The following interview with Jodie Mack was originally published in 2016 on Fandor but was no longer available online.
Jodie Mack’s Let Your Light Shine, a five-film presentation featuring a live performance, has been touring around the world to delighted audiences for two years. Using everyday materials like wallpaper, tye-dye t-shirts, and dollar store gift bags, Mack creates remarkable works of abstract animation that beckon the viewer to at once appreciate the aesthetic of objects while simultaneously drawing connections between them, ourselves and the real world in ways we typically ignore.
Known for her joyful personality, Mack is a bit tired of performing the piece, but couldn’t resist bringing it to Knoxville, Tennessee for the Big Ears Festival. Typically known for its eclectic range of musical acts, this year Knoxville’s own The Public Cinema, founded in 2015 by Paul Harrill and Darren Hughes, was asked to curate an event-based film program. Hence, Mack was a perfect choice—Dusty Stacks of Mom, the centerpiece of Let Your Light Shine, features Mack performing an alternative version of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon live. Her latest short film, Something Between Us, a rare work of live action for the artist, also screened as part of an experimental shorts program.
Mack is currently hard at work, splitting time between work on a feature film and her duties as Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth. I was able to catch up with her and discuss her practice at this in-between moment, as she begins to move on from Let Your Light Shine to new ventures.
Adam Cook: Could you talk about abstract animation and how you came to it?
Jodie Mack: I first got interested about abstract animation by learning about cameraless animation: painting and drawing on the film strip frame by frame, which of course is quite a constraint on the visual artist. If you’re working on 16mm, you’re not going to have a lot of options, you’re not going to be able to draw realistic figures or something like that. I learned about people like Len Lye and Harry Smith, and Brakhage, and then ran into a book called Experimental Animation by Robert Russet and Cecile Starr. I realized there was this whole tradition of it that included cut out animation, hand-drawn, and pre-video art, and things like that. I’m a big music fan and so to me I really got behind the idea of visual music. It seemed like a pure and joyful entry into weirdo cinema. I’d seen other experimental filmmaking and I was like, “OK I can get my head around this,” but with abstract cinema you could be a child and get into it.
Cook: There’s a visceral immediacy.
Mack: Yeah, it’s spectacle, and it’s not so different than a lot of other visual spectacle. I fell in love with it.
Cook: Is there a philosophical difference for you between cameraless animation and abstract animation?
Mack: Not necessarily, but something that’s great about cameraless film is that it’s always a surprise, and also ties cinema to the plastic arts in a way no other genre really can. If you’re a painter painting on a canvas and then you put it in a projector and everything is magnified, and maybe your hair accidentally gets on it or a piece of tape, and that texture is magnified, and there’s no registration from frame to frame, everything is shaking and has this ebullient and fast metabolism.
Cook: The material and the film we’re looking at are the same but with your practice you’re filming the material.
Mack: I enjoyed abstraction from the beginning but I also recognized its limitations and place within culture. When I introduced the films today I referred to a post-psychedelic climate and what I meant was there are similar types of imagery that live in both high art and low merchandised traditions. Someone from the general public may not like a Yosef Albers painting as fine art and yet they’d buy something very similar as a design on a pillow for their house. If someone would see the work they’d say, “oh that’s trippy,” or “oh that looks like a screensaver,” and also there’s a critique about experimental animation that it’s not political. I feel like anything against narrative is a political stance. How can you make it more than just pretty? That’s what drew me to filming real objects. A lot of these objects in my house have imagery that belong in a museum or something like that.
Cook: So there’s a conscious effort to collapse high and low art by finding both in one another, a through line.
Mack: I’m trying! It’s like a seesaw, I try to reveal how it seesaws.
Cook: And design itself compels you.
Mack: What I’m really interested in is the break between painting and design. When the camera was invented, painting had a crisis yet around the same time it became easier to print things. You see this rise of graphic design, which was not having a crisis, it was free to do whatever it wanted, often borrowing from what was going on in the high art tradition. Graphic design—especially when I’m in Europe, particularly London where I spent my first eight years—you see a lot of design everywhere that has a relationship to fine art practices that regular consumers wouldn’t understand. My relationship to design—I love clothing, fabric, decorative objects, and yet I realize everyday how multiplicity codified these really simple patterns are.
Cook: When you break it down and link it to a context it’s usually divorced from.
Mack: In my film Posthaste Perennial Patterns (2010) [On Fandor now] with all floral prints, that to me breaks it down to what we actually seek to represent in art or cinema. The funny thing about painting having a crisis when photography was invented was no one wanted to painting anything than a really realistic scene, and then photograpjy captured reality and we questioned why make art if we just want to represent nature. That’s what’s funny about florals to me, there a kick back to our natural world but abstracted in this funny way, repeated turned into something that has nothing to do with the natural world—ironically it’s running the natural world via production practices and the birth of industry from which we’re still suffering the consequences.
Cook: With these everyday objects, they exist in our lives but we accept them on face value alone. Your films force us to engage with them. As soon as you put a frame on something, it’s a painting, or a piece, and we have to consider more deeply what the real relationship it has with ourselves and the world.
