RICHARD HALLAM AND THALMA GOLDMAN-COHEN, 3rd JULY 2014

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Thalma Goldman-Cohen listens to the talk by her old friend Richard Hallam

Richard Hallam had contacted me out of the blue to ask whether I could include a post on our Facebook page about the book he was writing with Sylvie Venet-Tupy about their old friend animator Thalma Goldman-Cohen: Thalma – An Artist’s Life.

I was more than happy to oblige and asked if he would like to come and do an evening of her films at London Animation Club. Richard delivered the talk whilst Thalma sat nearby, lobbing in occasional comments and correcting Richard on some of his facts. She was, to say the least, formidable – but very amusing too, perhaps in equal measure.

Thalma said that if her films move, they have power, they are magical, they have power over her. Her films deal mainly with the experience of sex, sexual fantasy and sexual objectification from a female perspective. Their style has the buxom humour of Beryl Cooke, on the one hand and the sharp observational satire of George Grosz, on the other.

When the talk began it was thought that Thalma’s films exist only as off-air recordings made by her friend Neil Hornick, but during the course of the evening it became clear that inside a cupboard somewhere in the centre of Thalma’s North London flat lay all of her original 16mm film cans (“Come to my cupboard!” she declared). I can happily announce that thanks to our friend Jez Stewart, her films have been moved to the BFI archive and telecine-ed, and in the process another of Thalma’s films was discovered.

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Theatre director Neil Hornick, an old friend of Thalma’s provided many of the paper materials which were used as reference material for the book. He also provided the off-air recordings of Thalma’s films which we screened on the night

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Richard’s daughter Sophie admires Thalma’s recent set of drawings of punters sitting in her local William Hill betting shop

You can see Richard’s excellent talk (filmed by Captain Zip) here:

For more information, see http://www.saatchiart.com/thalmagoldmancohen.

Afterwards LAC regular Alice de Barrau showed a selection of graduation films by her animation class at Westminster University, most of which were created in TV Paint.