My friend Paul Bush, who has died aged 67 in a road traffic accident, was an experimental film-maker and film teacher. His film-making work focused on replacement animation, in which objects are replaced between frames, lending a magical instability to the physical world.
Paul’s first short film, Furniture Poetry, replaced pieces of furniture and fruit, but later he went on to replace actors, with his films Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Pas de Deux de Deux swapping out two pairs of protagonists between each frame of film, while keeping the action continuous.
His replacement objects also included insects and, in his film Ride (2018), real motorbikes, from a huge historical collection in Portugal. His last film, Orgiastic Hyper-Plastic (2020), used a vast collection of plastic objects foraged from beaches and roadsides to make a stunning elegy to humanity’s love affair with the material. He also created longer-form mixed-media films, including The Rumour of True Things (1996) and Babeldom (2012).
Paul was born in London, to Geoffrey Bush, a composer of classical music, and Julie (nee McKenna), a physiotherapist. He grew up in Golders Green, north London, and after attending University College school in Hampstead studied fine art at the Central School of Art and Design and then Goldsmiths, University of London, before teaching himself film-making at the London Film Makers’ Co-op and the Chapter Film workshop in Cardiff.
Having experimented briefly with animation as a student, he returned to the medium in the 1990s, with the encouragement and support of Channel 4’s then commissioning editor for animation, Clare Kitson, and aided by the Arts Council of England’s funding for innovative work. This allowed him to start producing films that were laborious in their making process but compelling and seductive to the viewer. Paul’s enduring excitement about the mechanisms of film-making and perception translated into playful explorations of the possibilities for frame-by-frame production.
As his films did not generate much in the way of money, Paul made a living by teaching all over the world, including at the National Film and Television School in the UK, the Lucerne School of Art and Design in Switzerland, Harvard University and the International School of Film and TV in Cuba. Possessed of a razor-sharp wit, he was a kind and generous teacher. His ex-students populate the world of experimental film-making, and his films and his teaching have made a lasting impact in the world of innovative visual culture.
Paul is survived by his partner, Lana Nikolič, whom he met in 2018, and two children, Lewis and Eva, from his marriage to Jane Wilkinson, which ended in divorce in 2007.