Oskar Fischinger Biography
L’art du Mouvement 1919-1996, 1996.
Oskar Fischinger Biography
Dr. William Moritz
Oskar Fischinger is correctly celebrated as the master of Visual Music, for it would be hard to imagine a more perfect visual equivalent of auditory music than his mature films, such as Allegretto, in which subtly modulated colors, intricately choreographed forms, rhythmic background patterns, and general fluid dynamics rival the structure and action of their musical accompaniment. One also finds a satisfying variety in his compositions, and an abstract nuanced complexity that gives them the sort of re-play value that we expect from music. While the color compositions derive part of this freshness and vigor from changes of technique — the drawings of Circles vs. models of Composition in Blue vs. paper cut-outs of An Optical Poem — we can also feel how carefully he varied the aesthetic ambience even in the serial compositions of the Studies, choosing aerodynamic shapes and movements in Study No. 6, hard-edged geometrics in stark linear perspective for Study No. 7, afterimages in Study No. 10, etc. The perfect musicality of these films, however, should not obscure the fact that Fischinger never intended to “illustrate” music. He produced his first tightly-synchronized film only in 1929, as an advertisement for a recording — but its extravagant success convinced Fischinger that viewers could comprehend abstract images more easily if they experienced an analogous auditory parallel. Even in the middle of his 17 Studies he composed the intentionally silent Love Games, in which the trajectories of small figures shape the projector beam and lead the spectator’s gaze in a most satisfying choreography that culminates in a harmonic mandala.
His first films of the early 1920s are among his most radical, perhaps because he felt challenged to create something quite different from the romantic choreography of small figures in the films of the 13-year-older Ruttmann or the static development of graphic intricacies in the work of the 20-year-older Eggeling. Tibetan Buddhism also influenced Fischinger toward meditative mandala structures. In Wax Experiments and Spirals Fischinger designed visual patterns of extreme complexity which often move in hypnotic cycles, yet he interrupts with radical editing of single frames of contrasting imagery. Similar virtuosity in editing characterizes R-1 a Form-Play, a spectacular abstract multiple-projection show (using 3 and 5 film projectors, and slides) which he performed between 1925 and 1927. Even when viewing the panels as separate films, one is struck by their dynamic vigor, and the fresh inventiveness of the permutations, in the case of the side panels (“Orgelstäbe” or organ pipes) by the many variations on the same basic material, and in the case of the center panel (“Regenbogen” or arc-en-ciel) by the imaginative and sensitive transitions between different materials, such as a lissajous-curve rendered in wax, liquid and drawn line. His representational cartoon Spiritual Constructions shows the same radical consciousness and experimental techniques as his abstract films: the slender tale of two drunks who argue and stagger home becomes an epic voyage of warping shapes and thwarted perceptions, rendered again with single-frame editing and scratching directly on film frames — devices that would only re-emerge thirty years later in the films of Stan Brakhage. Similarly Fischinger’s Walking from Munich to Berlin, recorded in single-frame exposures, prefigures the diary films two generations later.
In 1934, when the Nazis had denied him permits to make other abstract films, he designed a silent loop film, Squares, and a decade later, even though the Guggenheim Foundation insisted that he make a film synchronized to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, he secretly composed another film without sound in order to affirm the integrity of his non-objective imagery — the masterpiece Radio Dynamics which breathes slow pulsating rhythms and astonishing single-frame flickers of painterly images in an evocation of the yogic meditation process as well as the cosmic relativity of Einstein and Heisenberg.
Although the Guggenheim Foundation specifically required a cel animation film, Fischinger made his Bach film as a documentation of the act of painting, taking a single frame each time he made a brush stroke — and his multi-layered style merely parallels the structure of the Bach music without any tight synchronization. Although he never again received funding for a film, the breathtaking Motion Painting won the Grand Prix at the Brussels International Experimental Film Competition 1949, and possibly inspired Clouzot’s Le mystère Picasso.
Fischinger’s experiments with Ornament Sound also occupy a distinguished place in the tradition of synthetic drawn soundtracks, for only Fischinger pursued the notion that the abstract shape of the sound image would produce fresh, unexpected sounds: new music rather than imitations of conventional music. This notion also arose from Fischinger’s spiritual and scientific researches, and it produced a decisive impact on the works of composers Edgard Varèse and John Cage, who met him in California.
Moritz, William. “Jordan Belson.” L’art du Mouvement 1919-1996. Ed. Jean-Michel Bouhours, Cinéma du Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1996, 154-158, 317.