Automorphosis

Director: Harrod Blank
Category: Popular Culture
Total Running Time: 78 min.
Release Date: 2010
Website: http://www.automorphosis.com

Synopsis

Automorphosis looks into the minds and hearts of a delightful collection of eccentrics, visionaries and just plain folks who have transformed their autos into artworks.

On a humorous and touching journey, we discover what drives the creative process for these unconventional characters. And in the end, we find that an art car has the power to change us -- to alter our view of our increasingly homogeneous world.

Subjects featured include: Harrod Blank and his Camera Van; world-renowned spoon-bender Uri Geller and his fork-and-spoon-covered “Peace Car”; Howard Davis’s “Telephone Car,” an obsession-driven telephone collection; and Leonard Knight, a religious folk artist who has painted his vehicles as well as most of an entire mountain in the desert as a testament to his faith.

Weaving his own tale amidst the others, Blank, as narrator, is the glue that binds these vibrant portraits.

This film looks at the quirky American sub-culture of “outsider,” or folk, artists who transform an iconic American conceit—the car and the road—into unique modes of both expression and transportation.

Trailer

About the Filmmaker

Photo by Alicia Pena

HARROD BLANK, the son of internationally renowned filmmaker Les Blank, earned a bachelor’s degree in theater arts/film from University of California at Santa Cruz. His first film, Wild Wheels, drew on his passion for “art cars,” the phenomenon of transforming one’s car into a spectacular work of art. The film aired on PBS in 1993. Blank subsequently a companion book, also called Wild Wheels, that featured his photography; the book was named “Best Book for Young Adults” by the American Library Association. Blank produced a sequel to Wild Wheels—Driving the Dream, which aired on National Geographic Explorer in 1997. A short version of the film was broadcast on TBS' National Geographic Explorer. Blank published a second book, Art Cars: The Cars, the Artists, the Obsession, the Craft in 2002, and later curated an exhibit of art cars for the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. Blank is currently in production on Burning Man: The Movie, about the radical arts festival, and is cinematographer on When I Come Home, a documentary on homeless veterans.