The Animated Art of Caroline Leaf introduction and post-screening discussion with Haden Guest and Caroline Leaf.

Transcript

Haden Guest 0:00

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. My name is Haden Guest. I'm Director of the Harvard Film Archive. I'm really thrilled to be here tonight for a very, very special evening. It's special because we welcome back Caroline Leaf, one of the great figures working in this remarkable efflorescence of animation that took place in North America and Canada and the United States in the post-war period, in the 1960s and 70s. And Caroline Leaf has been recognized as really a pivotal figure in defining a mode of artisanal and extraordinarily expressive animation. And it all began here in this very building. Caroline Leaf studied animation here, and she made some of her pioneering first films here, actually, in my office [LAUGHS]. She made her first remarkable, really unmatched for its poetry, this short film called Sand, or Peter and the Wolf. I'm proud to say this is also the first preservation project that the Harvard Film Archive has undertaken. Still unfinished, unfortunately, two years -- more than two years -- later, but almost, almost done. And we'll be seeing the close fruit of that. But we'll also be seeing some wonderful new prints of a really remarkable group of films, starting from the late 60s and continuing through the 1980s. We'll see tonight a showcase of an artist who really, a truly visionary artist, whose hand-crafted vision is one of an ever-morphing image that finds the most subtlest means of narrative expression. These are extraordinary works of storytelling magic, and they're also works -- really, when we say moving image, I think this is the quintessence of the moving image, this ever-restless, and truly captivating form of motion picture. This is a very special evening because Caroline Leaf is with us tonight to talk about her work. And so please join me in welcoming Caroline Leaf.

[APPLAUSE]

Caroline Leaf 2:16

Thank you, Haden, and thank you for coming, audience. Tonight, we're going to show seven of my short animations film chronologically, in the order in which they were made. They're each about ten minutes long. I'm here tonight because I was in the animation class at the Carpenter Center in 1968. It was a time when liberal arts colleges were starting to teach film, not as professional training, but as a form of self-expression, an art form. Women were as likely to take the class as men. Some of us who went on to make film careers for ourselves went into the industry. I became part of what is called the independent art animation scene, although I moved to Canada and worked as a Canadian government employee at the National Film Board of Canada, where there was and still is a strong culture of short animation filmmaking. At Harvard -- do I need to speak into this?

Haden Guest 2:47

Yeah.

Caroline Leaf

To be heard, I'll bend it down. [LAUGHS]. At Harvard, the animation class was taught in the corner basement room of the Carpenter Center. Our teacher was Derek Lamb, whom I remember not so much as a teacher with a system to give us, as a whirlwind of energy and curiosity to try things. We came from all parts of the University and MIT to take the course. We were not expected to know how to draw. We moved objects under the camera and out on the streets. We did stop motion. We moved quarters and key chains on lightboxes, trying to create characters through gestures in motion. I've been in touch with one of my classmates, Marion Walter, who is now Professor Emerita of Mathematics Education at the University of Oregon. I asked her what she remembered of the animation class. She was in the Ed School in 1968. And she wrote: "In Derek Lamb's animation course, I enjoyed the freedom to explore a variety of techniques. I got a surprise while animating an object tossed up in the air. Why? While moving the object, I felt in my hands what I knew mathematically; namely, that the velocity of the object approaches zero as it reaches its highest point. Indeed, without making use of this mathematical fact, the animation didn't look right." While Marion was finding visual equivalents to explain mathematical truths, which she used in her own teaching career ever afterwards, I made my own discoveries. I discovered that I could put sand on a light box, and roughly draw figures in the sand and move them. I discovered this because my family has a house on Wingaersheek Beach, which has very fine sand. Drawing in sand let me create characters better than I could with quarters and key chains. I found that storytelling was a way to structure my work. Best of all, there was no centuries-old tradition of drawing in sand. No one had done it before. And that freedom from rules gave me a great deal of energy and a push forward.

We'll start this evening with my student film, called Sand, or Peter and the Wolf, which I made in Derek's animation class. I went on to do more sand films, then worked in other under-the-camera techniques, never straying far from the work method I developed in the animation class. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

Haden Guest 6:23

Just a reminder, please, to turn off any cell phones or electronic devices that you have on you. Thank you very much. And we'll be returning for a Q&A with Caroline Leaf after the screening. Thank you.

