Catching up with Dartmouth's Jodie Mack, animated filmmaker
Sure, you've been watching a lot of online video. But Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies Jodie Mack takes the medium to a new level with her short animated films.
Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies Jodie Mack pedals a bike equipped with a zoetrope that allows the rider to view an animated film. The bike was built with the help of students from Thayer School of Engineering and resides in the Black Family Visual Arts Center. (Photo by Robert Gill)
Mack's Curses (2016) was featured March 30, 2020, in the New York Times' "Short Film of the Day," and The Grand Bizarre (2018) can be viewed for 30 days starting April 9, 2020, on the film connoisseur website MUBI.
Mack describes the hour-long The Grand Bizarre as "a postcard from an imploded society. Bringing mundane objects to life to interpret place through materials, The Grand Bizarre transcribes an experience of pattern, labor and alien[-]nation[s]."
Curses is a quasi-music video for the bedroom pop band Roommate. This 2016 interview of Mack by MUBI's blog describes how she created Curses, and this 2014 MUBI blog post rhapsodizes over Mack's break-out shorts.