| How to Draw a Bunny | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Directed by | John W. Walter |
| Produced by |
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| Starring |
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| Cinematography |
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| Edited by | John W. Walter |
| Music by | Max Roach |
Production companies | |
| Distributed by | Artisan Entertainment |
Release date | 2002 |
Running time | 90 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $4,148 [1] |
How to Draw a Bunny: A Ray Johnson Portrait, is a 2002 American documentary film about the Detroit-born pop, collage and performance artist Ray Johnson. [2]
Filmmakers John Walter and Andrew L. Moore delve into the mysterious life and death of Johnson, an artist whose “world was made up of amazing coincidences, serendipities and karmic gags,” according to Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times. [3] After Johnson's suicide, Moore and Walter conducted interviews with artists including Christo, Chuck Close, Roy Lichtenstein, Judith Malina, and James Rosenquist. In addition, they gathered photographs, works of art, and home movies, which were edited into a fast-paced narrative exploring the artist's life. [4] [5] [6]
The filmmakers “couldn’t have chosen a more elusive subject for a movie; their success in evoking Johnson, and in documenting his world, is a triumph of sympathy over psychology, memory over historicism,” wrote Stuart Klawans for The Nation. [7]
It has a score of 78 on Metacritic. [8]
The film premiered at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize. [9] The film also won the Grand Prix du Public 2002 at the Rencontres Internationales de Cinema in Paris and was nominated for a 2003 Independent Spirit Award and listed in New York Magazine ’s “Top Ten of 2004.” [10]
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the United Kingdom and the United States during the mid- to late-1950s. The movement presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular and mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane mass-produced objects. One of its aims is to use images of popular culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any culture, most often through the use of irony. It is also associated with the artists' use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques. In pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, or combined with unrelated material.
Raymond Edward "Ray" Johnson was an American artist. Known primarily as a collagist and correspondence artist, he was a seminal figure in the history of Neo-Dada and early Pop art and was described as "New York's most famous unknown artist". Johnson also staged and participated in early performance art events as the founder of a far-ranging mail art network – the New York Correspondence School – which picked up momentum in the 1960s and is still active today. He is occasionally associated with members of the Fluxus movement but was never a member. He lived in New York City from 1949 to 1968, when he moved to a small town in Long Island and remained there until his suicide.
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Bruce Conner was an American artist who worked with assemblage, film, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, and photography.
Charles Henri Ford was an American poet, novelist, diarist, filmmaker, photographer, and collage artist. He published more than a dozen collections of poetry, exhibited his artwork in Europe and the United States, edited the Surrealist magazine View (1940–1947) in New York City, and directed an experimental film. He was the partner of the artist Pavel Tchelitchew.
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Mark Rappaport is an American independent/underground film director and film critic, who has been working since the 1960s.
The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival is an annual international event dedicated to the theatrical exhibition of non-fiction cinema.
David Seals was an American writer.
Stuart Klawans has been the film critic for The Nation since 1988. He also writes a column on the visual arts for The New York Daily News.
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Kirsten Johnson is an American documentary filmmaker and cinematographer. She is mostly known for her camera work on several well-known feature-length documentaries such as Citizenfour and The Oath. In 2016, she released Cameraperson, a film which consists of various pieces of footage from her decades of work all over the world as a documentary cinematographer. Directed by Johnson herself, Cameraperson went on to be praised for its handling of themes about documentary ethics interwoven with Johnson's personal reflection on her experiences.
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Ken Kimmelman is an American filmmaker, animator, and Aesthetic Realism consultant. He is the president of Imagery Film, Ltd. and is known for his films opposing racism and prejudice, including The Heart Knows Better, a public service film for which he received a National Emmy Award and Brushstrokes, produced for the United Nations. Both films were inspired by Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy whose founder, Eli Siegel, identified contempt, "the addition to self through the lessening of something else" as the cause of racism and all human injustice. Kimmelman is also noted for his Poetry film, Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana, based on the prize-winning poem by Eli Siegel. Historian Howard Zinn said of this film, "It matches, in its visual beauty, the elegance of Siegel's words, and adds the dimension of stunning imagery to an already profound work of art."
Andrew Lambdin Moore is an American photographer and filmmaker known for large format color photographs of Detroit, Cuba, Russia, the American High Plains, and New York's Times Square theaters. Moore's photographs employ the formal vocabularies of architectural and landscape photography and the narrative approaches of documentary photography and journalism to detail remnants of societies in transition. His photographic essays have been published in monographs, anthologies, and magazines including The New York Times Magazine, Time, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Harper's Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Fortune, Wired, and Art in America. Moore's video work has been featured on PBS and MTV; his feature-length documentary about the artist Ray Johnson, How to Draw a Bunny, won the Special Jury Prize at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival. Moore teaches in the MFA Photography, Video and Related Media program at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Don't Blink – Robert Frank is a 2015 documentary film about the life and work of photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank.
Sandra "Sandie" Crisp, better known by her stage name The Goddess Bunny, was an American entertainer, drag queen, actress, and model. Footage of her tap dancing, originally recorded around 1987, was the subject of one of the first viral videos.
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