Wizards: Labour, Magic and The Wizard of Speed and Time

Art & Trash, episode 38
Wizards: Labour, Magic and The Wizard of Speed and Time
Stephen Broomer, August 2, 2024

A willed enchantment between the apparatus and the subject becomes a matter of personal conviction in the work of American animator Mike Jittlov, a talented outsider to the Hollywood dream factory. His story is told in a rebellious meta-fable autobiographical feature film, The Wizard of Speed and Time, in which Jittlov dramatizes the experiences of an independent filmmaker who enters into a one-sided, devilish contract with a broadcaster. For Jittlov, labour and recreation are continuous, the work of the artist and the pleasure and pastimes of the artist are inextricably bound together. Mike Jittlov sees the world as open to wonder: his illusionism can set it in motion.

In this video essay, Stephen Broomer addresses The Wizard of Speed and Time in relation to the legacy of pixilation animation, and discusses Jittlov's greater themes of labour and illusion.

SCRIPT:

In Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, the pleasures of labour and the pleasures of recreation are continuous. Work and play are not held in contrast but shown to be in a symbiotic relationship. Vertov illustrates a modern life composed in equal value of simple pleasures, intimate milestones, and those incessant operations that keep the everyday machinery of sunrise and sunset rolling, a glorious resolution of the forces of industrial revolution, diurnal revolution, and social revolution. For any symphony, there must be conductors: Vertov’s conductors are filmmakers—the cameraman of the title looms over the city, his own body a machine, his eye the iris of the camera, the cranking rotations of his arm akin to the gears that drive the city; an editor selects scenes from everyday life and her decisions change those scenes. Her operations are paralleled as well, with a pedicure and a sewing machine mirroring her process, her selections and cuts. Vertov was not imagining these filmmakers as wizards, or cinema as magic, but his illusions do suggest a romantic correspondence between the movie and the city that seem to transcend the mere act of representation. The subject, as if enchanted, runs for the benefit and at the command of the cameraman.

In another world, across decades, an ocean, a cold war, and irreconcilable politics, these themes of labour and illusion would persist. This willed enchantment between the apparatus and the subject becomes a matter of personal conviction in the work of American animator Mike Jittlov, a talented outsider to the Hollywood dream factory. His story is told in a rebellious meta-fable autobiographical feature film, The Wizard of Speed and Time, in which Jittlov dramatizes the experiences of an independent filmmaker who enters into a one-sided, devilish contract with a broadcaster. Unlike Dziga Vertov, Mike Jittlov is an individualist whose desire to cast illusions is tied to his devotion to entertainment; but like Vertov and the subjects of Man with a Movie Camera, he regards labour and recreation as continuous, the work of the artist and the pleasure and pastimes of the artist inextricably bound together. Like Vertov, Mike Jittlov sees the world as open to wonder: his illusionism can set it in motion. Enter the Wizard of Speed and Time.

The Wizard of Speed and Time is a heroic character, dreamt up to serve as the animator’s double, a wide-eyed spirit of innocent wonder and an expression of creative consciousness safe from the cruel intrusions of the real world. In the real world, the creative spirit is under attack. Under the rule of unimaginative people, the dreamer struggles and is made to feel like a failure. The dreamer’s ideal forum is cinema, for cinema is a thing of pleasure and fun: it transcends pure recreation, it becomes a free space for stray thoughts to become fables. But cinema is where the enemies of promise act at their worst, through a harsh irony: the dream factory of Hollywood is still a factory, a territory of warlords and serfs.

