Pen as an Instrument

Pen as an Instrument

Steven Woloshen has been passionately creating handmade abstract films and time-based installations since the seventies. Woloshen has been a lecturer, juror, technician, animator, craftsman and recently, the author of Recipes for Reconstruction, the filmmaker’s manual for decay, renewal and other handmade, analogue film techniques.

The Canadian film legend uses a technique called drawn-on-film animation, which works exactly like it sounds. To get the desired result that we can see in all of his films, he gets a roll of film and then draws, scratches or paints on it in every frame. A few hundred feet later, you have a movie. No program, no special camera, just painting and scratching. Simple, yet impossible.

The thrill for the auteur as well as for the audiences is coming from the fact, that there is no editing process. If you make a mistake in the process, it stays. The artform itself is also spontaneous and playful with no rules. Just like jazz which is a music Woloshen often animates to.