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LOS ANGELES ART COMMUNITY: GROUP PORTRAIT
Jules Engel
Interviewed by Lawrence Weschler and Milton Zolotow
Completed under the auspices
of the
Oral History Program
University of California
Los Angeles
Copyright ® 1985 The Regents of the University of California
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RESTRICTIONS
None .
LITERARY RIGHTS AND QUOTATION
This manuscript is hereby made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publication, are reserved to the University Library of the University of California, Los Angeles. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the University Librarian of the University of California, Los Angeles.
LOS ANGELES ART COMMUNITY: GROUP PORTRAIT
This interview is one of a series, entitled "Los Angeles Art Community: Group Portrait," funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and conducted from July 1, 1975 to March 31, 1977 by the UCLA Oral History Program. The project was directed jointly by Page Ackerman, University Librarian, and Gerald Nordland, Director UCLA Art Galleries, and administered by Bernard Galm, Director, Oral History Program. After selection of interview candidates and interviewers, the Program assumed responsibility for the conduct of all interviews and their processing.
CONTENTS
Introduction viii
Interview History xiii
TAPE NUMBER: I, Side One (December 29, 1975) 1
Childhood in Budapest, Hungary--Arr ives in Evanston, Illinois, at age of 13--An affinity for nonf igurative des ign--Moves to Los Angeles-- Apprentice animator at Charles Mintz Studio-- Interest in movement and rhythm grows out of early exposure to ballet--Kandinsky exhibit--Work at Walt Disney Studios-- Fantasia — Professional conflicts — A lack of sympathy for experimentation at Disney.
TAPE NUMBER:' I, Side Two (December 29, 1975) 25
Recollections of Walt Disney--Disney as an instinctive entertainer--Limits of Disney's approach to animation--Work at the Air Force animation unit--Herb Klynn, an exceptional talent in graphic art3--United Productions of America (UPA) — More on the limits of Disney's approach to animation--Personalities are the merchandise of Hollywood .
TAPE NUMBER: II, Video Session (January 23, 1976) 45
Los Angeles' shortcomings as an art center — Comparisons with New York--More on work on Fantasia- -Discusses his drawings for Fantasia-- Rico Lebrun's work at Disney--Animators in the 1950s--Exhibits of animators' paintings — The hard-edge geometrical style of Engel's paintings — A desire to translate qualities of simplicity and directness from painting into film — Film as a developing art form — More on work at UPA--An emphasis on flat, two-dimensional design at UPA — The UPA look influenced by contemporary painters — Raoul Dufy and the divorced line — The use of color as aspect of dramatic intent--Economy of gesture in UPA films — Robert Cannon, the greatest animator in the business.
1
I
TAPE NUMBER: III, Side One (May 19, 1976) 79
On present position as chairman of film graphics department at California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts) — Interrelationship of film and other art forms at Cal Arts — Early history of Cal Arts — Future trends in the arts--The live-action camera department at Cal Arts--Cal Arts as a reservoir of young talent--A positive working environment at Cal Arts.
TAPE NUMBER: IV, Side One (December 16, 1977) 105
Viewing Engel's experimental animation films-- Train Landscape, a painterly approach to f ilmmaking--Engel ' s methods of conception and execution- -Accident — Shapes and Gestures, the influence of dance-- Land scape , a color-field painting in time--Wet Paint--Fragments .
TAPE NUMBER: IV, Side Two (December 16, 1977) 121
More on Fragments — Rumble--Engel ' s working methods--v7orki ng through instincts rather than formulas- -Swan — The hazards of the computer film-- Three Arctic Flowers--Engel ' s work with computer graph ics--Coaraze_, a live-action film--Use of still photography in Coaraze--Coara2e wins Prix Vigo and numerous other awards--No commercial distributor opts to handle Coaraze .
TAPE NUMBER: V, Side One (December 22, 1977) 138
Oskar Fischinger--Fischinger ' s isolation within the Disney Studios--Los Angeles avant-garde painters and animators in 1940s--Fischinger ' s last years at Disney--More on Engel's teaching at Cal Arts — Disney trustees and the founding of Cal Arts--The evolution and success of the Cal Arts animation program--Engel ' s teaching methods.
TAPE NUMBER: V, Side Two (December 22, 1977) 163
More on teaching at Cal Arts--Student interaction at Cal Arts--Teaching approaches--Kathy Rose, Dennis Pies, and Adam Beckett--On establishing rapport with students--Women in animation.
VI
TAPE NUMBER: VI, Side One (December 30, 1977) 191
Preparation for work on live-action films — The Ivory Knife, capturing the environment of the painter Paul Jenkins--Colla'oorat ion with Irving Bazilon on film score--Interaction with Jenkins — The Torch and the Torso--Working with Miguel Berrocal--Structural and thematic relations between drama and painting--Mew York 100, the work of John Hultberg — Light Motion — Max Bill-- Technical considerations in live-action film-- June Wayne and the Tamarind workshop--Engel ' s introduction to li thography--Working environment at Tamarind.
TAPE NUMBER: VI, Side Two (December 30, 1977) 219
More on June Wayne and Tamarind V7orkshop — The Look of a Lithographer--Ken Tyler and Gemini Editions, Ltd. --Robert Rauschenberg , Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, and Frank Stella work at Gemini--Cirrus Editions--Engel ' s lithographic work--Engel on the status of film as an art form--Is film a "medium of consequence"?
TAPE NUMBER: VII, Side One (February 16, 1978) 246
Childhood interest in abstraction — Family background — First encounters with the work of Kandinsky — Engel's working methods--Connect ions between the mediums in which Engel works--Sngel ' s relations with dealers: Paul Kantor, Esther Robles, Felix Landau, and Irving Blum — More on limits of Los Angeles as an art center — Comparisons with New York.
TAPE NUMBER: VII, Side Two, (April 1, 1978) .....273
More on interest in abstraction — The "Four Abstract Classicists" show at Los Angeles County Museum--A developmental survey of the phases of Engel's artistic career--Establishing depth with color — The straight line — Engel's love of urban life--Living and working in Los Angeles — Animation, painting, lithography, and film — Future directions for Engel — Future trends for young artists and filmmakers — The bankruptcy of magic realism.
Index ........300
VI 1
«
I
I
INTRODUCTION
Jules Engel (born in Budapest, Hungary, 1913) came to the United States when he was thirteen years old. He began painting in a hard-edged geometrical style while a high school student in Evanston, Illinois. "I already had a very definite idea," Engel states in the following interview, "that, for me, going out and drawing landscapes or still lifes was not quite the idea what drawing or painting should be. Now, if you ask me where this idea comes from, I have no idea. But my feeling was then that if I would take an empty piece of paper and draw a line or two on it, even if I put a circle in a square on the paper, that that could be a drawing, and that could be enough. And that should be enough." (p. 7)
Immediately after graduating from high school in 1937, Engel came to Los Angeles. He worked briefly for Charles Mintz Studios, then Engel apprenticed at Walt Disney Studios. The studio assigned him to work on Fantasia , and he choreographed the Chinese and Russian dance sequences for the Nutcracker Suite section of that film. In these two sequences, Engel innovated the use of black-background animation. He v/as then selected to do color continuity and color keying on Bambi. Engel, however, was not happy with
VI 1 1
what he considered the restrictive creative environment at Disney and left to join the armed services after the United States entered World War II. Engel spent the war years assigned to Hal Roach Studios in Culver City, making training and educational films for the Air Force Motion Picture Unit.
After the war Engel went to work for the newly formed United Productions of America (UPA). He began as a designer but by 1950 he had become art director for all UPA productions. He teamed up with the late Robert Cannon to create Gerald McBoing-Boing , Madeline , Christopher Crumpet, and Jaywalker , plus a feature film "starring" UPA's Mister Magoo character. Engel and the other talents working at UPA changed the look of commercial animated filmmaking by adapting the artistic concepts of contemporary artists as varied as Dufy, Duchamps, Matisse, Kandinsky, and Klee.
In 1959, Engel left UPA to open with Herb Klynn a commercial animation studio. Format Films. Engel produced and art directed the Academy Award-nominated film, Icarus Montgofier Wright (1960), from a script by Ray Bradbury. Engel then went to Paris in 1962 and directed The World of Sine , featuring the work of French cartoonist Sine; this film received France's "La Belle Qualite" award.
The next film which Engel directed in Europe was Coroaze, made in the French town of Coroaze in 1965.
IX
I
I
p. Adams Sitney, writing on this film for Filmex, argues that this film is the "most impressive of [Engel's] nonanimated films . . . Coroaze utilizes high contrast black and white photography to outline the sculptural volume in Engel's view of the medieval townscape. Stills are freely incorporated in this film, at times in direct antithesis to the movement on the screen, but more often to indicate the ambiguity between the photograph and the filmed image of an empty street. In this carefully controlled optical universe the camera must seek out human activity to determine the status of its images. Engel's painterly eye dwells upon the tiled rooftops and the strong horizontals of the stone steps. By rapidly shifting the camera angles and recomposing these objects, he is able to draw 'graphic choreography' from them." ("American Independent Animation: Perspectives/ Jules Engel," The 1978 Los Angeles International Film Exposition) Coroaze won the highest award given by French film critics, the Prix Jean Vigo.
While living in France, Engel coproduced and codirected with Raymond Jerome the stage production of Antoine de Saint ExupSry's The Little Prince, which ran for several seasons in Paris, Rome, and Brussels. He also designed the sets for Le Jouex, an avant-garde play produced in Paris.
Engel has made several films on artists and their
work. In 1966, he directed a study of Spanish sculptor i4iguel Berrocal, The Torch and Torso. He directed a film for Tamarind Lithography Workshop, The Look of the Lithographer (1968). Other films on art and artists are American Sculpture of the Sixties (1968), New York 100 (1967), and Max Bill (1976).
Throughout a lengthy and successful career in both commercial and independent filmmaking, Engel has produced paintings, sculptures, drawings, and lithographs. He has had several one-man shows in Los Angeles, New York, and Europe. His art work is in the permanent collections of the Chicago Art Institute, the Hirshhorn Collection, the Rockefeller Collection, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Engel he did not intensively explore his ideas for experimental films until the 1960s, and his most "painterly" films were made in the 1970s. In Landscape (1971), Accident (1973), Train Landscape (1973), Shapes and Gestures (1976), Rumble (1977), Fragments of Movement (1977), and Wet Paint (1977), Engel has created pure abstractions which explore the movement potentials of lines and masses, optical conflicts, color and depth illusions, color-field concepts, and the single line. Engel calls these films paintings in motion or "graphic choreography." In 1977, in the magazine New, Engel wrote
XI
that his emphasis in these films is "on the development of a visual dynamic language, independent of literature and theatrical traditions, demonstrating that pure graphic choreography is capable of its own wordless truth."
Since 1969, Engel has been chairman of the Department of Animation/Experimental Film at the California Institute of the Arts. Engel in the following interview emphasizes the cross-fertilization that exists between painting and filmmaking in both his teaching and his creative work, but he says, "I have taken more from the painting world into the film that I've been doing, rather than the other way. . When we are talking animation, we have to realize that we're talking about painting in motion." (pp. 291-292)
XI 1
INTERVIEW HISTORY
INTERVIEWERS:
Tapes I-III, Milton Zolotow, graphic designer; Tapes IV-VII, Lawrence Weschler, assistant editor, UCLA Oral History Program, B.A., Philosophy and Cultural History, University of California, Santa Cruz.
TIME AND SETTING OF INTERVIEW:
Places ; Engel's home in Beverly Hills; Engel's studio/office at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California; and the Charles Aidikoff Screening Room in Beverly Hills.
Dates : December 29, 1975; January 23, May 19, 1976; December 16, 22, 30, 1977; February 16 and April 1, 1978.
Length of sessions and total number of recording hours: Interview sessions were conducted at various times of day. They averaged between forty-five and ninety minutes. A total of approximately nine hours of conversation was recorded.
Persons present during the interview: Tapes I-III, Engel and Zolotow; Tapes IV-VII, Engel and Weschler.
CONDUCT OF INTERVIEW:
There was a one and a half year gap between the work of the original interviewer, Milton Zolotow, and that of the interviewer for the final four tapes, Lawrence Weschler.
Zolotow's approach was chronological and followed the course of Engel's life and work as an artist. Weschler began his sessions by viewing some of Engel's experimental films and having Engel discuss them. Further sessions focused on themes which explored in depth the range of Engel's creative activities. In several instances Engel returned to topics previously discussed with Zolotow, in particular Engel's interest in abstract art, his years at Disney Studios and UPA, and his present teaching position at Cal Arts.
EDITING:
Lawrence Weschler edited the entire interview. He checked the verbatim transcript of the interview against the
Xlll
original tape recordings and edited for spelling, punctuation, paragraphing, and verified spelling of proper nouns. Words and phrases inserted for clarity by the editor have been bracketed.
Engel reviewed and approved the edited transcript. He made no changes or deletions in the manuscript.
Richard Candida Smith, principal editor, wrote the introduction. George Hodak, editorial assistant, prepared the index and the table of contents.
SUPPORTING DOCUMENTS:
The original tape recordings of the interview are in the university archives and are available under the regulations governing the use of permanent noncurrent records of the university. Records relating to the interview are located in the office of the UCLA Oral History Program. . ..
XIV
TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE DECEMBER 29, 1975
ZOLOTOW: Now, one of the first things they [UCLA Oral History Program] were interested in establishing is v/here you came from, how you got here. Where 'd you come from? [laughter]
ENGEL: Where 'd I come from? I was born in Budapest, Hungary, and I came to this country as a citizen, because my mother was already here for some time. So as I said, when I came over, I came over as an American citizen, because she was already a citizen. ZOLOTOW: How old were you?
ENGEL: I think about thirteen. I landed in Evanston, Illinois, which was a lucky thing for me, because it's a lovely place, and the people were very kind to me. They really looked after me in anything and everything. They made sure that my presence was comfortable. Naturally, I spoke not a word of English, so I attended some night school. But I was also able to enter a high school in Evanston. I guess I already was showing some signs of drawing talent, but they wanted me also because I showed promise in athletics. I became one of their star athletes. ZOLOTOW: What sports were you interested in? ENGEL: Track. I'd run anything from the 400 up. ZOLOTOW: Still run?
ENGEL: No, no, no. I don't like to run for fun. No, let me take that back. For me, it's competition; that was good. But the running aspect of it, the whole athletic aspect of it for me, was a natural thing; it was just part of my body, my body rhythm. And I was pretty damn good at it, I guess, because I was the track captain, and I broke, oh, about a dozen high school records. But to me, the good thing was that I enjoyed it. Your body can function like an animal. In other words, you have your head and your body, and running, jumping, and all, that was where the body was in motion. To me that was a very good thing. So I guess because of that and the drawing, the people at Evans ton were really very, very beautiful, and, really, I think I was lucky to land there because of the care that they showed toward me. ZOLOTOW: Then where ' d you go?
ENGEL: Then from there I took off to Hollywood. ZOLOTOW: Direct?
ENGEL: Yes. I just got on a bus and I came out here. I only knew one person out here, because I met somebody back in Chicago who gave me the address. Of course, the whole thing is a little vague now. But what happened was that I landed out here and I went to see this one person, and there wasn't much there; but then he recommended me to go see somebody at the Chamber of Commerce of Hollywood. I
saw this other man, and he said to me, "You know, you're a very nice chap. I'll tell you what I'll do for you. I'll give you the money that it would take for you to get back to Evanston, Illinois. You should go back. You are a nice fellow, and I really want to help you. Why don't you go back?" [laughter]
ZOLOTOW: He didn't want to wish Hollywood on you, huh? ENGEL : And so that was my big contact. ZOLOTOW: How old were you, Jules?
ENGEL: I was seventeen. And then I had an introduction to an artist; I think I got that from a high school teacher of mine. I had the address, so after this man at the Chamber of Commerce had given me the money to go back home to Evanston, I then decided to look up this artist. And that was something that bugged me already then, because the word artist--I had no idea what the hell I'm going to get into.
I was near the place that this man was living. He was living, as I remember, near Hollywood and Highland, somewhere there. I saw a man on a corner painting a land- scape. He kept holding the pencil up in one hand, you know, looking through for perspective or something.
And I said, "Oh, no, shit — if that's the guy, oh boy, I'm already in bad shape." Because at that time already I had ideas, and I thought, "No, my God, if that's him — "
Anyway, I had no choice. I had to go to his apartment. Well, it wasn't him--it was another man, luckily, but he was also a strange one. He painted landscapes of Arizona, and then he would go up there. He painted the landscapes here, and then he would go up to Arizona and sell them there. He did extremely well. Now, he was the guy who knew somebody at the Charles Mintz Studio. ZOLOTOW: Do you remember his name?
ENGEL: I think his name was [Ken] Strobel. He painted landscapes of Arizona. He knew somebody at the Charles Mintz Studio. He recommended me there, because I had no way of making a living, really. I was very good at doing pen-and- ink drawings at that time.
ZOLOTOW: Had you had any training, at this point? ENGEL: I had very little at the high school. I had like four years of art school. I went to Evans ton Academy. (Evanston had a kind of art school called Evanston Academy of Fine Art.) As a high school student, I would go there evenings and draw, m.ostly designs and that sort of thing. They would set up the material for a still life and so forth. ZOLOTOW: Were any of the original teachers any good? ENGEL: Well, I don't recall that I had too many teachers, really. I mean that person there set up the still life, and I would draw from it.
But now I have to get around to a certain point. I
have to be very specific here. To get back to Strobel, he knew somebody at the Charles Mintz Studio, so he introduced me. But the thing that he asked me was, he would give me some photographs of the desert scene, and I would then draw pen-and-ink drawings of that, as I was very good at pen-and- ink, as I said. So I would be there six o'clock in the morning, and I would draw these pen-and-ink drawings of landscapes for him until eight. ZOLOTOW: Did he sign them?
ENGEL: [laughter] You're ahead of me. I did about a dozen. I went there for months and months and months in the morning. A year or two later, I don't know how I picked up a magazine, Arizona magazine, but, by God, there were my pen-and-ink drawings, and he signed them. Of course, it was a kind of a compliment to me, because this was a mature painter, a very "fine painter" with a big studio here, and yet my pen-and- ink drawings were good enough for him to sign them. Then I find out later that he also colored some--you know, put color over the prints. I was not angry at the man, because he did introduce me to the Charles Mintz Studio, which gave me the first job. So in a sense, I felt that he did me a favor, and I did him a favor, although I wish to hell I had those drawings now. Just the reproduction, just to prove the point. He was a kind of real wheeler-dealer. He never paid for anything.
ZOLOTOW: Well, maybe we can track the drawing down. What
magazine were they in?
ENGEL: I think it's called Arizona.
ZOLOTOW: Okay, well, maybe we can get some researchers to
work on it and see if we can track them down.
