Visual Music

LIST OF WORKS

Alexandre Alexeïeff and Claire Parker
Pioneer experimental animator Claire Parker studied to be a painter before starting a lifetime career in film. She worked with her husband-to-be Alexandre Alexeieff for nearly a decade before being married in 1941. Parker was the technical specialist and artistic assistant to Alexeieff. Their films are milestones in the history of 20th-century fine-art animation in the United States and throughout the world. Cecile Starr

Alexeïeff at the Pinboard 1960
Une nuit sur le mont chauve (Night on Bald Mountain) 1933
La belle au bois dormant (Sleeping Beauty) 1935
En Passant 1943
Colour Commercials 1952-61
Le nez (The Nose) 1963
Tableaux d'une exposition (Pictures at an Exhibition) 1972
Trois thèmes (Three Moods) 1980

Program provided by Center for Visual Music in association with Cecile Starr and The Women's Independent Film Exchange.

Saul Bass
Saul Bass created new parameters for the field of feature film title design through his striking use of geometric graphics animated to music. He famously collaborated with experimental filmmaker John Whitney (see program 'James and John Whitney') on the opening title sequence of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, his title sequences for three of Hitchcock films are his best known work.

Bass on Titles 1977 | Director: Saul Bass
Vertigo 1958 | Director: Alfred Hitchcock
North by Northwest 1959 | Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Psycho 1960 | Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Jordan Belson
'The essence of cinema is precisely "dynamic movement of form and colour," and their relation to sound. In this respect Belson is the purest of all filmmakers . . . the films remain concrete, objective experiences of kinaesthetic and optical dynamism. They are at once the ultimate use of visual imagery to communicate abstract concepts, and the purest of experiential confrontations between subject and object.' Gene Youngblood
'Jordan Belson is one of the greatest artists of visual music. Belson creates lush vibrant experiences of exquisite colour and dynamic abstract phenomena evoking sacred celestial experiences.' William Moritz

Allures 1961
Samadhi 1967
Chakra 1972
Light 1973
Music of the Spheres 1977
Northern Lights 1985
Epilogue 2005

Stan Brakhage
Creating nearly 400 films in his lifetime, Stan Brakhage was one of the most prolific and influential American experimental filmmakers. Brakhage's beautiful and intimate films use colour and abstract form to explore love, mortality and spirituality. Brakhage endeavoured to remake filmmaking in order to create new viewing experiences, which he termed 'moving-visual-thinking'. His experiments with directly scratching and painting on the film's surface and layering recorded images, reflect his strong desire to remove film from the confines of narrative cinema and break audiences habitual patterns of viewing.

Cat's Cradle 1959
The Garden of Earthly Delights 1981
The Dante Quartet 1987
Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse 1991
Sirius Remembered 1959
Untitled (For Marilyn) 1992
The Cat of the Worm's Green Realm 1997
Commingled Containers 1997
Dog Star Man 1961–64
Mothlight 1963
Window Water Baby Moving 1959
Stellar 1993
I . . . Dreaming 1988
Christ Mass Sex Dance 1991
Black Ice 1994
Crack Glass Eulogy 1992
The Dead 1960
The Dark Tower 1999
Lovesong 2001
Stately Mansions Did Decree 1999
Fred Camper, The Chicago Reader The Wonder Ring 1955
Blue Moses 1962
Anticipation of the Night 1958
A Child's Garden and the Serious Sea 1991

Mary Ellen Bute
'A pioneer of visual music and electronic art, Mary Ellen Bute produced over a dozen short abstract animations between the 1930s to the 1950s. Set to classical music by the likes of Bach, Saint-Saens or Shostakovich, and filled with colourful forms, elegant design and sprightly, dance-like-rhythms, Bute's filmmaking is at once formally rigorous and energetically high-spirited, like a marriage of high modernism and Merrie Melodies.' Ed Halter

Rhythm in Light 1934 | Directors: Mary Ellen Bute, Melville Webber, Ted Nemeth
Synchromy No. 2 1935 | Directors: Mary Ellen Bute, Ted Nemeth
Dada 1936
Parabola 1937 | Directors: Mary Ellen Bute, Ted Nemeth, Rutherford Boyd, Bill Nemeth
Escape 1937
Spook Sport 1939
Tarantella 1940
Polka Graph (Fun with Music) 1947
Colour Rhapsody 1948
Imagination 1948
Pastorale 1950
Abstronic 1952
Mood Contrasts 1953

