Seder-Masochism is Paley's second feature film, following Sita Sings the Blues in 2008, an animated film loosely based on the Ramayana. In a similar fashion to her previous work, Paley mainly uses previously published music in Seder-Masochism, with popular and liturgical songs ranging from 1928 to 2018. She also draws from spoken voice recordings she made in 2011 with her father, Hiram Paley, who is placed in the role of the traditional Hebrew deity. Greg Sextro served as sound designer on the film.[3]
With Theodore Gray, Paley formed PaleGray Labs to create a method for animating embroidery, which they call "embroidermation". In Seder-Masochism, embroidered animation is the basis for one scene: "Chad Gadya".
Debuting in the 2018 film festival season, Seder-Masochism was reviewed positively, with Paley's bright and satirical style compared to Monty Python and others. The film earned the Audience Award at the ANIMATOR film festival in Poland.
After Sita Sings the Blues, Paley was criticized by some observers for co-opting the culture of India as an outsider, an assertion with which she strongly disagreed. A recurring theme among the negative comments was "how would you like it if people made a film about your religion?"[5][6] Paley thought that she would enjoy watching any such film. Accepting this as a challenge, she turned to her own Jewish cultural heritage for her next project: a revisionist retelling of the story of Passover. She pored over the Book of Exodus, finding details that were not part of modern Jewish culture, for instance, that Moses's brother Aharon performed some of the acts that are commonly attributed to Moses, and that the Jews were killing each other during their 40 years "wandering" in the desert.[7] For inspiration, she also read The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner, and The Language of the Goddess by Marija Gimbutas.[8] She concluded that the Book of Exodus represents the final defeat of goddess worship by the patriarchy that had been rising since the agricultural revolution.[9]
Hiram Paley provides the voice of God, represented here on the US dollar, in conversation with his daughter Nina Paley, depicted as the sacrificial goat
In 2011, Paley interviewed her terminally ill father, Hiram, intending that his voice would serve as the old bearded god figure of the Israelites. For herself, she chose to play the part of a sacrificial goat, because animal sacrifice was essential to many early religions, and because she has been seen as the black sheep of her family.[5] Hiram Paley died in 2012 at the age of 78.[3] Even though her father was a Jewishatheist, the Paley family had celebrated Passover every year so that the children would know their cultural identity. Paley, also a Jewish atheist, weaves the voice recordings of her father into the film as a way to understand the Passover story.[10]
In September 2011, Paley initiated a Kickstarter crowd-funding effort to raise money for "Phase I" of the film, with a goal of $3,600. The campaign brought in $4,146.[11] The intent of Phase I was to make recordings of various family Passover Seder discussions. Ultimately, the project took another direction, and the recordings were not used in the film.[12]
Paley worked on the project over the course of six years, spending about three-and-a-half years animating and producing it. First, she animated some musical numbers – "This Land Is Mine" and "Moses-Exodus" – using Macromedia Flash 8 running on a first-generation Mac Pro tower, but this was not powerful enough to edit 4K resolution video in a practical manner. In 2013, she shifted the project to a second-generation Mac Pro, the vertical cylinder model, and settled on the application Anime Studio Pro.[2] Paley initially found the Anime Studio Pro interface to be frustratingly complex, so she hosted Chilean animator Victor Paredes at her workspace for a week in 2014 to better learn the software. In 2016, Anime Studio Pro became Moho Pro, with an upgraded version. Paley said that it was not until 2017 that she could express herself easily in Moho Pro.[13]
In November 2017, Paley wrote that much of the project had been completed without a "coherent story", despite the attempt to tie it together in the loose form of a Passover Seder. She decided instead "to articulate the Exodus from the Goddesses' point of view", the goddesses who were at that time worshiped in Egypt as Hathor, Isis, Nut, Sekhmet, and others.[14] This turned her film into a narrative "about patriarchy and the suppression of the Goddess".[2]
