I'm in a way saying things shouldn't be like this. It's a harsher side of life, but it's a reality. - Ruth Peyser
(December 30, 1994, St. Paul, MN) - MOOD, the third program of the Independent Television Service series ANIMATED WOMEN, to be broadcast on public television, profiles the dark animated world of Ruth Peyser, an expatriate Australian transplanted to New York. Peyser captures the threatening aura and anonymity of urban decay in films such as Another Great Day (1980), Covered in Fleas (1988), and her recent project, GO TO HELL! (1993). In MOOD, Peyser is seen in her element, at her drawing table and walking in the heart of Manhattan, where she chronicles the roughness of life on the streets.
"With Ruth," says series director Sybil DelGaudio, "her films were very different from most animated films that we normally see, because they're dark and moody." Indeed, Peyser has developed a highly original look in her animated art, which has partly been inspired by underground comics.
The movements often have a jagged, jerky, stylized quality, as if some frames have fallen out, or are missing. At first that wasn't entirely intentional. Now, she plans it that way. The rawness has a practical side, however. Hand animation is a labor-intensive process and Peyser needs to limit the number of images with which she works. "If I were to do totally smooth movements throughout a whole film," says Peyser, "let's say I would be working on one project my entire life!"
Initially, Ruth Peyser experimented with coloring photos, as in her animation debut film, Another Great Day, a chilling image of a trapped woman. Many of her works, according to Peyser, are a direct response to the society she has adopted to live in. Covered in Fleas captures the exact feeling of being verbally harassed by strangers on an American city street.
Her most recent film, GO TO HELL!, reflects a time when Peyser began to feel enraged about limits placed on women's bodies in this country, particularly by men. It was the year of the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings, she says, and the William Kennedy Smith rape acquittal. "It was building and building. There was all this stuff going on in the media, in the world, so that's really where GO TO HELL! came from. I guess there was a lot of emotion in me about this stuff."
The shapes her emotions take can be oblique. In GO TO HELL!, for instance, a woman slips through a broken stair step into a netherworld of disturbing dream fragments. The "real world" in Peyser's cartoons is just as claustrophobic and demonic.
Although she knows she tends to gravitate toward more controversial or disturbing images, whether it's a moody piece about personal relationships gone bad or about feeling oppressed as a woman in this society - a repeated theme about which she feels a need to comment - her commitment is political.
Peyser lives in America but admits she still doesn't identify with the culture. Sydney is a different kind of urban environment from New York, she says. "Kids don't carry guns to school there," she says. Yet she loves the city, and wouldn't want to live anywhere else. "If I lived somewhere peaceful and quiet, I wouldn't have anything to respond to," she says.
"If I'm going to spend a couple of years making something, it's not in my nature to do it on the life cycle of a beautiful flower or something," she says. "I know all those things are lovely, but it's not in my nature to make a film about those kinds of things. It's more important to express my own frustrations about injustices I see around me."
Animated Women is a three-part public television series produced by Side-Kicks Productions (Patty Wineapple, producer; Sybil DelGaudio, director) for the Independent Television Service (ITVS) with funds provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Review tapes, photos and interview opportunities are available. Contact ITVS