David Ehrlich: Citizen of the World

by Oliver Cotte; translated by Sarah Mallinson
Dreamland Editeur, Paris, 2002
144 pp., illus. Paper, $20.00
ISBN: 2-910-02780-5.

Reviewed by Martha Patricia Niño Mojica
Pontificia Universidad Javeriana de Bogotá, Colombia

ninom@javeriana.edu.co

This a vital illustrated, bilingual text written in French and English in which the experimental filmmaker Olivier Cotte documents and acknowledges David Ehrlich’s 25-year period of continuous artistic production. Ehrlich is well known as animator, professor, film director, sculptor, musician, activist, and International Animated Film Association (ASIFA) promoter. This association has recognized his dedication, giving him a special award at the Zagreb World Animation Festival Croatia 2002 for his exceptional contribution to the art of animation. Ehrlich has an extended filmography, comprised of more than 35 films. Among his most recognized works are Precious Metal (1980), Dissipative Dialogues (1982), Dryads (1988) A Child's Dream (1990), and other works that have been screened and awarded in a variety of film festivals.

The book starts with Ehrlich’s biography that consist of a chronological look at his broad interests: medical studies, international relations and languages, Indian aesthetics, sculpture, playwriting, painting, music, art therapy, philosophy, and holographic film, and later on explains his interdisciplinary artistic practice and way of living. There is a chapter entitled "An Aesthetic Study of the Films" that has several writings that analyze key formal and conceptual aspects of his work, such as geometry, lines, points, fields, wipes, color, surface, editing, cycles, symmetry, perspective, music, holography, metamorphosis and the fascination with rhythmical transformations both methodic and intuitive that lean toward the sensuality of the forms. He was also a pioneer in experimental holography with his 1978 Oedipus at Colonus, an sculptural hologram, shown at the International Animation Festivals in Annecy, France, and Zagreb, Yugoslavia.

The central part of the book is made of an aesthetic study of his films and an interview that depicts Ehrlich’s family background, education, creative process, way of thinking, intentionality, his relationship to narration and abstraction, his starting point as animator, religion, philosophy, ideas and artistic influences are exposed. Ehrlich appreciates the importance of international collaboration. The work, Animated Self-Portraits, that made the Short List for the Oscars, involved artists from Japan, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Estonia and the U.S. Ehrlich’s experimental obsessions, such as the award winner Academic Leaders Variations, was another international collaboration among 21 artists from Poland, China, Switzerland, and the U.S. He has done numerous workshops with children around U.S, Asia and Europe, in 1987, produced The ASIFA Children’s film, made by children in nine countries. Ehrlich speaks about the difficulties of his own creative process with an incredible openness, both the contradictions that naturally arise from the collaboration of artists with divergent socio-political backgrounds among people from Estonia, Czech republic and Yugoslavia and to his unsuccessful attempts to integrate Muslim and Jews animators in one project that could get enough funding to be accomplished due to its political implications are clearly presented.

The text ends with the contributions section that compile descriptions of Ehrlich’s personal character made by numerous directors, professors, and friends and colleagues from all over the world. You can have little pieces of extra information, their extremely personal statements of gratitude, that depict him as an altruist person with social engaged work that helped enormously to the development of the animators community.

There are some small typographical errors, and the layout of the bilingual pages is sometimes difficult to read. It is recommendable for people who have an interest in experimental animation, in particular, or the visual arts, in general. However, it would better understood for people that already know Ehrlich’s work because the static, and two-dimensional characteristics of the silent printed text cannot adequately represent his animated and colourful movies.