An Optical Poem

Listed as a 1938 film but perhaps first shown in 1937 since the TCM website states that as the year audiences first viewed An Optical Poem, this was a pioneering animation short. I'm surprised I never watched it before the year 2019, TCM should be showing it more often (and other stop-motion independent shorts from the time). While watching this short I began to think of how it was made. It's using stop motion, taking a picture of the scene and then moving the items in the frame a slight bit at a time and taking another picture and so many thousands of times. TCM has a lot of information about this short. It was done with cut out paper patterns held together by fishing line, no computers back then! It could have been done with animation but when you realize it is being done with stop motion it adds credibility to the degree of work involved in producing the film. MGM, a very conservative studio, paid Oskar Fischinger $11,000 to make the film. Anything he had left over was his to keep. The only problem was there was nothing left over, so Oskar, while he may have wanted to make some money, did this one for the love of his art. It was not widely released and was used as a "prestige" item, playing for high end movie audiences, like as the TCM article states, "first-class ocean-liner passengers". Many at the time thought it would be nominated for an Academy Award (it was not). Mr Fischinger would have a falling out with MGM over the money made from the film that included a physical altercation with MGM staff and his arrest, he would only do 5 more independent shorts before losing interest in film-making and devoting his work to painting instead. MGM, which was using an outside studio before for its animated shorts at the time, the Harmon-Ising studio and their Happy Harmonies series, around the time of An Optical Poem, created their own animation department resulting in many future Oscar winners from the Tom and Jerry franchise. This is the story of An Optical Poem, quite an interesting one not only on how it was made and the level of sophistication it presented in 1937 with its high fidelity sound, brilliant technicolor photography and inspired use of stop motion animation, but for the way mainstream audiences and Hollywood basically rejected it as being too far ahead of its time. For film history buffs it marks an achievement in film making and a time capsule on the social attitudes towards modern artists in the 1930s. 10 of 10.

Just about anyone who's ever made a music video — especially an abstract one — owes a debt of gratitude to Oskar Fischinger. This short film is a charming rendition of Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody set to a dazzling series of colored dots, lines, flashes and vivid visual effects that often look like a Piet Mondrian painting come to life. Paul Marquardt's often cheeky orchestration — far different from the one usually heard — adds a quite inventive series of tonal effects to the film that only underscores the rambunctious appeal of Fischinger's animation. I remember seeing films like this from the 1960's and not realizing anyone had done anything this imaginative with the same format thirty years earlier — and I can't for the life of me imagine what unsuspecting moviegoers who caught this in 1937 on a program headlined by an MGM feature of the period made of it!

After years of favoriting this on YouTube, I finally watched this M-G-M/Oskar Fischinger colored paper-animated short there. Done to the music of Franz Liszt's "Second Hungarian Rhapsody" (the same music Bugs Bunny would play in Rhapsody Rabbit), we see lots of circles, rectangles, and other shapes in space moving and appearing/disappearing to that music. Quite fascinating to watch and maybe it may have been the inspiration for Walt Disney's later feature length Fantasia a few years later. This seemed to be Fischinger's only film work for a major studio. It certainly seemed possibly too avant garde for the tastes of the public of the time! How many even know about this one? Anyway, that's a recommendation for An Optical Poem.

The tagline for Disney's 'Fantasia (1940)' read: "Hear the pictures! See the music!" This is, in effect, what Oskar Fischinger was doing with his animation – communicating music to the deaf, giving visual life to music using colours and geometric patterns. His approach, though later imitated by Walt Disney, was largely appreciated outside the mainstream. However, 'Allegretto (1936)' and 'An Optical Poem (1937)' were both commissioned by big studios – Paramount and MGM, respectively {however, the former film was inconceivably stifled into a black-and-white release}. It was a little novel, I'll admit, to see such an abstract cartoon presented under the MGM banner, and, indeed, it seems that the studio was understandably cautious; they bizarrely introduce 'An Optical Poem' as a "scientific" experiment.

Fischinger's film uses patterns of oscillating circles, paper cutouts dangling from invisible wires, synchronised to Franz Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2." The animation itself resembles a journey through outer space. The orbiting circles are akin to moons orbiting planets, planets orbiting the sun, and there's an unmistakable image of a comet hurtling across the night sky. The overall effect of the space-themed visuals and accompanying classical musical is not all that dissimilar to Kubrick's use of the "Blue Danube" waltz during '2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).' Fischinger seems to be suggesting that to fully articulate such magnificent music is beyond the grasp of our earthly minds – to do so, we must utilise objects far beyond our mortal scope. Most incredibly of all, Fischinger reconstructed these great objects using little more than coloured paper and wire.

What makes me chuckle about this short film is that MGM actually financed it! Who'd have thought that such attitudes were ever present at the big studios? The intertitle at the start calls the movie a "scientific experiment"*, gawd those guys were dumb. Anyway they let Fischinger get on with his business so I can't complain. The second time I watched it I really was dumbfounded by the MGM logo, for once, ars gratia artis actually meant something! Anyway the film is a visual accompaniment to Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody no.2. Fischinger chose his music really well because there are lots of sea changes within the piece that allows him to do something totally different at the mood switches. He uses coloured paper circles and stop motion animation, to create a geometrical ballet. He must have done a lot of work because the movements are all very smooth. In fact it's really a masterpiece of technical craft and almost unbelievable how synchronised the animation is to the music.

It brought a big smile to my face and that's really rare.

* "To most of us, music suggests definite mental images of form and colour. The picture you are about to see is a novel scientific experiment. Its object is to convey these mental images in visual form"