Cineplastick: Synthetic Materials in the Films of Mary Ellen Bute, Jim Davis and Jeff Keen

Abstract

In this thesis I engage with the work of experimental filmmakers for whom plastic was an indispensable profilmic medium. I trace the development of three careers against the backdrop of the cultural history of synthetic materials, which proliferated in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Chapter One concerns the early films of the American animator Mary Ellen Bute, whose film aesthetics, I argue, extend Élie Faure’s vision of the private nature of cinema spectatorship. My reading of the films is informed by the contemporary—and markedly gendered—connotations of the cellophane and resins that were appearing in the 1930s in packaging, cosmetics, records and cinema architecture. Analogies between illuminated plastics and new scientific paradigms are continued from the first chapter in the second, which examines the films made by the painter and filmmaker Jim Davis over the course of the 1950s. I consider Davis’s relationship with experimental film luminaries like Stan Brakhage, on the one hand, and, on the other, his unlikely participation in Cold War international fairs and exhibitions. Davis’s queer abstractions reflect a mutation in the reputation of plastics in the post-war years; rather than slickly hermetic and privatising, plastic begins to be suggestive of the flesh with which it came increasingly into contact in so many domains of everyday life. In Chapter Three, I discuss British Neo-Surrealist Jeff Keen’s work in two contexts. I read his destructive art practice in connection with the intermedial, countercultural currents of the British 1960s underground, while attending to the transition of the British toy industry’s manufacturing to Hong Kong. Harking back to Salvador Dalí’s fetish for the ‘edible’ beauty of Art Nouveau, Keen’s work uses plastic as a viscously fleshy medium in both his live action and animated films.