UCLA

This thesis examines a fourteen-second stop-motion animation David Smith and Douglass Crockwell produced between 1936 and 1937. Through an analysis of the collaboration and the models that guided its production, this paper argues that Smith utilized, in the mid-1930s and throughout his later career, a sense of the photographic medium derived from his encounters with surrealist sculpture. A conception of photography as a set of operations exceeding the inscription of light onto celluloid film, epitomized in a 1936 issue of Cahiers d’art and at the “Surrealist Exhibition of Objects,” is therefore at work in the development of modernist sculpture. This paper suggests that the collaborative film provides a lens onto these influences in Smith’s work, revealing an expanded sense of photographic and sculptural production therein.