Georges Schwizgebel

[Lemmy Caution]

Was interested in getting more information about Georges Schwizgebel.

I just picked up a Japanese disc (from Geneon) compiling 13 of his short animation films from 1974-2004. The films range from 1 to 9 minutes in length, with most around 5 minutes. According to IMDb this appears to be nearly his complete output, with the exception of his first film from 1971, his most recent film released in 2006, and one from mid-career.

The dvd I picked up has no English except for his name and the name of the dvd company. I can only read the year and minute length for each film. But at least that lets me match it up with IMDb to learn the titles.
His films seem to be highly rated, at least for the handful which have attracted 5 votes or more. None that I see have any User Comments or Summaries.

Elsewhere on the Internet, not too much info (in an admittedly hasty search and with wikipedia not functioning in the PRC tonight).

One of the most important representatives of Swiss animated filmmaking, Geneva resident Georges Schwizgebel ... with marked brushstrokes, paints directly onto acetate film. Fourteen images per one second of the movie… amount to his total work of almost 20 short films.

From a quick preview in the store it appears that most (all?) of the films have no dialogue. Which is fine with me as I have no English subtitles.

The only mention I found on this forum was a post by zedz placing Schwizgebel's latest film, Jeu, on a best of 2007 list.

Seems his films haven't been widely available on Dvd. Further info welcome.

For anyone interested, the best resource I found on Georges Schwizgebel comes courtesy of The Animation World Network Gallery.
There's clips of 4 of his early films. And if you click on the Preview of the artworks on that page, or the link I just provided, you can see a still image from most of his short films.

One Schwizgebel film, Nacounine from 1986, appears to be the only live-action film he has done. The biography from that site is pretty basic (more like a resume), but I was intrigued that he had studied Chinese in Shanghai in the early 80's, when there would have been precious few foreigners around (and those that were here would have been suspected to be spies).

The AWN site looks promising.

[zedz]

I've seen bits and pieces of his work over the years, and everything points to his genius. Not only does he have a fine, distinctive graphic style, but he's brilliant at conceiving his film's spaces in three dimensions and playing with that to create amazing, surreal transformations. Jeu is a mind-blower, but it's great to hear that there is a DVD collection of his earlier work out there.