Close Up

3 - 4 March 2018: Edge of Frame Weekend

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A unique three-day celebration of experimental animation, featuring innovative, visionary and risk-taking work in a packed programme of screenings and discussion. Featuring premieres of new films alongside classics and rarely screened historical work, taking place across London at BFI Southbank, Barbican and Close-Up.

Curated by Edwin Rostron (Edge of Frame) with guest-curated programmes from Herb Shellenberger and Alexander Stewart, a retrospective of guest artist Peter Burr and an afternoon of talks illuminating the processes, histories and context of experimental animation, the Weekend presents an expansive insight into this vibrant art form.


Programme 1: Bend Me, Shape Me: The Animated Body

Though all forms of animation push and pull at anatomical correctness, artists working with animation have explored its potential to morph, transform and bend the body in ways that have wide-ranging and sometimes unexpected implications. This screening features work from the last five decades which explores how through representing bodies – or specifically their own bodies – artists exploit animation’s remove from reality to comment on very real subjects, including sexuality, gender, violence and trauma, in ways that can variously provoke, titillate and horrify.

Curated and introduced by Herb Shellenberger. read more


Programme 2: Made at CalArts: Experimental Animation, 1974 - Present

This programme features a selection of experimental animation work made at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), from the programme’s foundation in the early 1970’s through the present day. With a focus on the aesthetic innovation, unrestrained spirit, and emphasis on personal vision that have defined CalArts in its 45 years of existence, the line-up includes eccentric cartoons, cosmic psychedelia, existential crises, subtle studies in textural abstraction, and stroboscopic reveries. These films represent an approach to animation that is by turns ambitious, introspective, joyful, and imaginative: uniquely and distinctively CalArts.

Curated by Alexander Stewart. read more


Programme 3: Voyages Elsewhere

This programme explores the outer limits; travelling into the far reaches of the imagination and out to celestial bodies. With films pushing at the boundaries of what is real or unreal, micro or macro, animated or non-animated; these works weave together fragments of images into webs of clues, hinting at what is “beyond.” 

Curated and introduced by Edwin Rostron, followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers. read more


The Edge of Frame Weekend 2018 is supported by Jerwood Charitable Foundation, Royal College of Art, and using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

More info: www.edgeofframe.co.uk