After showing rough cuts of the new concept to friends, Paley decided to bring more goddess images into the film. In late 2017/early 2018, she imported high-resolution photos of ancient goddess figurines into the graphics editor GIMP to remove backgrounds, then she exported the resulting PNG files to Moho. In Moho, Paley assigned "little skeleton" points on the images to establish how the goddess figurines could bend, and she created additional layers for smaller movements such as eye blinks and smiling/frowning. She offered these individual goddess animations for free on her blog.[13] Among the goddess figurines appearing in the film are the Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük (6,000 BC, Turkey), the Venus of Willendorf (30,000 BC, Austria), and the Venus of Hohle Fels (35,000 BC, Germany).[15]
The final assembly and editing of the film were performed on Final Cut Pro X, which Paley said was "horrible" in its interface but powerful in its processing of 4K video: 3840×2160 pixels.[13] In all, Paley estimated the film's final budget at $20,000.[2]
Embroidery animation
An embroidered goat used in the "Chad Gadya" animated short
Paley teamed with science writer and programmer Theodore Gray to develop "embroidermation": an automated method of animating embroidery. In 2015 after working for a year and a half, the PaleGray Labs team produced a Passover-themed animated short, "Chad Gadya", intended to serve as intermission for Seder-Masochism.[16] Paley created animated figures in Macromedia Flash 8, then Gray imported the resulting vector files into Wolfram Mathematica, a powerful visualization program which he co-created. The figures were rendered as polygons in Mathematica, then a custom application was written to properly align the embroidery stitch direction, different for each polygon.[17] Using an embroidery machine, a total of 516 embroidered figures were stitched into 86 matzoh covers (decorative cloths for holding matzoh during Passover), then each completed figure was photographed to create one frame of animation.[18] The "Chad Gadya" scene runs just under 3 minutes, accompanied by the children's Passover song, "Chad Gadya", sung by Moishe Oysher and recorded in the 1950s.[19]
Release
Moses in front of the Pillar of FireAncient goddess worship depicted in the scene "Paroles, Paroles"Moses is entreated by Hathor to believe in the goddessThe Angel of Death sings above nuclear destruction
When the film was complete, Paley determined to wait until it had been screened at film festivals before she offered the film for free online in the same manner as Sita Sings the Blues.[5][20] Earlier, she uploaded some scenes-in-progress to Vimeo and YouTube, including the opening "God-Mother" number in 2017,[21] and "Death of the Firstborn Egyptians" in 2014, the latter gaining 2.7million views by August 2020.[22] The scene "This Land Is Mine" was first posted in 2012, and by 2014 had received 10million views, with more viewers added during every news cycle highlighting the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.[23]
October 19–21, 2018 – United States: Animation is Film (Los Angeles)[29]
October 22–26, 2018 – Italy: VIEW Conference (Turin)[26]
October 24–27, 2018 – Israel: AniNation International Animation Festival[26]
October 25–28, 2018 – Norway: Fredrikstad Animation Festival[30]
October 23 – November 21, 2018 – Australia: Jewish International Film Festival[26]
October 26 – November 3, 2018 – Russia: Big Cartoon Festival (Moscow)[26]
October 28 – November 3, 2018 – Armenia: ReAnimania (Yerevan)[26]
November 20–25, 2018 – Poland: Etiuda & Anima (Kraków)[31]
November 21–25, 2018 – Canada: Les Sommets du Cinema d’Animation (Montreal)[26]
November 28 – December 2, 2018 – Hungary: Anilogue[26]
December 13, 2018 – France: Le Carrefour du Cinéma d’Animation (Paris)[32]
January 13–14, 2019 – United States: New York Jewish Film Festival[26]
January 10–24, 2019 – United States: Miami Jewish Film Festival[26]
March 17, 2019 - Austria: Tricky Women Festival[26]
October 12–13, 2019 - United States: Cleveland Cinematheque[33]
Public domain dedication
On January 24, 2019, Paley dedicated the film to the public domain, releasing it under a CC0 license, and uploading the master files to the Internet Archive. Paley clarified that the music used in the film was still copyrighted by its original authors, and this was one of the reasons she had no plans to pursue commercial distribution of the film.[34]
Reception
