It’s remarkable how many of the animators who worked on Dumbo – John Hubley and Stephen Bosustow being just two of the more famous ones – went on to become important figures at UPA, the pioneering studio of the 1950s that with a steady stream of Magoos, McBoing-Boings, and stunning one-offs (Rooty Toot Toot being perhaps the most notable) made modern art stylization the de rigeur of American narrative animation.

Our discussion of abstraction as it relates to context in animation spills over into other genres and the formal systems they offer. Take noir, a mode that freely dabbles in formally obtuse and often highly experimental approaches to narrative. Two examples which no one could hardly argue are not works of film noir – Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out, starring the incomparable James Mason as a militant activist shot, stumbling through the Dublin night trying to hide from police, and The Narrow Margin, Richard Fleischer’s quick-and-efficient programmer with hardboiled dialogue, daring hand-held camerawork, and extreme uses of contrast. Despite the fact that the former film engages more obviously in formally experimental style – the nightmarish sequence at the apartment house with the painter, for example – I’d argue the second functions more resonantly as an avant-garde text, by refusing to allow the audience to discount the stylization as a subjective reflection of a ‘warped mind.’ In Fleischer’s grimly powerful world, our delusions are real – the nightmare is inescapable. In Reed’s as in Dumbo’s, it is but a trick of light and shadow – but what a magnificent trick!

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