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Kinetica 2 Catalog, 2000
Influence and Inspiration: The Great Tradition of Visual Music
Dr. William Moritz
Inspiration (from the Latin "inhale") and Influence (from the Latin "flowing into") are fragile things, hard to trace, hard to quantify. But such ties do link many artists who turn their attention to the possibility of creating a "Visual Music" -- an art for the eyes as fluid and layered and intricately counterbalanced as the sounds of music are to the ears.
Oskar Fischinger was definitely inspired and influenced by seeing Walther Ruttmann's Light-Play Opus I, and even his interest in Buddhism may have arisen from a 1924 feature film The Living Buddhas for which Ruttmann prepared special effects depicting sacred practices of Tibetan lamas. Fischinger in turn would provide various levels of Inspiration and Influence to three generations of abstract filmmakers.
When Fischinger's black-and-white Study No. 7 played widely in cinemas during 1931/2, it encouraged a number of filmmakers to pursue a career in visual music. The New Zealand born painter Len Lye emigrated to England and shot one 8-minute animation film, Tusalava, based on aboriginal art and mythology, with the support of the London Film Society, which in effect owned the film and only screened it a few times (and never recorded Jack Ellit's musical score onto the film). In disappointment, Lye put aside filmmaking and returned to painting, sculpture and literature for a few years. Seeing Fischinger's Study 7 inspired him to return to animation, which he managed by joining the government General Post Office Film Unit, which allowed him to make largely abstract films such as Colour Box (drawn directly on film) that contained a minimal public-service message at the end. In a film like Free Radicals, scratched directly into black leader some 25 years later, a trace of the influence from the dynamic contrast of black/white gestures in Study 7 still remains, although Lye's film is wholly original with its hypnotic African music and the rugged gestural vigor of the etched lines. Free Radicals justly received a major prize at the Brussels world fair in 1958.
Norman McLaren also worked for the GPO unit in England and felt inspiration from Fischinger's Study 7. As a pacifist, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1939 and a few years later to Canada, where he produced a long, dazzling series of films, most of them exploring types of visual music, from the drawn-on-film jazz improvisation of Begone Dull Care to the magically altered footage of ballet dancers in Pas de Deux. In Synchromy McLaren drew shapes that provide both the visual imagery and the soundtrack, so we literally hear what we see (except, of course, that color is not really a component of the sound image). This also reflects an inspiration from Fischinger's 1932 Ornament Sound experiments, which McLaren saw in London at the Film Society.
Claire Parker and Alexeieff produced (after seeing Study 7) a number of visual-music films on their Pin-Screen, from the thrilling 1933 Night on Bald Mountain to the lovely Canadian folk-song En Passant (1943) to the films based on Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition from the 1970s. The American painter Mary Ellen Bute saw Fischinger's Study 5 in New York, and subsequently produced a dozen visual-music films, most of which screened at Radio City Music Hall in New York as prestige shorts. In addition to the standard concert repertory (Bach, Grieg, Liszt) she also used challenging modern compositions, such as the eccentric, dissonant, whimsical Shostakovich score for Polkagraph.
When Fischinger arrived in Hollywood, a second generation of artists discovered Visual Music through him. The brothers John and James Whitney encountered him already in 1939, at an art gallery showing his paintings, where Fischinger also screened several of his films. This "influence" contained both positive and negative quotients, since the teenagers both resolved to devote themselves to making Visual-Music, but felt that Fischinger's own films were to some extent old-fashioned in their use of European classical music and tight choreographic synchronization. This inspired them to attempt to create new kinds of music (their pendulum-generated sound) and "modern" imagery that captured a sense of neon, motors and other contemporary phenomena (in the Five Film Exercises, which received a prize in Brussels in 1948, when Fischinger was awarded the Grand Prize for Motion Painting). John and James worked separately, and after the Exercises diverged considerably. John pursued a new technology that could produce both sound and visual imagery "in real time", something like a visual-music piano. This led him to experiment with an oil-wipe screen that could parallel a jazz improvisation, as in Hot House from 1952. John then pioneered computer graphics, and developed a motion-control camera system, which his brother James would use in 1963 to film his Lapis, shooting his hand-drawn dot patterns in multiple exposures that could make 1000 dots from 100, forming intricate mandalas.