ENGEL: I remember definitely I saw one of these drawings
in a magazine with his name under it. Oh, what the hell,
it ' s long ago.
ZOLOTOW: What'd you do for Charles Mintz when you started
there?
ENGEL: Well, you could only do one thing entering that
animation studio, and that was to join as an apprentice. I
was apprentice animator, what they call an "in-betweener . "
Aside from that, I used to take a lot of layout drawings;
then I would go over them with my lines to get it ready for
the background department to paint. I had a kind of a nice
line that they liked, so I would take some very rough drawings,
go over them, and trace them for background. The big thing
as apprentice, "in-betweener," was that you're going toward
animation.
But you asked me something which is very important--if at that time when I was going to Academy of Fine Arts in Evanston, if I had teachers of consequence. Well, now, you see, this is the very strange thing that I have to explain. It might sound as if I am not telling the truth, but this is
the truth. When I was in high school, I already had a
very definite idea that, for me, going out and drawing
landscapes or still lifes was not quite the idea what
drawing or painting should be. Now, if you ask me where
this idea comes from, I have no idea. But my feeling was
then that if I would take an empty piece of paper and draw
a line or two on it, even if I put a circle in a square on
the paper, that that could be a drawing, and that could be
a piece of art. And that should be enough.
ZOLOTOW: Was there anyone that encouraged you in this?
ENGEL : No, nobody encouraged me, because at that time I'd
never even seen anything like it. I never saw anything
except-- Because when you grow up in Budapest, and you go
to museums on Sundays , you go and see the Rubens and
Rembrandts and Titians . But my point of view was already
that there must be more to painting and drawing than just
what I have seen. In other words, that you should be able
to just put anything on a piece of paper of your own invention,
imagination, and that should be art.
And the strange thing is that in high school, because I already had a very large presence as a draftsman, or drawer, my high school teacher, somehow — And I don't think she really knew much about things, but I remember that the class would go out in the field to draw the trees, and she said, "No, you can stay in the room, and you do what you want to do." I
still don't understand why she would let that happen, but I remember everybody had to go. And I would stay in the room and draw my circles and squares and lines. She went along with that, and yet I don't think she knew what the hell I was doing, because I was doing things out of my head. So this is how I began. I wanted to make this point, since at that early time, the basic concept of what my art would be was already there.
ZOLOTOW: Can you trace back and place where you were exposed to nonf igurative art?
ENGEL: No. I told you there was no such thing. This is why, when people say that you have to have those other ingredients, I have to get back to myself and say, "It's not so." I say, "At that age, I had these concepts, and I made those drawings in high school." I remember when we had to do portfolios and put covers on them and make the designs, I was always drawing squares and triangles and stuff like that, filling up the space. I felt that that was already an expression, and that should be art.
Now if I were to go back, I have to go back to certain experiences which at that time were strange. I remember when I saw-- I was in an artist's studio once, and I was about twelve, eleven, maybe twelve, thirteen, very little. That man was painting, and he was an artist. How I got there, I don't know. But I remember he had a big picture
on his wall. It had kind of like a kitchen, and three dogs were chasing; and one dog was on the top of the stairs, one was in the middle, and one was already on the landing. What fascinated me, already then, was not the dogs but the fact that there was all that space underneath the dogs. And that fascinated me. That space underneath the dogs. Not the dogs. The space. (And it had some lines.) Now, this was the first time, as I think back, that I said to myself, "That's inter- esting." At that time, I was aware of that and it captivated me .
Another thing I was aware of when I saw the Rubens and the Rembrandts and Titians was, you had a head which was enormously well painted, and you would have a hand which was well painted, but then you had a whole section of the canvas where you saw the brushwork. That brushwork fascinated me to the point where I said, "I like that better than the head. I see the canvas coming through and the rough feeling of the brush stroke. If I could frame it, for me, that's a painting."
I can make one more point, which to me is more interesting today than it was then. I was never aware of cars, of auto- mobiles. I couldn't tell one car from another. I'm pretty good at that now. But I remember (I was again around that age) I came around a corner with my friends, and I saw a car which stopped me cold. For the first time, I noticed a car. I noticed a car, and it really was an experience. What grabbed me
was the front of the car, the enormous simplicity. Again, as I say, at that early time, I asked my friends what it was. And that's the first time that I ever wanted to know what a car was. It v;as simply that I liked the front. It had the kind of a structure that I reacted to. And what the hell do you think it was? It was a Rolls-Royce. But the Rolls-Royce front had that classical shape. Later in time, I realized these things — that there was a gut reaction you can't explain. But why did I react to that shape? I never cared for a car, and I never looked at a car. When I saw that, I said to myself, "My God, that is something."
So somehow — I come to a very early point here, or conclusion--I reacted because I had to. Sometimes you do in life what you have to do 1 In other words, all these things later were very obvious, and you see I_ had no choice.
Now, this idea of having no choice is present in a lot of people. I remember listening to Jacques Tati a couple of years ago, and I asked him why he makes comedy. Tati simply answered, "I have no choice."
Now, I have heard that from other people, and sometimes that no choice comes very early. But the fact that I saw that Rolls-Royce and that structure; saw the dogs and the space underneath the dogs; saw the Rubens, the Rembrandts, the Titians, and those large areas in the canvas where you just see texture — I was drawn to all that at a very early time. But I never studied abstract paintings when all
10
these things were happening, but already my thinking was coinciding with those things. And yet they were not abstractions — they were part of a painting, or part of an object that I had an immediate simpatico with. So I know it might sound silly, what I'm saying now, but this is the way that all my work is started.
ZOLOTOW: When you got into film, did you feel a contradic- tion between what film was asking you to do and your own impulse to create the forms that you were interested in? ENGEL: Well, no. At first, when I got in there, I didn't worry about that, because it gave me the first opportunity to be in a professional environment, an environment where things can happen. I wanted to get in there. I didn't care how I'd get in there just as long as I got in there. And then what was going to happen later, of course, I could do something about. But, you see, my first big impact of the world of the arts, in my gut, was when I saw the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Then I saw, for the first time, music, movement, dancing, painting--all those things combined. So that was the thing that propelled me to get into an environ- ment where I could function on all those levels. ZOLOTOW: You're decribing two forces, then: the inner force toward a certain formalism, then this external force, the richness of full drama-art. Both these were working on you.
11
ENGEL : But that was the biggest impression on me as a young person; because there, for the first time, I saw the direction I might want to involve myself in. The sense of movement always interested me--I mean, the sense of movement as in dancing. That from the first always interested me, and it was already part of me. But again, you see, in the dancer's movement you have enormous simplicity. You have structure, but you have the simplicity, because you can't lie with movement. When you move, you don't lie. You have no choice. When you make with the words, you can say things that somebody else will come and say, "No, he means that." ZOLOTOW: What do you mean, Jules? Aren't there phony dancers?
ENGEL: I'm not talking about phony dancers. I'm talking about, for instance, athletes and the Martha Grahams and the Ballet Russe. I mean, when a man runs, he runs, and that's all there is to it. When a man jumps for a ball, and he wants to put it into a basket, he jumps. And no one can come up and explain, now, well, he meant this or that. And you're going to say something, and five other people will interpret what you're saying. But if I run a 100-yard dash, no one can interpret this: I am either going to get there before you do, or you are going to get there before I do . So in that area of movement, you can
12
have this enormous simplicity and directness. It is a kind of total expression. And in my work, my early thinking was that when you got to a line, it's a kind of statement with enormous simplicity.
Where these things came from, you see, is what we're talking about here. Where it came from, it came from my gut, and from no place else. And this is why often, when people say you need this and this and that to arrive to this thing, I don't think so. Because my whole experience in my life has always been against that. In other words, when I had a concept--
I remember in high school, they were putting on a stage performance. I was very much involved in that scene. And I recommended not to use anything as a set, just to use a bench, a table, and a chair. They looked at me like I was out of my mind. But then, five or ten years later they were doing Our Town, where they did nothing but use a chair or a table. But where the hell did this come from? I don't know where the hell it came from. All I can tell you is that these things are possible, that it can come from a person without his ever being exposed to anything of that sort.
ZOLOTOW: It seemed to arise simultaneously in a lot of people at the same time. ENGEL: That happens. But I wanted to just make this
13
point — and this is kind of a large statement — that if pure nonobjective art had never existed before my present, it would have arrived because I would have been doing it. Of course, people have a lot of art school, and then they have all the teachers, and they're exposed to a lot of things--but that's something else. But when you arrived at those things and you've never been exposed to anything like that and you just do it, well, that is something else, And maybe that's why, when I am looking at nonobjective work, I often feel that the stuff is not right, because it doesn't — not that it doesn't really come from the gut, the heart, but the person has no feel for it. If you have a feel for it, it should be as natural on the canvas as when Cezanne put an apple on the canvas.
ZOLOTOW: And yet when you got into film, you didn't feel unnatural doing representational images.
ENGEL: No, never, because then I was in another terrain, and I had to go along with that aspect of it. Let's say at the Charles Mintz-- Although the Charles Mintz studio experience for me was a disaster because of the people's lack of sensitivity of what the world was doing, I realized then that there was nothing I can do about that, because I'm a young fellow, I'm a beginner and I'd better keep my mouth shut. Which I believe at certain times is what you're supposed to do. But the whole place was
14
very anti-intellectual, anti-sensitive to art, anti-art, anti-culture. I mean, people were doing that because it was a job, but not with passion, not with tenderness. ZOLOTOW : Do you remember the year that this was? ENGEL: Well, it had to be '38 and '39, see. But by that time, around that time, I was exposed for the first time to • comtemporary art. I think the first one that I saw was here in Los Angeles, either a book or something that I saw, a Kandinsky. And POW! That opened the whole vista. And also what was interesting about it, that I, all of a sudden, felt that I wasn't alone. Because before I always felt that I was alone.
I made little sketches, and I showed them to my friends. I remember I showed it to a friend of mine--my first non- objective little drawings and stuff. He was a very good commercial artist; and he looked at the drawings and he said, "What the shit are you doing, Jules? What are you wasting your time for? What is this crap you're doing?"
Well, all I could do, I just put the goddamn thing together, the little package, and we went to a party, and the next day I went back to my goddamned little abstractions. In other words, it could have destroyed me, but it didn't. It didn't bother me that he didn't like it, or that he reacted the way he did. It didn't really mean a damn thing. I just kept doing what felt right for me.
15
In the studio, however, that was something else; that
was a job. But still I was involved in getting closer
to things that I wanted to get closer to. The only way
to get closer to this desire was for a while to work
with people whether I liked them or not.
ZOLOTOW: What images were you drawing for Charles iMintz?
What were they--? ' . • ■
ENGEL: Oh, Jesus--! can't remember. But those were
horrible things. I mean, they were just awful things.
But as I say, when you start, you don't complain. It gives
you, as you know, the opportunity to work and get experience,
and that was important. The environment was bad because
the people there were absolutely against anything that was
refined or sensitive. In fact, I remember a couple of times,
they knocked me a little bit. In other words, you were a
kind of an "egghead," and "intellectual," a "snob," and all
that kind of thing. So you kept your mouth shut and you
worked.
But already, by that time, I was in touch with a couple of people that were working with Disney on Fantasia. In fact, I saw a wonderful photo in a Vogue of those dandelions coming down, so I gave that to a friend of mine over at Disney, because they were already working on the Nutcracker, the whole suite. I gave him that piece of photo and I said, "Why don't you take it there and show him
16
that--this could be like the ballerinas. You know, use those shapes." That's what happened. They used those shapes in Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker , at the beginning, and then they recommended-- Because by that time, I was doing a lot of drawings--as I say, I was already a ballet freak--of dancers in movement, just line, you know. They showed it at Disney to somebody. At that time they were working on the Nutcracker, and they had a lot of problems with the "Chinese Dance," the "Russian Dance," the "Arabian Dance." So the next thing I know, I was called for an interview at Disney, and I was hired as a consultant chore- ographer, put immediately on the "Chinese Dance" and the "Russian Dance," to do the choreography. ZOLOTOW: Did you have musical training at all? ENGEL: No, I didn't have musical training, but my mother was a pianist. It was something that was around me, all the time. And a lot of the theater was around me, a lot of theater--not so much movies. And because I had this experience at Charles Mintz, so I knew how to put up a continuity sketch, you know, for the choreography.
Now, the problem at Disney was that the word choreog- raphy got in the way. They didn't know what the hell it meant. But it didn't matter, because I had these drawings, and they put me in a unit. Now, the problem with the unit was that no one had seen ballet before and no one went to
17
the theater--! 'm not going to mention names. ZOLOTOW: Mention names. Mention names!
ENGEL: Well, Norm Wright was the story unit director of this sequence, and Norm Wright, at that time, I don't think he had ever seen a ballet. I don't think he ever saw a play. And there was a couple of other people: they could draw well, but they were not into that scene. They never heard of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Ted Shawn, or any of that world. And, of course, the Kandinsky stuff or a Paul Klee idea of art was definitely taboo. But here they were working on [the] "Chinese Dance," and none of them had been exposed to any of that stuff. So again I come into the place like an egghead. And I began to make continuity sketches for the "Chinese Dance," the choreography, and then of course the "Russian Dance."
And that started a big battle, between me and the other people in the unit, because for one thing, I was pushing for the black, total black environment, just black. Of course, that was unheard of there.
"What do you mean, just black? We've gotta have some- thing back there. We gotta have the bottom of a tree, or grass" or some crap."
And I said, "No, no, just pure black, just pure black with characters moving, choreographies being done on the board. And nothing, not even the source of light--you see
18
the light at the bottom, but not as a source of light."
Now, this thing, this enormous simplicity, was staggering there, because they wanted to go with what they called "production"--f ill up the place, you know, lots of stuff on the screen. Now, I had a lot of fights there, a lot of fights. Also they wanted to do like a Goldwyn. They wanted to have down shots, kind of like those follies girls with the down shots-- ZOLOTOW: Busby Berkeley. ENGEL: Busby Berkeley.
ZOLOTOW : They wanted the Busby Berkeley choreography. ENGEL: But I'd already seen the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo; I saw the "Chinese Dance" in the Nutcracker Suite there, and I had all that in my gut already. And now comes again the simplicity, the pure black and just the shapes. I didn't design the shapes (the shapes were already designed) , but the way they were going to move, I did all that. So we ended up — with both of those, the "Russian Dance" and the "Chinese Dance," we ended up on black. But the reason we ended up on black, I think, was because at that time the budget was so depleted, that that was the cheapest way of going. Now, the strange thing is that today, in Fantasia, whenever they run it, they always talk about the "Chinese Dance" and the "Russian Dance" — it looks like it was done today. At that time I had to [fight] them into not getting a
19
Me tro-Goldwyn [-Mayer ] musical thing in there, not getting
all that crap in the background — just to go with this
enormous simplicity.
ZOLOTOW: That was probably one of the first times that an
idea from modern painting and modern art got introduced
in animation.
ENGEL : So, you see, with all those things in the bag, here
I had the opportunity for the first time to put those
things into motion. But I had an awful lot of fights and
some very bad times with my people around me. All I wanted
to do was just put something on there which I felt was right--
there was nothing for me to get back. In fact, I didn't
even get credit on Fantasia because I was working in this
particular area. And then when I wanted choreography credit,
I remember, the guy said, "What do you mean? What does it
mean, 'choreography'?" So forget it. So the fellow who
animated the "Chinese Dance" — Art Babbit did the animation--
now, whenever you mention that, it's interesting, because
it'sArt Babbit. But the concept, the continuity — that
had nothing to do with him. The animator comes in when
the aesthetics are solved.
ZOLOTOW: Was there anybody at Disney who was interested
in what we call art, painting?
ENGEL: Well, they were all painting; they were all painting.
But the painting then had the presence of what you call
20
then the West Coast watercolor — Barse Miller, Millard Sheets, and Phil Dike, [who] was the man who hired me. ZOLOTOW: Phil Dike was working there? ENGEL: He hired me. He was the man who hired me on this job after seeing those drawings. So that was the texture of the art scene.
ZOLOTOW: Paris didn't exist? Picasso didn't exist? ENGEL: Well, we used Stravinsky, you know, and all that. Or Beethoven. But then it was almost as if you were going to put them on the map, you know. Or I remember, I was going into a story meeting and they told me, "Don't use the word abstract because you're going to have people look at you like you're a strange character."
In fact, I had drawings--! ' 11 show you some drawings-- I had drawings on the story board, and the guys used to take them off the story board when Walt and his entourage came into the room because they felt that this kind of a drawing might look strange. You see, my approach to use colors then was like that. ZOLOTOW: What years were these?
ENGEL: This is '39, '39-40. Now, you see, this was not the kind of color approach to doing things over there. I was doing things like that then.
ZOLOTOW: We'll recapitulate this on videotape, so we can see that.
21
ENGEL: This was wild for then. So what happened — No, at the time we were finishing Fantasia, Tom Codrick, who was art director on Bambi , one day stopped me in the hall, and he said, "I like this kind of a way you use color. I would like you to do something on Bambi , but to use color like you do.
So that was the one nice thing that happened there, that this fellow saw this and he said, "I want you to use colors like this." But while I was working on colors like that on Fantasia, I had a lot of fights and a lot of problems. But these were drawings that were yanked off the board-- You see, just black. It has this kind of enormous vitality. ZOLOTOW: In those years, the difference between commercial artists and art-artists was so aggravated-- ENGEL: Oh, yes. Because you were either an egghead, a queer, a snob--all kinds of strange tags were put on you, you know. I think there were some people there who would have a Cezanne in a room, maybe. But then Cezanne was already, for a lot of people, very weird. So when you come to something like Kandinsky-- ZOLOTOW: Did Walt ever collect art?
ENGEL: No, I don't think he collected art, although he bought something of mine. I don't know whether he has it or not; I know he bought something from me--I think they had a sale. You see, you can't just say Walt, because that
22
would be unfair, because at least Walt had what I consider a tremendous sense of integrity to himself. But he was surrounded by people who fostered that, because none of them had the guts ever to comment or buck him. So he had a lot of people around him who were constantly yessing him, and they had even less than Walt. That's not fair. They had less than Walt, because at least Walt had a sense of integrity to himself. I might not agree with him, but he believed really what he was doing, whereas these other guys were just there for the ride. They would go along with him, but he was the total talent, and all these other people were just working out his fantasies.
I remember at one session, on Bambi , I recommended something, and Walt didn't care for it. But then when the meeting was over, I remember one of the guys came over and he said, "Jules, you know, I like your ideas. That's good stuff."
I said, "You son of a bitch, if you like my idea, then why didn't you speak up?"
Well, we were in a meeting, so, you see, they wouldn't. ZOLOTOW: Who hired Rico Lebrun to work on Bambi? ENGEL: I don't know who hired him. I really don't know. But, you see, Rico was teaching the animators--and I don't think they liked this idea--how to draw the animal. Because if you see the deers in Snow White and you see the deer
23
drawings in Bambi, you can see an enormous difference of drawing talent, of structure, because Rico was teaching them from the inside out, you know. He had the classes, and you can see. Then also they had a couple of people like [Bernard] Garbutt, who was an animal artist, not a cartoonis t--an animal artist who did fantastic drawings of the deer. He could draw like you write your name. But Lebrun was an enormous influence. And also there are beautiful books there, those big books with drawings of the skeleton of the deer in every position that you can think of. In fact, I have some someplace around here, ZOLOTOW : Why don't we remember these for the videotape. I'm going to make some notes, because I would like people to know about the existence of those drawings.
24
TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO DECEMBER 29, 1975
ZOLOTOW: So the only painters that worked on Fantasia and the only painters that worked at Disney before Bambi were really the traditional California school of conser- vative watercolorists?
ENGEL: Yes, with the exception of one man, Kai Nielsen, who's a wonderful illustrator, a classical illustrator from Sweden. Nielsen did the story board on Night on Bald Mountain. Now, when you see the material on Bald Mountain, in Fantasia, when you see the dancing of these characters, you can see these drawings. I mean, it's completely out of character with everything else, as far as Beethoven. But again, he was a classical illustrator. In fact, when Tom Codrick first showed me some footage on Bambi and showed me a tremendous amount of color stuff already, paintings, you know, after he asked me to do something with color, I said, "Well, you know, the problem--and you probably know it--I feel very silly, because I can't paint like this, because that approach in using color is like an illustrator, instead of using colors dramatically. Forget the aspect of a book illustration, but use color as you would use words in a theater." So the whole idea which I will come back to later, when we talk about UFA [United Productions of America] was, don't paint backgrounds, but make the color
25
part of the dramatic intent. My ideas was, don't put the character in front of the background, but put the character in the background. That's another scene.
ZOLOTOW: Let's finish with the years at Disney. When did you leave Disney?
ENGEL: Well, I left Disney around, about '42 and then went into the Air Force,
ZOLOTOW: Up to that point, nobody from the world of painting had ever affected the Disney people in any way? ENGEL: You couldn't because, Walt had a point of view, and that point of view, for him, was all right. But that point of view of course was Walt's feeling about what he wanted. Walt was a tremendous talent. He had the instinct of an entertainer. He had an instinct of a director. And he directed every damn thing that came out of that place while he was there. He looked at the rushes, he looked at the rough reels, and Walt said yes or no. There's no question about it. He was an entertainer, but the kind of entertainer that was right for him. In that sense, he was 100 percent. And he would not deviate from it. He had a feel for that. I remember we were in a session on the "Dance of Hours," of the ostriches, and we were in a sweatbox, looking at a rough reel, at the early part, when the ostriches were beginning to wake up. Walt looked at the damn thing, and he said, when somebody wakes up, then that person goes [Engel gestures] like that, you
26
know. And you say now, that was right, for him, to spot
that. So he had that natural instinct of performance,
like a lot of directors--like [D.W.] Griffith. I mean,
what the hell, Griffith became a great director, yet he
was a lousy actor. He was such a lousy actor they kicked
him out of the studio.
ZOLOTOW: As you talk, you're moving a lot like an animator,
which is really interesting. Do you think that this is
part of what Walt gave you, that you took on with you to
use in other places?
ENGEL: No, no, no--no way. No way. I think that aspect
of me using my hands, [laughter] I think that's European.
ZOLOTOW: That's Hungarian.
ENGEL: I think that's European. No, I didn't get anything
like that.
ZOLOTOW: You know, that particular gesture that you went
through when you were imitating Walt--
ENGEL: I was imitating him.
ZOLOTOW: That's a very animatory thing to do.
ENGEL: But he had that feeling, you know, of what was right,
what felt good, how a person would react. He had all that.
ZOLOTOW: Well, did you get some of that stuff out of those
meetings?
ENGEL: No, because if I knew what he was doing and why,
then I already knew the stuff. This is obvious. I know I'm
27
going to sound goddamned conceited, but I had all those feelings. In other words, I brought a lot to that place, in a lot of those areas. But for me, it was all just part of me, since I'd seen an awful lot of ballet and an awful lot of theater and liked that world.
In fact, I was already involved also in a little theater. That's right, I was very much involved in a little theater in Hollywood. At that time I was in plays. I did it out of necessity, because I couldn't talk in front of people. I couldn't open my mouth. So I went to Anita Dickson Academy of Theater to take diction. I couldn't talk, I was so scared.
ZOLOTOW: But what about the meetings at the studio? ENGEL: Well, it was very rough on me, because I died every time I had to-- ZOLOTOW: — express yourself.
ENGEL: Or say anything. And I was very shy, enormously shy. And that's why sometimes I said very little in those big meetings. I was different when I got to know people. But I went to the Anita Dickson theater to overcome the fright, and before you know it, they put me in a play. I don't tell it to lots of people. I died every time I went on stage, but I forced myself to do it, because I knew I needed to overcome this fright.
I know other people say other things about Walt
28
influencing their life. Of course, it would influence you if you'd had forty years. But I was only there about three and a half, four years. And I fought more for what I wanted to get out into the thing than I got from them, because as I say, these people, most of them were not exposed to--
ZOLOTOW: Yes, Walt had invented the animation technique, the in-betweening and everything that you learned. I mean, in a sense, everybody was his child.
ENGEL: Well, not everybody was his child, and the animation was already on the scene, it was already invented. All that stuff was already in motion, the in-betweening and all " this. But Walt had ideas. You see, if Walt was a good artist-- Walt, let's face it, you know, he couldn't draw like his talent. But it's not important, because as I say, like Griffith couldn't act, he had all the other ingredients. He wanted to do things. You know, he had these dreams. And he knew how to do it, because he looked at the stock and he said, "No, I don't want this--I want that. Forget it." But Walt was the drive. He was a force in the place. And so you were doing things with the idea that he would like what you're doing, because he would either come in and he'd buy it, or he would say, "No, I don't like that. I'm not going to buy that. So start all over again." But his instincts for his needs were right. Naturally my desire.
29
like doing the "Russian Dance," and all that--of enormous simplicity--it was bought, as I said, because we ran out of money. But in other areas, he wouldn't buy it, because he wanted things always to be right in front of you, not hidden. It was never to suggest the idea. It was put in front of you. But, what the hell, if you could gain a little something.
ZOLOTOW: Then after Walter was the Air Force. I guess that must be where UPA started.
ENGEL: Yes, the Air Force. Then came the Air Force, and we were at Hal Roach in Culver City. And UPA was, in a small way, in motion. But John Hubley was at Hal Roach, Bill Hurtz, Herb Klynn, myself, Rudi LoRiva, Willa Spire. So the bulk was already in motion there. And the good thing there was that a lot of ideas were put into motion doing training films for the Air Force. ZOLOTOW: You had more sympathetic ears, didn't you? ENGEL: Well, also, you see, the Air Force was new. They set up a motion picture unit, and the people would come around and say, "Well, you guys know what the hell it's all about, so we're not going to tell you how to do it." So in the animation unit, where I was involved now for the first time, because they didn't care, we were able to use shapes, sizes, and all kinds of things for certain things. I remember I had to do a map--I had about five or eight
30
cities. Well, I made little Kandinsky-like images of each city. I made a down shot, so I had to stand on a wall. And I remember bhis lieutenant came in--his name was Baer, and before, I think, he was working with Orson Welles. He came into the room and (I was just a sergeant) and he looked at the map, and he says, "God damn it, they look like Kandinsky." [laughter] Well, son of a bitch, evidently he knew something about art. But the other people didn't say that or didn't realize that. "Are you kidding?" He looked at the map and said that's what it is. Well, in a sense I was doing that. But that is a small thing. But at the same time we were able to do all kinds of things. Like we were sending food over to some other countries, and [we were supposed to] show the stuff. And instead of using apples, oranges, bananas, we used words: apples , oranges . So in a sense, the Air Force was by the far the best environment to try out ideas that other studios [wouldn ' t use] .
ZOLOTOW: If it worked, they bought it, eh?
ENGEL: Oh, they bought it. If it worked, they bought it. And they said, "Well, you know what this is all about. We don't." And that was the most democratic studio I had ever
worked in.
ZOLOTOW: I wasn't aware of that.
ENGEL: We could do anything we wanted to do, and we did it.
31
We tried out all kinds of graphic inventions.
ZOLOTOW: Bill Hurtz must have been a kid in those years.
I had the idea he was a lot younger than you and Hubley
and the others.
ENGEL: Funny, because he was the one married already. I
remember we would go out to nightclubs, and they would
always ask for his cards, because he had those eyelashes.
ZOLOTOW: He just looked young.
ENGEL: He looked like eighteen — no, he looked like sixteen.
But anyone with a f ace--generally people who have tiny noses
and big eyes and round heads--
ZOLOTOW: Was he fairly sophisticated about what was going
on in the world of painting?
ENGEL: Yes, well, this, you see, is what then motivated
UPA, because men like Hurtz and like Hubley--and of course
Herb Klynn was a very important man. He's always been
overlooked and not given credit. Herb was the first of
what I consider--don ' t forget we're talking about that
world--was the first really fine graphic artist in the
whole business, including Disney and everybody else.
ZOLOTOW: I remember Herb Klynn used to get copies of
Arts et Metiers Graphiques and Gebelsgraf ik — all the
European art magazines. I remember him as being aware.
Now, was that true? He was totally aware?
ENGEL: He was more than aware; he was able to do it.
32
Because I remember we were working with Alvin Lustig doing
the Magoo titles, and Herb had to go over the damn thing
to correct the lettering. Fantastic lettering! Airbrush,
colorist--he had that stuff.
ZOLOTOW: Is he as important a factor as Hubley?
ENGEL: Well, for me, yes, because the first titles on UPA
films, on the early three that we did for Columbia, if you
see the title pages, it was all designed by Herb. Now,
those were the first really sophisticated titles that came
out of the whole goddamned motion picture industry. Let me
put it that way.
ZOLOTOW: Where was Herb trained?
ENGEL: Ohio. And he had a very, very — I mean, his training
was very strong. And he knew about color. He knew about
the chemistry of color. He did airbrushing that you
couldn't believe.
ZOLOTOW: Did he know about French painting?
ENGEL: He knew everything about all that! He was with us
at Culver City. But he was a civilian working for the Air
Force. UPA was already in motion on Vine Street, and I was
working there, evenings or weekends, doing coloring. They
needed a lettering man on a sequence, and I said, "There's
a guy in the Air Force. His name's Herb Klynn. He's very
good at lettering." Well, they got him up there. And
that was it. That was the beginning. I got him up there.
33
ZOLOTOW: That's fabulous.
ENGEL: Yes. And you see, if you realize that those title cards were an early UPA function from the very beginning and they were all designed by Herb--now you put those cards against all the other stuff in the whole industry, including the live action — nobody had that effect. That was the thing that started even the--because, you see, then we had the first job at UPA, "Fourposter , " which was Hubley's job. The motion picture people seeing those titles was also a reason why the jobs came to UPA. That was the first live action picture where you really had titles. Saul [Bass] came much later. In fact. Herb and I were doing outside jobs for the Mirisch Company, about eighteen full-page ads in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. We did a full-page ad, which is the first one, I think in 1951 or '52 for A Woman with Four Faces (I have that some- place) , where she [Joanne Woodward] won the Oscar. Full- page ads in Variety and Reporter . [The movie in question ■ was actually called The Three Faces of Eve (1957) .] So we were doing--see, this is Herb's contribution. ZOLOTOW: Wasn't Herb involved in a law suit with Saul? Wasn't that — ? ENGEL: No, that was Les Goldman.
So Herb, for me, was very important in the whole structure of the picture business, and then if you want to
34
come down, just the animation business, because he was
the first man who was able to put this kind of a really
refined typography on the screen, plus color. Because
he was the one responsible —
ZOLOTOW: I'm interested in this connection to painting.
ENGEL: Now, he was painting all the time here. He was
painting all the time. In fact, we had a couple of shows
together. He was very good. But then Herb got naturally
more and more involved with management, because now, you
see. Herb was made manager of the whole studio at UPA.
See, he not only had these other talents [with] the brush,
but he was very good in an executive area, to write up
contracts and all of that. Of course, also there's
another side. But he was put into that position, and he
was very good at that. So he was painting, and although
he still paints, his painting, even five, eight, ten years
back, was already on a downfall, because —
ZOLOTOW: Can you visualize to me what it was like when it
was good--say, fifteen years ago--what he was interested in?
ENGEL: Very articulate. He always painted people or houses
and streets, all that, very articulate painting at first,
almost a little bit like [Charles] Sheeler, the early
paintings .
ZOLOTOW: The American Sheeler?
ENGEL: Yes. You know, he painted those factories.
35
ZOLOTOW: Sure, like photography. Very much like photo- graphic images.
ENGEL: Well, he had perspective in his work. Herb was painting like that then, very hard-edge, but — ZOLOTOW: Sheeier was the only one in America doing it at that time.
ENGEL: Sheeier has a lot of atmosphere and mood, whereas Herb had a very beautiful color sense, excellent. ZOLOTOW: Flat.
ENGEL: And very flat. Then he goes away from that and gets very impressionistic and stuff like that. But he didn't develop.
ZOLOTOW: But it is kind of a sign that he was aware and influenced by that whole Georgia 0 ' Keef f e- [ John] Marin- Sheeler American school.
ENGEL: No, he had all of that. Herb had all of that. Well, Hubley was aware; Bill Hurtz was aware; and I was aware. So that, you see, was the gut of the UPA. Now, the other most important man was, of course, Robert Cannon, the animator. And Robert Cannon was the important man. And also what was about Cannon was that he had this idea again of how to move, how to animate. Which was not the Disney approach. Some people call it animation, which it's not. But the thing about Cannon--because I worked closely with him--was that Cannon was open to ideas and wanted to do
36
I
I
fresh and new things. He would go along with me and Herb because he didn't have the graphic, the color, like Hubley had. Hubley had all that, because Hubley was painting and whatnot. But Cannon was not that. Cannon was an animator, a most creative animator, and a filmmaker. But all of that was instinctive. It was intuitive with him. Hub was more the artist. But Cannon would go with Herb and me on visual or graphic concepts, you see, because he knew that was right and he knew instinctively. This is how Jaywalker, Fudget' s Budget, stuff like that were created. See, Hub left very early — Hub left in '52 or '53.
ZOLOTOW : I have wondered, in my mind, to distinguish between what the Disney people were thinking about movement and the way you people started to think about movement, and one idea popped into my head that I want to test on you. Disney was always trying to create sort of Renaissance space. All his movements had to be the movements of volumes in space. But it appeared to me that cubist space, flat space, suddenly appeared in UPA, and that made it possible to make moves that weren't volumes in space but were moves parallel to the picture plane and other moves. Now, am I crazy, or is that really — ?
ENGEL: Well, you're putting it into a very intellectual and sophisticated level, because this feeling of Renaissance space and all that--Disney wouldn't know what the hell you
37
were talking about. You don't need to make an intellectual movement out of something that had nothing to do with intel- ligence. Disney was strictly commercially oriented. His people working at the studio wouldn't know what you were talking about either. Nor would his animators. What they were aware of was that they had to create personalities in order for a studio like that to exist, to function. And this is where Walt was, again, what he was. He had to create personalities. Mickey Mouse was a personality but certainly not Renaissance in any way. Mickey Mouse was like a [Charlie] Chaplin, let's say, for another studio. Donald Duck, let's say, came like a Jerry Lewis. In other words, they had to create personalities in order for the studio to live, to function. Like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had people under contract. So when you create this kind of personality, which is very close to reality, you have to animate them as close to reality as you possibly can. So whatever was going on around the character, it was a natural thing that if you have a character, like a Donald Duck or a Goofy, who had all the characteristics of a human being moving, they had to put him in a room, which has the charac- teristic of a natural environment. They were thinking on that level. But the important thing was to create personali- ties, [phone rings; tape recorder turned off] ZOLOTOW: Yes, go back to the Disney days a little.
38
ENGEL: So Disney was out to create personalities, like a major studio had a Clark Gable and a Harold Lloyd and Douglas Fairbanks and all those people under contract. They became merchandise of the major studios. So Disney was creating personalities in order to hang the whole studio on it. If you have personalities like that, then naturally they are going to impersonate a real person, and then they had to move like a real person. And if you're going to have a real person working for you, then the physical environment has to also be real. The best people that could give that reality were the painters that were functioning, and they were thinking of painting of that kind. And one of the large talents as a painter- talent, I think, was Lee Blair, who was also one of the great West Coast watercolorists , like Barse Miller, Millard Sheets, Phil Dike, and even Emil Kosa, Jr. ZOLOTOW: Did Kosa work for — ?
ENGEL: No, but these were the people that made the scene. And all the painters at that time were influenced by these people's watercolors. So the Disney background painters were all painters of that ilk. They had no other desire, and they had no other need. Barse Miller and Millard Sheets and Phil Dike were the best of that type. Also, the film, the character, needed that kind of environment. Of course, that was Walt's bag, working in that terrain.
39
ZOLOTOW: Well now, wait a minute. The characters were abstract. I mean, what the hell could be more abstract than Mickey?
ENGEL: You might use the word abstract, but they would die if you used the word abstract . ZOLOTOW: I understand that.
ENGEL: No. Mickey Mouse is not abstract like abstract art. As far as they were concerned, the characters had dimension. The characters were three-dimensional. And then you go into Snow White, and Snow White was airbrushed, and the face was three-dimensional. In Bambi the characters were three-dimensional. They had volumes; they had-- ZOLOTOW: Yes, but the volumes were always eggshapes , ellipses. In a sense, that's a high degree of abstraction. ENGEL: They had to do that in order to give it a kind of structure that anybody can pick up and say, "Here's the structure." The head is a circle, the body is an eggshape . So you had to have the structure underneath all that so anyone can pick it up and work with it, and also because it was easier to maneuver, to animate those shapes. You can put a structure in that very easily and locate the place for the eye and the nose and all that. But the whole aspect of it was still a natural environment, where a three- dimensional person who behaves like a real person can function; therefore, the painter had to be painterly, didn't
40
have to be an artist. He was more or less a renderer.
ZOLOTOW: Except I do remember distortions of size,
distortions of color.
ENGEL: Well, the size and all that. You have no choice.
You got to have that because you're still working with
the film. You're working with a medium that is the
property of the poets. But, you see, a lot of those
things came about because they had no choice. They had
to go, but it was never done with any kind of a static
thinking.
ZOLOTOW: Well, most painters don't do their own-- Theories
come after the fact, right?
ENGEL: Yes, somebody thinks them up later.
ZOLOTOW: Naturally, Walt and those guys wouldn't have
theory. But you must see, you know, that theirs was not a
school of photorealism, and theirs was not a school of
realism. Theirs was a pretty abstract way of drawing and
painting, even though they didn't know it.
