Seder-Masochism
About Seder-Masochism
The film follows a Passover Seder through the Book of Exodus. Moses, Aharon, the Angel of Death, Jesus, and a Hebrew God voiced by Nina Paley's father tell the plagues, the Red Sea, and the march into the promised land. A Great Mother goddess is pushed aside as that story takes over.
Cast & crew
More about Seder-Masochism
Nina Paley wrote, directed, produced, and animated it. It opened at the Annecy festival on 11 June 2018. It runs 78 minutes. She recorded her father, Hiram Paley, in 2011. He died in 2012. His voice is the deity. Greg Sextro designed the sound. With Theodore Gray she built an embroidery-animation method, used for the Chad Gadya scene, at PaleGray Labs.
Themes
Technique
One scene, Chad Gadya, is animated from embroidery, a process Paley and Theodore Gray called embroidermation.
Music
The track is built from existing records, among them Andy Williams's This Land Is Mine (1962), Louis Armstrong's Go Down Moses, the Pointer Sisters' You Gotta Believe, and Moishe Oysher's Chad Gadya. Greg Sextro designed the sound.
Preservation
Paley put the master files in the public domain on 24 January 2019. The Wikimedia copy is an audio-muted file. The Internet Archive copy is the release.
Notes
- Barry Gray speaks Jesus. Paley herself is the sacrificial goat.
- She dedicated the picture to the public domain on 24 January 2019 under a CC0 license. The music stays under its own copyrights.
- It is her second feature, after Sita Sings the Blues (2008).
- It won the Audience Award at the ANIMATOR festival in Poland.
Awards
- Audience Award, ANIMATOR festival, Poland
Scenes
- Moses and Aharon lead the people after the Red Sea.
- The Chad Gadya number is stitched animation.
Influenced by
- Book of Exodus
Also available
- Internet Archive (sedermasochism)
- Wikimedia Commons (Seder-Masochism (2018) by Nina Paley (audio muted).webm)
