Jules Engel: AN ARTIST FOR ALL SEASONS

Jules Engel (1909-2003) arrived in Los Angeles in 1937, but as a young immigrant from Budapest in Illinois, Engel attended a performance of the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo that significantly imprinted this young artist’s developing oeuvre. With this, he understood art to be the aesthetic embodiment of an experimental vision. The Modernist choreography of the Ballet Russes recalled Engel’s intuitive discoveries of abstraction in his paintings and subsequently formed the conceptual core of Engel’s experimental animation films. If pressed to identify a singular aesthetic in the whole of Jules Engel's work, it is certainly the virtual containment of timing in a definitive quality of choreography.

This short documentary film comprises a part of a larger Jules Engel Biographical Project that includes this film, a book, and an interactive website which will become a depository of stories from his four generations of students. The biographical project frames Jules Engel’s work within the critical histories of art, cinema, and experimental animation. Engel was the Founding Director of the Experimental Animation Department and Institute Fellow in the School of Film and Video at California Institute for the Arts for over 30 years.