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Haden Guest

Excuse me. I was wondering if you could begin by reflecting a bit on direct animation, this mode of working that you've been such a pioneer in, whether working on glass or whether with sand. This sort of, how to describe, the creation of this fugitive image, which is constantly changing and metamorphosing. And it seems to me many of your films themselves deal with shape-shifting. Most explicitly, of course, with the Kafka adaptation, but also with Sand, and with the animal shapes are constantly shifting. So I was wondering if you could maybe talk a bit about the specific challenges and possibilities that this allows, for example?

Caroline Leaf 7:20

Well, direct animation just means that I'm working straight ahead, under the camera, making the images one after the other. It doesn't really necessarily mean that there'd be any shape-shifting. I got into that because I'd never learned how to edit. I didn't know how to make a cut. And that was very scary. So I found that I could draw my transitions and go from one scene to the next. And, yeah. So that's why there's that scene-shifting, shape-shifting, I guess. And it's actually quite a mechanical way to animate, because I would set up increments and just carry it out. It's not actually as interesting character animation as I, as I find even in my first film, Peter and the Wolf.

Haden Guest 8:20

And in terms of, I mean, we see a bit of this in Interview, too, there's a sort of mapping out of where you're going. I mean, can you describe a little bit more, just technically, how this, you know, how much of this do you, the direction of the images, do you give to the shapes that they start to take, the sort of, you know, turns, say, will be, maybe unexpected turns that the image starts to take, and how much of that is sort of precisely sort of controlled and planned and...

Caroline Leaf

Oh. Well, my films look spontaneous, but they're not. And they're very controlled. But because of the medium that I'm using, you see the little fingerprints in the sand or the paint. I think maybe that's what you're feeling in Interview. So it looks lively. And I do keep my moment-to-moment interest, because things are changing, and accidents happen that I might be able to use. But in fact, because I have a story that's my structure, I can't go off on too many tangents. So I might plan a scene by knowing my first drawing and my last drawing, so I know where I'm going to and I know more or less how much time it should take. And it will probably take longer, but that's okay, if I don't have dialogue that I'm trying to fit it into.

Haden Guest

Can we talk a little bit about your work for the Film Board of Canada? I mean, something that I actually know little about, and actually how it worked, and how one, you know, submitted projects, and had them approved and such. Can you tell us a little bit about this extraordinary sort of unit, and movement, and sort of school of sorts that you were part of?

Caroline Leaf

Well, the Film Board was set up during World War II as a propaganda tool for the Canadian war effort. And it's a bureaucracy, and it entrenched itself. And by the time I got there, maybe its halcyon days were over. But I was there in good times, anyway, because they were inviting filmmakers from around the world to come. Specially to make documentary and animation films with educational content. And my films fit the bill. They're not way out, or hard to understand. But they are personal films, and that fit into the Film Board mandate. And then, I was on staff there. So I received a salary for the films that I made. Other people came in as freelancers. And today, the budgets are smaller and smaller, so more and more often, people come in as coproductions, looking for partial funding for the films they make.

Haden Guest

How about Interview? How did Interview come about? And what was the nature of the collaboration between you and Veronika Soul? I'd be curious to know more about this really fascinating, wonderful film.

Caroline Leaf

Well, thank you. This was Derek Lamb. Derek, after he was teaching here, went back to the Film Board. And at one point, he was interested in making films about the animation directors. He was the head of the English animation unit. And I thought, well, maybe with another, I, at that point, I wanted to work with somebody else. And I thought maybe Veronika and I could make a film about ourselves. So, our idea was a day in our work life. And we actually interviewed each other for hours and hours, we had a lot of fun doing that, talking about ourselves and our work. And then we cut it down to about ten minutes. I think we thought we could do a documentary, but we knew it was going to be animation. So we shortened it. And then each went off and did our own piece of animation. And I wanted to work with her because her style is so different from mine. And then we came together and edited it at the end.

