CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/19/2015

The Art of Smallfilms

Featured image is from The Clangers, Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate's psychedelic UK animated television show of the late 60s and early 70s about "a small tribe or extended family of civil mouse-like persons living their peaceful lives on, in and around a small, undistinguished moon." It is reproduced from Four Corners Books' remarkable new archive of The Art of Smallfilms, in which English comedian, writer, director and musician Stewart Lee writes, "It's difficult, if you are of a certain age and political bent, not to talk about Smallfilms without sounding reactionary. This book makes me naively nostalgic for a world before free market doctrines and focus groups, when a publicly funded body gave two indefatigable eccentrics and, we now realize, avatars of a distinctly British folk art, license to pursue their particular, and quietly subversive, ideas, unencumbered by crass commercial expectations. Whole series of Smallfilms were green lit because someone in an ashtray-filled office somewhere saw an eight-page book of pasted up scripts and scraps of sketches and decided it was worth commissioning. This would not and could not happen now. And the social circumstances and value systems that shaped those paper and scissors, arts and crafts cowshed visionaries of another era, Firmin and Postgate, are long gone."