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Absolut Panushka, Jan-Apr 1997.
Oskar Goes Hollywood
Dazzled by the dynamic art deco architecture of new buildings in New York and Hollywood, Fischinger designed a thrilling color short, full of concentric curves, exploding diamonds and dramatic angles. Unfortunately Paramount wanted to print the film in black-and-white, because the feature they wanted to used it in, Big Broadcast of 1937, was not in color. Fischinger quit, and his abstract segment (renamed Allegretto) was not seen until 1943, when he was able to buy it back from Paramount with a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. Fischinger fared better at MGM. He produced An Optical Poem, which played in theaters during 1938 and 1939 as a short with prestige features. But since the film belonged to MGM, he received no royalties and earned only a few hundred dollars during the months he was actually animating. Unable to afford his own studio as he had in Berlin, Fischinger went to New York, hoping for a commission for the World's Fair. He had two one-man shows of his paintings, and met Mary Ellen Bute and the Baroness Hilla von Rebay, Curator of the Guggenheim Foundation and Museum. But no commission materialized. Because he could not really support his family, he returned to Hollywood and took a job at Disney on Fantasia. He animated the opening Bach "Toccata and Fugue" sequence for that film, but all his designs were altered, both in color and form (mostly so that everything looked like something representational). Again, Fischinger quit in disgust. Orson Welles hired him to work on a feature; and although that film was never finished, it allowed Fischinger to use the time and space to work on his own film Radio Dynamics. Meanwhile when war broke out, Fischinger was officially labeled an "enemy alien" and could not work in any media job. It was then that his earlier contact with the Baroness Rebay paid off. She offered him a series of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation to produce An American March, Allegretto and a film synchronized to Bach's "Brandenburg Concerto No. 3." Since Fischinger used much of the money from these grants to support his family of five children (Alexander Laszlo quipped to Moholy-Nagy, "Our old friend Fischinger isn't doing too well in Hollywood: he's managed to make more babies than films."), he had to work out a cheap way to finish the Bach film. He finally decided to paint the images in oils on canvas and to record each brush stroke with a single frame of movie film -- thus costing only the price of paint and canvas (which he already had) and the film stock. The resulting film, Motion Painting No. 1, was greeted as a brilliant masterpiece by everyone except Hilla Rebay, who never offered Fischinger another grant. Motion Painting received the Grand Prize at the Brussels Experimental Film Festival in 1949. But despite prizes and acclaim, and many dozens of proposals and applications, Fischinger never received funding for a further film from any source. Although he painted several hundred more canvases during the last 20 years of his life, Motion Painting remains his last film, except for a few commercials he made for TV in the early 1950s. Moritz, William. "History of Experimental Animation." Website. Absolut Panushka, curated by Christine Panushka. (Jan-Apr 1997). |