Oskar Fischinger
'As a pre-eminent progenitor of experimental film, Oskar Fischinger became one of the most influential filmmakers and visual music practitioners of the twentieth century. During the 1930s, Fischinger increasingly focused on the synchronisation of music and image, leading to experimental drawings on the soundtrack section of filmstrips (producing synthetic sound) and to multiple Studien (c.1929–34), black and white films accompanied by phonograph recordings. For Study No. 7 1931, Fischinger animated 5000 drawings to compose forms metamorphosing with Johannes Brahms's Hungarian Dance No. 51869. His first colour films, including the vibrantly hued Composition in Blue 1935, earned an international acclaim that lured Fischinger to Hollywood in 1936, where he worked for Paramount, MGM, Disney, and Orson Welles. He departed from image-sound synthesis with Radio Dynamics 1942, in which visual; imagery asserts its primacy by functioning as soundless music.'
Lauren Hebert and Heather McGuire

Spirals c.1926
Walking from Munich to Berlin 1927
Spiritual Constructions c.1927
Study No. 1 c.1929
Study No. 2 c.1930
Study No. 5 1930
Study No. 6 1930
Study No. 7 1931
Liebesspiel (Love Games) c.1934
Coloratura 1932
Kreise (Circles), (Tolirag Ad Version) 1933
Kreise (Circles), (Abstract Version) 1933
Muratti Greift Ein 1934
Muratti Privat c.1935
Komposition in Blau (Composition in Blue) 1935
Allegretto (Early Version) 1936
Allegretto (Late Version) 1936–43
An American March 1941
Radio Dynamics 1942
Motion Painting No. 1 1947

Len Lye
A pioneer of direct-animation, Len Lye (1901–1980) was also a highly innovative painter, photographer and poet, as well as an important figure in kinetic sculpture. Born in New Zealand, Lye left home as a young man in search of film activity and the stimulation that would satisfy what he called his preoccupation with art and movement. Inspired by the primitive imagery of South Sea Island art and film's power to present dance ritual and music, Lye's experimental — and often revolutionary — camera-less techniques attracted the attention of John Grierson and Alberto Cavalcanti of the General Post Office Film Unit in London, which sponsored A Colour Box and other films. Although Lye's filmmaking had nearly ceased by the late 60s, he continued to speak of his belief in cinema as 'the Cinderella of the fine arts.' Roger Horrocks
The Australian Cinémathèque gratefully acknowledges the assistance of The New Zealand Film Archive and The Len Lye Foundation. 'Len Lye' was compiled by Roger Horrocks for the New Zealand Film Archive and The Len Lye Foundation.

Tusalava 1929
A Colour Box 1935
Kaleidoscope 1935
The Birth of the Robot 1936
Rainbow Dance 1936
Trade Tattoo 1937
N. or N.W. 1937
Colour Flight 1938
Swinging the Lambeth Walk 1939
Musical Poster #1 1940
Colour Cry 1952-3
Tel Farlow 1980
Rhythm 1957
Free Radicals 1958
Particles in Space 1979

Light Play: Visual Music Pioneers
'Walter Ruttmann viewed his abstract films, among the first ever made, as both 'painting in time' and 'the music of light' . . . Using an animation table and the single-frame technique, Ruttmann completed Lichtspiel Opus 1 by early 1921, calling it an 'optical symphony' that 'aspires to a purity comparable to music'. Lauren Hebert and Heather McGuire Throughout his career, Hans Richter used painting and film to depict the movement of forms and the succession of time . . . On discovering Cubism in 1914, Richter conceived the rhythmic possibilities of visual form and began incorporating musical concepts into his paintings.' Lauren Hebert and Heather McGuire

Opus 1 (Lichtspiel) 1921 | Director: Walter Ruttmann
Diagonal Symphony / Rhythm 21 1921 | Director: Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling
Filmstudie 1926 | Director: Hans Richter
Ghosts Before Breakfast 1927 | Director: Hans Richter
Race Symphony 1928 | Director: Hans Richter
Twopence Magic 1930 | Director: Hans Richter
Richter on Film 1971 | Director: Cecile Starr