Following June 2018 showing at Annecy International Animated Film Festival, The Hollywood Reporter wrote that the film was "completely irreverent, occasionally hilarious and politically evocative", and that it "defies definition" with its different aspects of musical comedy, psychedelic cartoon, and "insolent" religious epic. Paley is observed to have "lots of fun" turning Bible events "into Busby Berkeley-style song-and-dance numbers."[35] Spain's El Mundo newspaper compared the film's irony and apparent naïveté to works by the Marx Brothers, Italian playwright Dario Fo, and Monty Python, writing that Paley applies unprejudiced and sharp commentary to the Jewish story while remaining bright and ridiculous.[36] French film website Courte-Focale compared Seder-Masochism to Monty Python's Life of Brian, writing that Paley brought a "fiercely humorous" spirit to the task of attacking patriarchal religion, an attack carried out with "acuteness and precision" in a way that disarms her opponents and yields a hilarious result.[37] Greek animator Vassilis Kroustallis said that Paley's second film "is another bold attempt... to associate the catastrophe that religion may bring with the male ego." He wrote that the musical choreography is good but the editing suffers from the juxtaposition of different scenes.[15]Variety wrote that the film was "delightfully impudent" and inventive, despite being "episodic and uneven" in its presentation as a series of short scenes.[38]
In Poznań, Poland, at the ANIMATOR film festival, Seder-Masochism earned the Audience Award for Feature Film.[24]
Music
A scene from the musical number "This Land Is Mine"
Paley spent $70,000 to secure the music rights to Sita Sings the Blues, just to distribute it freely, so for Seder-Masochism she turned to the parody defense in fair use: a parody of a copyrighted work can be considered fair use.[7] As a result, she did not try to secure the rights to the many recordings she used in the film. She told Variety that anyone who is interested can perform the legal work to clear the music rights, after which that person or corporation will be able to distribute the film commercially or license it for distribution.[5]
The song "This Land Is Mine" came first in Paley's production process; she used it to frame a scene in which a succession of warring men claims the Holy Land as theirs. The music is the main theme of the 1960 film Exodus, composed by Austrian Ernest Gold, with words added later by Pat Boone, which he sang and released as a single titled "The Exodus Song". Boone, an American Christian, said he wrote the lyrics in 25 minutes on Christmas Eve, on the back of a Christmas card, which he later sent to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.[39] The version Paley used in Seder-Masochism is a cover by Boone's friend Andy Williams,[40] released in 1962 under the title "The Exodus Song (This Land Is Mine)", as part of his album Moon River and Other Great Movie Themes, the album reaching number3 on the Billboard Top 200, selling more than twomillion copies by 1967.[41] In the 1960s, the song became a Zionist anthem. Paley parodies the song's Zionist theme to show the senselessness of war in the Middle East: the scene ends in atomic destruction, with nobody winning except the Angel of Death.[42]
Paley commissioned a song for the film from New York-based rock musician Todd Michaelsen, who had earlier collaborated on a song for Sita Sings the Blues, but Paley eventually decided not to use Michaelsen's song. She said that she prefers "songs that have a different original meaning", so that her animation adds a second meaning, yielding greater depth.[13]
For her dancing goddesses number, animated in early 2018, Paley chose a song from the 1976 film Car Wash: "You Gotta Believe", written by Norman Whitfield and performed by the Pointer Sisters, using Rose Royce as the backing band. In Car Wash, Paley said the song is used to "urge activist men to stand up for their activist sisters",[13] but in Seder-Masochism it is an ultimately unsuccessful plea to Moses to embrace goddess worship.[43]
The following recordings appear in the film credits:[3]
The Great Mother and the Hebrew GodAharon blows the shofar, with Moses and PharaohHebrew women transformed by the Goddess
2018 – "God Is Male", lyrics by Connie Bryson and Nina Paley, music by Nina Paley, organ performed by Camille Goudeseune, vocals by Nina Paley and Emilia Cataldo
Passover, also called Pesach, is a major Jewish holiday for Rabbinical Judaism, Karaite Judaism, and Samaritanism, one of the Three Pilgrimage Festivals, that celebrates the Exodus of the Israelites from slavery in Biblical Egypt.
