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Violence Sonata, simulcast at WGBH, Boston, MA, Channels 2 and 44, 12 January 1970

Violence Sonata is Stan VanDerBeek’s second foray into producing animation works using the resources of the television studio. His fist attempt was Panels of the Walls of the World, produced at CBS in 1963 using newsreel footage from the studio’s archive. Both of these works are the only animation ‘films’ ever produced in a television studio using its high end, broadcast quality technology. VanDerBeek referred to the television studio as the largest optical bench in the world, and this work demonstrates that view to a remarkable degree (VanDerBeek, 1965). Going much further than his CBS effort both conceptually and technologically, Violence Sonata should be understood in the tradition of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art although, untraditionally, he conceived of art as a hybrid of experimental film and popular mass media. He conceived it as part theater, part TV, part expanded cinema, part journalism. In aesthetic and political terms, however, he considered it, in the spirit of Dada, the first and only work of anti-TV. The studio stage set included three projection screens and several TV monitors, sculpture props and live actors performing mock and absurdist acts of violence. The audience of 300 included Black Panthers, White Supremacists, art luminaries and critics, ‘anyone with a bone to pick’ as Fred Barzyk has put it (see his contribution to the statements section, and Bartlett’s essay for a full description of Violence