Today on the site, Dash Shaw reports on his selections for the great Metrograph theater store in NYC. The Metrograph is hosting Dash's film, My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea, this weekend.
The animated movie I wrote and directed, My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea, opens this weekend in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto. The Metrograph theater in New York let me decorate their walls with original artwork from the film, and I also curated their small upstairs bookstore, which carries rare DVDs, film-related books, and issues of Cahiers du Cinéma. They asked me to pick books and DVDs that felt related to my movie, or that a cinema-going audience would be interested in. Here are some of the things I selected, and why.
The Adventures of Prince Achmed is a German animated film by Lotte Reiniger done in cut-out silhouettes against color fields. Made in 1926, it’s likely the first feature-length animated film. Although it’s well known, I’m always surprised how few people have actually seen it. Reiniger’s silhouette work was a key inspiration for Kara Walker. This movie is the perfect embodiment of “independent cinema”—the means/budget is tied to the aesthetic. It’s more powerful because it’s minimal. This is truly an “auteur” movie, much more so than the larger-scale collaborative films of the French New Wave that defined the term. The silhouette sequence in High School Sinking is an homage to this movie.
Elsewhere:
Here's a look at the growing Pittsburgh comics world from the perspectives of longtime mainstream comic book store Phantom of the Attic Comics and Tom Scioli.
The Doug Wright Award nominees have been announced.
Interesting looking word/picture book Playground of My Mind is discussed at Hyperallergic.
