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The Ties That Bind Filmmaker and educator Christine Panushka discusses the creation of her new self-made feature, Blood of the Family Tree. By Jennifer Wolfe
A
rtist, filmmaker, animator and educator Christine Panushka has completed her first feature-length film, Blood of the Family Tree — which is also her most personal project to date. The 63-minute film uses rhythm and movement to explore “questions of connections, hidden family history, disease and our ties to the past,” and will have its world premiere in September at the Ottawa International Animation Festival. Panushka’s award-winning short films, which include The Sum of Them (1985) and Nighttime Fears and Fantasies: A Bedtime Tale for a Young Girl (1986), investigate what she describes as “internal states of being and the female psyche using stillness and small gestures to describe emotional and spiritual states.” Visual artist William Kentridge described his own films as “chasing the image,” a creative approach Panushka readily applies to her own work. “I think it’s a perfect phrase to describe a particular sort of art practice,” she says. A graduate of the CalArts Experimental Animation Program, Panushka became associate director of the program in the 1990s and has served on the faculty of the John C. Hench Division of Animation & Digital Arts at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts since 1997. She is
perhaps best known for directing and curating Absolut Panushka, the groundbreaking online experimental animation festival sponsored by Absolut in 1996. Conceptualized by Debra Callabresi, the website was the first of its kind, featuring a history section authored by Dr. William Moritz and artwork and animated shorts by 24 international masters of animation, including Jules Engel, Ruth Hayes, Faith Hubley,
Kihachirō Kawamoto, Amy Kravitz, Lejf Marcussen, Priit Pärn, Maureen Selwood and Steven Subotnick.
Self-Made Visions With Blood of the Family Tree, Panushka joins a rare cohort of experimental animators who have self-made feature-length films. This select group of non-narrative animated features
www.animationmagazine.net 18
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september|october 21
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