Terry Gilliam-
Terrence Vance “Terry” Gilliam, born 22 November 1940 is an American-born British screenwriter, film director, animator, actor, comedian and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe.
He has directed 12 feature films, including Time Bandits (1981), Brazil (1985), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), The Fisher King (1991), 12 Monkeys (1995), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009). The only “Python” not born in Britain, he became a naturalized British citizen in 1968 and formally renounced his American citizenship in 2006.
Gilliam is most known for his work in the Monty Python comedy troupe, in which he created surreal stop motion animations and collages. His animations mix his own art, characterized by soft gradients and odd, bulbous shapes, with backgrounds and moving cutouts from antique photographs, mostly from the Victorian era. The main aim of his work being to astound and amuse those viewing.
Gilliam’s films have a distinctive look not only in mise-en-scène but even more so in photography, often recognizable from just a short clip; to create a surreal atmosphere of psychological unrest and a world out-of-balance, Gilliam frequently uses unusual camera angles, particularly low-angle shots, high-angle shots, and Dutch angles.
Most of his movies are shot almost entirely with rectilinear ultra wide angle lenses of 28 mm focal length or less to achieve a distinctive signature style defined by extreme perspective distortion and extremely deep focus. Gilliam’s long-time director of photography Nicola Pecorini has said, “with Terry and me, a long lens means something between a 40mm and a 65mm.” This attitude markedly differs from the common definition in photography which qualifies 40mm to 65mm as the focal length of a normal lens instead due to resembling natural human field of view, unlike Gilliam’s signature style defined by extreme perspective distortion due to his usual choice of focal length. In fact, over the years, the 14mm lens has become informally known as “The Gilliam” among film-makers due to the director’s frequent use of it since at least Brazil.
Hannah Höch-
Hannah Höch was born Anna Therese Johanne Höch in Gotha, Germany. In 1912 she began classes at the School of Applied Arts in Berlin under the guidance of glass designer Harold Bergen. She chose the curriculum glass design and graphic arts, rather than fine arts, to please her father. In 1914, at the start of World War I, she left the school and returned home to Gotha to work with the Red Cross. In 1915 she returned to school, entering the graphics class of Emil Orlik at the National Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts. Also in 1915, Höch began an influential friendship with Raoul Hausmann, a member of the Berlin Dada movement.
Höch was a pioneer of the art form that became known as photomontage. Photomontage is the process and the result of making a composite photograph by cutting,gluing, rearranging and overlapping two or more photographs into a new image. Sometimes the resulting composite image is photographed so that a final image may appear as a seamless photographic print. A similar method, although one that does not use film, is realized today through image-editing software.
Many of her pieces sardonically critiqued the mass culture beauty industry at the time, gaining significant momentum in mass media through the rise of fashion and advertising photography. Many of her political works from the Dada period equated women’s liberation with social and political revolution. In particular, her photomontages often critically addressed the Weimar New Woman, collating images from contemporary magazines. Her works from 1926 to 1935 often depicted same sex couples, and women were once again a central theme in her work from 1963 to 1973. Höch also made strong statements on racial discrimination.
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