Directing
Created for a show at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York, later to become the American Craft Museum, and now the Museum of Arts and Design, CHEMICAL ARCHITECTURE documents the creation of an exhibit structure created by Yale architecture students for a show entitled “Plastic as Plastic” that surveyed furniture, industrial design, kitchenware, clothes, jewelry, and more.
A compilation of images co-creator Frank Mouris had collected from magazines interwoven with two narrations, one giving a mostly linear autobiography and the other stating words having to do with the images, the story the first voice is relating, or neither. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive.
Coney Island in the day, at night and during all the seasons of the year.
A law student finds himself involved in a menage-a-trois with a free-spirited neighboring couple.
QUICK DREAM, subtitled "A Series of Exorcisms," is the result of this first assignment. As Mouris describes it, “This film is a series of visual experiments with magazine photograph cutouts that make moving collages; coloraid paper; Avery labels; whatever I could think of that might animate. It became the seedbed for everything that followed,” most notably FRANK FILM. As part of the project, the students’ films were subject to a round of guest criticism from artists and filmmakers Robert Breer and Red Grooms, who, as Mouris describes it, “praised our work and encouraged us to continue.” (Yale Film Archive)
Mouris’s “first attempt at ‘capturing’ Coney Island in home-made images” illustrates the sights of Coney Island with animated paper cutouts. “A classmate, Peter Schlaifer, who had split the day of filming with me on that first experience at the Chemistry department, joined me in doing a silent animated film rather than doing yet another two-dimensional poster for a graphic design class assignment. Thus was born CONEY ISLAND EATS.” (Yale Film Archive)
A classic of abstract animation that follows a tiny red arrow's journey through a multitude of spirals of white and waterfalls of color. Directed by Caroline and Frank Mouris, preserved in 2020 thanks to a collaborative effort between the Academy Film Archive and the Yale Film Archive.
This ultimate talking-head documentary provides the lowdown on making it in showbiz: the casting couch, how to play the game, how to change you name.
"Mouris’s film, YOU’RE NOT REAL PRETTY BUT YOU’RE MINE…, built upon the strongest elements of QUICK DREAM, and added a pop music soundtrack. Mouris says, “I shot another 100 foot roll on classmate Jerry Strawbridge’s home animation stand, and edited that into the best sequences from QUICK DREAM. The whole film was a tongue-in-cheek series of odd couples/couplings, which the title suggested. The FRANK FILM photo collage animation evolved here.” - Yale
A fragmented cinematic portrait of nine talented amateur actors and mimes. A candid look at an unusually gifted group of avant garde artists coming together to experience and share each other's art. These gifted artists have made more than 75 8mm films themselves. Then as now, they did all the costumes, sets and make-up and created and acted all the roles. Featuring: Herman Costa, Noel Levert, Adolph Garza, Albert Elia, Stephen Cervantes, Ronald Koladzie, Phillip Haight, Pedro Barrios and Richard Hartenstein.
A self-conscious counterpoint to FRANK FILM, FRANKLY CAROLINE focuses on Caroline Mouris and her story, but also examines the collaborative process and the creative roadblocks that always arise in a working relationship.
