Suzan's web site can be found here: http://home.earthlink.net/~suzanpitt and she can be contacted by email at suzanpitt@earthink.net
Please contact the artist directly for digital projection formats.
"Figures and objects in [Suzan Pitt] Kraning's drawings for her animated films are meticulously detailed and set into illusionistic spaces that evoke the surreal world of Magritte's paintings - but it is clearly Kraning's world. Her film CROCUS is about the artist's family life - giving the baby a glass of water, going to bed and making love. The CROCUS drawings poetically interpret an act of love during which a wild assortment of moths, birds, flowers, and vegetables - including a huge cabbage - float through the room and out the window." - Philip Larson, curator, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
"[T]he quality of imagination suggested by the images is individual and very lovely." - Roger Greenspun, The New York Times
"A charming seven-minute animated fantasy about sex and marriage and motherhood." - Saturday Review
"CROCUS is a sophisticated fantasy, which provides a parade of images as a man and woman make love - her style is amusing and very much her own, with many surprising and delicious touches." - P.K., San Francisco Chronicle
"A baroque saga of marital sex." - The Real Paper, Boston
1971, 16mm, color/so, 7m, $25
"Suzan Pitt [Kraning], whose childlike visions of winged creatures flitting through a bedroom was seen here two years ago in CROCUS, has in CELS offered her own answer to the Yellow Ball anthologies: as a typewriter clacks on the soundtrack, the camera seems to be tracking along a row of garage doors, each of which rolls up to reveal a different world - diced paper rain falling, paper grass, real children interacting, strange flying objects, wiggling worms, a cityscape." - Edgar Daniels, Filmmakers Newsletter, Ann Arbor Film Festival
"One of the truly imaginative short animated films." - Bruce Rubin, film curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY
"CELS is a six-minute series of vignettes made with students at Minneapolis College of Art and Design ... drawings of room-like spaces with heavy doors that trundle up and down to the sound of a typewriter. As each door opens, it reveals a partial thought in a series of film experiences: a spool unwinding, a guitar playing itself, a chase into infinity ...." - Minneapolis Tribune
Awards: Int'l Association of Film Animation (ASIFA-EAST), NY, 1972; Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1973.
1972, 16mm, color/so, 6m, $20
"Ms. Kraning taught children film animation in Minneapolis - one of the films she shows was made by her young students. In its naivete lies its charm. The children provide the sound effects for racing automobiles, comments on a house on fire and dialogue for the scene of a bank robbery. It is a gem, three minutes long, called A CITY TRIP." - P.K., San Francisco Chronicle
Exhibition: Oberhausen Int'l Short Film Festival, 1973; New American Filmmakers Series, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, 1974; Int'l Festival of Films by Women (MUSIDORA), Paris, 1974.
1972, 16mm, color/so, 3m, $20
"JEFFERSON CIRCUS SONGS alternates and sometimes combines life-size cardboard animations with live performances by children and the effect is entirely unified and delightful." - Edgar Daniels, Filmmakers Newsletter
"Suzan Pitt [Kraning]'s films possess an absolutely cosmic sense of patience, of things happening at their own speed and with their own logic. Made with children, JEFFERSON CIRCUS SONGS is a string of puzzling little episodes, some using cut-out animation, some featuring a pixilated cast clad in moppet wigs with stockings stretched over their faces. After its screening at the 1973 New York Filmmaker's Expo, critic Rex Reed noted that 'most of it is quite sophisticated and brilliant. It's likeable because it's perfect for what it is - a fantasy - and such things, if done well and with talent and vision, need no outside logic ... like looking into a Faberge egg.' " - Ron Epple, Media and Methods
Awards: Prize, NY Filmmakers' Exposition, 1973; Sinking Creek Film & Video Festival, 1974; Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1975.
Exhibition: Inside Women, Film Forum, NY, 1974; Festival de Films Americains, Centre Culturel Americain, Paris, 1974; Int'l Festival of Films by Women (MUSIDORA), Paris, 1974; New Directors/New Films, Museum of Modern Art, NY.
