A "chance" collage of video imagery and sound recorded and photographed directly from a television set during the course of a single evening. The filmed imagery was optically reprinted and color tinted frame by frame by hand. The imagery juxtaposes religious drama, murder mystery, musicals, horse races, and horror films.
"Visually compelling hand-painted images taken from a television set are humorously edited and accompanied by the sounds of random radio dial movements." - Film Center, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Award: Ann Arbor Film Festival
1976, 16mm, color/so, 3m, $20
SEVENTY-SIX is a collage and compilation of live action images, still images, video fragments, multiple generations of re-recorded imagery, post cards, photographs and optically reprinted material. The film juxtaposes several "histories," including Film History, Television History, American History and the filmmaker's own history.
Award: Ann Arbor Film Festival
1976, 16mm, color/so, 7m, $20
A mechanical dream is told in a series of elaborate tableaux. Machines, interiors, objects, re-composed pop imagery, fashion models, wrestlers and sleeping figures flash out of darkness to be seen and momentarily observed.
"An animated fantasy film that employs a simultaneous use of photo-collage animation, cell animation and multiple exposures all done in-camera. Although the imagery hints at the presence of a sci-fi narrative, DREAM 733 is best approached as a collection of carefully assembled collage fragments of a surreal future that flash momentarily into view before they flicker, change and vanish." - Filmmakers' Newsletter
"A precise science-fiction collage of technological iconography. These cluttered tableaux ultimately suggest a chilling view of the future." - Walker Art Center
Awards: Ann Arbor Film Festival; Sinking Creek Film & Video Festival; NY Filmmakers' Exposition.
1977, 16mm, color/so, 13m, $40
Live-action and still images of objects, places, classic films and other situations are presented and then followed by animated diagrams that explain, transform or re-interpret what has just been seen. The animated sequences become a vehicle of entry into an alternate viewing space. This is the first part of a trilogy of Diagrammatic films: DIAGRAM FILM, FIVE IMPROVISATIONS and FILM-WIPE-FILM.
"DIAGRAM FILM alternates shots of planes, cars and people walking with comically elaborate moving diagrams of them. And sometimes it reverses itself, as when a group of triangles is replaced by a shot of tepees. The diagrams head off into fantastic Rube Goldberg machine movements, with details undergoing constant transformation." - American Film
"The transformation of the original imagery is one of destruction and reconstruction, at once abstract and ethereal." - Filmmakers' Monthly
Awards: Ann Arbor Film Festival; Athens Int'l Film Festival; Baltimore Film Festival; Sinking Creek Film & Video Festival; Big Muddy Film Festival; Kent Film Festival; SF Art Institute Film Festival.
1978, 16mm, color/so, 14m, $50
The diagrammatic space first entered in DIAGRAM FILM becomes the stage for temporal, rhythmic, informational and spatial play with a single diagram (a 144-drawing cycle) that refers to the film and animation process, animation history, specific filmmakers and other encoded data. The arrangement of the drawings for each of the five sequences was improvised on the animation during the act of shooting, creating five variations and possible readings of the animated composition. "The film does not only diagram the film frame, it fills it with movement and ultimately explodes it. Homages to Windsor McCay and Georges Melies are justified by the film's humor and dynamism." - Chicago Reader
"The consequences of these incredible shifts is to engulf us in a powerful referential package of filmic elements. Glabicki - in this, his best film to date - has fashioned a fast, delirious, scintillating and playful homage to his predecessors." - Film Festival Review
Awards: Ann Arbor Film Festival; NY Filmmakers' Exposition; Sinking Creek Film & Video Festival; Purdue Film Festival; Kent Film Festival.
1979, 16mm, color/so, 3.5m, $20
The film is a journal (drawn by hand over a period of four years), opera, and journey through 100 animated sequences which are joined and transformed by 100 film wipes in continuous successsion. The film is a synthesis of both abstract and figurative imagery, analysis and commentary, writing and multiple languages, multi-layered sounds and music, lyrical and contrapuntal relationships, and elaborate animated compositions. The film plays with the thresholds of change between intuition and analytical thinking, as well as between what is read or heard as "figurative" or "abstract." The various animation sequences range from pure geometric abstraction to symbols, metaphors and icons (boxing ring, car, chair, airplanes, steps).
This film is not computer generated or assisted in any way.
Awards: Ann Arbor Film Festival; Black Maria Film and Video Festival; Chicago Int'l Film Festival (Hugo); Baltimore Int'l Film Festival; NY Filmmakers' Exposition; Sinking Creek Film & Video Festival; Festival of Experimental Film, Chicago; Santa Fe Film Exposition; SF Art Institute Film Festival.
1983, 16mm, color/so, 28m, $90
A series of source objects (scissors, a barbell, piano, boxing ring, ladders, an hourglass, an arch) are presented, defined, demonstrated, discussed, spoken about, juxtaposed and progressively re-invented during the course of a multi-layered visual and aural "conversation." The film plays with language, the viewer's memory, assumptions about "familiar" objects, associations and gender, puns, hieroglyphic forms and conscious and unconscious processes of thinking and perception.
"The film reprocesses the first motion picture studies by still photographer Eadweard Muybridge and elaborates on allusions to the origins of the medium itself as well as on the relationship between image, spoken word and text .... The viewer's perceptual dexterity is exercised as the elements ... appear momentarily in one state then reappear elsewhere on the screen in yet another." - Black Maria Film and Video Festival
Awards: Festival of Experimental Film, Chicago; Sinking Creek Film & Video Festival; Bucks County National Film Competition; Black Maria Film and Video Festival; Atlanta Film and Video Festival; Athens Int'l Film Festival; Santa Fe Film Exposition
1985, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $30
UNDER THE SEA is an experimental animated film structured on adaptations of five literary classics: Madame Bovary, Frankenstein, Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Gulliver's Travels and The Voyage of the Beagle. ...
The film synthesizes, layers and juxtaposes its multiple sources into a unifying context of an ongoing voyage at sea. The images are equal parts illustration, stream of consciousness, free association, objective data, random juxtaposition and period research. The animation is both abstract and figurative ....
Three scripts were written for each book: one dealing with narrative exposition, a second one dealing with character dialogue and the third script consisting of chronological fragments of words and phrases. ... Script text is also performed in German, Sanskrit and Japanese, as well as in English.
All of the animation in UNDER THE SEA was created by hand by Paul Glabicki, using paper, ink, prismacolor and collage. ...
... [T]he film is an Abstract Narrative film ... presented as a multi-layered, and somewhat disorienting event: an experience not unlike travel to a foreign land, picking up a map in a foreign language, or attempting to decipher an alien artifact.
Awards (selected): Grand Prize, Black Maria Film and Video Festival, 1989; 14th Atlanta Film and Video Festival.
1989, 16mm, color/so, 22m, $70