Oskar Fischinger
Oskar Fischinger
Oskar Fischinger is one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, embracing the abstraction the became the major art movement of that century, and exploring the new technology of the cinema to open abstract painting into a new Visual Music that performs in liquid time. If he is less well known than some of the other major artists, it is precisely because he was buffeted about by the wars, Nazism, the communist witch-hunt and other phenomena of his century.
— Dr. William Moritz, 2003
Oskar Fischinger: Who
- Wilhelm Oskar Fischinger
- Born: June 22, 1900, in Gelnhausen, Germany
- Died: January 31, 1967, in Los Angeles
- Brother Hans Fischinger was a filmmaker
Oskar Fischinger: What
- Abstract Animator
- Filmmaker
- Painter
- Inventor
Oskar Fischinger: When and Where
- Munich (1921 – 1927)
- Berlin (1927 – 1936)
- Hollywood (1936 – 1967)
Early Life
- Dabbled in painting
- Played the violin (Music was his first love)
- Organ maker's apprentice
- Draughtsman at an architecture firm
- Attended trade school and received a degree in engineering in Frankfurt
Early Inspiration: Walther Ruttman
Walther Ruttman’s Lichtspiel Opus 1 was the first abstract film to receive public attention.
Other Sources of Inspiration
- Kandinsky
- Klee
- Albers
- The Bauhaus
- Spiritualism, mysticism, Buddhism
The “Wax Machine”
- Fischinger consciously avoided painting and drawing his first abstract films so as not to copy Ruttman.
- He instead invented a machine that could slice of thin pieces of a wax object and take a picture to create abstract animated forms.
- It wasn't terribly successful because the wax melted under the lights for the camera.
Multiprojector Works: R-1
Primarily consists of serial rearrangements of an alignment of "staffs," a row of closely-parallel vertical bars, each of which can move up or down freely, thus creating patterns of motion across the screen — undulating waves, diagonal inclines …
Collaborations with Alexander László
The first known simultaneous performance of abstract film, color organ light projections, and music was that of Hungarian composer Alexander László and Oskar Fischinger, in Munich in March 1926.
Beginning in 1925, László performed "Farblichtmusik" concerts with his color-light piano, colored spotlights, and four slide projectors, with music varying from his own compositions to Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Scriabin
Collaborations with Alexander László
Fischinger coined the term Raumlichtmusik: Space, Light, Music
“Of this Art everything is new and yet ancient in its laws and forms. Plastic - Dance - Painting - Music become one. The Master of the new Art forms poetical work in four dimensions … Cinema was its beginning … Raumlichtmusik will be its completion.”
Spiritual Constructions (1927)
- Link to Google Video
- Silhouette animation
- Simple situation: two drunk men get into fight at a bar and stumble home to bed
- Fischinger employs "shock tactics" to illustrated their disorientation and hallucinations
- Actually scratched the film at points for dramatic effect
- Surrealism inspired by dreams
Move to Berlin
- Financial troubles forced him to move from Frankfurt
- He walked the 350 miles, taking stills that he eventually turned into a film
Woman in the Moon (1929)
Fischinger's income stabilized when he was hired to do the special effects for the Fritz Lang film. He worked with German rocket scientists, using models and blow torches.
Fischinger’s Studien
Several short studies, usually set to music, were popular in art circles as well as with psychologists and those interested in synaethesia.
“He was going in a completely different direction than any other animator at the time. He was really exploring abstract patterns, but with a purpose to them — pioneering what technically is the music video.”
— Book designer Chip Kidd
The Relationship Between Form and Sound
“Everything in the world has a spirit which is released by its sound.”
[His wife] Elfriede claimed that she inspired Oskar's thoughts … when he was lying down in a darkened room and she dropped a key in the adjacent room; he recognized the sound as that specifically of a key … so might the form of the key correspond to a distinctive sound?
Advertising
Fischinger developed a complicated stop-motion technique to show the cigarettes played sports, capitalizing on the Olympic fever in Berlin.
… he got his revenge on the Nazis in films like Muratti; besides being a brilliant work of art, with its goose-stepping cigarettes it's also a devastating satire on the kind of fascist groupthink at which the Nazis excelled.
Komposition in Blau (1935)
Komposition in Blau (1935)
Nazi Censorship
It took elaborate scheming to get Komposition in Blau even approved in Germany under Goebble's Reichsfilmkammer, but no distributor would pick it up.
With the help of Ernst Lubitsch and Paramount Pictures, Fischinger and his family moved to Hollywood.
Allegretto (1943)
The 1936 color short Allegretto was originally made as an insert for a Paramount feature, The Big Broadcast of 1937, but the studio wanted to print it in black-and-white to fit the film and Fischinger refused. Eventually he bought back the rights to it. Again it's hard to believe this film — with its dizzying concentric circles moving in and out of each other, its bold, beautiful colors, and wild angles — was made more than six decades ago.
Disney and Fantasia
“You should give something that the audience will recognize. I don’t think the average audience will fully appreciate the abstract; but I may be all wrong …”
Fischinger was furious when his abstract shapes were turned into half-seen violin bows and stylized mountain peaks for Fantasia. For his part, Walt Disney was uncomfortable with Fischinger's often uncompromising avant-garde vision. (NPR)
The Guggenheim’s 80th Birthday
Radio Dynamics (1942)
Silent film, to emphasize the integrity of the forms themselves.
Motion Painting No. 1 (1947)
The Lumigraph
Fischinger patented his color organ, the Lumigraph, in 1950. He hoped for commercial backing, but found none. After a speaker fell on his head while performing one night, he stopped public performances because of his superstitious tendencies.
Significance
“When I was 19 years old I had to talk about a certain work by William Shakespeare in our literary club. In preparing for this speech, I began to analyze the work in a graphic way. On large sheets of drawing paper, along a horizontal lone, I put down all the feelings and happenings, scene after scene, in graphic lines and curves. The lines and curves showed the dramatic development of the whole work, and the emotional moods, quite clearly.”
References
- Moritz, William, Optical Poetry
- Leslie, Esther, Where Abstraction and Comics Collide, Tate.org.uk, accessed February 5th, 2007
- Oskar Fischinger, FilmPortal.de, accessed Feburary 5th, 2007
- Keefer, Cindy, C Keefer - Space Light Art excerpt, Center for Visual Music, accessed February 5th, 2007
- Fischinger Archive, OskarFischinger.org, accessed February 5th, 2007
- Morris, Gary, Animator Oskar Fischinger, Bright Lights Film.com, accessed February 5th, 2007
- Oskar Fischinger, Wikipedia.org, accessed February 5th, 2007
- Oskar Fischinger's Avant-garde Animation, NPR.org, accessed February 5th, 2007