1973, 16mm, color/so, 20m, $60
An animated film commissioned by the Whitney Museum, New York to gain support for their film program, the "New American Filmmakers Series."
"WHITNEY COMMERCIAL and the erotic CROCUS were, with FRANK FILM, the surprises from the USA. Suzan Pitt [Kraning] does very colorful, naive-looking drawings with heavy outlines. Her movements have a touch of hesitancy that makes for atmosphere and suspense." - Nino Winstock, Graphis, Annecy International Festival of Animated Films
Exhibition: Oberhausen Int'l Short Film Festival, 1973; Int'l Festival of Animated Films, Annecy, France, 1973; Midwest Film Festival, 1973; Int'l Festival of Animated Films, Zagreb, Yugoslavia, 1974; Int'l Festival of Films by Women (MUSIDORA), Paris, 1974; Lucca 10, Int'l Exhibition of Animated Films, Rome, 1974.
1973, 16mm, color/so, 2.5m, $20
Four animated anecdotes and a squeaky violin - a selection of visual surprises.
"- A line drawing of a wooden board with 30 holes. A pink hand comes into the frame and deposits marbles, slowly, one by one, in the first row of five holes, then withdraws. A moment later it returns, deposits more marbles in the next five holes, and so on. You wait for the 'catch,' the exception that will break the spell and make it all humorous in some way, but it never comes. The hand deposits the last marble and 'exits' frame right, like some profoundly unknowable god, having performed a miracle too simple to grasp.
"- A patch of ground. Suddenly asparagus-like stalks emerge and begin to wave in the wind; slowly they metamorphose into penises, still waving in the wind - A 'garden of delights.'
"The animator is Suzan Pitt [Kraning], one of the best new American filmmakers in the medium. Kraning puts the handmade quality back into animation, accepting and then exploiting all the rudeness and primitivism such an approach brings. ... The result is a phantasmagoria that grows directly out of the medium, rather than being imposed literally upon the medium from other forms, as Disney imposed fantasy from literature." - Chuck Kraemer, The Real Paper, Boston
1975, 16mm, color/so, 7m, $25
This compelling portrait of the artist as a young women is a cell animation that was four years in the making. J. Hoberman in the Village Voice wrote, "Pitt's subject matter, a magicienne's relation to her art (daringly visualized as asparagus turns to phalluses) occasions some astonishing effects: at one point the heroine stages a 2-D Kandinsky-patterned light show for an audience of 3-D puppets. Pitt has a powerful graphic style, her cells are detailed and picture-book sumptuous. More than any other animator she has the gifts that could sustain a feature-length work." The film placed Pitt at the forefront of independent American animation artists.
1978, 16mm, color/so, 19m, $45
DVD Sale: $35 Home; $85 Institutions
A depressed woman and her imagined counterpart, a tiny cartoon mouse, create metaphorical opposites in a luscious animated tale of despair and rescue. Two states of mind swing dangerously up and down throughout the length of JOY STREET. These opposing forces which play against each other in a series of scenes set in a moody apartment in the middle of the night, conclude in a primordial rainforest. Five years in the making, Suzan Pitt traveled throughout the rainforest of Guatemala and Mexico to paint studies for this film. Skillfully animated and set to a brilliant score performed by the Jazz Passengers with an original title song sung by Debbie Harry, JOY STREET represents the best of American independent animation.
"Vivid, intriguing, and bizarre." - Caryn James, The New York Times
"A dazzling new animated film by one of America's premiere animators." - Richard Pena, New York Film Festival Awards and Exhibition (selected): Golden Globe Award, SF Int'l Film Festival, 1996; First Prize, Black Maria Film and Video Festival, 1996; London Film Festival, 1996; Sundance Film Festival, 1996.
1995, 35mm, color/so, 24m, $75
DVD Sale: $50 Home; $125 Institutions