Visual Music Archive

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Allegretto 

(1936) 

by Oskar Fischinger. Diamond and oval shapes in primary colors perform a sensual, upbeat ballet to the music of composer Ralph Rainger. The geometric dance is set against a background of expanding circles that suggest radio waves.

© Fischinger Trust/ Courtesy Center for Visual Music

 

Paramount brought Oskar Fischinger to Hollywood in February 1936, but did not allow him to continue his work in color film, and his tenure at the studio was short. A grant from The Museum of Non-Objective Painting (Guggenheim Foundation) allowed him to buy his short film Allegretto back from Paramount, and several years later he was able to complete it in color as he had originally intended. Fischinger used a cel-layering technique to animate formal visual equivalents of the musical concepts of rhythm, harmony and counterpoint. He implemented a "divisionist" technique of changing colors from frame to frame in order to achieve particularly luminous and chromatic hues that could not be produced by normal methods of animation photography. Fischinger was forced to finance the distribution of this film himself and was able to make only a few copies, but as the film was shown at museums and centers of advanced art all over the world, Allegretto eventually came to be recognized as one of the most accomplished pieces in the history of visual music.

 

Fischinger found it extremely difficult to work in studio situations, enduring episodes at Paramount (1936), MGM (1937), and Disney (1938-9). He composed An Optical Poem to Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 for MGM. He designed the Johann Sebastian Bach Toccata and Fugue sequence for Disney's Fantasia, but quit because his designs were simplified and altered to be more representational. Hilla Rebay, curator of The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, supported Oskar's work during the difficult war years with several grants. Rebay commissioned him to synchronize a film with a Sousa march (to demonstrate loyalty to America). Oskar then proposed a film without sound in order to demonstrate the artistic validity of non-objective imagery, but Rebay insisted that he make a film to Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3. While carrying out his commission for Rebay, Oskar discreetly composed the silent masterpiece Radio Dynamics.

 

Source: Center for Visual Music

 

 

Allegretto, jazz, 1st generation, Film

Reading

Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967): Experiments in Cinematic Abstraction (2012) edited by Cindy Keefer and Jaap Guldemond. This new monograph explores the position of Oskar Fischinger's work within the international avant-garde. The book examines his animation and painting, his use of music, his experiences in Hollywood, the Lumigraph, visual music theories, and his influence on today's filmmakers, artists and animators. The book also contains previously unpublished documents including texts by Oskar Fischinger himself, and unshot animation drawings. Essays compiled and commissioned by editor Cindy Keefer include new research and texts by Jean-Michel Bouhours, Jeanpaul Goergen, Ilene Susan Fort, James Tobias, Cindy Keefer, Richard Brown, Paul Hertz, Joerg Jewanski, and more. (Center for Visual Music)

Optical Poetry (2004) by Dr. William Moritz is the long-awaited, definitive biography of Oskar Fischinger. The result of over 30 years of research on this visionary abstract filmmaker and painter. In addition to Moritz's comprehensive biography, it includes numerous photographs in colour and black and white (many never before published), statements by Oskar Fischinger about his films, a newly created extensive filmography, and a selected bibliography. (John Libbey Publishing)

Sons et Lumières (2004) – A History of Sound in the Art of the 20th Century (in French) by Marcella Lista and Sophie Duplaix published by the Centre Pompidou for the excellent Paris exhibition in September 2004 until January 2005.


Curated by the Pompidou’s Sophie Duplaix with the Louvre’s Marcella Lista, the show required a good three or four hours to absorb, with its bombardment of sensory and intellectual input, including painting, sound sculpture, sound/light automata, film and video, and room-size installations. (Frieze Magazine)

Links

 

SEE ALSO

Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1994) by French critic and composer Michel Chion reassesses audiovisual media since the revolutionary 1927 debut of recorded sound in cinema, shedding crucial light on the mutual relationship between sound and image in audiovisual perception. (Colombia University Press)

Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900 (2005) traces the history of a revolutionary idea: that fine art should attain the abstract purity of music. Over the past one hundred years some of the most adventurous modern and contemporary artists have explored unorthodox means to invent a kinetic, non-representational art modeled upon pure instrumental music. (Amazon)

Len Lye: A biography (2001) by Roger Horrock tells for the first time the story of an extraordinary New Zealander, a brilliant artist with an international career who never lost the informality, the energy, the independence of spirit of his South Pacific origins. Len Lye began as an unsettled working-class kid with limited prospects and became a leading modernist artist in London and New York. Roger Horrocks's exhaustive study of Lye has taken many years and is based on interviews with many of those close to the artist as well as on voluminous documentary sources. (Govett-Brewster Art Gallery)

Opus I (1921) - Music by Max Butting. Walther Ruttmann's Opus 1 is the first abstract or absolute work in film history screened publicly. Instead of containing depictions of reality, it consists entirely of the colors and shapes already formulated in Ruttmann's Painting With Light manifesto. In 1919, he writes that, after nearly a decade, he finally "masters the technical difficulties" struggled with as early as 1913 while executing his formulated idea. (Media Art Net)

Symphonie Diagonale (1924) - original title: Symphonie Diagonale. In Diagonal Symphony by Viking Eggeling, the emphasis is on objectively analyzed movement rather than expressiveness on the surface patterning of lines into clearly defined movements, controlled by a mechanical, almost metronomic tempo. (Standish Lawder: "Structuralism and Movement in Experimental Film and Modern Art, l896-192l", doctoral dissertation)