7:00pm • Friday, March 29, 2019 • The Robin Theatre, REO Town
1105 S. Washington Ave., Lansing, MI 48910

After studying with Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy at the School of Design in Chicago, the Goldsholls made a series of innovative and socially engaged films in the 1950s and 1960s at their trailblazing firm Goldsholl Design Associates. The Goldsholls’ films collapsed boundaries between the avant-garde and the midcentury corporation as Chicago established itself as the Hollywood of industrial and educational filmmaking. Our program features a selection of the
Goldsholls’ experimental and sponsored work crossing the domains of art, industry, design, and film.

Programmed by Justus Nieland

Do Not Disturb (László Moholy-Nagy and ID Students, 1945), 19 min
Moholy-Nagy directed this poetic experimental film with his students at the Institute of Design. An example of the centrality of film in Moholy’s design pedagogy at the ID, Do Not Disturb’s abstract meditation on desire, jealousy, and betrayal demonstrates Moholy’s ongoing fascination with the expressive potential of color film, which the Goldsholls would extend in their experiments in “design and film.”

Night Driving (Morton and Millie Goldsholl, 1957), 11 min
Extending Moholy’s conviction that film was primarily a medium of light, the Goldsholls’ exploration of the kinetic play of automobile lights on a commercial highway is edited to the music of Bill Haley and the Comets. The film received a medal at the 1958 International Experimental Film Festival in Brussels.

Intergalactic Zoo (Morton and Millie Goldsholl, 1958), 3 min
A personal film made the Goldsholls, this animated film for children is dedicated to the men, women, and children of Mars.

Faces and Fortunes (Morton and Millie Goldsholl, 1959), 13 min
Intended to position the Goldsholls’ design firm as a leader in midcentury corporate identity programs, the film was sponsored by the Kimberly-Clark corporation. Combining woodblock prints, stop-motion animation, and techniques for scratching the film emulsion, the film’s explanation of the production of the corporate image drew on the talents of School of Design alums Larry Janiak and Wayne Boyer, newcomers to the Goldsholl studio.

Kleenex X-Periments (Morton and Millie Goldsholl, 1960s), 7 min
A superb example of the Goldsholl firm’s experimental work, these are five sample “pitches”— “Sneeze,” “Road,” “Glove Love,” “Birds,” and “Scratch”—for Kleenex advertisements for the Kimberly-Clark Corporation. In “Scratch,” Boyer and Janiak bring avant-garde techniques of cameraless direct animation into the instrumental domain of a successful paper company.

Dissent Illusion (Morton and Millie Goldsholl, 1963), 3 min
An experimental dance film made by the Goldsholls featuring Neville black, with an electronic score by The Electrosoniks. The film screened at fellow-designer Will Burtin’s Vision 65 conference, a “World Congress on Communication,” designed to explore experiments in communication across media.

Eastman Kodak: Worth How Many Words (Morton and Millie Goldsholl, 1963), 9 min
One of several sponsored films the Goldsholls made for Eastman Kodak, the film extolls the capacity of film and photography to reveal and explore worlds at scales beyond human perception. In this way, it underscores Moholy’s own interwar defense of the “New Vision” enabled by various kinds of technological prosthesis.

Up is Down (Millie Goldsholl, 1968) 7 min
An example of Millie Goldsholl’s socially-conscious practice, and dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr., this award-winning utopian film assumes the eccentric point of view of an unconventional boy who sees the world while walking on his hands. A strange and powerful combination of children’s animation and documentary images of a world in turmoil.

DL#2 (Disintegration Line #2) (Larry Janiak, 1970) 12 min
“Drawing directly on film,” Larry Janiak argued, “when approached calmly, reveals the universe.” Janiak, an Institute of Design alum who also worked on the Kleenex campaign at Goldsholl Design and Film Associates, understood filmmaking as a spiritual practice, and DL#2 enacts this in its stunning, optically printed color animations. Janiak described the film as “a view of the cosmos as a dance of atoms.”

Lens Distortion #10 (Goldsholl Film and Associates, 1971) 5 min
Exemplary of Morton’s increasingly abstract manipulations of light in the 1970, these experiments –meant to be projected as large moving murals—used what Morton called “any number of light sources (xmas tree lights, arc, line filaments)…in conjunction with distortion lenses, plastics, printed or scratched transparent films, Kodalith photos, and for the most part, no camera lens whatsoever, resulting in the purest form of light manipulation.”

Drop City (Wayne Boyer, 1968) 5 min
An experimental documentary about the countercultural commune Drop City, Boyer’s film testifies to the cross-over between practitioners of corporate filmmaking and corporate-identity production and countercultural experiments in living and designs on perception.

Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum & the Film Studies Program, Department of English