Oskar Fischinger – Ten Films (DVD)
Oskar Fischinger – Ten Films (DVD) / produced and released by the Center for Visual Music / NTSC, Region free, 50 mins
“For private home use sales only. Please contact CVM for sales to institutions, schools, museums and libraries.”
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Films include Spirals, Study Nr. 6, Study Nr. 7, Kreise (Circles), Allegretto, Radio Dynamics, Motion Painting no. 1; plus three of Fischinger’s very first films: Wax Experiments, Spiritual Constructions, and Walking from Munich to Berlin. Bonus features include Home Movies from Fischinger’s Berlin Studio c. 1931, never-released early experiments and animation tests, a selection of paintings and photographs, film notes, and a biography.
‘Decades before computer graphics, before music videos, even before “Fantasia” (the 1940 version), there were the abstract animated films of Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967), master of “absolute” or nonobjective filmmaking. He was cinema’s Kandinsky, an animator who, beginning in the 1920’s in Germany, created exquisite “visual music” using geometric patterns and shapes choreographed tightly to classical music and jazz.’–John Canemaker, New York Times
‘Oskar Fischinger is one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, embracing the abstraction that became the major art movement of that century, and exploring the new technology of the cinema to open abstract painting into a new Visual Music that performs in liquid time.’ — Biographer William Moritz
‘We now understand Oskar Fischinger not only as a link between the geometric painting of pre-war Europe and post-war California but as a grandfather of the digital arts.’–Peter Frank