Mike Jittlov conceived of The Wizard of Speed and Time out of obvious frustration with the powers-that-be in Hollywood. The film is a celebration of specialized skills and knowledge that Jittlov had a hard-won mastery of. In his first appearance, the wizard served as an avatar for Jittlov to demonstrate these abilities, in a short film that could also serve as a professional reel. At rapid speed, the wizard collapses great distances as he races in timelapse through postcard visions of the earth. In his travels, he is hailed as a hero, and accompanying him on his journey is a theme song in which he declares his intention: “I am the Wizard of Speed and Time / I’ve got magic to let you shine / Rise to the wonder, step into the scene / I can help you find your dream.” Jittlov’s pixilated vision of movie magic was following in the footsteps of Norman McLaren, who had used the technique of pixilation—stop-motion photography applied to human subjects—to more overtly political ends, as in Neighbors and A Chairy Tale, both allegorical fantasies of the futility of conflict. In McLaren’s films, the strange physicality created by pixilation is a sign that we are dealing in metaphor and illustration: this is not real life. In Jittlov’s film, wizardry, and in turn, pixilation, is not a tidy metaphor, for it is also an illustration of the magical potential of the apparatus. Jittlov in costume becomes the iconic Wizard of Speed and Time, but it was Jittlov, out of costume, who was the true magician. The theme song is, deliberately, about both animator and subject.

Jittlov would use the making of his short as the premise for his feature-length autobiographical film. By that time, he had a fully-formed sense of the disparity of intention between the executive class and filmmakers in Hollywood. Despite his recognition of the arrogance and greed of the forces he was up against, Jittlov embodies naivety, justice, and a folksy earnestness that signals the nobility of hard work and creativity: like a stock Capra hero, he’s an idealist. These qualities set him at odds with a world that doesn’t care. The resulting film deals with the corruption of creativity by malicious, uncreative forces. Jittlov’s critical sensibility doesn’t only target arrogant, brooding executives: he also goes after unionists with their closed ranks; nepotists; litterbugs; the IRS; the whole of the modern world, with its sense of professionalism, its prejudicial expectations of formality, its illogical bureaucracies. Against this he celebrates the dreamers, men in celluloid helmets who wants to share their visions.

In his search for work, Jittlov ventures out into a Hollywood that doesn’t understand him. In this, he’s not perfect. He admits to certain idiosyncrasies, for example, he refuses to shake hands—the reason for this is later revealed: he’s telepathic, and as he puts it, movies are the safest way he can touch people. Like UHF and Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, the film is campy and whimsical, the fantasy of an outsider. Like UHF’s George Newman, Mike Jittlov is a dreamer who the world regards as a failure. His quest will bring him into conflict with a mix of villains and enforcers who will either be charmed by his naivety or antagonize him, but like Pee Wee Herman’s journey, this experience will also end in friendship, love and victory, the acceptance and homecoming of the exceptional outsider. Is Mike Jittlov a filmmaker or an actor, asks antagonistic executive Harvey Bookman. We might ask the same question, but the answer is as plain as the one he gives: I am when I have to be. The film uses a simple journey structure as a platform for Jittlov’s mock-sermonizing for the church of cinematology, and his philosophy of independent creativity, a lived philosophy that would mark him as a lone revolutionary if not for the social spirit in which he is seen operating: his filmmaking is not about personal vision, but social vision. It is born from collaboration, pursued with family and friends, against the oppressive and anti-creative force of business. Thus the film becomes the triumph of the creative outsider and, conversely, of the social spirit of cinema. That social spirit is worth lingering on: Jittlov’s mother and brother appear as themselves; Jittlov is played by the Wizard of Speed and Time, and the Wizard plays himself, a beautiful declaration that the creator has vanished into his creation; and Richard Kaye, as antagonist Harvey Bookman, plays a grotesque caricature of his own real-life role, having produced the original film. It is a film of personal vision, but in the world of cinema, personal vision takes a village.

The hustling world of Hollywood is recreated with warts showing: an undercurrent of comically perverse sequences offer a chortling glimpse at the underbelly of the business, from childish wordplay about getting the clap, to an S&M fantasy, to implied criticism of the casting-couch culture of the villains of Hollywood. Jittlov’s work walks a line between childlike wonder and a mature rebuke of the absurd hypocrisies of family entertainment. Throughout the film, confronted with Jittlov’s magical illusionism, cynical audiences ask, “what do you think these guys were on?” It’s the square world’s response to creativity and imagination, but it’s also the morally bankrupt response of a misanthropic culture confronted with magic: rather than have their awe inspired, they sneer and punch holes in the motives of the illusionist.

