Oskar Fischinger: Pioneering animator's most psychedelic films

SUCH DAY AS TODAY, JUNE 22, 1900, IS BORN IN GELNHAUSEN, GERMANY OSKAR FISCHINGER
He was a painter, abstract animator, musician and German film director. He stood out for the creation of abstract musical animation in which geometry is combined with music, several decades before the appearance of computer images and music videos.
Filmmaker and German musician, He was born on June 22, 1900 in Gelnhausen, Germany.

He was apprenticed in a company dedicated to the construction of organs. Later he worked as a draftsman in the office of an architect. After the war, his family moved to Frankfurt, where he attended a trade and work school as an apprentice and engineer diplomat.

In Frankfurt, he met the theater critic Bernhard Diebold, who in 1921 introduced him to the work of Walter Ruttmann, a pioneer in film abstraction. Musician and technician of architectural design and tools before becoming an animator and filmmaker, he quit his job and moved to Munich to become a filmmaker and rehearse with animated musicalized painting, inspired by the diagrams of Tibetan Buddhism. His first films, dated in the early twenties, are among the most radical.

His works are a combination of geometry and music far removed from the traditional animation of his time. Experiment with the nature of visual art and in Wax Experiments and Spirals, create complex visual patterns that move in hypnotic cycles interrupted by a montage of unique frames. He also made conventional drawings demonstrating his handling of perspective and the conventional script. He showed his skills in the combination of abstract images synchronized with musical accompaniment, with each picture drawn or photographed by hand.

In 1927, he moved to Berlin hired to perform special effects of rockets, stellar landscapes and planetary surfaces for the science fiction film The Woman in the Moon, by Fritz Lang although he fractured a bone on the set, and in the hospital, followed drawing charcoal animations. He participated in the invention of the Gasparcolor process that allows him to make audiovisual pieces such as Composition in blue, his second film in color, in which we use small geometric models. It was exhibited in foreign festivals without receiving the required authorizations and won the King's Prize at the Universal Exhibition in Brussels in October 1935.

Considered his work as "degenerate art" in the Germany of Adolf Hitler, there were exiles in the United States arriving in Hollywood in February 1936 hired by Paramount, although they did not allow to continue working with color. The company bought its short Allegretto to pass it to color turning it into one of the pieces of visual music more highlighted by the layers of celluloid that revolutionized the world of animation at that time.

He made an optical Poem for the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, by Franz Liszt, although he did not make a profit, also a scene for Walt Disney's film Fantasia, which was eliminated. All his designs were simplified and modified or even eliminated. After making more than 50 shorts, he devoted himself to oil painting. He also devised an artifact, the Lumígrafo, which produced fantastic chromatic screens with the movements of the hands.

The German painter and filmmaker, considered the father of the video clip, and one of the great experimental artists of the early twentieth century, died on January 31, 1967 in Los Angeles.

Filmography

Silhouetten (1920)
Stäbe (1920)
Experimental Wachs (1921)
Studies 1-4 (1921-1925)
Spiralen (1925)
München-Berlin Wanderung (1927)
Seelische Konstruktionen (1927)
Study Nr. 2 (1929)
Study Nr. 3 (1930)
Study Nr. 4 (1930)
Study Nr. 5 (1930)
Study Nr. 6 (1930)
Study Nr. 7 (1930-31)
Study Nr. 8 (1931)
Study Nr. 9 (1931)
Study Nr. 12 (1932)
Study Nr. 13-fragment (1933-34)
Kreise (Alle kreise erfasst Tolirag) (1933-34)
Muratti greift ein (1934)
Komposition in Blau (1935)
Muratti Privat (1935)
Allegretto (1936)
An optical poem (1937)
Organic fragment (1941)
Am American March (1941)
Motion Painting Nr. 1 (1947)
Muntz TV Commercial (1952)