The Passover Seder is a ritual feast at the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover. It is conducted throughout the world on the eve of the 15th day of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar. The day falls in late March or in April of the Gregorian calendar; Passover lasts for seven days in Israel and eight days outside Israel. Jews traditionally observe one seder if in Israel and two if in the Jewish diaspora. The Seder is a ritual involving a retelling of the story of the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in ancient Egypt, taken from the Book of Exodus in the Torah. The Seder itself is based on the Biblical verse commanding Jews to retell the story of the Exodus from Egypt: "You shall tell your child on that day, saying, 'It is because of what the LORD did for me when I came out of Egypt.'" At the seder, Jews read the text of the Haggadah, an ancient Tannaitic work. The Haggadah contains the narrative of the Israelite exodus from Egypt, special blessings and rituals, Talmudic commentaries, and Passover songs.
Miriam is described in the Hebrew Bible as the daughter of Amram and Jochebed, and the older sister of Moses and Aaron. She was a prophetess and first appears in the Book of Exodus.
The Prince of Egypt is a 1998 American animated musical drama film produced by DreamWorks Animation and distributed by DreamWorks Pictures. The second feature film from DreamWorks and the first to be traditionally animated, it is an adaptation of the Book of Exodus and follows the life of Moses from being a prince of Egypt to a prophet chosen by God to carry out his ultimate destiny of leading the Hebrews out of Egypt. The film was directed by Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner, and Simon Wells, and produced by Jeffrey Katzenberg, Penney Finkelman Cox, and Sandra Rabins, from a screenplay written by Philip LaZebnik. It features songs written by Stephen Schwartz and a score composed by Hans Zimmer. The film stars the voices of Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sandra Bullock, Jeff Goldblum, Danny Glover, Patrick Stewart, Helen Mirren, Steve Martin, and Martin Short.
The Haggadah is a Jewish text that sets forth the order of the Passover Seder. According to Jewish practice, reading the Haggadah at the Seder table is a fulfillment of the mitzvah to each Jew to tell their children the story from the Book of Exodus about God bringing the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, with a strong hand and an outstretched arm.
Dayenu is a song that is part of the Jewish holiday of Passover. The word "dayenu" means approximately "it would have been enough", "it would have been sufficient", or "it would have sufficed". This traditional up-beat Passover song is over one thousand years old. The earliest full text of the song occurs in the first medieval haggadah, which is part of the ninth-century Seder Rav Amram. The song is about being grateful to God for all of the gifts given to the Jewish people, such as taking them out of slavery, giving them the Torah and Shabbat, and had God only given one of the gifts, it would have still been enough. This is to show much greater appreciation for all of them as a whole. The song appears in the haggadah after the telling of the story of the exodus and just before the explanation of Passover, matzah, and the maror.
Chava Alberstein is an Israeli musician, lyricist, composer, and musical arranger. She moved to Israel in 1950 and started her music career in 1964. Alberstein has released over sixty albums in Hebrew, English, and Yiddish. She is known for her liberal activism and advocacy for human rights and Arab-Israeli unity, which has sometimes stirred controversy, such as the ban of her song "Had Gadya" by Israel State Radio in 1989. Alberstein has received numerous accolades, including the Kinor David Prize, the Itzik Manger Prize, and honorary doctorates from several universities.