ENGEL: As far as they were concerned, their scene was
realism, total realism when they painted the leaves and the
grass--
ZOLOTOW: They thought mice looked like Mickey? [laughter]
ENGEL: Come on-- I mean when they painted the trees and
the grass and the meadows and the flowers and all that, it
was really — if you were around there, that was realism.
41
And if you, as I say, look at the Snow White backgrounds, Peter Pan, Pinocchio , you know, Bambi backgrounds-- [they are] almost photographic. And once in a while they would get off, maybe, and push the other way, but the other way was not good because that wasn't Walt's scene. This is where you have to give the man his credit. No matter what happened with any other person in the world, and no matter how successful it was, Walt said, "That's not me." And he said that! "That's not me. I can't think that way." I mean, he was aware of UPA--people mentioned and things were said about UPA--but Walt said, "That's not me." And in that sense, you have to give him his credit, that he wouldn't just say, "Hey, look, those guys are doing something great over there. Why don't we do it better?" Frankly, when they tried to do something like that, and although they say it's not, it was bad, [like] Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom. I don't care what they say — because they say, "No, it's not UPA inf luence"--but damn it, it is UPA influence because they tried to go into the flat design. And it's a disaster, because the taste is bad, the color is bad. They didn't work it from in their gut, you know. They were working it like, "Look, Ma, I made an abstraction."
In other words, they had the talent to do the other stuff, but in this area, for me, they only worked the
42
surface, and the surface wasn't good. And this is what a lot of people don't understand about UPA, because even now, you hear animators talk about like, "Oh, yeah, we'll do those backgrounds, we do those backgrounds." But it's not good because they don't work it out. They just look at it, and they think, "We'll copy it."
ZOLOTOW: There's no question that Disney worked from his gut. And I think that's why the young people now look back and see Disney through different eyes. Now, how about you? Does Disney's stuff look different to you now than it- did when you were in the middle of it, rebelling against it? Do you place a higher value on it, now?
ENGEL: No, I don't. I feel that it was right for the time, and it was right for Disney. And it was right for the animators. There are sequences, there are moments in some of the Disney efforts, like the pink elephant sequence in Dumbo, when you see that thing today, it's magic, it's beautiful. And how the hell that ever got made in that environment is still a mystery. That is a beautiful piece of motion, movement. But I don't get taken with the stuff. I admire the craft, and you have to start someplace. But it's craft.
ZOLOTOW: I notice you're not wearing a Mickey Mouse watch, [laughter] ENGEL: I could never do that, because I cannot advertise
43
other people. I don't want to advertise other people. That's what you're doing when you carry it. But I still don't have that feel for what they did, because, damn it, when I see some stuff of Jan Lenica or [Walerian] Borowczyk or I see an early [Oskar] Fischinger or a [Norman] McLaren, it's still the thing that turns me on. And although I admire the craft, the animation know-how, of Pinocchio and some of the Bambi stuff, it doesn't turn me on, you see. So that's the difference. And in that sense my feeling, my sensitivities are not changed. But I do admire Disney as a person who had a sense of direction. And he would never let go, just to get on a bandwagon of another art form, good, bad —
But then again, in the world of entertainment, you know, there is an enormous amount of room for all kinds of endeavors. There are people who would be entertained with that, and there are people who will not be entertained. And you can't just go one direction, because you're still dealing with the mass media. You're still dealing with mass entertainment of a kind.
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TAPE NUMBER: II [VIDEO SESSION] JANUARY 23, 19 76
ZOLOTOW: The room is filled with film cans, animation
cells, sculpture, painting, the products of a long and
active career as a painter and sculptor and filmmaker.
[tape recorder turned off] The area you are living in
is surrounded by all wonderful things, Jules. Is that
why you moved here to Beverly Hills? Why do you live
here?
ENGEL: Well, because it's about the closest thing to a
city in L.A. , and I love cities. I like the idea of
walking out on the street and walking to a shop, walking
over to the laundry, or walking over to the bank or the
post office. And I like the feeling of the city itself:
I like buildings, I like windows, I like front doors, I
like hotel lobbies. I would really like to live in New
York. That's the kind of life I like surrounding me.
[laughter]
ZOLOTOW: Yes, in a way, it's like living off Fifth
Avenue in New York.
ENGEL: That's pretty good. Or Madison Avenue and
Seventy-seventh, that environment.
ZOLOTOW: When Frank Perls had his gallery here, did you
hang around there a lot?
ENGEL: Yes, I used to go up there and see him. He was a
45
great influence, you know, on the Los Angeles environment, a great personality. Plus I spent some time with him in Paris at Deux Magots. I would find him sitting out there on the street.
ZOLOTOW: What about Herb Palmer's new gallery? ENGEL: I think that's a great gallery, and he's a very unique personality. He always adds a lot of excitement to the city. His first shows were very good, very inter- esting, and I just hope he stays there and keeps it going. It's the only way you can get a city like Los Angeles on the map, is to have knowledgeable people stay for years and build an art environment, you know.
ZOLOTOW: Have you been on the whole disappointed by the art scene and the gallery scene in Beverly Hills? ENGEL: Well, yes, because we just don't seem to have an honest and in-depth interest. It's a little bit too artificial, too much like table-hopping, you know. This is fashionable today — that's fashionable tomorrow. There's no reference to historical foundation. We are always working in a very small group in the city. You see, in New York, you have two or three dozen large galleries. You have half a dozen museums. So you have all kinds of avenues for expression. But here you have someone who can command like a high priest, and does command, "This is the way we go," and everybody then follows him. In
46
other words, there are no avenues here.
ZOLOTOW: Have you ever been tempted to move to New York? ENGEL: Oh, I've been tempted a hundred times. [laughter] ZOLOTOW: What made you resist?
ENGEL: I'm not resisting; it's just that the working oppor- tunities for me have always somehow been here. But if I have a chance (as I do once a year) to go anyplace, it's always New York.
ZOLOTOW: But didn't John Hubley create a center in New York that you might have worked at?
ENGEL: Well, he has a center, but that's not my center; that's John Hubley 's center because Hubley is Hubley. And I am not John Hubley. I have to consider my media of abstract animation and of art animation. This style is not in any way commercial like Hubley' s. So if I would go to New York, I would create my own center, and I would let Hubley have his.
ZOLOTOW: Jules! Here's this big, fat book on Disney, and it makes me think of what we were talking about when you were reminded of Fantasia , the role you played, and what happened. Tell me about Fantasia, and what you did. ENGEL: Well, I was hired to do, very specifically, the choreography for the "Chinese Dance" and the "Russian Dance," and then later I got involved with "Dance of the Flutes" and the "Arabian Dance." But evidently they had
47
problems with the "Chinese Dance" and the "Russian Dance," because no one in that particular unit had any background or knowledge or insight of what the dance world is all about, what choreography's all about. And I had some drawings, you know, so I took it over there. And Phil Dike saw the material, and he said, "I would like you to work on the continuity "--which means the choreography--"on the 'Chinese Dance.'" So that was the beginning of my experience with the Disney studio, working on the sequences of the "Chinese Dance" of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite. ZOLOTOW: Did they feel they were out of their depth with serious music?
ENGEL: Well, I mean, they never really adapted serious music, but Disney was going to do this project, and it came from, you know, it came from [Leopold] Stokowski, but I also understand that before Stokowski, it actually came from Oskar Fischinger, from Oskar Fischinger to Stokowski, from Stokowski to Disney. Somehow they liked the idea, and I think Disney felt that he wanted to do something that was unique, something different, and it was just a natural direction. But they were not in love with that world, because, you see, they interpreted it into a kind of a calendar art. That was about the height of [their] aesthetic intelligence. ZOLOTOW: Did they feel that that world was above them, or--
48
ENGEL : It was above them, because, you know, you were easily made fun of there if you considered art, or were considered to be an artist. Art and art appreciation were things that Disney was not very comfortable with--with the exception of a few people. But you see, generally, it was out of their range completely.
ZOLOTOW: But yet they were deep into music. What kind of music was Disney involved with in that period? ENGEL: The music they were involved with would be the composer who would score — like they scored a very handsome piece for Snow White. So it was a popular music, a popular talent, a composer who would just write a popular tune, "Whistle VJhile You Work" and stuff like that. Unfortunately it's no different today. They do the same thing as they did then--no progress. ZOLOTOW: I'm curious to know how you introduced some of your contemporary ideas into Fantasia . How were they visualizing their story boards? Did you play a role in changing their vision of how Fantasia should be shot? ENGEL: I was very specifically put on the "Chinese Dancer." Of course, they wanted to do a Chinese dance with a lot of mushrooms jumping around the base of a tree with a lot of roots and a lot of weeds and this or that all over the place. My intention was to keep it very simple, to get rid of all the background environment and just have a nice, flat.
49
simple black environment, black backdrop on a stage, you see. Simplicity is something I have always believed in. You would have a backdrop and then you need light--any light source, just have a light shade that gives you the idea that light is coming from someplace. So this aspect of just having black and not having any texture, any physical gimmicks around these little characters, was very difficult for them to understand. You look at Fantasia; everything else is just crowded, constantly crowded with all kinds of images and shapes and forms. But I think actually what happened with this section was that eventu- ally they ran out of money. Anyway, that was my under- standing. The budget was quickly disappearing, and the fact that we were going to work with a black background, that means we don't have to put any background artists on it. This made sense to them, the finances. And today, I think it paid off beautifully, because both the "Russian Dance" and the "Chinese Dance" have a beautiful presence, almost as if they were done today. That is the test--if it will hold today and tomorrow. Naturally it was a lot of fighting, an awful lot of fights over that, to put the idea across.
ZOLOTOW: Do you have any drawings from that period? ENGEL: I have some materials here which I used to propose the character or the spirit of dancing. The color here
50
is very important, because the way I used color, it was again very fresh and very much removed from their use of color, which related more to using color the way an illus- trator would. In these examples the primaries and the secondaries are just as brilliant but loose and not worked over, not too much underpainting and all that stuff. This is just brilliant colors on a black background, v/here color has a chance to come through into life. ZOLOTOW: Did Walt ever see these drawings? ENGEL: No, Walt never saw these drawings because the studio people were a little afraid that this stuff looked a little too way out than what they were used to. In fact, they told me to hide those drawings and not to let Walt see them. In fact, this is very abstract in character, and they told me not to use the word abstract when we went into sessions with Walt, because, I said before, you would be looked at as either an egghead or an intellectual or some kind of weird, weird character. So these are some of the drawings, you know, that got by, however, even though I hid them. You know, if I hadn't put these drawings away, someone would have torn them up. The Disney people never allowed you any feeling of creativity, just craft, copying. It was a surprise to them and a miracle to me that these drawings got in. ZOLOTOW: You weren't the only egghead around during that
51
period. Wasn't Rico Lebrun on the Disney lot at the time? ENGEL: Rico was on the Disney lot at that time. He was already training some of the key animators, and animators in general that were going to draw for Bambi. And I think his role was very comfortable, to be quite blunt. After all, he was an immaculate draftsman. All they could do was admire him, because this is what most of them wanted to be. Or I think they thought they were safe with him. He was one of them; he drew real things. They were crafts- men of enormous talent, but Lebrun 's influence was very important. You can see the deer, for instance, in Snow White and see how it's almost a bad drawing. And you compare the deer in Bambi; it's an enormous difference. At least now they were under the influence of impeccable craftsmanship .
ZOLOTOW: And they knew where the bones and muscles were. ENGEL: Yes, in fact, Lebrun made a number of the sketches, and they turned this into books. And here you can see a drawing of Rico Lebrun' s. And it gave them an idea of what the bone structure of the animal was all about. He had, I think, about twenty or thirty pages of different drawings — any position, every position of the deer. I mean, he was something very, very special, an enormous draftsman, a great draftsman. And that's what Disney wanted. ZOLOTOW: This is a far cry from the ellipses that the
52
Disney people animated. Did they resist this kind of attitude toward drawing when Rico introduced it at first? ENGEL: As I told you already, Lebrun was very comfortable at Disney. Actually, Walt wanted the animals to look, you know, real--at least as much, or as close to something real. Now, when he got to other characters, like a small rabbit or a skunk, and stuff like that, naturally they went back to their other style of drawing. But when it was deer, when it was Bambi, or the father or the mother of Bambi, I mean, those characters were extremely well drawn. So they had no choice. They couldn't resist or fight it because Walt wanted it to be done that way. After all, Walt was the boss in the place. This was his dream, and these people had to follow--to make the dream the reality.
ZOLOTOW: Did you get to know Rico during that period? ENGEL: Yes, I got to know Rico pretty well, not so much in there, but I got to know him after that because he used to lecture a great deal at Frank Perls 's. Frank had a gallery; he used to lecture there. I knew him socially. And he was an enormous influence on the whole Los Angeles scene. Of course, two artists. Bill Brice and Howard Warshaw, were really, at that time, his disciples, and then Edith Wyle was very much--you know, she has The Egg and the Eye today. But Brice and Warshaw really were his students.
53
ZOLOTOW: If you consider how big the Jepson Art Institute was, how do you account for the fact that so few painters survived from the number of painters that passed through Lebrun's classes?
ENGEL: Well, I would say that L.A. art in general was based on the Western watercolorists , as compared with the New York artists, who built their foundations on the experimental. So in a historical sense, Lebrun was not a trendsetter. You cannot be safe with safe art. Anyway, what happened to him? [Herbert Jepson] ZOLOTOW: I don't know.
ENGEL: I saw him recently at a dance festival. I think the only two who really are around and working and exhibit- ing are Brice and Warshaw.
ZOLOTOW: Brice and Warshaw were already mature young men when they met Rico. Of the people that Rico touched as young students, can you think of any that are still active in painting?
ENGEL: Not really. I think one reason--when you are being touched by a master like that, I think it's a very bad thing. And maybe that is what destroyed a lot of those people, because they were living on Lebrun's talent, on his personality. And if you do that, you die. You just can't do that. You have to find your own way. I think most of those people just didn't find their way.
54
ZOLOTOW: How do you account for the fact that there was
seemingly no connection between Lebrun's group and the
painters that followed? Did you reject Rico's stuff
because you were an abstract painter?
ENGEL: Oh, no, no, no. Plus I could never reject Rico's
works, but I could reject anybody else's work who tried
to emulate Lebrun. You understand that that's the way
the cookie crumbles? Rico commanded an enormous presence.
When he moved into sculpture, I think that Lebrun's large
talent was in that, but it came too late. All the others
tried to be Lebrun. The minute you try to be what you
can't, there's no future.
ZOLOTOW: How ' d you get this Lebrun here, the one on the
wall?
ENGEL: I think I bought it from somebody who wanted to
pick up some extra dollars.
ZOLOTOW: What year did you buy it?
ENGEL: I think I bought it around '59, 1960. I picked
it up from somebody, but I don't even remember who owned
the painting. All I know, it was just a lot of people
around and somebody needed some money.
ZOLOTOW: Was this before the [Lebrun] "Crucifixion [Series]"
exhibit at the museum or after?
ENGEL: No, I think it was before; I think it was before.
[tape recorder turned off]
55
ZOLOTOW: That was an interesting period. There was a lot of activity in painting then. Among the guys who were working in animation, how many of them were exhibiting painters in those years besides yourself? ENGEL: There was Paul Julian. He was exhibiting and Bob Mcintosh was exhibiting. And I think a little later, of course, there was Herb Klynn who also was exhibiting. ZOLOTOW: Where did he show?
ENGEL: I think Herb was showing at Leonard Grossman gallery, Leonard Grossman with, I think, Paul Julian probably and Bob Mcintosh, because that was the only, what we call avant-garde gallery in Los Angeles, Clara Grossman's on Hollywood Boulevard.
ZOLOTOW: I remember Julian showing at the Felix Landau Gallery on La Cienega. And I remember sculpture by-- ENGEL: --by Paul. Paul very specifically was in the stable of Felix Landau, whereas Mcintosh I think was more or less showing wherever he had the opportunity. Also I think Helen Wurdemann was an enormous influence at that time. She had a gallery on Wilshire Boulevard, where the Otis Art Insti- tute is. In fact, most of us, at that time, showed the first time at Helen Wurdemann ' s gallery on Wilshire Boulevard, Because somehow, somebody would recommend you for a show. Like, let's say there was a new painter, someone would recommend you and you would be showing there. Yes, that was.
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I think, a very important place for Los Angeles painters
to make their first presence.
ZOLOTOW : What were you doing at that time? What kind of
work?
ENGEL: At that time, I was doing very hard-edge, very
abstract [work]. My early work was hard-edge.
ZOLOTOW: You mean like that one over there?
ENGEL: Like this one down here, and then there's another
one. This is also an early one. This was characteristic
of my work of that time--very geometrical, hard-edge, almost
architectural in character.
ZOLOTOW: What medium were you working in?
ENGEL: Mostly watercolor or gouache. But I could use a
Windsor-Newton and make it look like gouache. But mostly
gouache .
ZOLOTOW: Did you ever work with the stuff you worked with
every day, at the s tudio--cells and--?
ENGEL: No, I didn't use any cells on any of my work. The
paint that we used at the studio was very cheap, cheap,
cheap paint. So I would never use that for my work, because
that stuff was always just throwaway.
ZOLOTOW: How did you relate the two things — what you did
at the studio and what you did at home?
ENGEL: Well, I think the most important thing was trying
to take something into the film that I was doing, let's
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say, of my own work. In other words, the simplicity, the directness, the flat aspect of the painting, the color taste, the color choice was something that I wanted to project into the work at the studio. That was, of course, a natural direction, especially if you didn't like anything that you saw around you.
ZOLOTOW : Did it ever work the other, way around? Did you ever want to take some of the things that were happening in film and move it into painting?
ENGEL: No. The most elementary thing being motion, I wanted to use my artwork in film. I was always interested in motion, and that aspect of motion didn't come to me until a little later, of putting just that onto film, what actually Fischinger was doing earlier. So the motion aspect of it is a big factor.
ZOLOTOW: Well, the painters and the futurists in the twenties were concerned with motion. Did you ever get into that kind of representation of motion on a canvas? ENGEL: No, no way. No way. No, they didn't interest me, because I was much more interested in almost architectural image on the canvas. In other words, it was almost like the idea of using the canvas just as a flat surface, which later developed into what [Ellsworth] Kelly was doing, and Ad Reinhardt. It developed into that world, you see. But the movement, for me, took care of movement for my films.
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This is very interesting. I threw away or lost the early ones. I destroyed the films until I was satisfied with my work, until about ten, twelve years ago, in 1961, '62, when I began to consider keeping my pure abstract films and to put motion onto film. But then I just began using pure shapes.
ZOLOTOW: Could I see some of the abstract things you were doing during that period? What's that black and white one over there, Jules, those volumes?
