Oskar’s Hand
Several years ago I spent three days in Elfriede Fischinger’s home in Long Beach, CA doing background research for an exhibition and film series that came to be called First Light in 1998. With almost no interruptions I was able to sift through the thousands of slides, paintings, books and papers that were stored in the Fischinger home. Elfriede was my guide as I looked at materials dating back to the 1920’s.
On the second night, after we pried open a jammed metal filing cabinet, we devoted nearly three hours to exploring her photograph collection. Images from her childhood, production stills from the making of Oskar’s films, and frame enlargements from the films themselves. Near the end of the evening, as the cool night wind blew in from the park two blocks away, I spotted a photograph of Oskar’s hand atop a piece of his animation art. Immediately I put it aside as an image I wanted to copy. Elfriede explained that when a film sequence went awry, Oskar would lay his hand on the animation plane as a marker denoting a mistake. It was an economical, effective way to signal an error.
For myself the image came to take on additional meanings. It is a singular image by Fischinger in that we see the normal form of a human hand in a universe otherwise dominated by abstract points of light, or by exaggerated caricatures from the 1920’s. Oskar’s hand bears other messages too. It suggests the many lost or disposed-of sequences from his filmmaking, and more poignant, the films he never made. Fischinger endured for most of his life the hostility or indifference of the commercial film industry, not to mention the deep anger and hatred of the Nazis in Germany.
Finally, this artist’s hand evokes Fischinger’s second career, as a painter. In the early 1940’s Fischinger, rebuffed by the Hollywood studios, translated the imagery that he could not record on motion picture film into the static form of oil paintings. But ever the filmmaker, he could not restrain his hand from imbuing his pictures with the tensions and potential of movement. Today his paintings speak to us on their own terms, of abstract forms in an arrested state, but also of the moving pictures Oskar wished to make.