Amy Kravitz: The Split Tooth Interview

Amy Kravitz’s animation connects with viewers on an almost chemical level. Her work explores how abstract visuals communicate with the mind. Kravitz is known for films such as River Lethe (1985), Trap (1988), and Roost (1999). Trap and Roost epitomize her style; she builds an interplay between light and dark that explores the sensory potential of high contrasts. In River Lethe, the animation careens around the frame in an intricate ballet.

Kravitz is also a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work and teaching philosophy focuses on guiding students along a creative journey that fosters each individual’s relationship to animation, rather than just imparting general technical knowledge.

In an email interview with Kravitz, we discussed the collaboration between artist and viewer, how she helps her students find their creative voices, and how to convey reality through abstraction.

Split Tooth Media: The description about your work on Vimeo explains that you “love to explore animation as direct, not vicarious, experience.” Could you expand more about what you mean by that? How might that philosophy differ from more conventional animation practices?

Amy Kravitz: Direct experience does not come through intellectual interpretation but entire body knowledge. You observe, see, and understand with more than your eyes. I make artwork that engages innate physical understandings in its structure.

Much independent and certainly almost all industry animation utilizes narrative as the primary structuring principle. I see narrative as just one of many kinds of structuring principles.

I know you are interested in kinesthesia in animation. This sense of motion comes across powerfully in River Lethe, especially during the middle sequence with that tornado of motion in white null space. What do you consider the key to creating convincing motion in River Lethe, and could you explain more about your interest in kinesthetic animation?

I do not set out to create “convincing motion” because I never know what will happen when I actually animate. When I work, I discover or realize the movement. I animate straight ahead so I do not pre-imagine movement. When I do pre-imagine, the animation often feels dead to me and I do not use it in the final film. I actually try to understand what the drawing wants — not what I want. Unlike many animators, I make a lot of animation that does not get used in the final work. I do a lot of editing.

The kinesthetic sense is our understanding of motion and our body in space. But, when we see movement, we feel movement. So that is the relationship between animation and the kinesthetic sense. We experience physical empathy. As primates, we have motor neurons, called mirror neurons, that trigger not just by experiencing but by seeing movement.

In your film Roost, the sound and animation enhance each other in a powerful way. What do you think about the synesthetic potential of animation, and how do you approach the sound design of your work?

Synesthesia, or the connection of usually separate, sensory, or cognitive pathways, is in the nature of almost all animation experience — making and viewing.

In editing sound and image, I try many combinations until I feel a physical response to the union of those two entities. The two can’t fight. When sound and picture don’t work together, one experiences the sound as sitting on top of the picture, not integrated with, or emerging from the picture. Sound design requires lengthy experimentation, and like the animation, I cannot pre-imagine it.

Still image from Trap. (Courtesy Amy Kravitz)

I love how light careens and undulates around the frame in Trap. It seems like the opacity is modulating between black and white layers. How did you create the lighting and color palette for Trap, and why make your films in shades of black and white where this play of light comes across so strongly?

When I began Trap, I was focused on the sensation of seeing deep, velvety black. I was inspired by Georges Seurat’s drawings — purely tonal drawings made with conté crayon on textured paper. As I worked, I explored the sensation of light and shadow as material. I looked for a long time for a textured paper that I could afford in quantity and also for drawing media. I was reading Van Gogh’s letters to his brother at that time. I found a letter in which Vincent goes on for several pages about a bit of crayon he had, requesting that Theo find him another such one. He described the crayon in detail. I started looking for something like it. I found Korn’s Lithographic crayons — an important discovery for me. The next stage in realizing that velvety black was shooting the animation. After a lot of testing, I discovered a high contrast black and white panchromatic print stock that worked beautifully. It further took a lot of research to find labs capable of printing that stock.

I was really interested in the experience of seeing black — the pigment that absorbs light — in this way; the physical experience of seeing black is almost beyond seeing.

What was it like learning animation for the first time at the Yellow Ball Workshop?

The experience of filmmaking as a child was empowering and liberating. Seeing the first scene I animated, when it came back from the lab, changed my life. The artwork was, magically, something that it wasn’t before.

How much of an influence did Yvonne Andersen have on your work and teaching, considering her passion for arts education, animation, and experimental film?

Yvonne was a formative teacher. One of her great talents was treating children as peers. Her respect was important in learning to trust my own process of working.

Still image from River Lethe. (Courtesy Amy Kravitz)

What drew you first to abstract animation?

I never set out to make abstract films — but I realized that abstraction was the form of imagery that felt real to me — that seemed to actually touch and evoke the sensations I wished to express and explore.

There are so many different philosophies when it comes to teaching filmmaking. But you have a unique style by focusing on your student’s “individual approaches to the medium” instead of just teaching a laundry list of technical skills. Why is it important to provide an individualized teaching process rather than a broad overview of general film practices?

Every person is unique and in turn has something unique to give the universe. What they give makes a difference. Students actually always teach themselves — a teacher just sets up the discovery process. Teachers can help students see what they are doing and understand what interests them — help them hear their own voices. Students absolutely need various skills for their voices to emerge — but the skills should serve the voice. That way students can develop thriving abilities and knowledge that are meaningful to them. They have a center. Their work becomes purposeful. I recognize that students must be able to earn a living after their schooling, but that reality need not contradict the voice they develop — indeed the stronger the voice, the more agile they will be.

It should also be understood that, at the university level, teachers teach as a community — each teacher has something to give that is different.

What sets the visual language of animation apart from other mediums, and what do you find is the core syntax of how animation can communicate with a viewer?

Huge question. How does animation work? At the core, unlike live action, nothing exists between two frames of animation, So the fundamental experience of animation is actually a collaborative operation between the maker and the viewer — the maker is making — but the viewer is also actively making.

Animation often seems like such a tactile medium, in regards to styles like stop motion or hand-drawn 2D. However, it has also historically been fueled by technological advancement, like with computer animation. Considering this, how has your experience been teaching animation remotely during the pandemic and relying on technology so heavily to teach animation?

Your question implies that digital work is not tactile, but digital forms can actually be material. For all animation, for example, time itself is a primary material — time has to be seen as having plasticity. Digital media is also plastic in its own way.

The other part to your question concerns not being physically present with students. I may not be physically present, but they are physically present with their own work. They are still drawing, and making puppets, and experiencing color. Furthermore, in animation we usually deal with photographs of material things, so we are one step removed from actuality — unlike, for example, seeing an actual puppeteer at work, or a painter’s painting. Thus, even when we are making work that is not created in a digital environment, that step of removal has always been a part of animation.

Do you think experimental animation’s space within the medium at large has changed over the years?

In some ways experimental animation existed long before there was film, photography, or painting — the joy of watching shapes moving, clouds, fire, water — seeing meaning in those shapes, and decoding all the special messages the universe sends us each and every day.

Find Amy Kravitz’s films on her Vimeo page
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