Op Hop - Hop Op
1966 · 3m · Canada
Directed by Pierre Hébert
Genres: animation, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal
Twenty-four hand-scratched abstract images continually arrange and rearrange on screen, creating an experimental pattern of sound and image with its own rhythm for eye and ear.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Hand-scratched abstraction in 1966 feels like the safe answer now, but Hébert's refusal to let a single image settle—that constant rearrangement—is actually hostile to meaning-making in a way that should bother formalists more than it does.
Hébert's intervention in the animation lineage is precise and historically vital: he strips away narrative and character to isolate the relationship between mark-making, rhythm, and sound as co-equal compositional elements—a gesture that echoes Len Lye while charting its own rigorous path.
The decision to let scratches *move*—to make the hand's act of destruction on film stock itself the performance—transforms what could be static pattern-play into something temporally alive and almost violent in its directness.