What is a wizard? In the context of Jittlov’s film, a wizard is an independent force, a conductor not just of cinema but of dreams. As protagonist, Mike Jittlov is interested in helping people find their dreams. Hustling his own talents, this seems aimed at both a potential audience that would be wowed by his illusions, and the executives who need artists like him to realize their product. Jittlov will find audiences, but the executives aren’t interested: they use his naivety as the basis for a bet, as to whether he will be able to make, with no resources, the short film he wants to make, which is, of course, The Wizard of Speed and Time. With a premise inherited from screwball comedies, Jittlov becomes the naive stooge to people with power and security.  Jittlov and friends re-enact the creation of The Wizard of Speed and Time, fighting against bureaucracy, deprived of a budget, pursued by keystone cops. Their work will be stolen; their contribution will be concealed; but in the end, the truth will come out. The film’s preoccupation with the process of filmmaking is filtered through whimsy, magic and play. When at last his short film is shown, the viewer knows how the shots were achieved, but those shots remain magical, speaking to the nature of film magic, which can convince us of illusions even when the process is revealed to us. The Wizard of Speed and Time becomes an act of revisiting and restaging and mythologizing Jittlov’s own past.

I began to make films around 2008. I’m fortunate enough to live in Toronto, Ontario, where an organization, the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto, or LIFT, is a longstanding and accessible supporter of independent film. LIFT is a rental house and post-production facility, but it’s more than that: it’s a community hub governed by a spirit of free collaboration and an incubator where new artists can explore and develop their practices and gain greater understanding of themselves in the process. That’s what it’s been to me. I was led there by a lifelong interest in movies. The Wizard of Speed and Time came out when I was four years old. I don’t know precisely how or why my brother and I watched it as frequently as we did—something encountered in a video store by parents who knew their children were curious about movies—but it felt as time went on that we were the only people who had seen it; I would later learn of its cult following, but that cult following never translated into anything resembling general recognition. The only other person I know whose experience of Jittlov’s film is similar to my own is Karl Reinsalu, who has been the technical coordinator of LIFT for all the years I’ve been going there, who, like me, worked in video rental stores and did his time on film sets, and who has been a silent collaborator on every film I’ve ever made, doing more than just facilitating spaces, cameras, supplies, but helping me and teaching me about technology. Karl Reinsalu taught me more about 16mm filmmaking than I ever learned in film school; as an autodidact of the first order, he has surely taught himself more about 16mm filmmaking than he himself ever learned in film school. In his own films, there is a restless, probing curiosity about what the frame, pulsing vagaries of light, and pixilation can create. Like Mike Jittlov, Karl possesses a unique and imaginative brilliance for the creative use of technology. Like Jittlov, both Karl and I operate at the edges of an industry that has a tendency to regard people as disposable, that sorts it workers into two piles: ‘stars’ and ‘everyone else’, categories that aren’t easily reconciled with love and passion. When presented with the question of what is wizardry, I can only think of the impossibility of magic, and the certainty of the magic of labour, the potential for hard-earned knowledge to take root in the soul and manifest, through expression, things that could not otherwise be. I think of Karl Reinsalu and his creativity, that brings forth vibrating forms, abstract, colourful geometries, and a harmonious relation between man and mechanism, the creative will and the animation of everyday life.

The question of magic in cinema is inextricable from questions of labour. The most awe-inspiring illusions take patience; they are translations of time, from hours and days of planning and executing into mere seconds on screen. This is at its clearest in stop-motion and pixilation and the ability through these techniques to create another world where time operates at the whim of work, and not the other way around, fashioning worlds of wonder and freedom, like those forged through the films of Mike Jittlov, or for that matter, those dreamt out by the rest of us. Cinema is one of those rare forums in which invisible labour can be translated into something so much more meaningful than mere function, and the spell it casts is far richer than the suspension of disbelief: it enchants and commands us to dance.