ABDUCTEES AT 30

+ subsequent work from PAUL VESTER

On Saturday 11th October at 5.30 at the Garden Cinema, 39-41 Parker Street WC2B 5PQ

An event to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Abductees, Paul Vester’s documentary following five parallel accounts of alien abduction, using a variety of animation styles and techniques. The film boasts a remarkable array of contributing animators and is rightly regarded as one of the greatest animated documentary shorts ever made. Beautiful, funny, haunting and not a little frightening.

The film is accompanied by a contemporary Channel 4 TV documentary about the film’s production and followed by a selection of Paul’s subsequent work. The screening concludes with a Q&A with Paul and Abductees producer Irene Kotlarz.

London-born filmmaker, animator and installation artist Paul Vester studied at the Central School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London and worked as a designer, animator and director for several London production companies before establishing his own studio, Speedy Films, in 1972. French TV commercials and the Arts Council of Great Britain financed his film Sunbeam (1980). British and U.S. TV commercials financed his next film, Picnic (1987).  With Abductees, made for Channel4 (1995) he was an early pioneer of the of animated documentary form. In 1997 he moved to Los Angeles where he worked for Rhythm & Hues and Klasky Csupo before teaching for 17 years in the Experimental Program at CalArts. His next film, In the Woods (2008) was made with a Guggenheim Fellowship. This was followed by two installations, Prototypes For a Clock 1 & 2, looping video installations that mark time passing by counting forwards in cycles of random lengths. He is currently working on a short piece celebrating a composition for player piano by Conlon Nancarrow; this will be screened in the show as a work-in-progress.

Running order

Abductees: short film (Paul Vester, UK, 1995)
Secret Passions: C4 documentary (Paul Madden, UK, 1995)
Snake Attack: MTV sting (Paul Vester, UK, 1989)
Bubblicious, Inkspots: TV Ad (Paul Vester, UK, 1993)
Hershey, Tastetations: TV ad (Paul Vester, US, 1997)
Xerox, The Printer that Thought it was a Copier: TV ad (Paul Vester, US, 1998)
Geico, Gecko: TV ad (Paul Vester, US, 1998)
Oasis – All Around the World: music promo (Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris/Paul Vester, US, 1998)
Drew Carey Green Screen Show: TV clip (Paul Vester, US, 2003)
In the Woods: short film (Paul Vester, US, 2008)
Nancarrow: composition for player piano (Paul Vester, UK, work in progress)

More information: paulvester.com

Contemporary reviews of Abductees

….Abductees, directed by Paul Vester, looks like a brilliantly pragmatic way to mix formal pleasure with narrative appeal. A dense compendium of pastiched and transformed animation styles, it also has a documentary backbone – the experiences of people who claim to have been kidnapped by UFOs. Abductees contains elaborately re-textured footage of the speakers themselves, mixed with their testimonies, depicted in a variety of clashing styles, from quasi-Disney to flickering notepad sketches. “People are animation-literate,” says Vester. “We’re giving an illusion of depth, but also telling people: this is a flat surface. So they’re getting a lot of information out of it, a lot of treats that aren’t really to do with the story.”

Jonathan Romney, The Guardian, 10 June 1995.

….The most affecting thing here is Paul Vester’s 11-minute Abductees, which utilises the confessions of people who have been kidnapped by aliens, as well as bringing to life the drawings that were wrung out by their therapy. Five years in the making, the film’s compassion and generosity negate scepticism…. It has a quiet profundity about it, painfully communicating our crippling loneliness in a stark universe…. a visual question mark to carry out into the great yawning night.

Ryan Gilbey, The Independent,  14 June 1995