Eduardo Darino: 60 Years in Animation

Ed Darino is a living legend. A groundbreaking visual artist from Montevideo, Uruguay, his over 60-year career encompasses massive paradigm shifts in hand-drawn, collage, and computer animation.

Inspired by animator Norman McLaren, Darino began making camera-less films in the 1960s while studying as a Fulbright fellow at NYU. He pioneered the use of posterization in his 1968 film Apex (two years before Andy Warhol popularized the style in 1970), which was also the first Cinemascope short shot in Uruguay. Many of his films, like 1964’s Cocktail de Rayas, featured images drawn and etched directly onto the film stock and were later digitally recreated in the 21st century. Meanwhile, his follow-up to Cocktail de Rayas, Correcaminos, was credited by Clemente Padin as the “forerunner of web code and animation” in Latin America.

Darino has worked at the forefront of major technological developments in the worlds of film and visual art, and much of his work acknowledges these developments. Most notably, his 1975 animated masterpiece Hello…? was created for AT&T for the 100th anniversary of the first telephone conversation. It’s no wonder Darino became fast friends and frequent collaborators with exploratory, cutting-edge multimedia artists like Laurie Anderson, who commissioned him to shoot some of her earliest animations.

While Darino’s work is highly varied and multimodal – spanning analog and digital, hand-drawn and computer-generated forms – his films share one important through-line: a vested interest in the nature of being human. Hello…? might’ve been a commission for a major tech corporation, but its focus isn’t so much on the evolution of a piece of technology itself (in this instance, the telephone), but how that technology has enabled human beings to connect and communicate with one another throughout history. Homomania is probably the clearest example of Darino’s investment in the ecstasy and agony of the human condition (and the history of humanity at large), tracing our evolution from ape to homo sapien and the creation and destruction borne of that journey. Films like Tango and 70 Veces 7 – with images of a couple happily dancing and fluttering butterflies, respectively – are notable for their sheer visual beauty, while a more recent work like Seagulls finds Darino recreating a story told to him by his grandchildren. Perhaps most stunning is Pasaporte, a sumptuous 1985 love letter to the filmmaker’s home country that deftly combines graphic design and animation with paintings, photography, and live action footage.

This program features a handful of key works by Darino currently available in the FMC archive, and traces the complex creative and technological arc of one of our greatest living moving image artists. -Matt McKinzie, Curator

(These films will be followed by an in-person discussion with Darino himself!)

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Followed by a conversation and audience Q&A with Darino, moderated by Matt McKinzie.