ENGEL: Well, these may be volumes to you, but in animation these would be seconds of film. This was the beginning, you see, of moving into that world. This was the first one. And then there was another one, which was also a first one of that terrain. And this--
ZOLOTOW: How did you work with these painted surfaces, to digress?
ENGEL: Well, this was wood first. I cut it and glued onto the background and then painted over. ZOLOTOW: Did you have film material like this? ENGEL: No, the film came a little later, but this was the first--this was the beginning of this kind of a-- Because you see, this is just pure movement. Here is where, for me, movement was beginning to be very much part of my work. Not like the futurists, who went out and wanted to put a loco- motive or a streetcar or a running horse and stuff like that.
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See, again, I go back to the straight line and put the straight line into motion. For me, the straight line always means something very, very intriguing. I mean, the vertical line was very intriguing.
ZOLOTOW: You know, the paper that describes you for this series calls you a Bauhaus painter, and this is about the only thing I've seen around that makes me think back to the Bauhaus and [Laszlo] Moholy [-Nagy] . Do you consider yourself Bauhaus influenced?
ENGEL: Well, let's say I admire the Bauhaus very much, but I don't-- Well, I can't help it if people see a con- tinuity between my work and Bauhaus. I mean, I admire them enough that I will not be unhappy about that, [laughter; ZOLOTOW: Maybe it's because you're Hungarian. ENGEL: Maybe because I'm a Hungarian and because Moholy- Nagy is a Hungarian and [Gyorgy] Kepes was Hungarian. The whole group of these characters who were working in that terrain. But I think this is just the way I am put together. It's my chemistry, and it is not a question of Bauhaus, you know, because I could just forget the damn thing and do something else. But I still am wedded to this character of very structured and organized imagery on a canvas. This intrigues me. And yet Martha Graham intrigues me, and Alvin Alley intrigues me, and Twyla Tharp intrigues me. That's an enormous contradiction to your Bauhaus idea of me.
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of what they do and how they move on stage, isn't it?
ZOLOTOW: Did you ever draw them as people?
ENGEL: No, I have absolutely never had any desire ever
to draw people. Never.
ZOLOTOW: Have you ever photographed people?
ENGEL: No, I don't even like to photograph people. I
feel I'm intruding on their privacy, and I think they have
every right to resent being photographed.
ZOLOTOW: Have you ever photgraphed objects?
ENGEL: Objects, yes. Oh, yes. Chairs all over the place.
Buildings, s tairways--anything and everything. See, for me,
a person comes to life on the stage either in the theater
or as a dance on stage.
ZOLOTOW: Did you ever do sets for the theater?
ENGEL: Oh, sets I've done. I did sets in Paris. I did
a very important play, LesJouex. I designed a set for
Les Jouex, a very contemporary play. And also other
things .
ZOLOTOW: Let's move on, along the work there, and see what
other periods you have there. This kind of complicated
spatial diagram is one. What's happening back there?
ENGEL: These paintings are of more recent vintage.
ZOLOTOW: Is that a serigraph?
ENGEL: That's a serigraph, yes. But here again I'm
working with these particular shapes that I'm always
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intrigued with. In fact, I put this into animation, where it turned out to be a little bit too much work, and too complicated. After about eighteen or twenty-four drawings, I think I gave it up, and then worked them into a single painting.
ZOLOTOW: When we were talking about Disney, we were talking about his preoccupations with volumes and deep space. In a way, you're going back to representing deep space, except that you've got a lot of perspective at work. ENGEL: But this is totally different; the shapes here are always in limbo and in space. In other words, I don't put perspective lines that would tell you that there is a front and there is a back, see. The only thing that would give you that feeling, maybe, is because the shape in the fore- ground is a little larger and the other shape is a little smaller, so it gives you a feeling of depth. But that idea of putting perspective lines that would take you back and stop, I generally don't work with that. It doesn't exist in any of the work I do or ever did. In other words, this whole terrain for me is still an area where you do nothing but excavate and come out and try to find new avenues.
ZOLOTOW: You know, it strikes me that most of your work is very small in scale, just about the same as animation cell or background. Do you ever do bigger things?
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ENGEL: Of course. They are architectural, but these are mock-ups of the real things.
ZOLOTOW: Where do you think paintings belong? ENGEL: Painting belongs in a home, in apartments, in museums. It belongs in the kitchen; it belongs to whenever and wherever somebody's in love with the painting and wants to live with it.
ZOLOTOW: Are you one of the film people that thinks that film and video's going to replace painting?
ENGEL: No way. It's impossible. I think film is important, I think video is important. But you can't live with film twenty-four hours a day because it belongs in a can, and you need a projector, you need a screen, you need all kinds of gadgets. But beside that, it's another world. It's another medium. It's a medium where you deal with light. It's a medium that also is a quickie. What I mean is, when you see a film--I have a very difficult time seeing a film twice. The second time they fall apart for me. And I love films. I mean, I've been in that world all my life. But the third time they die on me. Whereas painting, there's some magic about a painting. You can look at the damn thing and look at the damn thing, and you discover new avenues in that. But film — the greatest films that I've seen--oh, let's forget the word great, because that doesn't exist--but let's say the best of the very good films that
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I have seen, the third time, they fall apart. In other words, because it's still a bastard medium. Which is good. Which is good. It hadn't found itself yet; it's developing. And this is healthy. Let's face it, we're talking about an art that's seventy years old. It's not like the world of painting, where you have five hundred years, great artists. I mean, we have seventy years of film making and--
ZOLOTOW: Well, some people contend that painting is on its way down, and film is on its way up. How do you feel about that?
ENGEL : : Oh, I hope film is on the way up. After seventy years, it has no other place but going up. In other words, we don't have a Titian or a Rubens, the Rembrandts and El Grecos and the Goyas, and we certainly have no Picassos, Braques, and Matisses. And Jackson Pollock. I mean, that's a point of view. So after seventy years, you have no choice but going up. But from my point of view, I think a lot of film making is going down, because they're taking on the enormous presence of an illustrator. All of a sudden, most of the films look like they came out of the hand of an illus- trator. The mediums of the film are not being used to capacity, let alone beyond this. They're using the camera to illustrate an illustrator's script. They illustrate. They are illustrations. They don't even use several images
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in order to design a film. What they do, now, they take
a very good picture, an enormously beautiful picture, and
then they keep going into it, let's say for a close-up.
So they compose things inside this piece of illustration,
instead of using first shot, second shot, and a third shot,
and put the three together in such a way that it becomes a
composition that you can only get through films. We're not
doing that. We're beginning to illustrate again. But then,
what the hell, within seventy years--
ZOLOTOW: Are there economic reasons?
ENGEL: Oh, no, no. Talent, talent. That is nothing to do
with economics.
ZOLOTOW: Well, they tell me that one reason that —
ENGEL: When you spend $11 million on a film, there's no
problem of economics. When you spend 4 million, there's
no problem of economics. What the hell, you can take a piece
of 20x30 inch canvas, and you can put a masterpiece down.
So it's not a question of economics. It's a question of
talent, of thinking.
ZOLOTOW: How does sculpture relate to your painting and
film? When did you get into sculpture?
ENGEL: I got into sculpture around '61. I went to Europe,
and I was very impressed with Rome and Florence and Venice--
that whole environment. [tape recorder turned off]
ZOLOTOW: So sculpture really turned you on in Europe,
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and of course you made your things here.
ENGEL: Yes, but I first really saw things there, and what turned me on really was the structures. I liked their buildings. I liked the free flow of a lot of the designs on some of the buildings, and, of course, the great masters, you know. But I still had no desire to do anything with the figure, because, again, I went back into the very architec- tural kind of imagery. And eventually, like, you see this centerpiece on a table, this is what happened--! began to realize that there was no sculpture to me that's related to the American image. See that centerpiece? This is the American image--the skyscraper. And that's the beginning of my realization that there's nothing really in this country that relates truly to the American image. And what the American image is to me, is really the skyscraper.
Also what turned me on was that some time ago, about that time, I landed in Washington, D.C., and I saw all this — I saw Lincoln in a Roman environment. I saw the [Washington] obelisk, which is an Egyptian thing. I saw all Roman and Greek and Egyp- tian shapes in Washington, D.C., surrounding the American giants, you know. And I said, "Wait a minute. There's something wrong here. Why can't we have some kind of a shape, form, or sculp- ture, something that relates to this country?" And that was also one reason that I started to do this kind of shape, which to me is the American image — nothing Roman, nothing Greek,
66
nothing Egyptian, nothing but just American New York. ZOLOTOW: Well, that was what was so wonderful about animation, the fact that it really was a native art. And I remember that explosion that occurred when Gerald McBoing Boing hit the theaters, and for the first time, animation came from a source outside Disney. How did that happen? How did UPA grow out of Disney?
ENGEL: First of all, animation is not just a native art. It had a background other than America. What happened [was that] some of us-- I worked at Disney, Hubley worked at Disney, and Bill Hurtz worked at Disney. Let's say that we had other ideas. We had other concepts of what an animated film should look like. We were aware, very aware, that at Disney everybody was pushing the film toward what we call illustration. I mean, illustration that would work better in a magazine. Now, of course, there is a place for all that sort of thing, and there are people who love that. But we had other points of view, because we were already very much involved with contemporary art. You know, we were aware of Matisse. We were aware of Paul Klee and Kandinsky. Dufy was, I think, very important for us. Leger was very important for us.
ZOLOTOW: The divorced line was a big thing in animation. ENGEL: Also we wanted the character flat, and let's not divorce the character from the background. What they did
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over at Disney was that they put the character in front of the background. And that is even wrong in a world of theater. When a set designer designs with an idea that he's going to put a design behind a character, he's already off on the wrong foot. The important thing for a design, even in the theater, is to design so the character fits into the environment. In as much as we decided to work on a flat surface with the character flat, we wanted to push the two things together, and flatten out the background, flatten out the character, and now you're on a terrain, on a very honest, aesthetic point of view. Because you're not trying to cheat. You're not trying to make a three- dimensional background and put a two-dimensional character in it.
That was one of the point of views at UPA that we were very aware of. We wanted to have that happen and we did. It really happened and happened big and happened well in Gerald McBoing Boing. I have some materials here. Here is Gerald McBoing Boing from one scene. Then here's another Gerald McBoing Boing. Again, if you notice, something very interesting here. For instance, you don't see any lines. You don't see any line that would tell you where the floor stops and the walls start, and where the ceiling starts. In other words, the environment is estab- lished through the shapes that you were putting into the
68
scene. If you had a shape close and that was large, that gave you the point of view that this is the foreground. And then back here, when a shape was smaller, that estab- lished the position of distance and time.
But this point of view was a good one, and we knew we were doing something right. We wanted to get away from what we called just pure Sunday calendar illustration, that so much of the Disney background was about; and for us, it constantly fought a flat character. So this was the beginning of our thinking, of having a flat character working in a background where he would either do away with a horizon line where you would say, "This is the ground, and this is the sky." All that was not important in the world of painting, because our approach was more of a painterly approach, or an artist's approach, who was aware of the flat surface and knew what the hell that is all about.
ZOLOTOW: Do you think it's comparable to what happened in cubism, when the picture place got flattened out after all those years of deep space?
ENGEL: Well, for me, I'm a kind of primitive in thought; I'm not what you call an intellectual. And I think those things have to happen. I think there is no choice. I think an artist, a serious person, will come upon things. I think Picasso came upon things, because everything else
69
was there. And he said, "I'm going to do something with
all that, and I have a new point of view." Then he went
about and brought this thing into a position. But also,
I think he did something very interesting, the cubist
approach, that very much exists in film, or in a film
world. Because when you have a close-up and you have a
slow cross-dissolve to a profile and you have a slow
cross-dissolve to another point of view, you now have
three separate aspects of the image, looking at it from
a different position. And they are all on the screen at
the same time. I think in a strange way cubism is very
much in a film world, and I think a lot of filmmakers are
not even aware that this thing really is on the screen,
which is pure cubism, where you show a different aspect of
the image, at the same time, on a screen.
ZOLOTOW: What other influences of French painting can
you see on film? How about that thing you mentioned, Dufy
and the divorced line?
ENGEL: Dufy was very, very, very influential, and I think
I have something here where you can see the divorced line.
Now of course, this is very, very —
ZOLOTOW: That's not so divorced. [laughter]
ENGEL: Well, it is divorced.
ZOLOTOW: That's tightened up.
ENGEL: No, no, it's enormously divorced when you see the
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shape and where the black line is working. The divorced line here is very obvious. But it's very articulate; it's very clean; it's very neat. You notice we couldn't quite work Dufy in the film, because you're still dealing with a piece of merchandise that will be used by millions of people.
But it was very interesting, because even at [the] studio at UPA, the animators at first were very much against this idea of a divorced line from a shape. In fact, they made fun of it. They were knocking it, and they were criticizing it quietly. But once it got out there and people accepted it and we were applauded, then they shut up, and the criticism then died down. But at first, they were really not with it, because they said, "What the hell is the matter with this? There's something wrong. The line is missing at the edge of the shape." ZOLOTOW: Where ' d the color come from in those days? ENGEL: Well, I would think the first big influence at UPA was from Herb Klynn and myself. Herb was in charge of that aspect of it, let's say, background color. And I was working with Herb, and it came from me also. Then Herbie was moved into a managerial job, and the whole thing was on my shoulder So color was something that was in my bag, and I then had all the say-so, the total say-so, all the right to do as I damn well pleased. And then I really began to push colo: into
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this medium that it never really had had before. ZOLOTOW: You must have been looking at paintings during that period. Which paintings do you think influenced your use of color?
ENGEL: Use of color? Well, several, but I think Matisse was very important. I think Paul Klee was very important. Leger was very important, because he's so clear and clean. He uses the strong primaries, but always uses them very elegantly. But of course I must also mention Braque, and I must also mention Picasso. And I think that would take care of it.
ZOLOTOW: All Europe. No one on the American scene that you were interested in?
ENGEL: Oh, the only American scene painter that I was interested in for color was Albers , Josef Albers--and Hans Hofmann. Hans Hofmann and Albers were the two that I would look to. The other person who also interested me very, very much, and I tried to get some of that stuff into some of the UPA films, was Stuart Davis. But if you're talking about mood, then it's something else. [Charles] Burchfield and [Edward] Hopper--I was very, very keen on them. But Albers and Hans Hofmann, the use of the wild colors [by] Hans Hofmann, for me that was very beautiful. And Stuart Davis, for me, that was very, very important on the American scene.
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ZOLOTOW: Yes, I see the connection.
ENGEL: But, as I say, we just opened a whole new world then at UPA. The way I used color there, which you and I could never do at Disney. Because there, color was used simply as an illustration, and not as color which has something to do with the dramatics. Again, you see, at Disney, they put the color behind the character instead of putting the character into the color.
ZOLOTOW: Well, didn't you have problems putting colors on cells, though? Doesn't color fall off?
ENGEL: No, that's no problem, because you put it on the cell, at that time, whatever paint was used, and it was sharp. So it didn't matter what the hell happened after that. Today with acrylic and stuff, you can put paint on a cell, and it will stay on it for the next fifty, hundred years. You can step on it, you can walk on it, you can bend it, you know. But it didn't matter then. It just had to last from your desk to the camera. Once it was shot, it would go into the garbage anyway.
ZOLOTOW: Wasn't there a difference in the pigments between what the painters were using, the permanent pigments, and the kind of raw color that you were getting out of cans? ENGEL: No, because the subtlety was already there, because the question of what color you put in next to another color, you know-- But if I wanted to use raw vermilion, which was
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in the primaries, you know, if that was the mood of the film, I used that. But otherwise, no, because it's still what you put next to another color that makes the damn thing work, makes it right or makes it wrong. ZOLOTOW: Was Magoo the big commercial success of UPA? ENGEL: Magoo kept UPA alive. Magoo was the commercial success, and kept us alive, and the other stuff that we did, like the Gerald McBoing Boing, The Jaywalker, Frankie and Johnny, The Unicorn in the Garden, those were the offbeats. We had that contract with Columbia [Pictures Corporation] and Columbia had no choice. They had to take what we were delivering. But if Columbia ever had an idea of what they were going to get after the Magoo, we would never have had the opportunity to do those films, because
they hated every film that we made that was not Magoo .
ZOLOTOW: The Unicorn in the Garden--that animated the
Thurber drawings, didn't it?
ENGEL: Yes, and we kept very strictly to the Thurber.
ZOLOTOW: Was that the first time a thing like that had
been done?
ENGEL: Yes, yes. We did Thurber ' s Unicorn in the Garden,
and we did Madeline, which was [Ludwig] Bemelmans ' s
Madeline . And the idea when we used those people was to
give it the lines that they used in their own drawings.
Why destroy their drawing style? The whole idea was to
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bring those drawings alive. And they were right, because Thurber worked with the lines, so again, you were working with a flat design on a flat background.
ZOLOTOW: I think that really broke open the whole industry. ENGEL: Also, it broke open from a point of view of anima- tion, you see, because often people refer to that kind of animation as limited animation. They always downgrade it, which I think is very stupid because there's no such a thing as limited animation-- there ' s such a thing as limited talent, but not limited animation. They don't understand that the best performance that you can get from that medium should be a kind of limited gestures. Because if the animator really looks for performance to the stage, the gestures there are truly limited. There isn't a gesture on the stage that is not truly necessary. In other words, very seldom do you find a really great stage actor where he would use his hands or his head or any portion of his body, where he would make as much movement as the best animator made for Walt Disney. The animator at Walt Disney, or most of the animators, they are afraid to stop gesturing, because they are afraid that the damn character falls apart, because all of a "sudden he becomes flat. By having the flat character and designing flat, like we did at UPA, we didn't have to worry about that, and still our gestures, our "acting technique," was the closest to what a great actor on the stage would be doing.
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ZOLOTOW: Yes, most of the ges tures--like walks — were sort
of parallel to the picture plane at UPA, whereas in Disney —
ENGEL: Well, he was moving all over. He was moving his
body, and the more he moved, the better they felt that they
had accomplished something. Whereas our feeling was that
all that was very unnecessary. They thought they were doing
something that was real lifelike; when in reality they were
not lifelike. They were just something else.
ZOLOTOW: It was a different kind of symbol.
ENGEL: It was something else. But they were not as aware
at Disney of the art of acting, I think, as we were at UPA.
ZOLOTOW: Who was the great animator at UPA?
ENGEL: The great animator at UPA, whom I also think was
the greatest in the business, is Robert Cannon. He was
the one--
ZOLOTOW: They used to call him Bo Cannon.
ENGEL: Bobo Cannon, Bobo . He was the one who really added
that refinement to enact a performance of this gesture.
Because there is nothing more minimal. You watch Laurence
Olivier on stage, and it's absolutely magic. The gestures
are minimal. And this is what Bobo Cannon was able to do
on film. Sometimes not even with that kind of thinking, but
he had that instinct, that this was right.
ZOLOTOW: What was his background?
