BlackFace: The Sacred Legend

Color test for animation by Bob Sabiston

This is the first ‘independent’ use made of our “rotoshop” software. It was quite primitive in the beginning. This is a short road-trip documentary consisting of animated interviews with people found along the route from New York to Austin.

A Christmas Carol was a 1949 syndicated, black and white television special narrated by Vincent Price.

In a Chinese style garret, four men were playing Mahjong. A woman stood aside in silence, holding a bottle of liquor.They all had hidden cravings of their own, unaware that they would be invariably led to the ultimate doom.

An ancient was looking for the plum blossom in the snow storm during the trip.

A woodsman, who loves chopping wood, is relentlessly pestered by a boy made out of logs

Reworked and colored images of people playing at the seashore.

Adam and Eve are cast out of Eden. They discover that flowers can bring both joy and solace.

A gin bottle is personified with a spirit. As the gin bottle changes hands the spirit of the bottle tempts the various possessors to take a drink. A pro-prohibition movie, the story exemplifies the tragedies of drinking.

Living with OCD, Anna has an organized routine. This balance breaks when her sister forgets a piece of instrument. To bring it back, Anna has to face a world out of her control in which her fears materialize.

A man undergoes a ritual in which he is possessed by three lustful, witchy women of decidedly supernatural pedigree. After his acclaimed Thanatomorphose, genre filmmaker Éric Falardeau is both behind and before the camera in this sensory extravaganza, somewhere between an occult hallucination and a self-portrait of conflicted masculinity, that serves up a heady mix of horror, poetry and unbridled eroticism. A tribute to the magic of Méliès, the early American avant-garde and underground film (think: Kenneth Anger), Asmodeus renders bodies and fluids transcendent through its use of textured black-and-white Super 8 and in-camera special effects. A cinematic memento mori that’s at once carnal and otherworldly.