Mack: I think so and I think my really fast flickeresque films are trying to encapsulate some kind of collective memory that we have of these and the pace at which we are consuming them, whereas in the beginning of New Fancy Foils [the first short in the Let Your Light Shine program] for example, it starts slow and you get time to be with the object and see its texture and analyze the printing methods. Sometimes I worry that people don’t get to think about how they’re experiencing these objects in a new way.
Cook: And it’s important that viewers are considering both the design itself and paying attention to and taking notice of the material of the object. Could you talk about the role of abstraction?
Mack: I think it has a double-sided role. A lot of the time it is watered down to a decorative notion that’s easily dismissed. And at the same time I think industry uses it as filler, as wallpaper, screensavers, you can’t go to a concert now with visuals playing behind the musicians. You can’t go to Urban Outfitters without a three-screen abstract animation playing. Its role is becoming more complicated. I have this letter from Elfrida Fishinger to MoMA from a long time ago saying, “I really hope people are going to take Oskar’s films and imagine this new genre as something that can be viable for everyone,” and it just never happened. The role is to simultaneously bring people together and tear them apart. Some people are willing to suspend their disbelief and their wont for reality and they will of in there and other people just can’t even fathom liking something that’s abstracting representational imagery.
Cook: It’s counter-intuitive. Your films bring out an aesthetic beauty in the objects. My first instinct as a viewer was to tap into the sense of joy in the mage and its creation, but as I watched more of your films I sensed an ambiguity. I don’t think you romanticize the objects, you question them.
Mack: I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few years about polar opposite emotions and how they’re the same. I feel like joy and sorrow are the same emotion in some ways, or like excitement and anger. Anything that’s a polar opposite is carrying the same energy. I am excited about these materials and think they’re beautiful and let’s make a joy show out of them, but in other ways I think there’s a lot of anxiety within the films with them being so fast, and an equal amount of sorrow or fear about what it took to make them and where it came from. My next film will try to unpack that and how these motifs traveled around. I feel both ways about the material.
Cook: The form of your films is very accessible, maybe the ideas behind them take careful thought, but the pleasure is right there.
Mack: One thing that makes me nervous is that abstraction makes the general public feel unintelligent. When it’s not at at all, it’s shapes and colors moving around!
Cook: Is this concern about people not understanding it connected to wanting to present Let Your Light Shine in Person, to make it friendlier and fun?
Mack: I really love it actually, I’m a professor, and feel like from this point on that can be unlocked from my practice. I’m a good person to be able to help audiences unpack this stuff in everybody’s vernacular, I’m not going to put “-isms” at the end of it or act like an historian.
Cook: You want to to teach but prevent it from being a purely academic experience.
Mack: Right it’s about opening it up and cheering them on a little bit. Not everyone has seen a 12-minute silent film about paper before and I know they’re freaking out about that and that’s OK! It’s exciting for me to show people another way. It’s screened for a lot of film people but it’s screened for a lot of regular people.
Cook: That’s what you had today at Big Ears, a mix of some hardcore film folks and curious festivalgoers who just came from a jazz show and wander in.
Mack: Totally. Someone brought their nine-year-old daughter. You know she doesn’t have any experience with experimental film and she’s probably more bombarded with imagery than us! It is special to me to come in and say, “you might not like this but give it a try.” It’s important to let them know you’re aware it’s weird too. The audience here is familiar with experimental music. Music without a meter is like a movie without a story.
Cook: Your latest film, Something Between Us, is all live action.
Mack: I animate at home and I wanted to just get out of there, I didn’t want to feel confined anymore. A lot of my next film continues with that, and has animation as well.
Cook: Dusty Stacks of Mom is about your parents’ poster shop. Could you talk about growing up living with that imagery?
Mack: We had all these weird fine art appropriations coming through our house, and all of this paper, all of the time. I have no fondness for them, I wouldn’t let any of my roommates have posters in the house. Everywhere you go you see Che Guevara and Scarface on posters and t-shirts! They don’t even know what Che did, they see him as a revolutionary, but for what, they don’t know.
Cook: And Dark Side of the Moon’s album cover which obviously plays a role in your film. You can’t buy a t-shirt with that just for the love of the album, it’s been appropriated on such a mass scale it loses its meaning.
Mack: I see Dartmouth students wearing it and I ask where they got it, and it’s always Hot Topic. They put out these reissues that look and feel old. Lame.
Cook: I want to very vaguely ask you about prisms, which you use to stunning effect in Something Between Us.
Mack: I think they sum up the problem of the role of abstraction in our society and it also represents a relationship between the experimental film world and the sciences because at times you do see people experimenting with artifacts of science. The prism is something that illustrates how light works, and yet it’s become this trippy kitsch item. It’s an object riddled with multiple meanings. Are you a science object? Are you a visual wonder? Where do you live? I just want look at how this thing operates in different modes of culture depending on where you place it.
Cook: You shoot exclusively on film?
Mack: Pretty much. I have a music video coming out soon on video, so I will do the odd thing digitally, but film renders color, texture, and movement in a way that is complimentary to my films. The projection mechanism works better for flicker films. Why would anyone say to a pianist, “dude why do you play piano, don’t you want to play MIDI instead?”. I don’t know what wave of capitalism we’ve decided that we’re in but it’s pretty interesting to me that these bolex cameras are obsolete but they weren’t made to be obsolete, so they work still, whereas cameras built now aren’t built to last. It represents a time when markets didn’t create things with planned obsolescence.