Remembering Paul Bush, A Year On
Innocuous things flicker into life in Bush's subtle, funny films.
A year ago on Saturday, Paul Bush died while motorcycling in Wales. The animation and experimental film communities, among which he had forged his remarkable career, grieved in shock.
Since then, I’ve returned to his films on a few occasions. Last September, I attended a tribute to Bush at Viborg Animation Festival in Denmark, where his short Lay Bare (2012) was screened. Two months later, the London International Animation Festival hosted a longer retrospective of his films before an audience full of his friends. A few months ago, I rewatched these works alone at home. But “returned” may be the wrong word: once seen, his films stay with us, flickering to their own rhythms in corners of our memory.
A self-taught filmmaker, Bush started out in live action but gravitated toward animation in the 1990s, drawn by funding opportunities.1 For his early animated works, he worked with rotoscoping and scratching directly onto film—techniques he combined in His Comedy (1994), which riffed on Gustav Doré’s engravings for Dante’s The Divine Comedy.
But it was with the approach known as replacement animation that Bush worked most consistently. In this variety of stop motion, the animator doesn’t incrementally move or reshape one object but replaces it between frames with a similar object. This technique harks back to the oldest cinema: its roots are in Méliès’s and Edison’s experiments with montage. Play dozens or hundreds of such images in sequence and the similarities between the objects make us see a consistent, if unstable, thing—you could almost call it a character. Creating something fluid with this method is not easy.
Some of Bush’s films open with interesting epigraphs. (I always imagine them spoken in his distinctive North London drawl, which had a way of putting an ironic twist on pronouncements.) The one that opens Furniture Poetry (1999), his first replacement-animation short, captures the spirit of all his films made with the technique. It’s from Wittgenstein:
What prevents me from supposing that this table either vanishes or alters its shape when no one is observing it, and then when someone looks at it again, changes back? But one feels like saying—who is going to suppose such a thing?
The impression of objects discreetly expressing inner life runs through all these films, whether Bush is working with tables and chairs in Furniture Poetry, insects in When Darwin Sleeps (2004), museum exhibits in The Five Minute Museum (2015) or motorbikes in Ride (2018). For the most part, the things don’t move around the frame but quiver and pulse with shapeshifting activity on the spot, seen only by Bush’s camera (which also stays put). Sometimes they get bigger and smaller, bigger and smaller, like a beating heart. Sometimes they ease into their groove, Bush gradually dropping the number of frames per image to speed their transformations up. Their volatile forms suggest a mad atomic dance unfolding inside them: movement within, not across. We can imagine it all happening quietly behind our backs.2
The frames—the photographs—may show discrete objects, but we understand the thing to be one, containing multitudes. These films unify. When Bush works with human bodies, as in Lay Bare (watch the trailer below) or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (2001), I think the political potential of this becomes clear.
For all that, we still notice, on one level, the discrepancies between the frames. We’re aware the object has changed. There is a kinship between this animation process and editing: both create meaning from deliberate and evident juxtaposition, the new image both continuing and contrasting with what came just before. It’s just that editing works with shots, Bush with single frames. In a sense, his films are extended series of match cuts staged on an image-by-image basis.
A fan of Godard and Brakhage, Bush was interested in disrupting the codes of photographic cinema. He identified more with this tendency than with animation as such, explaining:
I feel that animators[’] idea of animation is to try to get movement into drawing of some sort—to extend drawing into time. My relationship to animation is actually to take film—moving photographic images—and to take that apart, to reduce it in some way down to the smallest particle.3
Lest this all sound too drily technical, I’ll add that Bush’s films can be very funny. Look at the motorbike(s) in Ride, perhaps his most playful film (but also the hardest to watch in light of his death). Having revved itself up inside a garage, the bike—still shapeshifting—takes its human rider outdoors in a tracking shot that must have been a hell of a challenge to shoot. As it exalts in its freedom, whizzing off into the distance, a jolting twist reveals it and its rider to be nothing more than a little plastic toy. This ending is at once silly and melancholic, and, like everything in Bush’s cinema, exquisitely timed. Many have imitated his work, but his humour is rare.
At the London retrospective, the filmmaker Regina Pessoa, a friend of Bush’s, recalled marvelling to him once about how prolific he was—she could never work that fast. He replied to this effect: “Regina, the thing is: you always want to make a perfect film. I just want to make a film.” He may have been self-deprecating by nature, but there’s no need to be modest on his behalf: Paul Bush was brilliant, and I still can’t believe he’s gone.
For more on Bush’s life and career, read the obituary written by filmmaker Ruth Lingford for The Guardian.
That said, “quiet” is not a wholly appropriate word to use in connection with Bush’s films. The soundtracks created by his regular collaborator Andy Cowton are subtle marvels in themselves.
See the interview with Bush in The animate! Book: Rethinking Animation (edited by Benjamin Cook and Gary Thomas).