Keyword Visual Music

Here the artist creates a world of color, form, movement and sound in which the elements are in a state of controllable flux, the two materials (visual and aural) are subject to any conceivable interrelation and modification.

An abstract film in which every motion of coloured shapes is in strict synchronization with music. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2000.

A pioneer of visual music and electronic art, Mary Ellen Bute produced over a dozen short abstract animations between the 1930s and the 1950s. Set to classical music by the likes of Bach, Saint-Saëns, and Shoshtakovich, and replete with rapidly mutating geometries, Bute’s filmmaking is at once formally rigorous and energetically high-spirited, like a marriage of high modernism and Merrie Melodies. In the late 1940s, Lewis Jacobs observed that Bute’s films were “composed upon mathematical formulae depicting in ever-changing lights and shadows, growing lines and forms, deepening colors and tones, the tumbling, racing impressions evoked by the musical accompaniment.” Bute herself wrote that she sought to “bring to the eyes a combination of visual forms unfolding along with the thematic development and rhythmic cadences of music.”

To the toccata portion of Bach's "Toccata and fugue in D minor," we watch a play of sorts. Blue smoke forms a background; a grid of black lines is the foreground. Behind the lines, a triangle appears, then patterns of multiple triangles. Their movements reflect the music's rhythm. Behind the barrier of the black lines, the triangle moves, jumps, and takes on multiple shapes. In contrast with the blue and the black, the triangles are warm: orange, red, yellow. The black lines bend, swirl into a vortex, then disappear. The triangle pulsates and a set of many of them rises.

The muted despair and confusion of Rob Ford or something like that.

An experimental short from Oskar Fischinger

Tanz der Farben (1939) is by no means a lost film. Created by Hans Fischinger, Oskar’s younger brother, it is considered the last abstract film made in the Third Reich. And it is a worthy swan song. Oskar was experimenting with volume, texture, he tended to have a certain graphical ‘dominant’ in each film. Hans preferred thin lines, sharp angles – which created an effect of a more rough and tense movement with a ‘space resistance’. Tanz der Farben indeed resembles a non-figurative universe living by constantly changing laws. The Gosfilmofond print is quite unique – it is in fact three prints spliced into one, and these prints differ: Hans Fischinger was trying several colour solutions for the same musical sequence.