Broken Down Film 1985 Japan, Osamu Tezuka.

Mubarak Ali at Supposed Aura recently discovered a treasure trove of Tezuka's shorts. In Broken Down Film Tezuka draws attention to the way that the act of exhibiting a film degrades and alters the film print. It demonstrates the fact that every time a movie is loaded into a projector it changes in a very real way, however small the changes are. He also pays homage to the pioneering work of Jones and other animators, like Tex Avery.

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You can also watch Jones' Duck Amuck online, thanks to YouTube:

Duck Amuck 1953 United States, Chuck Jones.

Duck Amuck is hailed in many circles as one of the greatest animated films ever made, by some simply as a film masterpiece, no qualifiers attached. I for one prefer Jones' playful exploration of film's artifice to Ingmar Bergman's labored, intellectual treatment of the same theme in Persona.

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Finally, animators can incorporate actual physical objects from our world into their films, as in:

Mothlight 1963 United States, Stan Brakhage.

Mothlight was made by taping bits of leaves, insects, and other objects onto a strip of film. By making a film out of organic matter Brakhage reminds us of the intimate relationship between life and cinema, which is easily forgotten or dismissed. Celluloid was made with gelatin, so in a sense Brakhage isn't doing anything new when he constructs a film from once living creatures.

Darragh O'Donoghue says about Mothlight, "You could say Brakhage puts the 'anima' back into animation, reanimating the dead, painstakingly affixing the remains of dead insects, leaves and the like onto the film strip, and feeding it through the projector back to life" (Senses of Cinema June 2004). It's a fascinating, troubling film.

Watch Mothlight

As is:

Bloodlust 1999 Germany, Thorsten Fleisch.

Fleisch made Bloodlust by applying drops of his own blood to a strip of film. The result is possibly the single most disturbing film I've ever seen. Eli Roth's Hostel doesn't begin to compare the sensation of watching a film constructed out of people.

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