Asparagus c. 1979 : In honor of Suzan Pitt, the great animation experimenter

Suzan Pitt’s Asparagus was attached as an opening short film to David Lynch’s Eraserhead as the latter was growing into a cult phenomenon on the midnight-movie circuit in the ’70s. Both films glide across an abstract reality of moving images that could only be wrought by the bare hands of their creators. Pitt’s animation used a combination of cut-outs, stop motion, and traditional hand-drawn and painted animation cels. She spent her entire career experimenting with form while finding inspiration through the natural world, and Asparagus is overwhelmed with florid images of vegetation that resemble genitalia, a not-so-subtle metaphor for life and its possibilities of creation.

Pitt animates her film with a gliding, dreamy quality of shape-shifting and effervescent movement. She refuses to cut hard from one image to the next, instead opting for something more fluid with a seductive, liquid effect of disguised image wipes, which give the short a sinking, hallucinatory aura. In Asparagus, when doors and windows open, within those images there are only more images to slip into even further, as if Pitt envisioned her 20-minute short as Alice falling down the rabbit hole if the falling never stopped. The sloping, curving images of Pitt’s animation also feel deliberately feminine in construction and are only amplified by the sensuality of hands cupping phallic imagery that morph and sway with the bobbing of a mouth. Pitt’s work is surrealist but deliberate in its intent, and her straightforward approach to emotions and sensations made all of her work prick the skin of feeling — feeling totally inhabited by the soulfulness of her own human spirit as a result.

Pitt died in 2019, but the influence of her artistry and of Asparagus in particular are undeniable in the fields of experimental animation, visual art, and film to the extent that a community formed in her orbit over the years. In a remembrance, her friend and fellow animator Julie Zammarchi recalled asking her deep “questions about art and life” over the years, which Pitt never shied away from. “No subject was off limits or too personal,” Zammarchi said. “She was always generous during these meandering interviews as long as we both kept drawing and painting.”

https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html