Young Oskar

Absolut Panushka, Jan-Apr 1997.

Young Oskar

In the spring of 1921, when Walter Ruttmann was rehearsing his Opus Nr. 1 with the music at a theater in Frankfurt, the performing arts critic Dr. Bernhard Diebold brought along a young man, Oskar Fischinger, who had studied music and graphic arts, but wanted to make some kind of synthesis. Fischinger had been drawing out graphic charts of the emotional dynamics of various plays, which Diebold insisted were abstract art works in their own right. When they saw Ruttmann's abstract film, they both knew immediately that the cinema was the art form of the future.

Fischinger immediately began experimenting with animation techniques that would be completely different from Ruttmann's painterly images. He tried making three-dimensional models of geometric shapes out of wax, which could be modified either by re-modeling the shape between exposures, or substituting a sequence of similar shapes (getting larger or smaller, for example) for each shot. He also experimented with filming the fluid dynamics of different liquids swirling together.

One day when Fischinger's sister was cleaning his room, she left the wax models on the window sill, and the sun melted them. As Fischinger tried to scrape the wax off the sill, he became fascinated with the different patterns that emerged each time he cut some away -- fluid patterns not unlike his liquids. He quickly began to devise a machine that would slice very thin layers from a prepared block of wax, with a camera synchronized to take one frame of the remaining surface of the block. Any kind of image could be built into the wax block -- a circle getting smaller would be a simple cone, for example.

Fischinger moved to Munich to take advantage of the film industry there, and ended up supporting himself by making conventional cartoon shorts for Louis Seel's Munich Album series. But he continued his abstract experiments, developing a modular imagery with parallel bars (cutouts from card-board) that could be easily moved up and down to create wave patterns, which he called "Orgelstabe" or Organ-rods (Fischinger had once worked for a man who built organs).

At first Fischinger did not have much success with his eccentric animation films. But in 1926 he collaborated on a project with the Hungarian composer Alexander Laszlo, who wanted dynamic abstract imagery to be performed in the concert hall during his piano recitals, called "Farblicht-musik" (Color-Light-Music). For the finale of this program, Fischinger designed a multiple-projector piece (using his "organ-rods" footage) with three side-by-side images; and for the climax, in full color, he had two more movie projectors overlap the other three, with colored slides also being shown above and below.

After Laszlo's concert tour ended, Fischinger successfully repeated his multiple-projection performances (now entitled R-1, a Form-Play) accompanied by a percussion ensemble and together with his other abstract experiments for a full Fischinger evening.

Moritz, William. "History of Experimental Animation." Website. Absolut Panushka, curated by Christine Panushka. (Jan-Apr 1997).