ENGEL: Just a person who grew up in a medium, who wanted to
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be an animator. I think, if you go back, he was a tumbler. So that means he had a beautiful sense of timing, which was again innate and was part of his body. He was very keen on movement and very keen on aspects of comedy, but again, in a very elegant sense, more like Jacques Tati. Tati always was mimicking people. I had lunch with him once, and he was mimicking people. He was mimicking at you with a fork or a knife that he had in his hand, you know, even in the way he did movements. Bobo Cannon was in the same thing. ZOLOTOW: Where ' d he learn how to draw?
ENGEL: Bobo? You don't learn it; you just sit at the desk eight, ten hours a day. None of those guys ever learned to draw, except that they decided to walk into the damn studio, and they sat there eight, ten hours a day and knew that's for them.
ZOLOTOW: Did he have any exposure to classical art education? ENGEL: No, none, none.
ZOLOTOW: Was he interested in painting at all? ENGEL: None. But I must say about Bobo that [although] he had none of that, he never fought it; he welcomed and respected it. This is why he was able to work with me and with Herb Klynn. He had a simpatico. He was sort of wide open for that, and it was beautiful. Whereas so many of these people, they either know it all, or they're against and afraid of it. Bobo, for example — this is a very strange
77
texture that this man was wide open for these recommenda- tions, for these suggestions, and he asked you. And yet he had none of that background.
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TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE MAY 19, 1976
ZOLOTOW: We are at Cal Arts, and what we really want to do, Jules, is find out what you are doing now. ENGEL: What I am doing now, you want to know? [laughter] I am now heading the California Institute of the Arts film graphics-experimentational film department and creating new talents for the world of films.
ZOLOTOW: Is that an experimentational film department? ENGEL: It's both. It's called "film graphics dash experi- mentational," and then animation, because this is all those levels. In other words, some of the works that come out of here are purely of an experimental character, whereas some other stuff, let's say, is more conventional in character. And then, too, you have the other type of film, which people relate as film graphics, which would be, let's say, just the highly designed and very articulated forms and shapes that people accept as film graphics. Still others in the abstract experimental vein don't have that quality, because it's, let's say, more liquid, more organic, more sensuous. It's purely experimentational, you know.
ZOLOTOW: What relation does this have to the traditional animation skills which are taught here?
ENGEL: Well, what I am doing here, I'm interested really in the talent that I would say has more of the character of
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the poet, the fellow who is really much more inventive, or the fellow who wants to go into the scene of film as an extension, let's say, of a painter who now wants to work in motion and not a question of aesthetic painting. So the conven- tional animation here is another department. And although I have people who work with characters, their approach to the character animation is where you invent the aspect of how the character moves. To be more specific, it's movement, but not from observation. It's movement from a point of view where you invent, where you create, where you make the movement function because you're dealing with a drawing, and not [because you] try to copy or imitate. That is the only thing that relates to conventional animation in my department.
ZOLOTOW: Are you getting young people out of the painting department to work here?
ENGEL: I have some people who come from the painting department in the school. But then I have people who come here from other schools, specifically because they want to work in experimenta tional filmmaking. These are the people who are art students, and they have a B.F.A. or whatever from other places. They come here, because they feel that here they have this total freedom of really working the medium and not [being] locked into any kind of ideologies or school structures .
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ZOLOTOW: Do you regard this as kind of an extension of painting?
ENGEL: Yes, it can be. I think of some of the people, like Dennis Pies, who's been here, as just that. He was a painter--he ' s still a painter--he ' s an excellent print- maker, and he came here because he wanted to get involved with film, but with his world of painting. And he's done some beautiful work. Barbara Stutting has done a few abstract f ilms--again, a painter. Jane Kirkwood has done a film like that. In fact, the best talents that I have are really the true artist, who looks to the film as an extension of the world of art. I make a difference between the talent that I would call studio-oriented (that's the conventional type) and then the other who says, "I don't want to work at the studio. I want to produce my own world. I want to make new horizons." So that's the other world. That's the large talent.
ZOLOTOW: You know, you have Bruce Nauman teaching here. How do your students and your work relate to what's going on now with video art and what's been called post-object art? ENGEL: Well, we have video in the school, of course. So, if a person in here wants to jump around and try something new, have fun, fall in love with the medium, they see what happens. And, if a Bruce Nauman is here, or another artist of that character, what happens is that my students will go
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over there. If he had any kind of a rap session, as they do, or they show their slides, I encourage my talent to definitely go over there and listen to the man. Just look and listen. And what you like you take in, and what you don't like you don't bother with. But the idea here is the exposure of young talent to all those other people. I mean, this is the best thing that I can help them--not tell them but just say, "Go and look, go and listen, and then work with that. "
But the talent is very young; you can't expect a hell of a lot at this stage. Also I am a firm believer of working with the talent where the talent is. But the important thing is exposure to all the arts, both to the large talent in the painting world or the dance world or the music world and then play. And then I wait.
ZOLOTOW: What about the relationship to photography? I notice that your print room has all kinds of photomechanical means. Are your people here getting into photographic ways to create new images?
ENGEL: Well, in the sense that, again, the lab is there. That's where you have to take chances, but why not? I mean, I like this idea of introducing a talent to another field and seeing when there is an explosion. Or if there is an explosion. Or if there is some kind of blooming that will occur .
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ZOLOTOW: Yes, because I think of that McLaren thing of the Pas de Deux. Remember, he did that basically photographi- cally. And then how did he get that movement? Was that on an optical printer? ENGEL: Optical printer, yes. ZOLOTOW: You have an optical printer here?
ENGEL: We have an optical printer here. And that is really the heart of the more experimentational filmmaker, because that's where they can really make magic, go and do all the impossible things. I mean, you can shoot something in black and white, and then go on optical printer and put color in it. You can triple, quadruple an image. You can make fifty passes on one frame. I mean, that's a magic machine, and it's a must today for a filmmaker. In fact, the big differ- ence, I think, today in the talent, when they come into a place like that, they ask you if you have an optical printer, they ask you if you have an Oxberry.
Now, years ago, and at the studios, I mean, a guy would come into a studio, like Hanna-Barbera or Warner's or MGM or Disney--! mean, for them to even ask if you have an optical printer, they would kick him out. [laughter] Because even today, most of those guys, they don't even know what the hell you're talking about if you talk about optical printer. ZOLOTOW: Do you feel you're sort of the leading edge, the cutting edge of the art world, sitting here?
ENGEL: Yes, today, I think in the field of a certain genre of animated film, yes, we are definitely a force. We have created films and images and concepts on film that just did not exist before. So, this place is that. Of course, I've been very lucky, because I've had some very beautiful people. When I say "beautiful," I mean talents who've been coming my way. It's just one of those fortunate things that always has happened. But we are definitely a force. And although I use the word animation, I don't like that word. But at the moment I have no other word. Because "animation" people always relate to arts, life, and the world. ZOLOTOW: Why don't we just call it "film art"? ENGEL: "Film art" would be much better, yes. Because when you mention that word [animation] , people are so conditioned- ZOLOTOW: Mickey Mouse.
ENGEL: --to what it was before, that they have no concep- tion--what is this all about? An interesting situation today is that the dance is so popular. I think probably the most inventive art that's happening today is taking place in the dance world on stage; and people will go to that and can enjoy this beautiful thing which deals just with movement. And yet, when you do that on a screen, people have a problem of going with it. Now, I thing maybe the word animation-- they look at it as animation, and they don't quite buy it or enjoy it. You mentioned "film art,"
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"art projected," or "projected art" — all these things would be much more apropos with that aspect of filmmaking that is happening here and what I am pursuing here. ZOLOTOW: One of the things that is happening in the world of so-called fine art is that there's a whole anti-art move- ment. They're saying the galleries are dead, paintings to hang on the wall are dead, easel painting is dead. And the peculiar thing about your activity to me is that you don't say that the canvas is dead, but you have certainly moved centuries away from the canvas into this kind of film activity. And I'm curious--do you think that video, TV, and the other kind of electronic forms are going to replace canvases and prints and the still images?
ENGEL: No, I don't think it will replace it. No way. I think painting is going to be here. And video is going to be here. And film is going to be here. And sculpture is going to be here. And it's all going to be here, and they're just going to work parallel. But not going to replace one another. If there is a great painter who comes around tomorrow, or a great sculptor tomorrow, everything is back as big as it was yesterday. Film is just a child. This whole medium is just a child, such a bastard medium at the moment, that it cannot replace the great arts of yesterday in no way. ZOLOTOW: I'm not talking about yesterday. I'm talking
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about if a vigorous young talent comes along, you know, will he be drawn to this medium here because it is new, it is exciting, it's in the twentieth century? And will he not be drawn to the single image of the canvas? That's the question. Are you, is this room going to siphon off the best of the kids, and the weakest of them wind up painting pictures?
ENGEL: Oh, no, no. I mean the good ones will paint pictures. And the good ones will make films. They're not going to siphon off to any one avenue. I think what's happening more and more, that the talents are working in the different medias. I think that's just going to be much more the scene than just picking a particular avenue. It's happening now, and I think it's going to happen more and more, because you can buy equipment and it's not going to be expensive.
And I think artists are always, no matter how serious and how big, what a giant they were, they still have to be in a character where they're playing. You've got to play, and if you don't play, you're finished, because that's the name of the game. So they are going to play with the medium of the canvas. But I don't think that you can walk into a home where you have kind of a spiritual presence, and you're just going to have empty walls looking at you. There's nothing wrong with empty walls, but I mean that's just the nature of man that he wants to live with things that--not
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just a piece of decoration, but that has a life of it's own. And I think great art has a life of its own, and a man wants to share this piece of art with himself, you know.
ZOLOTOW: Yes, I'm glad you're saying that, because for a long time people have been talking about what one man has called the industrialization of the mind. I mean, for a long time, every technological device was considered automatically a step forward, and apparently you don't consider film a step forward, you just consider it another-- ENGEL: — another form of expression, another form of art. And I think that's the most beautiful thing about it, that you can go back and forth. You go into one room, and you're looking at great paintings; you go into another room, and you're looking at great films. Of course, you don't have any great films to look at as yet, but at some time we will, because, as I said, the medium is so young. But I don't see that at all when people say that. I just don't understand them. Because when I go to Paris, I have to go to the Louvre; when I am in New York, I go to the Museum of Modern Art and I go to the Met [ropoli tan Museum of Art]. And I go and see films. And I go to the galleries and see new painters. I'm very anxious to see new sculptures or collage or whatever form. And I am very interested to go to the theater and see a dancer like Twyla Tharp or Merce Cunningham or Alvin Alley.
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ZOLOTOW: That's an extraordinary attitude, and that's why I'm hoping to have you develop it. Because from what I have been hearing of--well, I'm looking at Marcel Duchamp, and of course, he produced almost no art. I mean, he really was the origin of the anti-art sentiment that motivates a lot of young artists today. He, in effect, said, "Why do it? Why make paintings for dealers to sell to rich people, and so on?" But you don't share that really.
ENGEL: No, I can't share it, because when you do something, you do it because you have to do it. I mean, you don't tell a bird to stop singing. You have great stars at the opera house and you have Stravinsky and you have a Bach and a Beethoven. I mean, he still keeps on singing, and you keep on listening to him, and you keep enjoying it. Well, an artist is in the same position, if he's really something very special. He has no choice. He will create. He has to create. I mean, it's part of his chemistry. These are things that we can't explain, but it goes on all the time. And the talent that comes around me, I mean, they are coming around because they are interested in the medium of film. It doesn't mean that five or ten years from today, they stay with the medium, because it's possible that they just go back to painting or sculpture or prefer still the other arts. ZOLOTOW: You know, one of the things I think it would be good to have on record is your view of the evolution of Cal
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Arts. We did not discuss how this school came about. ENGEL: Well, I don't know anything except when I first came here and they said we'd like to talk to you. But I have no idea how it came about before that. I know that when the thing was in motion--
ZOLOTOW: Pick it up where you got on board. When was that? ENGEL: Well, I was on my way to New York. I was going to move to New York. A dear friend of mine heard about it, and he said, "We don't want you to leave for New York, because there is a school that is going to open up, and maybe they can use you. "
And they had a very dear friend whose name was Anais Nin, and they called--because Anais Nin evidently knew Herb Blau. So they told Anais Nin about me, who met me years before, but I don't think there was any strong remembrance. You know how sometimes you meet people, and then you're in limbo with them.
ZOLOTOW: Yes, but you can't forget her once you meet her. She can forget us. [laughter]
ENGEL: That's right. So, this friend called her, you know, and the next thing I know I was with her and on my way to Herb Blau. Then Herb Blau had me over and had a kind of a rough cross-examination, lasted like three hours. I never talked three hours in my life before, and he just kept, you know, talk, pumping me and pumping me. That went on, and
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then I met [Robert] Corrigan. Corrigan saw the films, and Blau saw the films that I had done already. And then I met Sandy [Alexander] MacKendrick, who was then already on the board as the dean. And they needed somebody for this particular department. So, just simple as that, they liked the material, and the next thing I knew, I was part of Cal Arts.
ZOLOTOW: You weren't involved in any of the struggles and the push-pulls.
ENGEL: Before that, and all that?
ZOLOTOW: Well, even then things got pretty complicated when Blau got in trouble.
ENGEL: Oh, yes, when Blau and Corrigan-- When we first opened, naturally, it was very hectic, because the idea was very big. The concept of what the school was about was going to be something very spectacular. But a lot of people that came here really didn't know how to use that kind of, let's say, freedom that they had. And they just-- I think they just blew their tops. And they almost wrecked the whole joint.
ZOLOTOW: Tell us about that period. I don't know if any- body's putting this into the history.
ENGEL: Well, no, it was just what happened. We were up in Glendale; they rented that old, old school. ZOLOTOW: Convent, wasn't it?
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ENGEL: Convent, some girl's Catholic high school [Villa Cabrini]. And so we just moved into the rooms. There was no furniture. You sat on the floors. You sat on boxes. I think, the largest problem was with the humanities. That's where the problem came, because I think at that time the idea was to go out into the street and have some kind of confron- tation with the local police in Glendale. And then once that would take place, then everybody would run back to the school, and then they would have something to talk about. I'm putting it more in a humorous way, but it turned out that that kind of activity constantly was that. Because the dancers were already dancing, the painters were painting, the filmmakers were already involved making film, but the humanities had a kind of a problem. Somehow they were so unstructured, because it's going to be free and you can do as you damn well please, you can come and go. And the next thing you know, we had all kinds of problems with the people in Glendale. And the humanities-- that was the big problem. They liked that idea of having this--
ZOLOTOW: Okay, obviously you don't want to get into the nitty-gritty detail. Well, some of it has been written, and somebody will put it on record, that period, but-- ENGEL: Well, probably a lot of things happened, you see, but myself, not ever being part of a school structure (I come here from a professional world), I don't even know, really.
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who's doing what to whom, because I don't know the mechanics. Now, the other people that were in other institutions knew all the strings. But when you're an outsider, you come into a place like this, you really don't know.
ZOLOTOW: Yes, it's like my relation to Art Center. I feel like an outside hired hand.
ENGEL: You don't know. Now, once you're in this world for some years and you begin to know the principal, the vice- president, the provost, and how those things, then you begin to get part of it. Maybe today, I'm much more aware, you know, what is going on in the place. But then maybe I'm the kind of person that frankly, I don't give a damn about those things, because I have my terrain. I'm working, and I said, "The hell with it. If there are problems like that, let them solve it. I don't care."
ZOLOTOW: Okay, let's get off the school then. The thing that we might explore a little more is working both in the painted canvas and in the film, what are the aesthetic similarities or differences between the two media? ENGEL: The similarities? Well, if you're a painter like I am, naturally, and I'm working in a certain characteristic of the canvas, which is the hard-edge, geometrical, archi- tectural, structural thing, naturally, I'm going to take some of those shapes and ideas and want to put them into movement. I mean, for me, that is the interesting situation.
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to put the character which is on a canvas into motion. For me, that's very lovely. But then again, I've always been very involved in the world of dancing. Then the other edge is that I would like to put the painterly shapes, the painterly characteristics on, get them into motion, but also put the dancing world, the dance world, the Martha Graham world, onto graphics and into motion. So that's the terrain.
ZOLOTOW: Well, the Martha Graham world is still concerned with storytelling, poetic storytelling as well as motion. Has storytelling been an interest of yours?
ENGEL: Storytelling, when I worked on my films, has never been. If I worked at the studios, naturally, then it's a must. It's just part of it, and I participate and do it. But at the moment I don't quite want to get involved with storytelling because, frankly, there are so many people doing that anyway. Everybody's doing that, so that I am very comfortable letting them all do that, because as I say, everybody's doing that, everybody's telling stories. The problem, I think, in this whole film area now — there are very few people doing these other things where you're dealing with movement and have all the characteristics of a painter's approach to movement to the film, or the painterly approach. I think that you don't find much around. But storytelling — I think everybody wants to tell stories.
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ZOLOTOW: One of the reasons I bring this up is that now, in the world of paintings, people are asking for a return to, somebody said, "pre-Courbet painting," painting that was involved with poetry, social ideas, storytelling. In fact, I think it was Bill Brice, in an interview in Art News, that said he felt the time had come for us to pick up previous things that painting used to be involved with. And painting was involved with poetry and storytelling, social ideas. And I'm just wondering whether, sitting here with this medium which is a natural storyteller but that's been telling jokes for years--the only story it's ever told has been jokes--do you feel that when painters move into these concerns, or pick them up once again, maybe film will be waiting for them, you know, as a new way to be a Delacroix, or a new way to be--? ENGEL: Well, from my corner-- [ laughter ] When Bill Brice is talking, he's talking from his corner. When I'm talking, I'm talking from my corner. And from my corner I don't see any such concern. Because you're not going to tell an artist that we, the public, are ready to reach back to pre-Courbet or whatever. No way. I think a talent comes, and he comes in his own time, and he has to work what's right for him. My feeling is that no such thing will happen. What will happen, let's say, I don't know, but I cannot see them going back to anything. I don't think that we're put together that way. We don't go back to the horse and buggy, we don't
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go back to the airplane with a prop, and we don't go back to fountain pens, the thick, heavy, bulky fountain pens. I don't see any way to go back to anything. I think Bill Brice is dreaming, or he would like to have that happen, but I, from my corner, I can't see that. No way. I think you come along in your time, and you work as the time is right for it, but no way that you can go back. I think that you are always going to have dramatics, you've got to have dramatics, but the theater is going to take care of dramatics. I think the film is not quite really put together for dialogue, because I think what people still enjoy in film is the feeling of movement. If you start a film and you're going to have nothing but dialogue going on up there, you're going to destroy the medium. There's some- thing about this medium, film, and what people enjoy about it is the sense of movement. I don't know why people enjoy that, but they enjoy it. Now you can see film after film where the beginning is just sheer movement. Nothing happens, but somebody sits on a bicyle and rides. Another picture starts with an airplane in the sky, and it's going and going and going. There's another film I saw recently where it started with waves, and it just goes and goes and goes, and then pretty soon somebody comes to the beach. But it's interesting, all these films starting with just sheer move- ment. Now, what happens? There's something about that that
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people feel right about. It moves, and this is what it's all about. Good heavy dialogue, and large meanings, T still prefer on the stage; that's me. I love the stage, and I love the fact that it happened there. Naturally, you've got to have dialogue on the stage, and you will have it. But it will have nothing to do with what took place yesterday. It will have nothing to do with what the painters did yesterday, because they were storytelling and stuff like that. Whatever dialogue is going to happen, it's going to happen, because it's going to be right--but not with the view because of what happened yesterday. This is
just from my corner. No way.
