An Optical Poem

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.

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"

I appreciated the soundtrack more than the abstract art, patterns of balloon-shaped dots that dance across the screen for six minutes while the 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody explodes with musical sounds.

After a few minutes, the short becomes too repetitious to be really novel. In fact, it's the sort of thing the Disney studio was already experimenting with and led to several short subjects, as well as the full-length feature "Fantasia" later on, combining classical music with unique animation.

But this was 1937 and the comparison to Disney was not made at the time. Nevertheless, I found it monotonous to watch and not unique enough, except for the exhilarating classical music performed.

Abstract images float across the field in time to Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody.

Oskar Fischinger had been producing this sort of abstract animation since 1924 in Germany as an outgrowth of the Dadaist movement. He was not the only film maker to at least dabble in this sort of work. Over in England, Len Lye started doing the same thing with the introduction of sound to films, and later, Norman McLaren would make several of his early shorts doing much the same. In fact, a couple of years after this came out, part of FANTASIA would do the same. It was a natural outgrowth of abstract art and program music, in which the music was meant to evoke emotions or scenes or even stories. They didn't call them etudes for no reason, but because they evoked enquiring thoughts. Only with abstract animation like this, the audience was called upon to go its own way, and perhaps afterwards discuss what it was all about.

Pretty colors, though. It reminds me of the days I was part of the light show crew at the Fillmore East.

This is from a collection of art films entitled "Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941". Unlike most of the other films in this set, this one is from a major studio--MGM. Somehow Oskar Fischinger was able to convince the MGM folks to sponsor this art film that consists of hundreds of paper cut-outs that are hung from invisible wires and which are shot, one frame at a time---all in synchronization with music from Franz Liszt. It's all in color and it's amazing that such a non-commercial sort of project was funded by this or any studio.

While it's not at all fun, it is an amazing film to watch. Not only is it wonderfully synchronized, but works so very well. It's all very hypnotic and amazing--even when you see it today. It must have taken forever practically to make this--and perhaps this is why this is Fischinger's only film. Strange but well worth seeing.