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ARTICLES
The
New Yorker
Filmaker
Art
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With few exceptions, patronage has
never been a particularly successful model for financing a film.
But animator and experimental filmmaker Jeff Scher has found a way
to revive this classical arrangement. Scher was recently commissioned
by Harry Stendhal, co-owner of the Maya Stendhal Gallery, to make
a film portrait of his friend Susan Shin. The resulting film, which
was unveiled at Stendhal’s gallery as part of Scher’s
recent show “Milk of Amnesia,” is a two-minute animation
loop. From that unveiling, Scher has already lined up a roster of
new subjects, each ready to pony up $25,000 for their very own animated
portraits.
While the financial arrangement harks back to the client-artist
relationship of classical portraiture, Scher points to Andy Warhol’s
film portraits as an aesthetic model. Scher remembers that Warhol
“shot them at 24 frames, projected at 18 frames and told people
not to move so any motion became incidental.” Scher, on the
other hand, shoots his subjects in 16mm and then rotoscopes the
film the old-fashioned way, projecting and drawing it onto paper.
The paper then becomes the outline of his paintings, which he rephotographs
and animates. In the end he has a film loop and some 120 paintings
of his subject.
Unlike painters who rely on furniture, wardrobe or a certain slant
of light to unlock their patron’s persona, Scher searches
for the right movement: “Because it is so about the motion,
I am looking for the gesture, the way that someone smiles —
the lip can be like a curtain in the way it goes up.” But
as a portrait artist, Scher also needs to find the movement that
catches the subject in the most appealing way. “The combination
of commentary and flattery,” as Scher acknowledges, “is
indeed a fine line.”
– Peter Bowen
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