Barry Spinello
Barry Spinello (b. January 17, 1941) is an American film director, experimental animator, producer, and screenwriter, who was nominated for an Academy Award in 1976. Spinello's early work of the late 1960s and early 70s focused on camera-less animation before turning to documentary and other forms.
Following undergraduate studies in music, literature, and painting at Columbia College, Columbia University, Spinello attended Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, leaving after two years for independent study in painting at the Belle Arte Academy, University of Florence. He returned to the US in 1967 and started making experimental animated films.
From 1967 to 1972, Spinello made films without a camera or tape recorder by painting both sound and picture directly onto clear 16mm leader, including Sonata for Pen Brush and Ruler (1968), Soundtrack (1969), Six Loop Paintings (1970), and others. His measured reputation in experimental animation derives from this time. The idea was to integrate sound and picture in a single creative process using a single tool.
In 1969, John Cage visited Spinello in studio and included his film Soundtrack in the influential Source Magazine: Music of the Avant-Garde (issue #7/8, 1970). The definitive publication Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art (1976) carries a section and illustrations of Spinello's animation work. In addition, two PhD dissertations, by Michelle Puetz (University of Chicago, 2013) and Gregory Zinman (New York University, 2013) include chapters on Spinello's Soundtrack. In 2007, Spinello wrote "On Sound and Image as a Single Entity" for the online film journal Offscreen. More recently, Leonard Lipton's Cinema in Flux: The Evolution of Motion Picture Technology (Springer Press, 2021) cites Spinello's early work in direct animation.
By 1972, hand painting film had, for the time, run its course for Spinello. He waited many years to reintroduce the ideas of film painting, but now within a computer environment.
A grant from the National Council of Churches sponsored his first non-animated film, Broken Soldiers (1973), which screened on PBS stations with a full-page review in the San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner. For the next 15 years, Spinello produced award-winning documentaries and other films from his Emeryville, California studio. He was a Directing Fellow at the American Film Institute, first and second years.
In 1975, Mike Wallace saw Spinello's portrait film, A Day in the Life of Bonnie Consolo (1975), which had been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film. The film, about a woman born without hands or arms and who performs all her activities by using her feet, brought media attention to Consolo and the disabled rights movement; screening five times on 60 Minutes.
Postcard from Paris, a documentary about a young girl's student journey abroad, premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in 1983. Also screening that year at Telluride: Erica: Not in Vain, Once Upon a Time (1983), which describes a different girl's story and a very different journey. It was nominated for an Academy Award and also received First Place at the John Muir Medical Film Festival, a CINE Golden Eagle Award, and a Blue Ribbon at the American Film Festival. Spinello's other filmed "portraits" include Mel on Wheels (1981); Counseling the Terminally Ill: Three Lives (1977), made with a grant from HEW; A Film about Sharon (1975); A Day in the Life of Dave Harvey (1972), and others.
Over the years, Spinello also made films for Industry: Rancho California (1978), about building Temecula, a new city in California, won First Place at the Film and TV Festival of New York. It's the Difference (1976), shot in and around the Mississippi Delta, was shown extensively on local PBS stations. Interviewing residents and legislators the film was designed to influence legislation in the southern Mississippi area. Spinello also made four short films for Villa Alegre (1973-1977), a children's program produced by Bilingual Children's Television.
Spinello's 1979 film Rushes is described in A New History of Documentary Films (2005): "Neil, the character played by Spinello, turns to the camera and says 'film everything for the next 24 hours, cause I've come to a strong, positive decision.'" We then see the actors (and audience) puzzled as to whether what is on screen is real or not. It is only after the final credits roll that we understand the film is a total fiction directed from inside the film, which was made with a grant from the American Film Institute.
Towards, a film started in 2000, returns Spinello to his experimental animation origins and introduces the idea of film painting into computer technology. Using a single tool, After Effects, sound and picture are interwoven, merged together, the warp and woof of a single cloth. It features the voices of Gertrude Stein and T. S. Eliot arguing while trapped in a Jackson Pollock painting. The Center for Visual Music (CVM) premiered this as a work-in-progress in a special screening at the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles, in 2013.
Full Bio:
https://www.encyclopediadrafts.org/profiles/NjQ0
Official Website:
https://barryspinello.org/