Fact Check:
I am saddened by the passing of Dave Hilberman, the pioneer of the new animation. He was involved with so much animation that is groundbreaking and revolutionary. He also is a hero of the animation labor movement who suffered, in a very real way, for his ideals. The working world of animators is a better place because of him.
But I really am not really going to talk that much about Dave Hilberman today. I just want to talk about what wasn`t said over the past week in regards to his career.
I have been reading the Dave Hilberman memorials from people who knew and loved this great man of animation and I have been struck by how a lot of historians today tend to simplify into sound bites. Even the top notch ones that I respect. They have all seemed to have bought into the media short hand. It is like they know know that they have to dumb it down for the masses. Here is a quote from Tom Sito, one of the best of the best:
Dave Hilberman was an important animator-layout artist at Walt Disney Studios in the 1930s. He spent time in Leningrad in 1930 with the Futurist Theater there and met Maxim Gorky, Mayakovsky and Vertov. He was a leader of artists in the Walt Disney Studio Strike of 1941, and for that earned the lasting animus of Walt Disney. When Walt testified to HUAC in 1947, he personally named Dave as a communist. Dave was one of the aentral founders of UPA and the UPA style. (italics mine)
And here is a quote from Amid Amidi:
I know I am being picky and that is what Tom will tell me at the ASIFA board meeting tonight. Hell, I respect Tom and Amid and their work and they are not, by any means, the only ones taking shortcuts with animation history.ASIFA-San Francisco president Karl Cohen forwarded a note to let us know that UPA co-founder and one of the last of the truly great animation legends, David Hilberman, passed away on July 5. (italics mine)
I have been out to the Guild site, I have done a Google search and I have even gone over to IMDB and checked the company names. They don`t even list Industrial Films and Poster Service or give them credit for the films they created under that company name.
See here is the thing, Dave Hilberman and his partner Zack Schwartz never really worked at a company named UPA nor did they own the company named United Productions of America.
Yes they founded the studio that became UPA but its name was only changed to United Productions of America after Zack and Dave sold Industrial Films and Poster Service to Steve Bosustow and John Hubley. Long, and very interesting story that no one is going to look into because no one talked about it.
And that is what I am bitching about here, the sound bites taking the place of the story, taking the easy way, dumbing everything down for the widest audience. Even the best historians know instinctively that they have to back off on the whole story to get anybody to listen, which just plays into the whole vicious cycle and trains another generation to not look deeper.
David Hilberman is a very important figure in animation history. Can`t we tell a little bit more about his life? Put some clues in the story so maybe someone will want to look deeper? Must we put everything into neat little packages with easy but incorrect labels?
I know it is easier to say Dave Hilberman co-founded UPA than to say he co-founded the company that became UPA. Maybe it is because I am a teacher, but can`t we let people know about a little bit about the complexities? Then maybe they will want to look a little deeper. Why must it always be lowest common denominator?
Maybe if the best didn`t feel that they had to dumb stuff down we wouldn`t have another generation of A.D.D. students that can`t follow my lectures? We will never know unless we try.
posted by Larry Loc @ 4:59 AM
1 Comments:
At November 5, 2008 8:31 PM ,
Anonymous said...
You know, most of us who studied with Dave Hilberman are old now. Goodness, he was born in 1911, and San Francisco state for me was 40 years ago, but Mr. Hilberman (and I can't recall that any of us in his classes EVER called him Dave...not because he didn't like it, but because it wasn't done at the time) was able to teach me and a friend of mine (both of us non-artists who kiddingly threatened to come to his classes even if he threw us out), how to work with artists, how to leave them alone to work, how style worked, to this day I can look at certain stuff and tell you who drew them. He taught us how a joke worked....at least a cartoon joke, he taught us stuff (all of which took hideously expensive equipment which now sits on my son's desk for a couple of thousand) but he taught us how to get art done. He never talked about his past life. He never talked about the things that went on in the trivia of the every day. He showed us how animation worked. He taught us about people like Flischer, Fischinger, Hector Gross and Arthur Hoppin and a very short film called Joir De Vivre that they made with basically a four legged animation stand and paper on the floor. And it still runs through my mind occasionally. Dave Hilberman taught us to do things with a pencil and a piece of paper that I never knew could be done. He gave me, at any rate, a standard for spotting art talent. And it's only in recent years that I have come to find out how really famous he was, because he never talked about any of it. When it came to UPA, his comment was "yeah, I had something to do with that." Nothing more. He never talked about Disney (I don't blame him), and he was a painter, which I haven't seen come out in any of the articles about him.
He'd invite the class up to his house on Divisidero Street in San Francisco, and you'd walk into his front hall, and there you'd see drawings by famous people, all signed, and autographed to him. Especially a funny series by Ronald Serel of Punch. And he and Libby tried out life in a commune for a while, before they moved to Santa Cruz, California, then to Palo Alto, and finally to Menlo Park. The rest, I suppose, was just day to day living, like anyone else. Knowing Dave Hilberman was learning by example that true talent, can be a part of the most ordinary looking people. As you've probably seen from his pictures, he wasn't a spectacular individual. Just a very talented one. That's a lesson most people don't learn about talent, or genius, or a lot of other things we stand in awe of. We have a family friend right now, who will, one day, be a great painter. She's already had a couple of major pieces hung in Chicago and New York, but right now, she's just a normal, funny, extremely talented 22-year-old. And I wouldn't recognize any of it if it hadn't been for the few years I spent in the mid-60s studying with David Hilberman.
Regards,
Raphael E. Serebreny
San Francisco State class of 67
San Francisco State, Class o
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