The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger: A Journey into Animation and Abstraction

The Dancing Cigarettes has become his most famous film. “Muratti intervenes” is the name of the advertising clip from 1934 for the cigarette brand of the same name. Some people are said to have come to the cinemas not because of the main film – but because of this three-minute short commercial film. You can understand it, especially when you see and hear what else Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967) created.

The animation and abstraction pioneer, tinkerer and inventor, born in Gelnhausen, emigrated to the United States in 1936 after working in Frankfurt and Berlin. Even before the invention of sound films, he thought of sound and image together; he is also credited with making the first complete color film (1933). attributed. His “studies,” hand-painted abstract sound-image collages created since the late 1920s, are all concentrated masterpieces. When red, blue, green, made of paper and hand-painted, dance across the canvas to Mozart or Bach, you can hardly escape the magic of these pictures.

Director Harald Pulch (left) and Ralf Ott: Image: JIP Film

Some may call it illustrated music, others the first music videos: It is thanks to the Wiesbaden director Harald Pulch that Oskar Fischinger’s life and work are now coming back to the screen. And the path to the film “Oskar Fischinger – Music for the Eyes” is almost as astonishing as Fischinger’s life’s work itself: Exactly 30 years ago, Pulch, who has been an expert in film history for years and has worked on it in numerous documentaries, was able to do so through a lucky coincidence Interview Oskar Fischinger’s widow, Elfriede (1910-1999), who was also born in Gelnhausen, in her home in Los Angeles.

Colorful shadow plays

“I met Elfriede Fischinger in 1991. At that time I made a documentary about advertising and avant-garde films from the 1920s and 1930s. There was no way around Fischinger. Walter Schobert, the director of the film museum at the time, had original paintings by Oskar Fischinger in his office. He made contact with Elfriede,” remembers Pulch. At that time, however, he was only interested in the German phase of Fischinger’s work. It’s lucky that another project took Pulch to America and he was able to film Elfriede Fischinger. She showed him her husband’s rich legacy, such as the Lumigraph he invented, which even laypeople can use to create Fischinger’s colorful shadow plays. Fischinger’s camera is now coming to the cinema with Pulch in Gelnhausen, for the cinema premiere on the occasion of the Hessian Documentary Film Day.

Just a few years ago, Pulch would not have thought that it could happen like this: in 1993 he became a film professor at Mainz University, the first there. “I thought I would finish the film in two or three years,” he remembers – but the teaching demanded too much of him. Then came a severe stroke in 2009, and working, even speaking, was out of the question for a long time. It was former students like the managing director of Frankfurter Filmproduktion Acht, Ralf Ott, who brought him back to filmmaking – and Ott asked about Fischinger’s video material. So both of them set about digitizing the material while retaining the characteristics of the films recorded, which were recorded in 4:3 format. The result is a multi-layered contemporary document – and a lively double biography.

Love between cousin and cousin

The then 83-year-old Elfriede, who vividly remembers an entire life with her funny American-Hessian-tinged German, proves not only to be a faithful chronicler who knows how to describe the path of the passionate synesthetic artist Fischinger, but also to be a congenial partner for her husband . She studied at the School of Applied Arts, which later became the University of Design, in Offenbach, so she was never the inexperienced helper that she sometimes portrays herself to be.

Eva-Maria Magel Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 1 Günter Herzog Published/Updated: Recommendations: 5

Film history is not a Sunday outing. It doesn’t glide smoothly while castles, towns and villages pass by on its banks – no, it occurs in jumps and tremors that cause entire landscapes to collapse…

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A great, touching love story emerges between cousin and cousin who had to overcome resistance in order to get married. She talks casually about how the family, with soon to be four children, lived in poverty in Hollywood for several years because Oskar Fischinger, who was hired by Disney, among others, couldn’t cope with the American system and, above all, didn’t want to make any artistic compromises. In the end, this man who made the cigarettes dance needed neither moving images nor sound: completely dedicated to painting, he let his abstract compositions dance by themselves.

Oskar Fischinger – music for the eyespremiere as part of the Hessian Documentary Film Day in the Gelnhausen cinema, September 15th at 8:30 p.m., second premiere on September 20th at the Filmmuseum Frankfurt, stations under hessischer-dokumentarfilmtag.de.

2023-09-14 04:47:44
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