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This summer, the Whitney Museum of American Art presents an exhibition
of Raumlichtkunst (Space Light Art), a triple screen film
environment by Oskar Fischinger. Debuted in Germany in 1926,
Raumlichtkunst was radical in format, creating, in Fischinger's
words, "an intoxication by light from a thousand sources." Fischinger
(1900–1967) worked in animation, filmmaking, and painting. An
influential pioneer of abstract cinema, he began his career in Weimar-era
Germany. Working with multiple-projector formats in Munich, he redefined
abstraction in the moving image with films that explore the interplay of
abstract shapes, color, and light. Inspired by the German painter Walter
Ruttman's 1921 film experiments with "painting with time," Fischinger,
working with Hungarian composer Alexander László, first
combined film and music with projections of abstract color in the
mid-1920s, before moving on to present independent multiple screen film
events.
The layers of geometric animations in
Raumlichtkunst echo Fischinger's earliest experiments with abstract
forms, including spirals, staffs, moiré patterns, tinted liquids,
and wax patterns. The triple screen format, the films' unique combinations
of abstract shape and hypnotic patterns, and the improvisational use of
music were decades ahead of their time, establishing Fischinger as a key
figure in the history of multiple projection environments.
Raumlichtkunst was photochemically restored from original 35mm
nitrate film material, then re-created in high-definition video by the
Center for Visual Music. Using modern digital processes, the restoration
makes visible once again the rich coloration of Fischinger's originals from
the 1920s.
During the period that Raumlichtkunst
was conceived, Fischinger worked in Frankfurt, Munich, and then Berlin as a
filmmaker, alternating between commercial work and his personal,
experimental filmmaking. In Berlin, his technical prowess and special
effects work garnered him the name "The Wizard of Friederichstrasse," after
the location of his studio. After the Nazi government declared all abstract
films "degenerate," Fischinger left Berlin for Hollywood, working first at
Paramount and later at MGM and Disney, where he designed sequences for
Fantasia. Feeling constrained by the demands of the Hollywood
studios, he increasingly turned to oil painting. During his career he
produced over eight hundred canvases and more than fifty films.
Raumlichtkunst is currently also on display at Tate Modern in
London. The presentations at the Whitney and the Tate are the first museum
showings of this historic multiple projection film work.
The
exhibition is curated by Chrissie Iles, the Whitney's Anne & Joel
Ehrenkranz Curator, with Cindy Keefer of the Center for Visual Music, and
is on view from June 28 to October 28, 2012.
Center for Visual
Music acknowledges film restoration support through the Avant-Garde Masters
Program, funded by The Film Foundation, administered by The National Film
Preservation Foundation.
*Image above:
Raumlichtkunst, installation view at the Whitney Museum of
American Art. © Center for Visual Music.
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