Kinetica 1 Catalogue

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Kinetica 1 Catalog

William Moritz

ABSTRACTION / ANIMATION / MUSIC

A GLIMPSE OF THE CENTURY OF VISUAL MUSIC
Some rare and some well-known films from The iota Center
Laemmle Monica 4-Plex, Santa Monica, CA
August 14, 1999

 A Reconstruction of Father Castel’s Ocular Harpsichord, William Moritz, 1 min.
Loie Fuller Dances, 2 min.
MobilColor Projections, Charles Dockum, 6 min.
In the Night, Walter Ruttmann, 6 min.
Furies, Sara Petty, 3 min.
Film No. 11, Harry Smith, 2 min.
The Vortex Concerts: High Voltage, James Whitney, 3 min.
Allures, Jordan Belson, 8 min
Come Closer, Hy Hirsh, 6 min.
Free Radicals, Len Lye, 6 min.
Celery Stalks at Midnight, John Whitney, 3 min.
Stars and Stripes, Norman McLaren, 3 min.
Silence, Jules Engel, 3 min.
3/78 (Objects and Transformations), Larry Cuba, 8 min.
Beethoven Machinery, David Brody Impressions in the Upper Atmosphere, Jose Antonio   Sistiaga, 7 min.
Algorithms, Baerbel Neubauer, 3 min.
Bubbles, Karel Dodal Study No. 6, Oskar Fischinger, 2 min.
Optical Poem, Oskar Fischinger, 6 min.

A Reconstruction of Father Castel’s Ocular Harpsichord, William Moritz (1985)
First a little reminder that the dream of a visual music flourished for several centuries before our own. Though most of the attempts to build instrumentation that would project colored light in a flowing dynamic comparable to the rhythms and harmonies of auditory music have been lost, Jesuit Father Castel left detailed descriptions of his Clavecin Oculair, which he played in Paris to popular acclaim (and glowing written accounts by Diderot, Telemann and others), for about 20 years, from the 1730s to the 1750s. Over a conventional harpsichord, he built a 4-foot square frame containing a grid of 60 glass windows, each with a different color in a rainbow array, and each covered by a little curtain, which could be lifted by a system of ropes and pulleys attached to the keys of the harpsichord. Each time one played a musical note a flash of its corresponding color would appear on the screen, thanks to hundreds of candles burning on the shelves behind the windows. This little animation attempts to show how such an Ocular Harpsichord display would have looked (synchronized to a music by Telemann, who did in fact write special pieces to be played on the Ocular Harpsichord) – including the “flaw” which Castel himself acknowledged – that during fast passages, the clumsy pulley-curtain mechanisms tended to lag behind the actual flow of the sound.

Loie Fuller Dances (ca. 1905)
The American Loie Fuller, a sensational performer through the 1920s, created true color-music spectacles rather than traditional dance choreography. This brief fragment of film, partially hand-tinted, can hardly give a correct impression of Loie’s art. She “danced” on a six-foot high glass platform in the middle of a black stage so that she appeared to be floating in space. 10 to 15 men with mobile spotlights were carefiilly rehearsed to cast different colored lights above and beneath her swirling veils, from all sides, changing color to express elements in the musical accompaniment. Her body was rarely seen, only a play of flowing colors, supple shapes appearing and disappearing from the darkness…

MobilColor Projections, Charles Dockum (1966)
The early electric era was a golden age for artists who could create “color organs,” non-cinematic instruments to project colors in music patterns. The British A. Wallace Rimington wrote a book COLOUR MUSIC describing his theories and experiments, and a version of his color organ was used to create color flows at the premiere of Scriabin’s Prometheus symphony. The Australian Alexander Burnett, the Danish Thomas Wilfred (who coined the word Lumia to describe his color light phenomena), the American pianist Mary Hallock Greenewalt whose color-instrument was called a Sarabet, the Austrian Count VietinghofT-Scheel’s Chromatophon, the Hungarian Alexander Laszlo’s Color-Light-Music and many others delighted audiences internationally. Unfortunately, no filmed record survives of any of these visual music instruments, largely because of the difficulties in capturing nuances of lights and colors on film. Charles Dockum made the first model of his MobilColor Projector in the 1930s in Arizona, but subsequently created more complex instruments for the Guggenheim Museum (1952) and to project in his own studio in Altadena, California. This record of three of his pieces, filmed in 1966, gives a good impression of the visual variety available from the instrument, but still cannot convey all of the subtle magic of intense colors burning in blackness that one experiences when the color organ itself is playing in a dark space.

In the Night, Walter Ruttmann (1931)
Ruttmann’s Light-Play Opus I appeared in regular cinemas in April 1921€” the first abstract visual-music film to do so. He created three more “Absolute Films” before he became involved in live-action films such as the famous documentary Berlin, Symphony of the City. He also pioneered sound synchronization in his feature Melody of the World, and this musical short, in which his third wife Nina Hamson plays Schumann’s piano piece while Ruttmann brilliantly cuts appropriate night-time shots of wind, water and woods in perfect rhythmic correspondence.

Furies, Sara Petty (1977)
Sara Petty’s pastel drawings of the secret metamorphoses of cats again provide perfect parallels to the Ned Rorem music. A later Petty film, Preludes in Magical Time, uses more pure abstract forms to correspond with absolute Bach music.

