Babobilicons

1973 - 1982

Dir. Daina Krumins, 16mm Color Sound 00:16:00

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Description

"Daina Krumins's 1982 BABOBILICONS is a spectacular special-effects study of molds, mushrooms and similar vegetation." - Richard Shephard, The New York Times

"Daina Krumins's BABOBILICONS is a truly surrealist work in terms of both its process and product. Krumins takes time to make her films. It took her nine years to create this remarkable animated short, yet her method is in line with the surrealist affinity for chance operation. She cultivated slime molds on Quaker five-minute oats in her basement, planted hundreds of phallic stink-horn mushrooms, and put her mother behind the camera to film them growing. The results are sexual and bizarre. She combined ordinary objects - wall sockets, candles, and peeling paint - to get unnerving, dreamlike images. Porcelain fish jump through waves; mushroom erections rise and fall. Her Babobilicons - robotlike characters that resemble coffee pots with lobster claws - move through all this with mysterious determination. Anyone who orders 10,000 ladybugs from a pest control company to film them crawling over a model drawing room definitely possesses a sense of the surreal." - Renee Shafransky, The Village Voice

Awards: Bronze Hugo, Chicago Int'l Film Festival; Sinking Creek Film & Video Festival; Atlanta Independent Film Festival; SF Art Institute Film Festival.

[Source: Film Society of Lincoln Center]