Haden Guest

Yeah, I know, I really love the energy, and sort of unexpected turns of that film. But it also seems very much a sort of stylistic and technical tour de force. You seem almost to be trying to do something new at each turn of the film. And that's something I think we can say of your own work. I mean, I think Two Sisters is a film that definitely pushes you quite boldly into somewhere new. And you know, for the first time you're working with an original story rather than an adaptation. And you're working in a different medium, if you will, like actually scratching onto the surface of the film itself. And I was wondering if you could talk about this project, the story, the technique, how this film came about?

Caroline Leaf

Well, I call this an original story, but in fact, I worked for about 10 or 15 years adapting the huge Russian novel The Master and Margarita. I did it first here as a radio play. And then I wrote a feature-length script and realized it wasn't anything I wanted to direct. And I wanted to come back to animation. And at the same time that I was doing that, I was starting to scratch in film emulsion. And when I scratched in black exposed film, I got a white mark, a white image. And so, as I was writing this story about the two sisters on an island, I was also discovering about light and dark in film. So the technique that I was using influenced the story quite a bit.

Haden Guest

Radio play? [LAUGHS]

Caroline Leaf

It was a very strange radio play. It was people making sounds behind curtains [LAUGHS]. Yeah.

Haden Guest 14:49

I'm intrigued. Let's take some questions from the audience, if we have any. There are microphones on either side, if we have questions for Caroline Leaf about tonight's program. Anybody? Yes, right here in the middle? There's a microphone coming on this side. If you could just wait for the microphone, then everybody can hear your question. Thank you. [LOUD BUMP] Turn the switch.

Audience 1  15:40

[INAUDIBLE] documentary of Eskimo or native peoples’ stories that you were transcribing through animation. Did you talk with any storytellers?

Caroline Leaf 15:56

Well, this again came about because the Film Board wanted to have Canadian, wanted to have Inuit content for their broadcasts with the CBC in the North, and there were no Inuit filmmakers. So they asked people at the Film Board to make films based on Inuit legends. And this was a story that I found in a book, actually, and it was just two written pages. But I went to the North twice, once in the Western Arctic, and once in the East, and found that they told the same story 3000 miles apart. And I actually changed the story as I was animating it, because the Inuit laugh at the owl because he's a fool to try to do what he isn't cut out to do. I humanized him. I made him so that you like him. And you feel sorry for him, I think, when he drowns at the end. So I've always had mixed feelings about the film, because it's not true to the Inuit legend, but it's, you know, it was out there. I took it, and I made my own story out of it.

Haden Guest  17:20

In the legend, is he driven by love, as well?

Caroline Leaf  17:24

Oh, yeah!

Haden Guest  17:25

Okay.

Caroline Leaf 17:25

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But I, you know, you don't reach for the stars when you live in the Arctic. I think you do what's been tried and proven, and works.

Haden Guest  17:39

Are there other questions at all? Yes, right here.

[QUESTION INAUDIBLE]

Caroline Leaf  17:49

Yeah, there was trouble with the soundtrack there. There were two young Inuit university students that played the owl and the goose. And then I went back up to the Arctic and got, I asked them to make the sounds of the animals. So the whole soundtrack was Inuit. It's a beautiful-sounding language.

Haden Guest  18:16

Let's see, we have a question right up here in front. Actually, if you could just speak into the mic, then people in the back can hear.

Audience 2  18:21

Yeah, so I felt like with Peter and the Wolf, that most of what I saw was very definite either black or white on the screen. And then there were parts where there were sort of shades in between, and it seemed like the sand took its -- that was sand?

Caroline Leaf  18:39

Mm hmm.

Audience 2  18:40

It sort of took on its own life. And then, in later films, that the sand really had its own life, and showed itself more, rather than directly black or white. Was that something that you just developed more as...

Caroline Leaf 18:56

Yeah, you're right. It developed. I learned that I could shade the sand. Peter and the Wolf, I hadn't thought of the white screen being infinite space yet. So everything moves back and forth, kind of like a theater stage. There's not 3D movement in it. And when I wanted to get rid of something, I just made it go back into a pile of sand. I hadn't figured out how to do these transitions that I did later. Yeah.

Haden Guest  19:31

I'd love to know a bit more about The Street. I mean, The Street, I think is really such a wonderful adaptation. The way in which place and time and memory and emotion are really just sort of blended. And it takes place, again, through this sort of shape-shifting. So anyway, what drew you to this story in the first place, and how did you start to understand its potential for your unique mode of animating?

