Oskar Fischinger

Our cover image is a still from Oskar Fischinger's Allegretto (1936–43), reproduced by kind permission from the Elfriede Fischinger Trust. In launching this journal we felt it appropriate to reference Fischinger, a pioneer filmmaker whose work anticipates so many later developments in music and moving image media. Inspired by the emerging abstract cinema movement in Germany in the early 1920s, Fischinger initially developed a series of animated Studies that explored the rapid interplay of abstract patterns moving in exact synchronisation to popular and classical music recordings. This technique he then refined in cinema commercials for the German advertising agency Tolirag in the 1930s, and later in Hollywood, in short films for Paramount and MGM, including Allegretto and An Optical Poem. He also designed the 'Toccata and Fugue' sequence for Disney's Fantasia but later walked out on the project, uncredited, after his designs were simplified and made more representational. In the 1940s he developed the notion of 'motion painting', a method of stop-frame animation on each separate brushstroke of evolving abstract patterns, again tightly synchronised to classical recordings; and in the 50s, patented his 'Lumigraph', an instrument for the manipulation of multiple coloured light projections in accompaniment to live music.

As early as the mid-1920s Fischinger also experimented with simultaneous abstract projections on several screens, a precursor of the psychedelic lightshows of some forty years later, and proposed the designing of patterns onto the optical soundtrack to achieve a conceptual unification of sound and image. In a 1932 article, 'Sounding Ornaments', he even advanced the idea of a new medium comprised of multiple optical tracks on which would be inscribed a counterpoint of overlapping and intersecting patterns, 'with the abstract, diverse effect of an orchestra'.¹

The only substantial critical study of his work can be found in William Moritz's Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger (Indiana University Press, 2004), although there are important web resources at The Fischinger Archive site (http://www.oskarfischinger.org), and at the Center for Visual Music (http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org). The iotaCenter (http://www.iotacenter.org) also maintains the William Moritz archive and has made available a number of articles online on Fischinger and other visual music filmmakers. Until recently his work has only been commercially available on two Re:Voir VHS compilations,² but in 2006 the Center for Visual Music in California released 'Ten Films', new high-definition digital transfers of visual music shorts, tests, early experiments, drawings, paintings, and even some home-movie footage.³ The Center is engaged on a long-term project to restore the Fischinger archive, and further DVD releases are anticipated.