Born in 1900, Oskar Fischinger began making abstract animation films in the early 1920s and completed about 30 Visual Music by the mid-1930s. His liberal politics, however, and his championing of “degenerate Art” placed him in a dangerous position with the Nazi government.  Both MGM and Paramount wanted to put him under contract in order to rescue him from Germany, but Paramount’s offer arrived first, and he set sail for America, the “Promised Land”, in February 1936. (…) Fischinger made no major films after Motion Painting, largely due to extreme poverty.  He made several advertising films, one of them including drawn “synthetic sound”. He also made special effects (like rocket ships) for a few films and television productions.  He experimented with 3-D stereo film in the early 1950s (as did Harry Smith, Norman McLaren, Hy Hirsh and Dwinell Grant), but never got to screen this lovely 1-minute abstract “motion-painting” piece much, nor make a longer one.  He also made a few starts for another Motion Painting, shooting single frames as he painted canvases, but never carried these on for more than a minute of film time.  He did design hundreds of abstract animations on mutoscope cards, one reel of which (oil-painted) he gave to Solomon Guggenheim as a birthday present (and it was subsequently destroyed).  But he painted hundreds of canvases, up to his dying days when he completed a large serene painting entitled Nirvana.  He died in 1967, but a third generation of his followers have already emerged among the practioners of the new computer arts (such as Lary Cuba and Vibeke Sorensen) and video art (Michael Scroggins).  So Oskar Fischinger remains the man of the century of Visual Music.

Bill Moritz