A Memorial Tribute to Remember Suzan Pitt and Her Films of Psychic Liberation

One of the most inventive and inspired experimental animators of her generation, Suzan Pitt passed away in the summer of 2019 at the age of 75. To celebrate her achievements, Anthology Film Archives will be hosting two programs surveying her career as a filmmaker. Between the two programs there will be a collective slideshow and memorial toast to the artist.

Click here for more information about the tribute program.

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Suzan Pitt (1943-2019) began her career as a painter, writing that “The paintings are not intended to ‘stand still’ but to create a kind of passive/electric panorama of association, a pictorial tableau much like our thoughts.” In 1968, she began making animated films. Pitt wrote that “My painted images seem to have a past and future and through animation I could imagine and dramatize their stories.” All of her films were drawn and painted by hand and filmed on an Oxberry animation stand.

Through her short film work, the artist occupied a unique position within the world of experimental animation. She drew upon the tradition of the Surrealists, of underground comics, and of Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop cartoons (coincidentally, Max Fleischer was the father of Richard Fleischer, the director of TRAPPED). She also was an inheritor of the animation tradition of Winsor McCay, especially his comic strip series Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend (1904, which was later made into a film by the Edison Co. in 1906), in which he probed the inner world of dreams as sites for whimsy, imagination, wit and nightmares, depicting human fears and delusions. Pitt also relied upon her own interior world and imagination, through which she vividly displayed her female psyche on the film canvas. As renown author and animator John Canemaker has observed, “She put her undiluted, unadulterated, uncensored dreams on screen.”

Pitt’s most famous film is ASPARAGUS (1979), a hypnotic, wordless, erotic and jarring visual poem about a woman without a face. While exploring the creative process, the character enters a theater, where she opens a suitcase and unleashes a hodgepodge of items — a lamp, a chair, balloons, insects, and a phallic asparagus — that waft above a fascinated audience of animated clay figures. Unusual for an experimental animation film, ASPARAGUS achieved wide commercial success when it was shown at midnight screenings together with David Lynch’s ERASERHEAD (1977).

In the throes of a deepening depression, the artist/filmmaker found solace in the rain forests of Mexico and Guatamala; the hallucinogenic paintings she made there inspired the scenes from JOY STREET (1995). Set in Mexico, EL DOCTOR (2006) concerns an old doctor who encounters a miracle on his last day on earth. In VISITATION (2012), the monochromatic images encompass dark visions of the Spanish inquisition and witches in the forest. Set to Georges Antheil’s score of BALLET MÉCANIQUE, the mostly abstract images in PINBALL (2013) ricochet against the film frames. About this film, Pitt wrote “Think of PINBALL as a spinning flying saucer which lands in your yard, performs, and then flies away to the sound of film flapping in a projector.”

SUZAN PITT WORKING ON THE MINIATURE THEATER SET, WITH AN AUDIENCE OF CLAY FIGURES, SHOWN IN HER BREAKTHROUGH ANIMATED FILM, ASPARAGUS.

SUZAN PITT - ANIMATED FILMS is available from GME to North American educational buyers as a downloadable DSL 1080p .mp4 file or on DVD.