Visual Music Archive

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No. 4: Fast Track 

(1947) 

by Harry Smith works with a black background and white shapes. In No. 4, the influence of Oskar Fischinger on Smith's work becomes more marked. At times, Smith spoke of his films in terms of synaethesia.

No. 4 begins with two small circles dancing in tandem across the screen, as well as decreasing and increasing in size to give an impression of depth. These are joined, via superimposition, by two simple grilles, and then by a larger grille which swishes from left to right and vice versa at such a speed to produced a blurred effect. Gradually the forms become more complex: larger, more elaborate grilles as well as clusters of less geometrically precise dots.

 

Harry Smith here is playing upon the tension between precise shapes and rhythms, and less regulated patterns and movements. The simple, regulated forms become more indistinct and murky through alchemical transformation. In No. 4, one can detect echoes of Oskar Fischinger’s Study No. 7 (1931) and Study No. 8 (1932), which also feature geometrical forms dancing with precision against a plain background.

 

Oskar Fischinger’s films, though, seem to play upon a more regulated, complex mode of patterned mutation, as well as featuring more elaborate curled forms.

 

Source: Senses of Cinema

 

 

No. 4: Fast Track, 2nd generation, Film

Reading

American Magus: Harry Smith (1996) demonstrates how differently Harry Smith appeared to friends from each circle, offering personal recollections that present a multidimensional, largely contradictory picture of the man. The films, paintings, and recordings of Harry Smith pay tribute to his genius. Filmmaking, painting, anthropology, musicology, and the occult - his knowledge of each was encyclopedic and firsthand. As might befit a man of such varied interests, his circles of friends were large and, for the most part, wholly independent. (Experimental Cinema)

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)

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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SEE ALSO

James Whitney (1921-1982) younger brother of John Whitney, Sr., was a filmmaker regarded as one of the great masters of abstract cinema. Several of his films are classics in the genre of Visual Music. James Whitney was born December 27, 1921, in Pasadena, California, and lived all his life in the Los Angeles area. He studied painting, and traveled in England before the outbreak of World War II. In 1940, he returned to Pasadena. He completed a number of short films over four decades, two of which required at least five years of work. (Wikipedia)

Free Fall (1964) is an experimental film from Arthur Lipsett. Free Fall is an assortment of film trimmings assembled to make a wry comment on humankind in today’s world. It evokes a surrealist dream of our fall from grace into banality. (National Film Board of Canada)

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)

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)

Lillian F. Schwartz (*1927) is an American artist, known for some of the first use of computers in computer developed art. Lillian Schwartz is best known for her pioneering work in the use of computers for what has since become known as computer-generated art and computer-aided art analysis, including graphics, film, video, animation, special effects, Virtual Reality and Multimedia. (Lillian F. Schwartz)