Description

Co-Existing Dualities: the Art / Films of Ed Seeman (forthcoming)

Born in 1931, Ed Seeman was raised in New York’s lower east side, attending the High School of Music and Art in Harlem before being admitted into the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. From 1952-1954, he served as an Armed Forces cartoonist during the Korean War. Following this Army service, Seeman was contracted as a cartoon cel animator for Paramount Pictures in New York and shortly thereafter formed his own company, Gryphon Productions.  Established as a commercial animator, he worked on such legendary characters as Popeye, Casper the Ghost, Sugar Bear, Bullwinkle, the Trix Rabbit, My Little Pony, and the Flintstones alongside steady television commercials. During this time, Seeman won numerous Clio awards, Addy’s and other TV advertising commercial honors.

During the 1960s Seeman’s oil paintings were represented by East Hampton Galleries on 57th Street. One such paintings was exhibited in the New York Museum of Modern Art for three years. Many of these oil paintings were subsequently purchased by the Chrysler Museum in Provincetown, The University of Massachusetts, and discerning, private collectors. An authentic multimedia pioneer, Seeman was simultaneously a frequent visitor to midnight movie screenings organized by Jonas Mekas and segued into avant-garde film-making, beginning with series of nude dance films. After Seeman’s film of Space Oddity won a Silver Phoenix Award at the Atlanta Film Festival, five of Seeman’s experimental short films were added to the US Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Seeman’s most known (not to mention also most wanted but least seen) film was a 45 min collaboration with underground musician Frank Zappa – Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention – for which Seeman won a Cine Golden Eagle Award in 1968. Zappa himself won a Clio Award for Best Music for a Commercial in 1967, for a Luden’s Cough Drop commercial animated and filmed by Seeman. As Zappa recalled:

“A freak in an ad agency who was an animator, Ed Seeman, who came to the Garrick shows, did the pictures and recruited me to do the music. I went along with it. The commercial shows a squiggly white thing that’s supposed to be the cough wriggling around. A box of Luden’s appears on the left side of the screen, like a monolith and squashes it.” (Zappa)

Zappa’s song, “The Big Squeeze,” was never released on an album. So too, the vast majority of over 14 hours of footage shot by Seeman during his collaboration with Zappa – ostensibly for a never completed film Zappa provisionally referred to as Uncle Meat – was shot silently as a montage intended for Zappa to score. This prompted Seeman to reflect: “I’m a montagist…my experimental films are mostly montages”, an aesthetic approach to film art he shared with Zappa. Indeed;

“What Frank Zappa liked about my in-camera-montage shooting was what he called ‘montage-a-go-go,’ which, because of its continuing flow and motion, make my ‘dailies’ easy to score the next day. Ad lib improvisational montaging in the camera made for no budget special effects that was simpatico with the way he composed or played jazz like on his guitar riffs.”

Following his work with Zappa, however, Seeman was influenced by the burgeoning New York “adult movie” scene, making a series of nude dance films in his signature in-camera montage style – High Contrast, Space Oddity, Dana & Clay.  Subsequently, under the pseudonym Eduardo Cemano, Seeman segued into making a trilogy of sexually explicit films – The Healers, Fongaluli and Madame Zenobia.  These maintained his core style but were infused with a sex-positive attitude that distinguished them from many of their exploitative or bleak contemporaries.  It was during his association with the 1970s “swinger” scene in New York that Seeman/Cemano released a unique, distinctive body of film work.

Seeman / Cemano, however, abruptly left the adult film scene to resume commercial animation.  By 1989, Seeman had moved to Coral Springs, Florida and in 1991, started Ed Seeman Animation Productions wherein computer motion graphics replaced traditional cel animation. As a creative adjunct, Seeman and his wife Amy started MANA-T’S Cartoon T-Shirt Company, producing animal T-shirts for theme park including the Miami Seaquarium, Naples Zoo, Lion Country Safari, Billie Swamp Safari, and state-wide chains gift shops. This eventuated in an eBay store stocking more than 1,300 original cartoon and animal designs s well as optional free customized options for T-shirts and kids-wear.  Seeman maintained the eBay store after retiring to Oclala, Florida in 2011, alongside his second wife Amy who wryly commented “if I had wanted to marry a very normal type of man, I would not have married an artist”.   Indeed, even in retirement, Seeman remained a consummate artist, transitioning from his oil and acrylic on canvas painting legacy to experimental computer painting – fractal artworks.

This forthcoming ebook (work in progress) is a career history and analytical filmographic retrospective of Seeman/Cemano.  Presented using the artist’s original materials and in full-color, it restores to cinema history the work of a virtually unknown filmmaker whose work bridged commercial animation, the American avant-garde and the American XXX adult cinema.

This title is forthcoming:No PDF for download/sale yet.
Price: TBA.
Expected Release Date: 2025/03/15-21.