The Pharaoh's daughter in the story of the finding of Moses in the biblical Book of Exodus is an important, albeit minor, figure in Abrahamic religions. Though some variations of her story exist, the general consensus among Jews, Christians, and Muslims is that she is the adoptive mother of the prophet Moses. Muslims identify her with Asiya, the Great Royal Wife of the pharaoh. In either version, she saved Moses from certain death from both the Nile river and from the Pharaoh. As she ensured the well-being of Moses throughout his early life, she played an essential role in lifting the Hebrew slaves out of bondage in Egypt, their journey to the Promised Land, and the establishment of the Ten Commandments.
The Annecy International Animation Film Festival was created in 1960 and takes place at the beginning of June in the town of Annecy, France. Initially occurring every two years, the festival became an annual event in 1998. It is one of the four international animated film festivals sponsored by the International Animated Film Association.
Passover songs are songs from the seder, the festive meal associated with the Jewish festival of Passover.
Chad GadyaorHad Gadya is a playful cumulative song in Aramaic and Hebrew. It is sung at the end of the Passover Seder, the Jewish ritual feast that marks the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover. The melody may have its roots in Medieval German folk music. It first appeared in a Haggadah printed in Prague in 1590, which makes it the most recent inclusion in the traditional Passover seder liturgy.
Nina Carolyn Paley is an American cartoonist, animator, and free culture activist. She was the artist and often the writer of the comic strips Nina's Adventures and Fluff, after which she worked primarily in animation. She is perhaps best known for creating the 2008 animated feature film Sita Sings the Blues, based on the Ramayana, with parallels to her personal life. In 2018, she completed her second animated feature, Seder-Masochism, a retelling of the Book of Exodus as patriarchy emerging from goddess worship.
Sita Sings the Blues is a 2008 American animated musical romantic comedy-drama film written, directed, produced and animated by American artist Nina Paley. It intersperses events from the Ramayana, light-hearted but knowledgeable discussion of historical background by a trio of Indian shadow puppets, musical interludes voiced with tracks by Annette Hanshaw and scenes from the artist's own life. The ancient mythological and modern biographical plot are parallel tales, sharing numerous themes.
Exodus is a soundtrack album by Ernest Gold with the Sinfonia of London from the 1960 film Exodus directed by Otto Preminger.
"A Rugrats Passover" is the 23rd episode of the third season of the American animated television series Rugrats. It first aired on Nickelodeon in the United States on April 13, 1995. The episode follows series regulars Grandpa Boris and the babies as they become trapped in the attic on Passover; to pass the time, Boris tells the Jewish story of the Exodus. During the episode, the babies themselves reenact the story, with Tommy portraying Moses, while his cousin Angelica represents the Pharaoh of Egypt.
This Land Is Mine may refer to:
"Theme of Exodus" is a song composed and performed by Ernest Gold. It serves as the main theme song to Otto Preminger's epic film Exodus, based on the 1958 novel of the same name by Leon Uris, which tells the story of founding of the modern State of Israel. The song was released on the soundtrack album for the picture. All music was written by Gold, who won both Best Soundtrack Album and Song of the Year at the 1961 Grammy Awards for the soundtrack and theme to Exodus respectively. It is the only instrumental song to ever receive that award.
The Saturday Night Seder was a Passover Seder held on April 11, 2020 by StoryCourse in response to the COVID-19 pandemic; to provide relief and support to the public in an effort to combat the spread of the COVID-19 virus. The seder was sponsored by BuzzFeed and aired on their Tasty YouTube channel.
Maya and the Three is an animated fantasy television miniseries created by Jorge R. Gutiérrez and produced by Tangent Animation. The nine-episode series premiered on Netflix on October 22, 2021.
↑ Nina Paley (April 12, 2018). "Synopsis". Seder-Masochism: A new animated feature from the creator of Sita Sings the Blues. Retrieved August 30, 2018.
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