ZOLOTOW: Do you see the reintroduction of subject matter in painting? I mean, look at, well, we've got the photorealists now, and then we had the pop guys before that, turning their eyes on parts of the world that painters hadn't looked at before. Do you see that?
ENGEL: No, I think it's just a moment. I think it seems like eternity because you're part of it. But if you look back ten or fifteen or twenty years later, you're going to see this thing's just like bubbles — it has just disappeared. I think these are just things that are brought on by galler- ies and brought on by people because it sells, it makes news — these are quickies. I don't see anything in them. But I accept them as part of my time. I accept them as
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I accept a headline. And often they are headlines and nothing else. But you cannot go back. You cannot go back, to anything. I mean, you can look at it and enjoy it, but I think these are just moments, of no consequence really. But I still accept them as part of my life, and I think I understand, it has to happen. But I think whatever is going to happen tomorrow, it's not because you're going back to something yesterday, in other words.
ZOLOTOW: I didn't do justice to that idea if I implied it was just a retreat. What I was trying to suggest is that some people in the world of painting feel that certain ideas that have been not of concern in the last fifty years are going to become of concern again, the way the Museum of Modern Art, with its Beaux Arts show, suggested that certain concerns of Beaux Arts architecture which were thrown out by Le Corbusier and by the organicists may be reintroduced, but in a new form. I phrased it badly. ENGEL: Yes. Okay.
ZOLOTOW: A thing that interests me about your conviction that films dealing with movement and space and color and shape are going to be with us in the future--how do you see them being distributed?
ENGEL: Well, I see them distributed in the museums. In other words, they will be part of the museum. In other words, I see [that at] every museum we're going to have a
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projection room. Every museum is going to have several projection rooms. It's going to be just part of your going to a museum and seeing this projected art. I can also see them in galleries, where galleries will have small gadgets where you work with a tape--the material is going to be on the tape. You put it with this gadget into this piece of machine, and it comes onto the screen. It's going to be sold like you sell albums, music, in the same way. In fact, it probably could go on a record, the image could go onto the record. You just put it on and you have a projected image. So I see these things as part of, well, like you buy a lithograph, or you buy a multiple. I can see them as people buying it like they buy books, and they have a library. But people are already beginning to-- oh, it's another reason. People are beginning to buy films. Now, twenty- five years ago, it was unheard of that a young student could go out and buy films. Well, damn it, today, they're buying films. They go out today and buy early black and white films which cost-- ZOLOTOW: Sixteen [millimeter].
ENGEL: Yes, which cost five, eight dollars, beautiful things. But they are buying films today. And this is very new, and that's very interesting. And I've been in a lot of homes of people who are film buffs, like you have record buffs, and they have projectors. They are buying projectors.
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and they have a screen. A lot of homes now, you know,
they pull a screen down. This is the way, and it's
happening because they are buying films. I was very
surprised when I first began to realize that the young
people are buying films. This never happened before.
My God, I was over at UPA and Disney, nobody had a film.
But today, they have films.
ZOLOTOW: I used to rent films a lot.
ENGEL: Or you rent. But they buy. They buy. They want
to have it. And I think galleries definitely will have
rooms predicated for showing films. And there's no question
that museums--because look at the Los Angeles art museum,
[which] has big film events where they're showing Mervyn
LeRoy and characters like that. I mean, this is just a
natural next step in the world of art, running films.
ZOLOTOW: Well, you know, of course, the big revolution is
going to be cartridge TV. Apparently within two or three
years we're going to see some more signs of that.
ENGEL: Yes.
ZOLOTOW: So that's what you see. You see the museum
playing a role and the 16 millimeter projector playing
a role, and maybe the 8 millimeter, those cheap little
rear projection units that are developed for 8 millimeter,
and then the video cartridge, and you see that as the natural
distribution--?
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ENGEL: Natural distribution of these art films. For art,
yes .
ZOLOTOW: Well, do you ever see this integrated in the
feature film as we know it? Do you ever see any of the new
expressive or communicative techniques you have being
swept up by an avant-garde director and integrated into
feature filmmaking?
ENGEL: Well, I think you see maybe little tiny bits, like
2001 [A Space Odyssey] , you know, that one where he goes
through that space area.
ZOLOTOW: Doug Trumball's section, yes, the split scan.
ENGEL: Yes, so you saw a little of it there. And then
you see some very bad thing where this guy did Tommy--
ZOLOTOW: Yes, terrible.
ENGEL: It's terrible, but that's the problem.
ZOLOTOW: No, but I mean do you ever foresee it being done
well?
ENGEL: Oh, yes, oh, yes.
ZOLOTOW: Do you ever foresee artists like your artists here--?
ENGEL: Oh, definitely, it's a must, it's a must. It takes
a little time, but it's a natural thing. It's going to
happen--that ' s tomorrow. Oh, but yes, there's no question
about it, because people are getting so conditioned to all
kinds of imagery. Now you can begin to come in, and it's
no problem for them to participate emotionally [with] what's
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on the screen through this imagery. It's going to happen, it's just a question of somebody has to come along with a film which has all these characteristics, and people will love it. The problem is that people who are still running the film world are still so definitely locked in to what's been yesterday-- ZOLOTOW: — or last month —
ENGEL: — or last month [laughter], that it's hard, it's hard to break that wall. But, oh, it's on it's way, there's no question about it.
ZOLOTOW: This is the first time I thought about it, listening to you here, and it really does seem to me a possibility.
ENGEL: Oh, yes, it's all around you, you know. Somebody just has to have the opportunity to do it. People today will buy, they'd buy it.
ZOLOTOW: How strong is the cinema deparment here, the live- action cinema department?
ENGEL: It's very strong. In fact, the cinema department here is the same as it was when the school first opened. That's the one department where all five persons — Sandy MacKendrick, Terry Sanders, Don Levy, Kris Malkiewicz and myself--
ZOLOTOW: Terry Sanders was here? ENGEL: He's been here from the beginning.
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ZOLOTOW: Oh, I didn't know that.
ENGEL: Oh, yes. [All five] have been here from the very
beginning. And it's very strong. It's very powerful.
ZOLOTOW: Well, maybe this new film artist that has the
resources of live action and film art, maybe that new film
artist is going to come out of here.
ENGEL: You hope so. I would like to see it. But, for me,
we have produced some fantastic talent. The new book just
came out from the Whitney Museum [of American Art in New
York], which works with the American Federation of Arts,
called New American Filmmakers, you know, and in that, in
the film-graphic area, Adam Beckett has a full page. Dennis
Pies is in there. Pat O'Neill is in there. And myself, I
am in there. So here is four people from Gal Arts in this
new book called New American Filmmakers. So, I think the
texture is right here, the ambience is right.
ZOLOTOW: So when I asked you whether you felt you were
at the cutting edge, you've got justifiable reason to think
that you are.
ENGEL: It's a shame I didn't bring the book. I just got
it yesterday from the Whitney. But it's very powerful.
You see, that's the difference between USC and UCLA and us.
ZOLOTOW: Okay, let me ask you another funny thing, because
I get a real strong feeling about this film department here.
How do the painting students view this activity in this school?
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ENGEL: Well, so far, they've been very keen. They're very keen, and they applaud us. The accolades are really plentiful from them. They've really been very good to us. They appreciate, and they understand. They know that this is something very important that's been growing here and happening here. So I really have the backing of other departments, including the dance school, because I've put on some film performances for the dancers, to open their eyes to the mechanics and the possibilities. But the painters in this school are very keen about us. Really they--you know, I'm not trying to say something that's not real or honest, but really they look to this place as some- thing very, very special.
ZOLOTOW: Well, you know, it's a refreshing thing to hear because, I don't know, I talk to people and I don't get this kind of story.
ENGEL: Oh, you mean about this place? ZOLOTOW: No, about other schools.
ENGEL: Oh, you mean where they knock the other departments or something like that?
ZOLOTOW: Yes, where there isn't this kind of feeling. Obviously this is a uniquely motivated and strong department you guys have, and its connection to the traditional painters and the traditional printmakers and all that seems to be pretty exciting and pretty good.
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Well, what haven't we covered, Jules? ENGEL: I don't know. See, I don't come with notes, so-- [laughter]
ZOLOTOW : Well, I think, you know, we have some sense of where you came from personally, and I think we've covered the relationship of yourself to the Disney world, and the relationship of the Disney world to what spun off. It's really funny, because it's almost duplicated at Cal Arts, because you've got a Disney department--right?--and you're like a spin-off department. I think we've covered your relationship between painting and film art as you see it. I think we've really covered the story.
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TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE DECEMBER 16, 1977
WESCHLER: This is the first tape of the second series with Jules Engel, and we're interviewing today at the [Charles] Aidikoff Screening Room in Beverly Hills where we're going to see some of Jules 's films. Well, Jules, perhaps you can introduce them yourself.
ENGEL: Yeah. Well, you're going to see about eight abstract films, and this will be probably a good indication of where we go from here as far as your questioning me on my intentions, where I am, where I am going.
The first film is Train Landscape, and it's a paint- er's approach to filmmaking, to putting painting in motion. Primarily I'm working here with vertical lines. The reason for that is because it gives me a kind of effect that is not known, not discovered. So we're discovering imagery that comes about when you put images in motion. So the idea here is to discover, which often is my concept or approach to filmmaking, where I am at . In as much as I worked in the major studios where you had so much restric- tions, you never had any opportunity to have things happen, I mean, happy accidents or painterly accidents, or even from the point of view of a sculptor, that accident that I can find here. [the film starts]
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These are straight lines, and you're already beginning to feel the strobes, something the vertical lines would give you, strobes. Now, this is total taboo in the stu- dios, but I'm interested in that aspect of it, because as a painter I could never get this character on canvas. But because you're working in time — in other words how long I hold a straight line on the camera, whether I hold it a second or two seconds or eight frames or four frames--this will give me the front strobes. You see a lot of strobes there.
WESCHLER: And you're using color.
ENGEL: And color also. But very little color here, because I've always been very interested in strong black and white.
Now you begin to get really the feeling of the strobes here on the straight lines. And this is a form of discov- ery that I'm very interested in when I work in film. Very nice. It's wonderful stuff all through here. It's all strobes, and it's all geared timing. It's all strobes — beautiful. Fantastic. [the film concludes] WESCHLER: I notice that the sound score is by Stan Levine. Does he develop the score after you've — ?
ENGEL: Yes. I like to finish a film, and then I have some session with a musician. But I always look forward for him to surprise me. Just as I'm looking for surprises or
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accidents, I also want him to surprise me, because I could nowhere near have the idea that he as a musician would have. So I think here he did something very special. As my art work is still the terrain of a painter, he at the same time brought me a sound score that had the character of a poet and not just a sound score that would be some- thing you could pick up by going to the train stations. So I leave the musician open; I want to give him all the free- dom. Again, I hope that he'll surprise me with the kind of image sounds that I could never in a million years think of.
WESCHLER: One other question about the general form: Do you work mathematically at some of the effects that are created, or are mathematics not at all part of it? ENGEL: No, I don't work mathematically, because that would put me in the terrain of a computer animator. No, the rhythm has to come from me, and it comes from my gut. Although this is hard-edged stuff that you've been looking at, I am incredibly influenced by the world of dancing. That is a major influence apart from painting or being a sculptor. And so the rhythm that I have is something maybe from that world that I have experienced. But I do not work with any kind of formulas. I think that because I'm so interested in the world of dancing and I had some experi- ence in it (but not professional or anything), I think I
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just have a good sense of rhythm. Often the musicians, they said that when they start to work, they discovered there is a natural rhythm they can work to which is there. But I prefer to create my own rhythm and timing. But timing is something that — maybe because I have all those years of experience in the medium — but timing is something that you either have or you don't have. That is something you can't develop. You can go to dance school and learn all the steps, but if you don't have a body rhythm, forget it, you see. So I'm glad that you asked that question, because it's been asked before, and some people do look for formulas. They very specifically ask me how do I struc- ture, what formula or musical gimmick [do I use]. But I don't work that way. It's just from the gut. WESCHLER: One fact question: How long did it take you to make that particular film?
ENGEL: Oh, I think it took me about three months to do the art work, and the shooting was maybe, I'd say, about fourteen to sixteen hours under the animation camera. But the art work, maybe three months, just to put it together. WESCHLER: Well, why don't we see the next one? ENGEL: Okay. The next one is Accident . We go into entirely different terrain. You'll see an animal running, and the idea here is to disturb that piece of artwork that
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you see there so completely that you almost end up with something else. Okay. [film starts and concludes]
Now again, you see, if I thought of maybe a sound of the dog making a panting sound — But then I let Carl Stone, the musician, I let him come up with something. I like what he came up with, because the other one would have been just a natural sound with nowhere the mystery, the magic that is on the screen. Because the kind of sound he came up with — this clung-clung — it's like breaking up a piece of porcelain. That's what I mean: I would like the musician to surprise me, and he did surprise me.
I wanted to work with this idea of when I have a piece of art — and also the aspect of a smudge, you know, how when you smudge something that's a nice texture there. The only way I could make it really interesting for an onlooker is to have here a dog that you can relate to. It's a dog that is running, and it's running well, and this thing happens. You take him off the paper, bit by bit; and eventually all I had left there was the smudge or something that I couldn't quite get off the paper altogether. But at the same time I have arrived at another image, and arrived at this other image, again, this form, because I'm working in time and I'm working in movement. The aspect of the smudge to me was something that I can always get when I make a situ drawing; I leave it there, and those are nice
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accidents. But here I had to go about it other ways so that the onlooker will have a kind of sympathy with the image.
WESCHLER: It's interesting in hearing you talk that when one sees the title Accident one gets a certain kind of image, like a traffic accident, but in hearing you talk, you're also interested in the accidents and things that happen when you erase and so forth.
ENGEL: That's right, that's what this is all about. Often, the interpretation is very wrong, because they make the associations that you said. But actually the accident was that of using the eraser and having the smudge happen. So that's a whole different terrain.
WESCHLER: That is a very visceral image to watch hap- pening, and I think you relate to it on one level almost as a philosophical concept about mortality or so forth. But do you try to discourage that kind of interpretation? ENGEL: Yes, I would, because I had none of that in my head. No, it was strictly a piece of line drawing, a pencil line, a dark line on a piece of white paper, and then you take an eraser and begin to take some of it off, and then all those wonderful things happen. But to make it interesting — because you're still dealing with a medium where you have onlookers and a lot of people — so I had to give something that they can relate to. If I was doing,
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let's say, this strictly for a museum or an exhibit, maybe I would not use a dog. But I'm still dealing in a terrain that I want people to get acquainted with; and the only way, sometimes, you can pull them in is to give them a little something back that they can get ahold of. WESCHLER: Well the dog is also an incredibly graceful creature, this particular dog; it reminds me of some of your comments about dance.
ENGEL: Yes, that was very important, to have this beau- tiful piece of rhythm on the screen. WESCHLER: Did you take a film of a dog.
ENGEL: No, I worked from an [Eadweard] Muybridge book. I studied the dog there, and I used those movements. But then I would exaggerate the movement, so that when you see it here, it's a very beautiful, rhythmic movement; and at the very end you just have those little black feet. WESCHLER: It's spectacular how long you have the image of the dog beyond when it's almost completely smudged. It continues to be there for the onlooker.
ENGEL: Yes. Actually, when I finished the film I wish now that I would have gone with him a little longer; just a little longer. But that's the way things happen. WESCHLER: Well, what have you got for us next? ENGEL: Next is Shapes and Gestures. Now, this is a film where the influence of the dance world is very obvious.
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It's pure abstraction, and it's really pure graphic choreo- graphy. I think the musician again came through here and did something very, very special, [film starts, runs, concludes ]
WESCHLER: For people who didn't see that and only heard the tape, the images are as graceful as the music. The music seems to fit them perfectly.
ENGEL: [Steve Goldman] did the job. It took him like six months. I had no idea that it was so long: I thought the film was much shorter, and I had no idea. But he used mostly classical instruments, a very young fellow, and I think he did a beautiful job of scoring it. He doesn't make it too cute. Sometimes he goes with the rhythm and sometimes he stays away from it; it's in and out. So, again, see, I could never have visualized this kind of a musical score. So that was again one of those wonderful things that he gave me back something that I hoped he'd do with the piece. Now, this is pure graphic choreography where the dance is very obviously influencing me, the movement and gestures. It's again this pure abstraction working with the simple lines. I'm very keen on art working: that it does look like a line, a drawing, it does look like something that you put on paper, it doesn't look mechanical, it's not pretty, it's not gimmicky, it's not clever. It's very simple, and sometimes simplicity is very
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difficult for people to accept because they look for something that's clever.
Now the other thing is, it's interesting for me that people will go to a dance concert, let's say Merce Cunning- ham. All he does is walk around the stage, you know, and he stops and walks around the stage. That's it — no music, no sound — and people are very comfortable with it. All they see is pure movement, and nobody's going to try to say, "What the hell does that mean: a tree walks around? or a pyramid?" No, it's just a man walks around and they're comfortable. I think what I'm trying to do here with these things is to have the same character. In other words, when you come to see this film, it's more like seeing a concert, an exhibit, an exhibit-concert, more than a film. People think of film immediately in certain ways because they're conditioned. But I think this fits into the terrain of a concert world.
WESCHLER: Do you find that it's possible to bring this before dance audiences rather than film audiences? It seems that most people who see these are people who are film freaks.
ENGEL: Well, I think this is where I am heading for. I am heading for that world where I can have a dance audience or a concert audience to see these things, or a painter. But that's the world that I'm working in, and this is why.