When Fischinger visited San Francisco for the Art in Cinema festival 1946, a number of young artists fell under his spell. The painters Harry Smith and Jordan Belson resolved to begin making "motion paintings" of visual music. Smith, lacking a camera, drew incredibly detailed imagery directly onto blank film strips, composing three 3-minute pieces roughly synchronized with Dizzy Gillespie's jazz (he would play them live as a "light show" at Beat clubs like Bop City). The Film No. 3 contains a direct homage/quotation to Fischinger's Composition in Blue, with horizontal bars rotating around a vertical center. On Fischinger's recommendation, Smith and Belson received some stipends from the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Smith's Film No. 5 (entitled "Homage to Fischinger") animates more hard-edged geometrical shapes, and the brilliant Film Study No. 7 records a live performance in which Smith projected slides and films from seven projectors, re-filming them from the screen. Jordan Belson’s first films were also extensions of his paintings: he prepared long scrolls of sequential imagery, then filmed them imaginatively in rhythms and textures. In the mid-1950s Belson became the visual director for the Vortex concerts at Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco, projecting elaborate "light-shows" on the dome, using filmed imagery (some by James Whitney and Hy Hirsh), the specialized planetarium projections, a kaleidoscope projector, etc. Allures incorporates some of these visual effects that could be re-created on film, along with fresh footage created specially for the film. The soundtrack is also an original composition, since the rights to Pierre Schaeffer's "Allures" (which was played during the live Vortex performances) was not available for the film. Belson subsequently produced a sequence of some 20 spiritual abstract films with exquisite color sensitivity and ravishing movement in a wide spectrum from nebulous manifestation to intense intermittence.
Hy Hirsh, a professional cameraman and still photographer, also fell under Fischinger's spell after Art in Cinema, and provided the necessary technical training and equipment for Harry Smith and Jordan Belson's first film experiments. Like John Whitney, Hirsh loved technology, and he also experimented with an oil-wipe technique in some films. Hirsh built his own optical printer so that he could layer live-action and animation together in the same image. He also used geometric patterns generated on an oscilloscope screen as imagery for his abstract films like Come Closer, which he prepared in a stereo 3-D version (which was very much in vogue during the early 1950s). (Mary Ellen Bute and Norman McLaren, both independently, also worked with oscilloscope patterns as a source for geometric imagery, and 3-D). Hirsh traveled widely on commercial photo shoots, and avidly tape-recorded ethnic and jazz performances, which he often used as soundtracks for his visual-music films.
Jules Engel knew Fischinger from 1939 when they were both working on Disney's Fantasia. In 1947, Engel, Fischinger and Herb Klynn (who then worked with Engel as a designer at UPA) shared a 3-man show of their oil paintings at a Los Angeles gallery. Although he made many documentary and character animation films, it was not until 1970 that Engel began to produce his own visual-music films, by which time he was teaching at California Institute of the Arts, and screening Fischinger films for his students. Engel does not synchronize with pre-existing music, but rather creates the visual imagery with its own pace, dynamic, arc, development -- and then finds a composer to create a parallel music. In Shapes and Gestures the choreographic style of the imagery and action links felicitously with the elegant musical score.
By the 1970s art film was no longer so isolated or rare. Film series, college film schools, and film festivals proliferated. Then videotape and laserdiscs made films more easily available for study and international distribution. A third generation of Visual Music artists flowered in this milieu. Larry Cuba attended Cal Arts, and programmed John Whitney’s computer graphic Arabesque. His own computer film Two Space perfectly balances positive and negative space, illusions of color and streaks of afterimage -- and uncannily represents some essence of the gamelan music that accompanies it (as had Jordan Belson's Mandala some 25 years before). Sara Petty studied animation at U.C.L.A., but her artistic style seems rooted in Los Angeles painters like Helen Lundeberg and perhaps Fischinger. Preludes in Magical Time again offers a visual landscape perfectly congruent to the accompanying Bach music. British Robert Darroll spent a year in a Korean monastery before creating his hand-drawn trilogy, of which Lung is the first part. Darroll continued to make abstract work in new technologies, including computer graphics, virtual reality, and multi-media opera performances. Like Larry Cuba, he has been an artist-in-residence at the ZKM (Center for Art and New Technologies) in Karlsruhe. Paul Glabicki, on the other hand, delights in hand craftsmanship of his quite intricate interactions of numerous figures, some quite representational, some pure geometry; though this element of representation might seem to preclude an inspiration from Fischinger, Glabicki himself avows it. Other artists working in new technologies include Vibeke Sorensen, whose intricate computer graphic N-Loops was designed for a multi-monitor installation as well as single viewing, and Michael Scroggins, whose years as a painter and light-show liquid artist contribute to the lush colors and textures of his video Study No. 6. Among other European artists, one must mention Danish Lejf Marcussen, whose 1983 Soundtrack presents one of the most satisfactory imaging of the attack and decay of musical tones (in this case a Carl Nielsen symphony). The Basque painter Jose Antonio Sistiaga has made a feature-length abstract animation, painted directly on the film -- a glorious feast of color. His sublime Impressions in the High Atmosphere evokes the windy peaks of the mountains of his homeland, ending with the electrifying "irintzi", a yodel cry meant to carry from one peak to a distant other. The film’s dedication to Van Gogh, Nijinsky, and the Basque sculptor Oteiza adds another dimension to the "cry", since all three artists died insane. The Austrian Barbel Neubauer paints her films directly on the film’s surface, and manages to construct complex layers with several figures moving before and behind each other, all at once. Uniquely among these visual-music artists, she composes her own musical scores.
Moritz, William. "Influence and Inspiration: the Great Tradition of Visual Music." Exhibition catalog. KINETICA 2. Los Angeles: The iotaCenter, 2000.
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