WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Clark Art Institute will screen a selection of short films covering experimental animation from the 1960s and ’70s in its auditorium on Thursday, Feb. 2, at 7 p.m. The showing is the third event in the Clark’s Film and Drawing series, inspired by the exhibition Promenades on Paper: Eighteenth-Century Drawings from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, on view through March 12.
This screening takes place in the midst of the Cold War as animation artists explored alternative realities. Their artistic explorations enabled them to venture outside of the ideological boundaries of international politics. Some of these realities reached back to fairytales, like the animations of the Soviet Union’s Yuri Norstein. Other artists, like the Canadian-Scottish animator Norman McLaren, pursued abstraction, looking for basic first principles that might be shared across the animation frame. The film will run for 90 minutes.
Admission to the Clark is free through March 2023. No registration is required. For more information, visit clarkart.edu/events.
The final screening in the Film and Drawing series is “Persepolis” at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 16, in the Clark’s auditorium.