. Conversations at the Edge (CATE)

13 Films about Animals

Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | December 13, 2001

Thursday, December 13, 2001, 6pm

1923-2001, various directors, France/Russia/USA, ca 110 min, various formats

From the warm-and-fuzzy to the chilly-and-scaly, from the gently lyrical to the grimly pedagogical, these thirteen films feature dogs, cats, bats and bugs and the people who love them, or don’t. Programmed and presented in person by animation artist/professor Jim Trainor, this tour through the animal kingdom includes Dave Fleischer’s 1937 Be Human (Betty Boop), Franklin Miller’s 1973 Cold Cows, Stephanie Barber’s 1999 Dogs (articulate canines), Jacob Boshard’s 2000 Fossil Fuel (plastic dinosaurs), Sara Peety’s 1974 The Furies (Siamese cats), Henry Hills’s 1996 Goa Lowah (caves full of bats), Naomi Uman’s 1998 Grass (dog in the turf), Brian Frye’s Lachyrmae (lightning bugs), Julie Murray’s 2000 Micromoth (dead dried-up little bugs), Stan Brakhage’s 1966 Sirius Remembered (decomposing dog), Sid Davis’s 1957 Skipper Learns a Lesson (neighborhood mutts), Jean Painlevé’s 1934 The Vampire Bat (and a guinea pig), and Ladislaw Starewicz’s 1923 The Voice of the Nightingale (taxidermy birds).