Caroline Leaf 20:05

Well, I was living in Montreal at the time, and I was living very near the Jewish Ghetto. And I had done the Kafka film. No, or I was making that at the same time. I guess, I had done The Owl Who Married a Goose. And I wanted to do something for the first time with people and dialogue, and yeah, using the things that I could see around me. So my research was to look around me. And Mordecai Richler wasn't necessarily an empathetic writer. I changed the story quite a bit, also making it more sympathetic, I think. But for some reason I felt a kinship to the story, I felt there were characters there that I could get into.

Haden Guest  21:01

It's also a story about the imagination, though, as well, no?

Caroline Leaf

Yes.

Haden Guest

And ending it on the note that you do, I think, is very much a sort of homage to that, and to the powers of the imagination to create the lasting image, right? Other questions? Yes, in the back there's a question.

Audience 3  21:28

So I want, if you can tell, like, the process, just using maybe one, like The Street, or anything you want. I guess I want to know, one, is that how long it takes to make that ten-minute film? And then also the process? How do you know that putting together, you know, it is kind of coherent. And small movement, do you have to take photos? Or do you have to take video? How do you know, it actually, you know, connects and it works? I'm just curious, like, how the process -- do you have to draw already? And you already know, and then you start the process? And when you set the camera? Do you set an interval to take a photo automatically? Or when you're ready, you push the button? Just, I guess, like, the details, if you don't mind to share.

Haden Guest  22:26

All your secrets!

Caroline Leaf  22:26

No, I think you should go to the animation class, and try something [LAUGHS]. My films take about a year to animate -- The Street did -- but maybe two years from start to finish. And what else were you asking me? It's very boring to do things twice. So I never plan absolutely carefully. Like I said earlier, I might know where I start and know where I'm ending. And it's through experience that I knew how it would look, although every time rushes came back from the lab, it was a big surprise. Things didn't move exactly as smoothly as I thought they would. And now, with the computer as a recording instrument, you can see quickly what you've done, and make changes to it -- change the speed, add things, take things away.

Haden Guest

Yes, a question right here.

[QUESTION INAUDIBLE]

Haden Guest

A question about influences.

Caroline Leaf  23:48

I remember in the animation class, we saw a lot of films, and it was seeing films of Alexandre Alexieff, the pin screen films that he made, and a couple of films by Jan Lenica, that made me think, Oooooo, this is something I'd like to do.

Haden Guest  24:05

Did you cross paths with Lenica, who also taught here, as well?

Caroline Leaf  24:09

Yeah. I was doing a second film. Bob Gardner gave me money to come back a year. And that was the year that Lenica was--

Haden Guest  24:17

Making Landscape here, right?

Caroline Leaf  24:19

Yeah. Yeah.

Haden Guest  24:21

So did you actually study with him, or?

Caroline Leaf  24:25

No, and he was a difficult man to talk to.

Haden Guest  24:27

Yes. [LAUGHS]

Caroline Leaf  24:27

He was very shy. He was in Chris Killip's room.

Haden Guest  24:33

Mm hmm.

Caroline Leaf  24:36

[LAUGHS] And there's a wonderful documentary of this building that, or I guess it's about Lenica. But it showed, he was a Polish animator who made fabulous posters, but also some very wonderful films. And at the end of the film, because we were all working in the basement here, he comes out onto the roof of the building, and he's squinting like a mole would, when it comes out into the sunlight. [LAUGHS]

Haden Guest  25:01

That's a film by Richard Rogers.

Caroline Leaf  25:04

Yes.

Haden Guest  25:04

And Lenica famously quotes, he said he and his wife were so bored here in Cambridge that they had to teach each other how to play chess.

[LAUGHTER]

Caroline Leaf  25:15

That was his fault!

[LAUGHTER]

Haden Guest  25:19

Yeah, exactly. Any other questions? Yes, right here.

Audience 4  25:26

I'm just curious, do you have a definition for what animation means to you?

Caroline Leaf  25:35

Oh! No, I don't. You mean a technical definition?

Audience 4

Well, not just a technical definition. But just maybe, you know, I think animation is a pretty vague term. And I'm just kind of curious if there's a way that you view animation, or kind of what it means to you?