Film No. 11, Harry Smith (1958)
After painting directly on the film surface the pure abstractions of his early films, Smith’s alchemical explorations led him to collage of sacred symbols (including many secular objects standing in for hieratic practices), in this case synchronized with Thelonius Monk.

The Vortex Concerts: High Voltage by James Whitney (1957)
Allures by Jordan Belson (1961)
The Vortex Concerts, held at San Francisco’s Morrison Planetarium from 1957 until 1959 (and also at the Brussels World Fair in 1958), were the prototype for later “Light Shows.” Henry Jacobs (whose voice you hear introducing High Voltage) arranged for stereo electronic music from around the world while Jordan Belson created special visual effects with non-cinematic machinery as well as screening abstract film images (such as James Whitney’s for the Pierre Henry piece) in synchronization with the “new music.” Allures began with music by Pierre Schaeffer in the Vortex concerts, but since he did not have the rights to use the Schaeffer music on a film copy, Belson composed his own score and revised the visuals as well after the Vortex was over, in the early 1960s.

Come Closer, Hy Hirsh (1953)
Footage by Hirsh also appeared in Vortex Concerts. Come Closer originally screened in stereo (with special glasses) during the 3-D craze of the early 1950s. The superb depth effects often play with “impossible” M. C. Escher illusions. Hirsh pioneered the “new technology” oscilloscope patterns as source material for his shapes and movements -coincidentally echoing the carnival atmosphere of his Caribbean soundtrack.

Free Radicals, Len Lye (1957)
New Zealander Lye began making films in England in the 1920s, and pioneered painting and stenciling directly on the film surface in the early 1930s. After he moved to the U.S. during World War II, he spent increasingly more time on his sounding sculptures than on filmmaking, but his last few films, like the breathtaking Free Radicals (scratched directly on black leader) are still masterpieces.

Celery Stalks at Midnight, John Whitney (1952)
Better known for his later computer graphics, John here visualizes jazz using an “oil-wipe” which allowed him to draw in real time. Hy Hirsh’s Chasse des Touches uses a similar technique.

Stars and Stripes, Norman McLaren (1940)
Best known for his National Film Board of Canada masterpieces (Begone Dull Care, Neighbors, Synchromy. Mosaic, etc.), the Scottish McLaren made this film in New York, just after emigrating from wartime England, before he went to Canada, to prove his allegiance to his new home (as Oskar Fischinger did with his American March), especially to the Baroness Hilla Rebay of the Guggenheim Foundation who gave grants to many abstract film artists. The music here, by the way, is not Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes” (Fischinger in fact used that for his film). Does anyone know what march it really is?

Silence, Jules Engel (1968)
This subtle combination of computer graphics and text is, in fact, consciously silent…
3/78 (Objects and Transformations), Larry Cuba (1978)
An exquisite use of the delicacy possible with irregular configurations, perfectly matched by the eccentricity of the Japanese flute music.

3/78 (Objects and Transformations), Larry Cuba (1978)
An exquisite use of the delicacy possible with irregular configurations, perfectly matched by the eccentricity of the Japanese flute music.

Beethoven Machinery, David Brody (1990)
Another aspect of computer graphics, creating a structure that visualizes all aspects of a Beethoven string quartet.

Impressions in the Upper Atmosphere, Jose Antonio Sistiaga (1989)
The Basque painter Sistiaga has also made a feature-length painted-directly-on-film abstract animation, in Cinemascope. Impressions, with its soft sounds of wind, recalls the steep mountaintops of the Basque country. It ends with an “irintzi”, a traditional Basque yodel which will carry from one peak to another to identify the whereabouts of shepherds – but it is also dedicated to artists who died tragically in madness: Van Gogh, the Basque sculptor Oteiza, Nijinsky – so the irintzi also takes on the voice of falling despair…

Algorithms, Baerbel Neubauer (1997)
Austrian Neubauer has made a dozen direct films, echoing Len Lye in her scope of techniques, drawing, painting, stenciling, scratching and flash-exposing objects laid on the filmstrip. Algorithms is particularly distinguished by its complexity, with four or five layers of simultaneous action. Neubauer, almost uniquely among abstract filmmakers, composes and performs the music to her own films – so they are truly visual/music.

Bubbles, Karel Dodal (1936)
This Czechoslovakian soap commercial reminds us that many visual music artists have had to support themselves with commercial work (Oskar Fischinger and the Alexeieff/Parker team spring particularly to mind).

Study No. 6 (1931) and Optical Poem (1937) by Oskar Fischinger
These two films chart contrasting aspects of the great Visual Music master: the stark simplicity of the loose charcoal sketches, full of whimsy and supple sensuality (as well as cosmic symbols), as opposed to the grand color images laid out in careful spectrums like key signatures, rich in depth effects and dazzling flickers (and cosmic allusions). John Cage worked as an assistant on Optical Poem, helping to move the hundreds of paper cutouts suspended on threads from bars nailed to the rafters – each one to be moved slightly, then steadied to stillness with a feather on a broomstick before the next exposure.

The iota Center is a non-profit arts center for abstraction in the animated arts including film animation, video synthesis, computer graphics, and live performance on visual music instruments. For more information, please visit our website at www.iotacenter.org or call 310-842-8704

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