Thanks to the Criterion Channel, the best streaming service out of all ~300 of them, I was introduced to the late animator Suzan Pitt over the weekend. Pitt's collection of animated short films are celestial, sensual fever dreams that sometimes took her and her collaborators four to five years to complete. Why so long? According to Pitt, every single second in her films required 12 different paintings. Each of them are good enough to be exhibited on their own.

Her most famous film, the 20-minute Asparagus, is required viewing. Here's a trailer:

Many viewers were originally introduced to Pitt's work alongside David Lynch's Eraserhead. Asparagus screened with it on the midnight movie circuit for two years. Here's what Haden Guest had to say about Pitt's similarities with Lynch, for Criterion:

Although Asparagus shares many uncanny elements with Lynch’s cinema—and even anticipates things to come in his oeuvre with heavy velvet curtains hiding alternate dimensions, a fleeting figure of a cowboy, and mysteriously beckoning lights—Pitt avoids the angst of his films.

[…]

In stark contrast to the oozing, shameful, queasy sexuality in Eraserhead, Pitt’s boldly frank and almost joyous display of the woman’s body leads to a climax in which the woman opens her Pandora’s carpetbag to release a strange flock of winged creatures and effulgent objects, letting loose her imagination in a gesture that lyrically affirms the artist’s generous, giving role. The final, now-iconic image of the woman fellating the asparagus goes further still by perversely and playfully offering her assertive act as transformative and creative, with the vegetable stalk turning into a cascading waterfall, an asphalt ribbon, a passage into another realm.

A woman fellating an asparagus? It's a funny, bizarre sequence, and while I'm not sure this is what Pitt was referencing, Stranger writer Rich Smith told me that "an old girlfriend" of his said "getting on your hands and knees and biting the tip off the first crop of spring asparagus is an old Michigan tradition." Apparently she and her mom would do it every spring. "I guess it’s supposed to ensure a good crop," Rich said. The more you know!

Pitt passed away over the summer at the age of 75 from pancreatic cancer. Seven of her films are currently screening on the Criterion Channel accompanied by the documentary Suzan Pitt: Persistence of Vision. If you aren't subscribed to the channel, you can start a 14-day free trial here.

Some more trailers: