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Rare documentary footage shot by Janeann Dill
Short Form Documentary
JULES ENGEL: AN ARTIST FOR ALL SEASONS
Jules Engel arrived in Los Angeles in 1937. When a young immigrant in Illinois from Budapest, Engel had attended a performance of the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo, a performance that significantly imprinted this young artist's developing oeuvre. With this experience, Engel understood the aesthetic embodiment of an experimental art. The Modernist choreography of the Ballet Russes recalled Engel's intuitive discovery of abstraction in his paintings and subsequently formed the conceptual core of his experimental animation films. If pressed to identify a singular aesthetic in the whole of Jules Engel's work, it is certainly the virtual containment of timing in a definitive quality of choreography. As his biographer and a scholar, this documentary is part of a larger Jules Engel Biographical Project that includes a book, film and dedicated website to frame Engel's work within the critical histories of art, cinema, and experimental animation.
--- Janeann Dill, phd, mfa