Asparagus

Being merely human she searches and watches and tries to see into the secrets of the passing garden… she imagines a sexual interrelationship, those particular moments in which all is knowable and awareness of time and being simply Are. Paper illusions created to represent the search are carefully presented, performing in the theater, and she returns home to the garden.

I wanted the film to mirror the way we daydream - as Jung said, “Images are pregnant”: each image leading to the next, the mind unfolding, constantly giving birth. I wanted the audience to see the film unfold as if in a daydream. Paced slowly and carefully, each stage and scene fully dense and a bit hyper-illusionistic, the movement going forward without the jar of the “cut”. I brought back the”wipe”, an early film device to create transitions to keep the action evolving more than changing.

The film is a circle more than a straight-ahead experience - you could enter at any point and the meaning would be the same. The taking in and spewing out, the searching and the discovering, the desire and the contact, the ever-evolving acts of nature. There is something of the 60's and the 70's there in the film- acid and hallucinogens and spectacular insight and the trance of getting lost and being found- and color. All my films have been made by hand and shot under a 35mm camera - the slight jiggles and the layering of the cels and the hand-drawn animation, and the staccato vibrations of the shading and the variances of light and the medium of film itself are all a part of the way the movies look and feel. To me as different as looking at a painting and looking at a reproduction of a painting - the film quality itself is a part of the message.

ASPARAGUS
Suzan Pitt conjures up a distinctive, passionate, hushed vacuum of sexual and artistic metaphor as we follow a mysterious woman on a journey from intimate toilette, to a longing gaze out her curtained window to a hallucinatory garden of totemic flora, to the theatrical projections of her visions to the amazement of a vast audience. That the (faceless) protagonist receives her glittering inspiration while performing oral sex on an asparagus stalk only points to the inadequacy of language to describe what is essentially a feminist dream of ruthless self-control. Her world is a baroque artifice of familiar items, lovingly shaded in pencil and watercolor, layered into impossibly deep space. The stage contains archaic spatial illusion machines for clouds and rippling waves. Yet when the artist opens her bag of tricks, out springs a swarm of translucent marvels, so real that they hover and dance in a magical space just over the heads of the grasping audience. Pitt skillfully folds multiplane cartooning, tabletop sets with puppets, and sophisticated bi-packing optical effects, into a tour de force rendering of a performance space as dream. - Excerpt from “The Anxious Pencil” Trickraum:Spacetricks, Suzanne Buchan and Andres Janser, eds, Museum Für Gestaltung, Christoph Merian Verlag, 2005. (Download PDF)