{"id":6376,"date":"2015-09-30T10:03:25","date_gmt":"2015-09-30T10:03:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.saic.edu\/cate\/?p=6376"},"modified":"2025-01-09T22:27:35","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T04:27:35","slug":"on-wayne-boyer-and-larry-janiak-camera-and-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/2015\/09\/30\/on-wayne-boyer-and-larry-janiak-camera-and-line\/","title":{"rendered":"On Wayne Boyer and Larry Janiak: Camera and Line"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tomorrow Wayne Boyer, Michael Golec<\/a>, Associate Professor of Design History at SAIC, and Anne Wells, Collections Manager for the Chicago Film Archives<\/a> (CFA) will join us at the\u00a0Gene Siskel Film Center<\/a> post screening for a round table discussion. This week Anne Wells of the CFA writes for us, reflecting on her personal relationship with the filmmakers as she also re-introduces and\u00a0premiers\u00a0their highly innovative and\u00a0visually stunning work.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Disintegration<\/a>
Larry Janiak, still from Disintegration Line #2 (DL2), 1970. Courtesy of the artist and the Chicago Film Archives.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I first came to know Wayne Boyer and Larry Janiak through Chicago Film\u00a0Archives\u2019 \u00a0Mort & Mille Goldsholl Collection<\/a>, which contains over a hundred\u00a0industrial films made by the Chicago-based design firm, Goldsholl Design & Film\u00a0Associates. Both Boyer and Janiak worked for the firm in the 1960\u2019s and played a\u00a0significant role in shaping the look of their playful sponsored films. I didn\u2019t get a\u00a0full understanding of Boyer and Janiak\u2019s fierce experimental vision for film until\u00a0CFA acquired Janiak\u2019s films<\/a> in 2011 and Boyer\u2019s in 2015.<\/p>\n

Wayne and Larry share strikingly similar biographies. Both were born in Chicago\u00a0(Wayne in 1937 and Larry in 1938), attended the same high school and college\u00a0(Lane Tech High School and the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology), worked at the same Chicago-based design firm (Goldsholl Design & Film Associates), helped found an artist-run film co-op (Center Cinema Film Co-op) and went onto teach and\u00a0develop art programs at Chicago universities (Wayne at University of Illinois at\u00a0Chicago and Larry at IIT).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Their biographies first converge in the early 1950\u2019s in the hallways of Lane Tech\u00a0High School, where the two collaboratively made their first films\u2013the first such\u00a0films ever made by students in the Chicago Board of Education system. The two\u00a0later honed their filmmaking skills at the Institute of Design and then at Goldsholl\u00a0Associates, two environments steeped in Bauhaus traditions.<\/p>\n

\"Adams<\/a>
Larry Janiak, still from Adam’s Film, 1963. Image courtesy of the artist and the Chicago Film Archives.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But despite these similarities, their styles and filmmaking techniques are\u00a0unmistakably distinct. As our concise blurb<\/a> states, Wayne explored visual\u00a0abstraction via technical mastery and appropriation, while Larry utilized direct\u00a0animation techniques and personal fragments of everyday life. The subjects and\u00a0moods of their films also differ. Boyer\u2019s work approaches historically rooted\u00a0subject matter with unbelievably precise skill, while Larry\u2019s work reflects his own\u00a0quest for meditative transcendence through both unfamiliar and familiar imagery.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been working with Janiak\u2019s films for a few years now and I\u2019ve begun to\u00a0connect with them in a deeply personal and emotional way. A lot of this has to do\u00a0with the delightful conversations I\u2019ve had with the very private Larry over the\u00a0years, but also from the indescribable places that Larry\u2019s films seem to take me.\u00a0His films are both emotional and physical for me. I feel them in my gut.<\/p>\n

\"Wayne<\/a>
Wayne Boyer, still from The Building: Chicago Stock Exchange, 1975. Courtesy of the artist and the Chicago Film Archives.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I\u2019ve only just started to work with Boyer\u2019s oeuvre. I find his films to be similarly\u00a0emotional and absorbing, but due to their more defined subject matter, they\u00a0transport me to more specific times and places. The structures Wayne\u00a0documents\u2013the Chicago Stock Exchange Building and Drop City, for example\u2013are no longer with us. Through this loss, his films gain further significance by\u00a0granting us the opportunity to just simply experience these past environments.<\/p>\n

\"Faces<\/a>
Goldsholl Design & Film Associates, still from Faces and Fortunes, 1959. Courtesy of the Chicago Film Archives.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The one for-hire work presented in this screening\u2013Faces and Fortunes<\/em> (1959)\u2013presents an early example of both of their styles within a very unique commercial\u00a0framework. As a filmic treatise on corporate identity, Faces and Fortunes<\/em>\u00a0explores the legacy and importance of \u201cpersonality\u201d achieved through the\u00a0branding practices of industries, organizations and companies. Through the\u00a0inventive use of live action, animation and optical techniques, this Kimberly-Clark\u00a0sponsored film stands out as a stellar example of the industrial film genre. We\u00a0see Wayne\u2019s hand through the film\u2019s innovative use of superimposition and\u00a0Larry\u2019s through the film\u2019s spirited drawings and direct animation.<\/p>\n

This screening is not just a re-introduction of these two artists to new audiences,\u00a0but also the premiere of newly restored film prints funded by the National Film\u00a0Preservation Foundation<\/a>. We are so delighted to share these prints with Chicago\u00a0audiences for the first time, and in general, excited to screen all of these titles on\u00a0their native format\u201316mm.<\/p>\n

Chicago Film Archives<\/a> is a regional film archive dedicated to identifying, collecting, preserving\u00a0and providing access to films that represent the Midwest. Our purpose is to serve institutions and\u00a0filmmakers of this region and elsewhere by establishing a repository for institutional and private\u00a0film collections; serve a variety of cultural, academic and artistic communities by making the films\u00a0available locally, nationally, and internationally for exhibition, research, and production; and serve\u00a0our culture by restoring and preserving films that are rare or not in existence elsewhere.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tomorrow Wayne Boyer, Michael Golec, Associate Professor of Design History at SAIC, and Anne Wells, Collections Manager for the Chicago Film Archives (CFA) will join us at the\u00a0Gene Siskel Film Center post screening for a round table discussion. This week Anne Wells of the CFA writes for us, reflecting on her personal relationship with the […]<\/p>\n

Read More… from On Wayne Boyer and Larry Janiak: Camera and Line<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":205,"featured_media":6379,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[70,72,115,116,177,872,247,351,630],"class_list":["post-6376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-20","tag-animation","tag-anne-wells","tag-chicago","tag-chicago-film-archives","tag-documentary","tag-essays","tag-goldsholl-design-film-associates","tag-larry-janiak","tag-wayne-boyer"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/205"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6376"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9893,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6376\/revisions\/9893"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.saic.edu\/cate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}