Caroline Leaf  26:00

Well, I do feel that any subject can be handled in animation. There's no limit to content. I know that in the world of real big cinema filmmaking, the feature animations that are coming out now are trying to be more and more like live action in the movement. And I don't find that very interesting. But that's also animation. I like the simpler things, and the handmade things.

Audience 4  26:34

Okay. And really quickly, could you just say how you got into animation, and if you enjoy animating? And maybe anything it's taught you about life, or just...

[LAUGHTER]

Caroline Leaf  26:50

Well, I said in Interview that I felt I was hiding from life. And I got burnt out. I was tired of being in that dark room. So I've stopped animating. But I started in the animation class here, and it was my senior year, and it was just by chance that I took the animation class. And there's more animation offered here now.

Audience 5  27:20

[VERY FAINT] What are you doing now?

Caroline Leaf  27:20

Ohhhh!

Haden Guest  27:20

There we go. Good question. John, are we ready?

Caroline Leaf  27:25

I was hoping someone would ask that, because I wanted to show some of my recent work. About 20 years ago, I started to paint, and I've been teaching to support myself, but my painting's coming along, so I've got some images I could show you.

Haden Guest  27:44

"Enter a password." Ah! Hold on.

Caroline Leaf  28:09

So, I have a small studio in my house in London, and I'm painting in oils and doing drawings on paper.

Haden Guest  28:17

Do you want to bring the house lights down a little bit? Thank you.

Caroline Leaf

This is a painting called "Remembering the Beach When I Wasn't There" --"When I'm Not There." "Remembering the Beach When I'm Not There." They're about 36 inches square. And this is "Remembering the Beach When I'm Not There."

Haden Guest

This is oil?

Caroline Leaf  28:45

These are oil. These two are oils, yeah. This was a little drawing on paper that I did after I went to Japan last year and I was thinking about the temple. A temple. And this one I was also thinking about the temple. Ah! This one is called "Deborah Fortson's Garden." And it's rather a large drawing. It's probably about 30 inches square, and one hot, muggy, August dog day afternoon, I was in Deborah Fortson's garden here in Boston. And I tried to get the feeling of the heat and the sunlight.

This I call a water painting. I did two of them. These were the last two, well, this was the last thing that I did. And that's its pair. This doesn't have a title, but it's a space. That’s another space that sort of, has some connection to a train station that I go through when I am, on my teaching days. And this one is connected to that last one. That’s it? Okay, yeah. [LAUGHS]

Haden Guest  30:42

There was a question in the middle. There he is -- are you, you're all set, then? Okay, are there any other questions, comments? Yes, right here.

Audience 6  30:56

Can you just talk a little bit about animating versus creating still images? And about like, looks like with the still images, the paintings, you're still, almost look like they could be stills from the films. There's that sort of blurry quality in the motion is still there, but obviously, takes so much less time. [INAUDIBLE]

Caroline Leaf  31:22

Okay.

Audience 6  31:22

More pleasurable, I guess?

Caroline Leaf  31:24

Well, it's a lot more fun to draw and paint than it is to animate. Because I can do it anywhere. I'm in the sunlight. There, I started to do the drawings and the paintings. Well, I always used to, and they were kind of like diary entries. They were stories that I was telling, things that had happened to me. And I did that alongside the animation all those years. But gradually, as I spent more time painting, the structure became more and more interesting. And they're much more complex in their structure than the animation could ever be. The animation was line drawn. And individually, there's no one image in my films that is outstanding. It's the sequence of the images that become interesting. So I found working on single images, trying to create space, that became very gratifying.

Audience 6  32:32

Are they like, purposely abstract because of that? [INAUDIBLE] people are linear, you know, like a story.

Caroline Leaf  32:46

Well, sometimes in terms of the original idea, there's a story, like "Deborah Fortson's Garden." I was really trying to recreate the heat that I remembered. But yeah, there isn't a story. And I've been surprised how they went, you know, the direction they've taken, that there haven't been people in them.

Haden Guest  33:16

Well, thank you so much, Caroline, for this really wonderful evening. Please join me in thanking Caroline Leaf!

[APPLAUSE]

Caroline Leaf  33:21

Thank you.

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