Spheres

(1969)

is a play on motion, against a background of multi-hued sky, by animation artists Norman McLaren and René Jodoin. Spheres of translucent pearl seem to float weightlessly in the unlimited panorama of the sky.

The spheres do have music in this film, as animation artists Norman McLaren and René Jodoin expose a dancing ball to the magic of Johann Sebastian Bach played by pianist Glenn Gould.

The background is the limitless depth of sky, multi-hued, changing in mood from midnight blue to the rose of dawn, and, against this, the McLaren-Jodoin play on motion.

A ball of translucent pearl appears to float freely into space and to multiply like a distant galaxy brought suddenly close. But the free movement of the sphere is only momentary. Music, balance, symmetry begin to bring them to order so that they form patterns, grouping, regrouping, with mathematical precision, at times dancing about in airy circles or colliding and multiplying like some stylized burst of the atomic chain reaction.

This airy dance has its moments of whimsy when a butterfly flutters briefly from ball to ball, a symbol of winged caprice in a universe of sound and motion where the discipline of art is supreme.

Source: National Film Board of Canada

Spheres, johann sebastian bach, 2nd generation, kugeln, Film

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The Film Work of Norman McLaren (2007) by Terence Dobson approaches the puzzles that are set by the film work of Norman McLaren. It is divided into three parts, based on chronological divisions in McLaren's life. The first part deals with McLaren's formative years in Scotland and England and examines his early exposure to the social, artistic and institutional influences that were to shape his filmic output. The second part deals with McLaren's maturation in the USA and Canada. The third part examines specific issues in relation to McLaren and his work and as such is concerned principally with his mature output. (John Libbey Publishing)

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)

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Norman McLaren (1914-1987) was a Scottish-born Canadian animator and film director known for his work for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Norman McLaren is remembered for his experiments with image and sound as he developed a number of groundbreaking techniques for combining and synchronizing animation with music. (Wikipedia)

Synchromie (1971) by Norman McLaren features synchronization of image and sound in the truest sense of the word. To make this film, Norman McLaren employed novel optical techniques to compose the piano rhythms of the sound track, which he then moved, in multicolor, onto the picture area of the screen so that, in effect, you see what you hear. (National Filmboard of Canada)

Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967) was a German abstract animator, filmmaker, and painter. He made over 50 short animated films, and painted c. 800 canvases, many of which are in museums, galleries and collections worldwide. (Wikipedia)

Len Lye (1901-1980) was an experimental film-maker, poet, painter, kinetic sculptor, eccentric and ebullient personality. Len Lye was one of the few filmmakers working in inter-war Britain to have established an international reputation in experimental filmmaking. Though his British oeuvre was by no means limited to the making of abstract films, this was the area that most interested Len Lye and he has sometimes been viewed as the only genuine avant-garde filmmaker of this period. (screenonline)

Point Line Cloud (2001) is a collection of audio and video collaborations between Curtis Roads and Brian O'Reilly, it has been a ever shifting project over the years which constantly continues to evolve. The first performance of the materials that grew into the project was in 2001 at a concert with Autechre and Russell Haswell in Los Angeles. Since then it has been performed in many diverse venus around the world. (Brian O'Reilly on Vimeo)

Storm de Hirsch was a very important player in the New York Avant-Garde film scene of the 1960s, though her biography and work are generally left out of the history. Despite lack of recognition, she was very present in the underground film movement and socialized with every big name on the scene, filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke and others. (Wikipedia)

Larry Cuba (1950) is widely recognized as a pioneer in the use of computers in animation art. Producing his first computer animation in 1974, Cuba was at the forefront of the computer-animation artists considered the second generation – those who directly followed the visionaries of the sixties: John Whitney, Sr., Stan Vanderbeek and Lillian Schwartz. (Sonic Acts Festival)

Jordan Belson (1926-2011) creates abstract films richly woven with cosmological imagery, exploring consciousness, transcendence, and the nature of light itself. (...) His varied influences include yoga, Eastern philosophies and mysticism, astronomy, Romantic classical music, alchemy, Jung, non-objective art, mandalas and many more. He has produced an extraordinary body of over 30 abstract films, sometimes called cosmic cinema, also considered to be Visual Music. ("Jordan Belson – Biography" by Cindy Keefer)

Audio.Visual - On Visual Music and Related Media (2009) by Cornelia Lund and Holger Lund (Eds.) is divided into two sections: the first deals with the academic discussion on the subject of visual music; the second introduces contemporary paradigms of audio-visual praxis in brief presentations and contextualises them. Apart from being a guide in the historical sense, this new volume provides theoretical approaches to understanding and making visual music. (Fluctuating Images)

Visual Music Archive

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