I wanted to start off this post feigning nostalgia for Al Jarnow’s amazing films, but I admit in a rare act of self-effacing honesty that I have no childhood attachment to the experimental and educational filmmaker’s work. I didn’t grow up in the 70s watching Yaks bash into the screen on Sesame Street, nor did I ever park myself in front of “Cosmic Clock” on PBS’s 3-2-1 program in the 80s (videos incoming below jump). And while I did mature slightly in the late 80s (from a conglomeration of inanimate cells into a healthy snot-nosed kid), and could have feasibly seen reruns of these shorts and more, it never happened — or at least my memory fails me.
But, I did just watch these videos on Youtube, and let me say, you don’t need any nostalgia to thoroughly enjoy Jarnow’s poignantly abstract yet immediately effective shorts. The Brooklyn-born filmmaker’s talent for reflecting on the nature of animation, stop-motion, and geometry in simple visual experiments is executed with stunning grace. Yes my friends, inspiring thought can be fun!
The dusty archivers at Numero Group compiled Jarnow’s film work on DVD, Celestial Navigations, just released last week. It features the transferred shorts with remastered sound, extracted from the original 16mm film, along with both a 30-minute documentary on the filmmaker’s creative process and a 60-page book including essays, notes, and ephemera. Numero Group waxes the nostalgic version of the story, the one I was so tempted to steal and make my own:
Curled up on our couches in the wee hours of the morning, in reruns, and nostalgic You Tube forwards, filmmaker Al Jarnow has touched our lives and changed the way we look at the world without us ever knowing. Beginning with his work for a certain public television show that featured a big yellow bird, Al Jarnow captured life’s scientific minutia and boiled it down for easy consumption between cookie eating monsters and counting vampires. Coupling time-lapse, stop motion, and cell animation with simple objects found in every day life, Jarnow deconstructed the world for an entire generation.
From the third floor of his Long Island gingerbread home, his mind wandered beyond the confines of educational programming. Delving into New York’s avant-garde film scene alongside Harry Smith, Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage, Jarnow created a body of awe-inspiring films that remain in the collections of MOMA and Pompideau Center.
In “Cosmic Clock,” made for the 3-2-1 education program for children, Jarnow frames questions of time, mortality, society, and nature in a short animation.
We see the analogous relationship between human behavior and the computational operations of a typewriter in Jarnow’s “Face Film.”
We dive into conceptual play on the letter “Y,” the last letter of “reality,” of which there is none in “television.”
Celestial Navigations already screened in New York, but it’s coming to San Francisco on April 29th, and is supposed to hit Los Angeles around the same time.
[Numero Group releases "Celestial Navigations"]
[Greencine interviews Al Jarnow]
I DO remember this work from my childhood and thank you for introducing me to the artist.