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often for critics or judges, it's very difficult for them to put themselves into that scene. 'Cause what I should have rather is a dance critic come and see it. When I run these things for dancers, the reaction is incredible. At Cal Arts I often have a program of these films for the dance school, and it gives a lot of ideas for the dancers. At the same time, I needle them a little bit — "Look what I can do that you can't do" — but, I mean, that's just a friendly suggestion. But that's the terrain where this film and these ideas function. It's not really for what you call a film audience; it's something else. It's an extension of the dance floor; it's an extension of the music world; it's an extension of the painting and sculp- ture world. You see, it's all that and it's something of its own that I am doing. But it still has all those ingredients. But this is film, this is new, the whole scene is new. You know, all we can go back to is 1920, to Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter, and that's all. WESCHLER: One thing that I just wanted to note in terms of my own reaction was just the grace. That's the word that I would use for some of the movements; they were just incred- ibly graceful. What have you got next? ENGEL: The next one is called Wet Paint [actually Landscape] . It's not a flicker film like some people relate it. It's a color-field painting in time. It's very
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important: a color-field painting in time. By that I mean, if you go into a gallery and let's say the canvases are red or yellow or blue, you can walk through or you can stop at your own time; but what I'm doing here, I am doing that, but I make the time, I allow the time for each canvas. That gives you a clue. [film starts] Oh wait, this is a different film. [film concludes] WESCHLER: So this one was different than we thought. ENGEL: Yeah, it was my fault. This was Wet Paint and the interesting thing here is that I asked him [Nikolaj Bogatirev] not to follow the image too closely. I wanted him to have the music function with the film but almost as if it was coexisting. They each work on their terrain, and they work in themselves; but still they don't get in each other's way, and they help each other. So that was very important here, because when you relate this to Shapes and Gestures here the music was just playing around the place and yet they worked together. So that is what I asked him to do, but that was the only thing. Then he looked at the film, and he was trying to work out a music. After maybe about fifteen or eighteen or twenty sessions that he was looking at it — that was like three months later — we said, "Okay, let's do it." Then we made one take, ran the film, and he had the continuity. But also here I structured a very straight line, so there's a structure almost like a
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building against a soft, simple image, just dabs of color, and a lot of texture here. I used a very soft paper because I wanted the paint to seep through the paper and maybe end up with something at the bottom, which it did. So that was, again, the kind of beautiful accidents and gestures that I look for. I [found them here] by using another paper where the paint had a chance to go through, and then I would look back and there it was, you know. It just happens. But it's good, and it makes this kind of a thing more human, you know, it has the human quality. You know man is at work, and it doesn't look like a piece of engine.
WESCHLER: How do you relate it to Shapes and Gestures? They seem in similar universes.
ENGEL: Yeah, but in Shapes and Gestures, all the shapes are very hard-edged, cleaner and more geometrical. Whereas here the shapes are very loose, primarily, and a lot of shapes just happen because of the character of the paper. Even his music was then like that: Instead of hitting the notes or hitting the shapes, it was just sort of playing around; so it had the same character. WESCHLER: Which did you do first of those two? ENGEL: Oh, Shapes and Gestures I did way before this one. Often, when I do something as structured as Shapes and Gestures, then I have a desire to do something very loose.
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you know, to loosen up. And so this is how this came about.
The next one is Landscape , and that's the one I described earlier. [film starts, runs, concludes] Stan Levine scored that one also.
WESCHLER: Why don't you talk about this? You mentioned the color-field quality before.
ENGEL: It's a color-field painting in time. That means that what it does is to give you just so much time on each color, and by doing that I^ give you the right and not you giving me your time when you walk through my exhibit and you just run through or maybe stop for a painting. I did stop for some paintings — the red and the blue, when I give you a little more time to watch the color. But even if you walked through the gallery and saw the exhibit, you would still never have the interaction with the colors, how the red came forward an the blue moved backward, which is just naturally characteristic of these colors. One recedes and the other goes forward.
WESCHLER: I was thinking: In this particular one, you are much more interested in optical effects, things that human beings in their perception would experience about the blues and the reds and how they bleed together, back and forth and so forth.
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ENGEL: Yes, and that of course just comes about because, again, you're working with time. That is something that a painter has to consider, that when you work with film you're working in time. That's why it's so important, that word, "in time" — how long it's up on the screen, how short a time it's up on the screen. But you mentioned [the optical effect] that happened. That is something that's almost like a by-product. That other color that sometimes you see — it's not there, but you see it because — WESCHLER: Did you do a lot of experimenting yourself to develop those kinds of effects?
ENGEL: Well, I shot a lot of colors and got some kind of idea how they're going to interact. Toward the end you saw there were very soft blues and purples where they just hardly move, but you saw the change.
WESCHLER: That was with the train whistle at that point. ENGEL: Yes. Again, it's by shooting some tests and then putting the whole thing together. It's really like one large canvas. Again, you need the film, and you need time to create those secondary effects that a painter cannot get on a canvas. That's why this whole adventure is so ex- citing, because there's so much to discover in this medium, there's so much there that we don't know. The only way is by sometimes just shooting and seeing what comes back; then, if you want to, you can make notes, so the next time
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you go into it you know what's going to happen. But the minute you do that, you're already restricting yourself, and I think we're too early in this terrain to restrict ourselves to anything like that.
The next one is silent. Now, here is Fragments, just a pencil line. You have to watch it because sometimes it's so little. [film starts] The idea of what I'm doing here is this idea that there is space behind the canvas; I poke holes into the canvas, and the line disappears and comes out of the canvas, you see. [film is running] Sometimes I go off and that's, of course, a surprise, but then other times-- And you also repeat; you repeat like a musical theme repeats. Sometimes I'll do something like that, where I'm going to leave a little dot where he goes in, so those are with the holes.
WESCHLER: Are the holes consistent on the canvas? Are there about eight places where they go out, or do they go out anywhere?
ENGEL: Well, they're consistent as far as where I struc- ture them, you know, the movement. The idea is that there is space behind the canvas as there is space in front of it. The movements were working here more in a circle, but then also now I'm going to bring very straight. WESCHLER: Straight seems to read as having more velocity.
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ENGEL: Yes. [film concludes] I think I'm going to leave it like that, not have any sound.
WESCHLER: Is that a fairly recent one that you've done? ENGEL: No, it's about four years ago, one of the earlier ones .
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TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TWO DECEMBER 16, 1977
WESCHLER: You were just talking about Fragments. You were going to leave it without sound.
ENGEL: Yes, leave it without sound, because I think it's just an idea of this very delicate pencil line and a piece of white paper and at the same time working with the idea of puncturing the canvas with a pencil. Again, as a painter, I could never really do this kind of thing, but showing a way that there is space behind, that you can move into it and almost move into an incredible amount of space that is just there, and you can make good use of it by doing just that. There was a painter, a sculptor, [Lucio] Fontana, Italian painter, who did some wonderful things on a still plate or a copper plate — he would have holes in it — and in a sense I've been always very jealous of that. I wanted to do something like that here, and this was a perfect approach to that. But I think I'll sometime do the next step where I'll have the line go into the canvas and leave a hole there and then see what happens when the whole canvas is full with these holes, like he did on copper plates.
WESCHLER: The silence in that piece reads like negative space in a way, so that it fits right in with the white of the canvas.
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ENGEL: Yes, yes.
Now the next one is Rumble. Now here, after these gentle delicate lines almost, here I go to very heavy, almost bombastic, kind of like a [Franz] Kline painting. So much work in this terrain is kind of light, and I wanted something really heavy and weighty, very much influenced by the world of dance. Even the title came from West Side Story — "Rumble" — and the sound took wonderful care of it (it almost looks, feels like logs rolling). Okay. [film starts, runs, concludes]
David Shoemaker scored that, and I think, again, he captured the character of the shapes. He's a very good musician: they had six hundred applicants at Yale, and they only took three — he was one of the three that were accepted. But I think he really got hold of those shapes and sounds. It's a hard-edged, heavy painting. Yet at the same time, every once in a while I come from way back and come forward; so I give you the feeling that, again, there is space. If I had this on a canvas, it would all be on the surface. But by having it come from there, small growing to big, again, I point out the character of space that the film gives you. As I said before, I wanted to do something where the shapes would be big and heavy and bold. Now, interestingly, a man in France asked me, a film critic, "Why black?" That's a strange question, "Why
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black?" "Why not?" I said. "Why not?" But you see how far these people are removed from that world: he wanted color. Well, I mean, you have black etchings, you have woodcuts in black, you have painters — Ad Reinhardt worked with black. And yet here's a film man who said, "Why black? It's so heavy," he said. But you see how — Because people are so conditioned, what film sometimes is, if you do something like this. And I was quite surprised, because he was a very bright man, and he was very disturbed. "Why black?" That's what I wanted to do is to have this kind of a weight on the screen. The shapes are painterly. They make good paintings, but I could never have had the excitement and vitality that I got there. And also switching from the black background to the white image or the white background to the black image; and letting the shape come from the top or sometimes from the bottom and going from left to right or right to left. So I created a kind of excitement that I could never, never get on a canvas. And that, again, is the magic of working in time. WESCHLER: Are you interested in the room in which the film is being shown? In this particular film, it completely lights up the room when it's white, and it makes it dark, it makes pyramids of light and so forth. Is that inter- esting to you?
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ENGEL: Yes, that's very interesting to me. Of course, this one lights up the room, almost as if lights were turned on and off. Also, with this film, you need a large canvas. The other day I ran the film, and the canvas was that big, and I had to explain that this is a painting that needs forty-by-fifty, or fifty-by-fifty. So that is, again, a very important character of the film, that some- times I make the size of the screen very important. And here a very big canvas was important.
WESCHLER: A naive question, as someone who's obviously not an artist myself: Do you find that when you're working on this that you are psychologically more on edge or tenser than when you're working on the very graceful gestural things?
ENGEL: Oh, yes. When I work on the other one, that's very soft, very gentle, almost like listening to a piece of chamber music.
WESCHLER: And you feel that way yourself afterward, after working that way? ENGEL: Yes, yes. WESCHLER: And this one?
ENGEL: This is entirely different. It's a blast, and that I feel, because this is the only way I can really get the rhythm into the film.
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Now, this was a film where I was asked by a very competent filmmaker what rhythm structure I used. And again you see people are so locked in to that aspect of it. But I cannot do that because my feeling — The way I feel about the rhythm structure is, I think it's so right, that it's all there. Now, he wanted me to give him a formula. Well, I don't work with formulas, you see. You make a gesture and the people say, "Oh, you made a gesture. What does it mean? Is it a tree?" "No," I say, "it's not a tree, it's just my hand." You see, it's as simple as that. Maybe it's not that simple to other persons, but for me it's just that simple. But the film always has a totality: it has a beginning, it has a middle, it builds, and then I like sometimes the surprise ending, which is very impor- tant, also it's very theatrical. But the exit and entrance is very important for me on the stage, and it's very important for me on the film — how you start out, how you finish.
WESCHLER: Continuing my question of a moment ago: You say you don't work with formulas. To what extent do you work with feelings? Is that a proper category to attribute to your pictures, that some of them feel?
ENGEL: It ' s a total feeling, yes. And naturally I have some years of experience, so I know where I want to go off.
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where I want to come into the scene. Well, that is the experience I have. But I think it's also a natural rhythm. WESCHLER: The response is one of feeling, and that's expected. ENGEL: Yes.
WESCHLER: You're not just concerned about the perceptual response?
ENGEL: No. For instance, I talk to my students and I try to tell them, "If you come in from the right" — And they'll come in from the left and they'll come in from the bottom. It's very difficult to convey this aspect of movement in the right directions. They say, "What do you mean?" It isn't that I mean anything. That's natural. It's very interesting to convey these ideas to a beginner. But I have to work through feelings. Plus, don't forget the experience that I have viewing other work, the world of ballet, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, the Ballet Russe. I mean, naturally, you gain something from that world. But then you want to connect it to something that's your own. But I just assume that I have all that in me, and so it happens.
The next film is a computer film, Swan. I have a piece of music [by Camille Saint-Saens] which is very popular in the dance world — [Anna] Pavlova danced that — and I've always wanted to do something with this music. And I
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had this piece of computer film for ten years before I decided what I wanted to do with it. In other words, I have done a lot of editing here. But what I'm doing here, I want to put an end to those computer films which are beginning to look like TV titles, where they are so cute and so clever that I think they are a total bore. What I want to do with the computer is to cut that concept into ribbons. Because in the painting world, those things would never exist; they would look banal. They would make magazine covers, but they would never exist as a piece of art. So what you see here is none of that. [film starts, runs, ends]
See, this is computer material. Naturally, I always wanted to do something with that piece of music. I had a lot of material for about ten years, and about a year ago or so all of a sudden I said "I know what I'll do with this." So I edit and cut. Almost out of this idea of — It hasn't been around much, hasn't been out too much. But every time I see a computer film, everything is the same on both sides, they're always glued together, and God, that stuff just drives me crazy, because it's getting to look so much like television titles. That's the danger with computer film and people doing it. They begin to look like industrial graphics. At the Academy last year, I was sitting next to this man; we were looking at some feature
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pictures, and some computer stuff came on as the beginning. He said to me, "Oh, a television title." You see how horrible that is. It was a feature, had nothing to do with television, but he already equated this kind of texture with television titles and television commercials. You see this damned thing all over in television, and they're killing this. What I have here is irregular lines, just moving. There is no such a feeling that they're all the same on both sides. A lot of these people when they work with computers, they work with engineers who have abso- lutely no idea what the hell they're doing. Most of these people are not artists, they're really not. They just get on this gadget — and naturally when you have a circle here and a circle there and they're working at the same time, they're so taken, so seduced with that stuff. It's so cute and it's lovely. But as a piece of art when you look at that stuff — well, it's very bad stuff, it's incredibly bad stuff, very banal. So this, I almost did it out of anger. Because it has some lovely stuff here: nothing works cutely, it's never cute, the image.
WESCHLER: Do you want to do more with computers? Is computer technology developing so that there are more interesting things to do?
ENGEL: I will do something. I have something else I'm working on which is a lot nicer [Three Arctic Flowers] . It
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will be very popular, I think. I think I have a lovely piano score behind it, and it's not too long. I think it'll work. But I like this because of the lack of regular lines. It's an irregular line which very seldom you see. When you go to see a computer, just watch: It's always the same at the bottom and the [top], at the corners; and it's just a very banal piece of design.
WESCHLER: I want to ask you about the line in this movie: it's beads of light. Is that because the computer was only capable of that, or did you choose to have the beads? ENGEL: No, it's only doing that. And of course the blue that comes out of that, that just happens, but it's very nice. So, again, I grabbed that because, as I say, it is very nice. This is again that something that happens; and when I find things like that, I'm very happy with them, because those are unexpected things. It's all there: It's like an incredible mine that's full of surprises. Unless you're aware of that, you almost throw out the surprises; whereas I don't throw out the surprises because I think that's a most wonderful thing. This is that constant search and discovery that I have. See, when a scientist goes from A to B, that's from A to B. Then the next person takes the B, and he goes from B to C, and then he goes from C to D. But there's an incredible progression somehow. Whereas in art you don't discover things; you don't even
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know it's there. It's not like taking Picasso, and then I go from there to something else. No, you move into the field, and all of a sudden you discover something. I think film has that, but a lot of people are afraid of that, they don't know, and the surprise is something that they think is a mistake. It's not a mistake — it's there. WESCHLER: Sure, you realize it's there.
ENGEL: Yes. It's there, yes! So that's the terrain that I'm very much involved in.
WESCHLER: What is this last thing you're going to show us? ENGEL: Now, the last thing is my first live-action film which won the Jean Vigo award, won half a dozen awards. It was done in 1965. It's called Coaraze. Coaraze is the name of a French village. This is moving from the world of animation into the world of live-action. I had a wonderful time, and also I used a lot of still photography here (some of it you'll be aware of; some of it, not). But it got a lot of wonderful presence. It got such a good presence that none of the art houses would show it. They threw me out of major studios with this film. Ingmar Bergman saw the film, and it ran with his film in Paris. Even there the people complained to the management — the sound was too this, the editing was too fast. We're talking 1965, of an art house in Paris, and it raised hell. But it's such a gentle film. You'll see, it's nothing like it. But I was
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able to incorporate a lot of ideas coming in from the
animation field, knowing how to use the animation camera
and still photos, and again, as a painter who sees things
differently. It's a very gentle film. [film starts].
That's the highest award you get in France.
WESCHLER: Prix Jean Vigo.
ENGEL: Yes, and it beat out all the features that year.
[film is running] There's a still. Still. . . still. . .
still.
WESCHLER: Did you take the photographs?
ENGEL: I took all the still shots, set up the camera, and
I directed. These are all still photos put together a
certain way. [film ends]
That was quite a film because it is shot in 35 and 15 with all the stills. But it is incredible that in Paris, you know — Bergman liked the film, and he wanted to do it with his feature. Actually the sound on the 35 is much more brittle at the end, and [the people in the audience] would complain to the management, they complained about the editing to the management, too fast and things like that, and this film never could get a playdate anyplace. It was in the hand of a distributor in London — couldn't —
But see, coming in from animation and having all that experience in painting, I was able to see images and shapes and sizes. Then it's a question of editing, of putting
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together the structure and the film in a way that a little thing like that becomes very potent. A lot of people have seen this film. But I could never get a job with that, by the way; I was turned down every place. WESCHLER: Really!
ENGEL: Oh yes, because they said, "You're too arty" and things like that. But this has a lot of wonderful things in that, you know, and if you're working in a large film, there's that kind of thinking. There's a lot of things that have never been touched in live-action when you're dealing with content, that have never been touched. And then when you go in with something like that, they say, "You're too arty," and stuff like that, or "It has good black and white." Again, I think it's a question of the eye, how I'm able to see things. Those doors: I would cut those photos and put the photos together in a way that works. People don't know, look at it and don't realize it's stills. They don't even realize that some of those images were cut down and put together to give you the nice feeling of panning down the doorways. That man in the foreground, you know, who was sitting — there's a bench, and he's at the other end, too. I come up here, and it's the same man and the same picture, in all three shots. WESCHLER: Or the shot that suddenly seems like it's a photograph and then the cat suddenly walks in.
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ENGEL: And then the cat walks in. That's a sur- prise— that's very beautiful, to do those things. WESCHLER: Are the scenes of children fighting acted for you?
ENGEL: They were just playing for us. They were just having a hell of a good time. I mean, that's the biggest thing to happen in that little place, you know, a couple of people with cameras.
WESCHLER: Exactly who was it? Was it you and another cameraman?
ENGEL: Oh, I had a camera. I had a 35 Eclair cameraman. In fact the whole fight was a hand-held 35. I'm not a photographer really. I don't know a damned thing about cameras, but they rented a camera for me. But, you know, if you have an eye, you see things; it doesn't matter, because you know when you look through, that the composition is all there. If you spend your life composing pictures, well, it's a hell of a lot easier to pick up a camera and all, because it's all there and it's just a question of getting those images. And then, of course, the next important thing is when you get into editing, how you juxtapose images. And again, that's timing, it's rhythm. It's something that you can learn, you can acquire; but some of it, you have to come with something to do that.
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This was, as I say, the first time I shot anything in live- action.
WESCHLER: To what extent was this a purely formal exer- cise, and to what extent was it trying to say something about that specific town of Coaraze?
ENGEL: