Oral History Project
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ORAL HISTORY PROJECT MADE POSSIBLE BY SUPPORT FROM PROJECT PARTNERS: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts INTERVIEW SUBJECT: David Lebrun Biography: Filmmaker David Lebrun was born in Los Angeles in 1944. He attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon and the UCLA Film School. He came to film from a background in philosophy and anthropology, and many of his films have been attempts to get inside the way of seeing and thinking of specific cultures. He has served as producer, director, writer, cinematographer, animator and / or editor of more than sixty films, among them films on the Mazatec Indians of Oaxaca, Mexican folk artists, a 1960s traveling commune, Tibetan mythology and a year in the life of a Maya village in Yucatan. He edited the Academy award winning feature documentary BROKEN RAINBOW, on the Hopi and Navajo of the American Southwest. Lebrun combines the structures and techniques of the documentary, experimental and animated genres to create a style appropriate to the culture and era of each film. Lebrun’s experimental and animated works include the radical editing styles of SANCTUS (1966) and THE HOG FARM MOVIE (1970), his late 1960s work with the multimedia group Single Wing Turquoise Bird, the animated film TANKA (1966), works for multiple and variable-speed projectors such as SIDEREAL TIME (1981) and WIND OVER WATER (1983), and a 2007 multi- screen performance piece, MAYA VARIATIONS. David Lebrun Oral History Transcript/Los Angeles Filmforum Page 1 of 145 Lebrun’s animated feature documentary PROTEUS premiered in January 2004 at the Sundance Film Festival and has won numerous international awards. Animated from period paintings and graphics, PROTEUS tells the story of 19th century biologist Ernst Haeckel, who found in the depths of the sea an ecstatic and visionary fusion of science and art. PROTEUS explores the sea through poetry, oceanography, technology and myth. Lebrun’s most recent documentary, BREAKING THE MAYA CODE, a film on the history of the decipherment of the ancient Maya hieroglyphic writing system, was produced under major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation. The feature length version premiered in March 2008 at the International Festival of Films on Art in Montreal; shorter adaptations were produced for the PBS program NOVA and Europe’s ARTE France. In addition to his work as a filmmaker, Lebrun has taught film production and editing at the California Institute of the Arts. He has been the curator of numerous art exhibitions, and is the co- editor of IN THE MERIDIAN OF THE HEART, a 2001 book on his father, painter Rico Lebrun. He was for ten years (1987-1996) president of First Light Video Publishing, a production company and distributor of over 250 video titles in the field of media arts education, distributed to over half of US colleges and to educational institutions worldwide. Since 1996 he has been president of Night Fire Films, a documentary film production company. He was a founding Board Member and Treasurer of the non-profit Center for Visual Music (CVM) and is on the Advisory Board of the Chabot Space & Science Center’s MAYA SKIES project. Source: Night Fire Films, David Lebrun’s production company. Filmography: Metamorphosis (in progress) Breaking the Maya Code (2008) Maya Variations (Multimedia performance piece, 2007) Proteus (2003) Wind Over Water (1983) Sidereal Time (1981) Luminous Bodies (1979) Tanka (1976) The Hog Farm Movie (1970) Sanctus (1966) Tape Contents Tape 1: Pages 4 - 25 Interview date: October 30, 2009 Interviewer: Adam Hyman Cameraperson: Andrew Schuler Transcript Reviewer: David Lebrun, Ben Miller, Jon Irving Tape 2: Pages 26 - 47 Interview date: October 30, 2009 Interviewer: Adam Hyman Cameraperson: Andrew Schuler Transcript Reviewer: David Lebrun, Ben Miller, Jon Irving David Lebrun Oral History Transcript/Los Angeles Filmforum Page 2 of 145 Tape 3: Pages 48 - 70 Interview date: October 30, 2009 Interviewer: Adam Hyman Cameraperson: Andrew Schuler Transcript Reviewer: David Lebrun, Ben Miller, Jon Irving Tape 4: Pages 71 - 87 Interview date: January 23, 2010 Interviewer: Adam Hyman Cameraperson: Amy Halpern Transcript Reviewer: David Lebrun, Ben Miller Tape 5: Pages 88 - 108 Interview date: January 23, 2010 Interviewer: Adam Hyman Cameraperson: Amy Halpern Transcript Reviewer: David Lebrun, Ben Miller Tape 6: Pages 109 - 129 Interview date: January 23, 2010 Interviewer: Adam Hyman Cameraperson: Amy Halpern Transcript Reviewer: David Lebrun, Ben Miller Tape 7: Pages 130 - 145 Interview date: January 23, 2010 Interviewer: Adam Hyman Cameraperson: Amy Halpern Transcript Reviewer: David Lebrun, Ben Miller David Lebrun Oral History Transcript/Los Angeles Filmforum Page 3 of 145 TAPE 1: DAVID LEBRUN 00:00:09 ADAM HYMAN Today is October 30, 2009. Could you please start by saying and spelling your name for the transcriber? 00:00:22 DAVID LEBRUN David Lebrun, D-A-V-I-D L-E small B-R-U-N. 00:00:30 ADAM HYMAN Great. All right. Tell me, where were you born and who is in your family? 00:00:41 DAVID LEBRUN I was born in Los Angeles, and my mother came from an old California family from Pasadena and my birth father was a composer, Serge Hovey. My mother remarried when I was a very small child – when I was a baby to Rico Lebrun, who was a very well-known painter, very influential painter in California in the '40s and '50s, especially. I was later adopted by him, took his name. My earliest years were spent in what was then called the Baldwin Hills Village, now called the Village Green, which was a kind of experimental green space community in Baldwin Hills that was designed by my grandfather, who was a well-known Southern California architect, Reginald Johnson. 00:01:41 DAVID LEBRUN (CONTINUED) We had a couple of architects in the family. So we grew up in that space and lived there until I was seven, eight years old, when we moved to Mexico and I spent a couple of years living in Mexico as a child. But all during that period, being around my father and his work was a big influence on me later on. I didn't quite figure out how until much later. When I was a very little kid, my parents would give me paints and I was [a] very wild and free painter. They would set up huge pieces of poster paper in the backyard, butcher paper, unrolled butcher paper which was like three feet high and endlessly long. and I would do these very wild murals of things and they encouraged that a lot. David Lebrun Oral History Transcript/Los Angeles Filmforum Page 4 of 145 00:02:34 DAVID LEBRUN (CONTINUED) I remember one day there was a construction project in the neighborhood and I began to do all the construction machinery. It was very free. I remember, there's one story I just mentioned it to my mother and she said it was actually she, not my father, that at one point I was doing trees and I said, well, I need some brown to do the tree trunks. And she said, let me take you for a walk—I thought it was my dad but she said it was actually she that did this—and took me for a walk around the whole neighborhood, and we looked at the color of all the tree trunks and realized that brown would not be a good description of any of them. 00:03:07 DAVID LEBRUN (CONTINUED) I think it opened my eyes to color, you know, it was every possible kind of color that we're talking about. Then when I got into the first grade, somehow the influence of school made me start doing little rigid, very tiny, very constricted drawings. I remember doing rows of cabbages in a garden and rows of carrots, very detailed, and mountains with tiny, tiny, tiny detail, and all of the spontaneity went away. I was never able, really, to draw with a great pleasure after that. I remember my dad used to give me classes now and sort of try to get my hand freed up, but I was never able to really follow in his footsteps of drawing. He was a wonderful draftsman. 00:03:57 DAVID LEBRUN (CONTINUED) I did hang around his studio a lot. I remember, as a small boy, I would go up in the loft he had and climb up and then look down on the paintings of his. Like, at the time, 1950, when I was first can remember this, he was doing a big show at the L.A. County Museum, a big cycle of paintings related to Crucifixion, and he was doing a huge triptych that he could only do on the floor and then climb up above and have his assistants move pieces of collage paper around. So, we’d climb up in that attic. He would also do things with me and paintings for me. He would paint a tiger and then put a red fluorescent eye on it and hide it in the house, turn all the lights off and we'd go hunting for the tiger with flashlights. 00:04:42 DAVID LEBRUN (CONTINUED) They would do wonderful, wonderful things like that. One of the memories I have as a kid is them waking me up at 4:00 in the morning. It was pitch black and they woke me up and said, put your clothes on, we're going somewhere. Didn't tell me where. And we got in the car, I was sleepy and bewildered and excited, and we drove down to this place, which I had no idea where it was, parked the car, and there were a few other cars parked there.