Lineage
“traces a circuitous thread through synthetic times and spaces to recover a lost age of innocence, when photography and magic tricks merged into ‘movies.' The agent in this investigation is a square man who appears as a line drawing on an artist's table, as a paper-thin puppet in a vaguely deco set, and as a ‘real' man in the street, though not, as logic would seem to dictate, in that particular order. In fact, logic is constructed in Lineage only to be parodied.
“As an antidote to the accepted avant-garde practice of artistic patricide the film searches for and ultimately confirms its own heritage. The traditions established by Melies, Cohl, Fleischer, Richter, and Fischinger are invoked through a series of visual and verbal essays, self-mocking introspections, and fictional oral histories." -George Griffin

• (1979, 20 mins, color)

In a note on his earlier films, George Griffin wrote: “My work this past year (1976-1977) has continued in the direction of ‘anti-cartoon,' anti-illusionist animation. This notion is admittedly paradoxical in that animation is the most synthetic, hence the purest, form of cinema. My efforts use the very mechanics of illusion to reveal something of the nature of drawing in time.” From this period, and included on tonight's program are: Step Print (1976, 7 mins, color, silent), Thumbnail Sketches (1977, 7 mins, color), Block Print (1977, 17 mins, color, silent), and Viewmaster (197 , 3 mins, color).