Part of their new strand of screenings at Close-Up, Filmarmalade presents a programme of moving image work and performance by Let Me Feel Your Finger First.

Let Me Feel Your Finger First films are populated by a cast of characters from its "defective" cartoon family: an incestuous Bavarian patriarch; an oligophrenic nine-year old whose aberrant animated behaviour is not frame-accurate; a background rock lifted from the land of the Smurfs and married with R.D. Laing’s ideas about the petrified subject and mutating minstrels reconfigured from the problematical imagery of the colonial carnivalesque.

Homo Zombies
Let Me Feel Your Finger First
2000 | 4'50 min | Colour | Digital

Combining live action and animated drawings Homo Zombies is adapted from the comic strip of the same name from Let Me Feel Your Finger First's Greenhorn comic. Wandering through the park at dawn, Cute Punk, passive and wide-eyed, happens upon a dreamy world of the undead where there's rustling coming from the bushes and silent figures standing around emitting sporadic grunting noises. Both satire of homo culture and homage to zombie culture, in Homo Zombies the undead get animated.

Ontologically Anxious Organism (Episode 1)
Let Me Feel Your Finger First
2010 | 2'30 min | Colour | Digital

Ontologically Anxious Organism is nervous about the notion of character. He feels the other members of his comic family trying to rise up inside him and use him as an exit. Ontologically Anxious Organism disguised himself as a boulder...

Episode One: Camouflaged yet constrained, Ontologically Anxious Organism shifts between a series of reconstituted cartoon backgrounds, as he grapples with existence.

Francis
Let Me Feel Your Finger First
2007 | 3'36 min | Colour | Digital

An account of the creation of a nine-year-old "defective" animated character. As the draughtsman’s hand goes to work and Francis attains animated consciousness, his behaviour is observed and assessed by a child psychologist. The boy’s responses – initially slow and apparently flawed – develop in unusual comic directions as the examination progresses. As his vocalisations begin to address the nature of his animated world, it appears that Francis may "break out" once and for all and become a "real" animated character.

Ontologically Anxious Organism (Episode 2)
Let Me Feel Your Finger First
2011 | 3 min | Colour | Digital

Episode Two: Trapped in the cartoon void, Ontologically Anxious Organism meets his maker and experiences the fabrication of the Variant.

Postcolonial Capers
Let Me Feel Your Finger First
2014 | 9 min | Colour | Digital

Blackface minstrelsy, the most popular and enduring American theatrical entertainment of the nineteenth century, has shaped the design and behaviour of animated characters, from the white gloves they wear to their wilful disobedience. Let Me Feel Your Finger First’s Postcolonial Capers reconfigures the problematical imagery of the colonial carnivalesque and considers the minstrel’s influence upon racial stereotyping, anthropomorphism and the strange dualistic nature of the animated organism.

Ontologically Anxious Organism (Episode 3)
Let Me Feel Your Finger First
2012 | 4'30 min | Colour | Digital

Episode Three: An encounter with a young deer and a baby rabbit lost in the cartoon void causes the boulder's fragile universe to come crashing into line.

The Uncle Hans-Peter Party
Let Me Feel Your Finger First
2009 | 30 min | Re-enaction of live work

Uncle Hans-Peter is the patriarch of the Let Me Feel Your Finger First cartoon family. He’s a hunter. An operator. He enjoys tying up his nephews on hot summer afternoons. The Uncle Hans-Peter Party is an initiation into the comic world of Let Me Feel Your Finger First, a "live" comic strip comprising masquerade, animation and participatory performance where the audience don plastic masks and collectively assume the persona of the "Fiend of Feuchtwangen". First performed at the ICA, London in 2009.

More info:
www.letmefeelyourfingerfirst.com
www.filmarmalade.co.uk