Norman McLaren
While attending art school in his native Scotland, Norman McLaren was converted to cinema after seeing the extraordinary films of Eisenstein and Pudovkin, and of the German animator Oskar Fischinger. He subsequently worked under legendary documentary filmmaker John Grierson, first at the General Post Office Film Unit in London, where he created Love on the Wing 1937, using the technique of drawing directly on the filmstrip. He immigrated to the US at the start of the war and made abstract films including Stars and Stripes 1940 and Dots 1940, then moved to Canada in 1941, where he again worked with Grierson, who had founded the National Film Board there. For his best-known works, including Begone Dull Care (co-directed by Evelyn Lambart, 1949) and Blinkity Blank 1955, McLaren drew and etched directly on film to create kinetic works that synchronised images with music. Other techniques included paper cut-outs (Rythmetic, co-directed by E. Lambart, 1956; Le merle, 1958) and line animation. Blinkity Blank, an explosion of lines etched on film, won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Love on the wing 1938
Scherzo 1939
Spook Sport 1940 | Directors:  Norman Mclaren, Mary-Ellen Bute
Dots 1940
Loops 1940
Stars and Strips 1941
Boogie-Doodle 1941
Hen Hop 1942
Mail Early 1941
V For Victory 1941
5 For 4 1942
Dollar Dance 1943
Hoppity Pop 1946
Fiddle-de-dee 1947
Mail Early for Christmas 1959
Begone Dull Care 1949
Blinkity Blank 1955
Short and Suite 1959
Serenal 1959
Lines Vertical 1960
Lines Horizontal 1962
Mosaic 1965
A Little Fantasy on a Nineteenth Century painting 1946
La poulette grise 1947
A Phantasy 1952
Rythmetic 1956 | Directors:  Norman McLaren, E Lambart
Le merle 1958
Canon 1964
Spheres 1969
Synchromy 1971
Creative Process: Norman McLaren 1990 | Director: Donald McWilliams
Cinéastes de notre temps: Norman McLaren (Filmmakers of Our Time: Norman McLaren) 1972 | Director: Andre S Labarthe

Rare Classics: Essential Visual Music
From German pioneers to light show psychedelia to experimental animation classics — rare films and preserved prints from the Center for Visual Music.

R-1 ein Formspiel c.1926–1933 | Director: Oskar Fischinger
Tanz der Farben (Dance of the Colours) 1939 | Director: Hans Fischinger
Dockum Mobilcolor Performance at the Guggenheim 1952 | Director: Charles Dockum Demonstration of Mobilcolor Projector 1966 | Director: Charles Dockum
Performance Film 1966 | Director: Charles Dockum
Early Abstractions, Film No. 3 (Interwoven) 1949 | Director: Harry Smith
Muntz TV Commercial 1952 | Director: Oskar Fischinger
Mood Contrasts 1953 | Director: Mary Ellen Bute
Cibernetik 5.3 1960–65 | Director: John Stehura
Turn, Turn, Turn 1966 | Director: Jud Yalkut
Single Wing Turquoise Bird Light Show Film 1971 | Directors: Single Wing, Turquoise Bird
Tanka 1976 | Director: David Lebrun
Celebration 1978 | Director: Jules Engel
3 Arctic Flowers 1978 | Director: Jules Engel
Accident 1973 | Director: Jules Engel

Soundfields from the Netherlands
The Netherlands is one of the few countries in the world where there has been continuous activity in abstract filmmaking. Despite this, one can not really speak of a Dutch tradition of abstract films because this activity always consisted of individuals who did not follow historical models but reinvented an idea of abstract film for themselves. These individuals were often inspired by the work of contemporaries abroad, and the periods in which most abstract films were made were also the periods in which an active Dutch scene existed that was well-connected with what was happening in other countries. In the last few years a new group of artists has emerged who are mainly doing live performances with projected abstract images and electronic sound. Their work has many spin-offs in the form of installations, collaborations with theatre- or dance-companies and also exists in the form of films, which are often condensed versions of live projection projects. They form a loose group, sometimes working together on artistic projects, but also collaborating on the organisation of events such as the 'Sonic Acts' festival in Amsterdam, where they invite people doing similar work abroad.

Sessions_03_rev03 – SH 2006 | Director: Telcosystems
Interfield 2007 | Director: Martijn Van Boven
Synchronator 2006 | Directors: Bas Van Koolwijk, Gert-Jan Prins
Black Noise White Silence 2006 | Director: Marcel Wierckx
De Tijd 2008 | Director: Bart Vegter
LOUDTHINGS 2008 | Director: Telcosystems
#11, Marey <-> Moiré 1999 | Director: Joost Rekveld

Bärbel Neubauer
Bärbel Neubauer has been creating animation and experimental films since 1980 and composing music and film music since 1991. An Austrian artist living in Germany, Neubauer works in a variety of film mediums including 70mm, 35mm and digital formats. Her practice spans handmade filmmaking techniques of painting and scratching directly on to celluloid through to digital 3D abstract animation.

Algorithmen (Algorithems, Algorthmés) 1994
Falter-Spot 7 1994
Roots 1996
Mondlicht (Moonlight) 1997
Holiday 1998
Feuerhaus (Firehouse) 1998
Passage 2002
Flockenspiel I-IV 2004
Morphs of Pegasus (work in progress) 2004

James and John Whitney
'Painter and filmmaker James Whitney and his brother, fellow filmmaker John Whitney began collaborative investigations of abstract film in 1940 . . . Considered a pioneer of camera animation, John Whitney engineered multiple technological innovations to make films that create a dialogue between imagery and sound, "the voices of light and tone.' Lauren Hebert and Heather McGuire

Lapis 1960
Matrix III 1970
Per-Mu-Ta-Tions 1968
Experiments in Motion Graphics 1968