This weeks lecture was based on the development of European Abstract Animation.
Avant Garde Art and Animation
Like everything in animation, we can trace back a style to older art. This Abstract animation leads back to the Avant Garde of Modern art. This art movement spanned from the 1860s to 1970s and it was all about this idea of experimentation. The modern art movement rejected any religious and traditional forms of art which strived to recreated life and its static view. Instead Modern art was all about showing the movement of life, it was abstracting what we can see and instead creating the feelings, emotion and life on a still canvas. This is seen through the optical effects and psychological concepts of movement captured in the lines, forms and shapes captured on the canvas.
The artistic movements that have these ideas at the time include :
Cubism
Futurism
Dadaism
Surrealsim
After impressionism, paintings moved to then try capture movement and life itself by capturing action. This is seen best in the work of Giacomo Balla, whose paintings look very similar to onion skinning in animation to this day, with its overlapping steps and the lack of sharp edges along all of these movements. I think these are some of my favourite pieces from the modern art movement, they give a charm, life and personality and perfectly capture the idea of movement in a static frame. I think from these two pieces, The Hand of the Violinist is my favourite, it captures really good form and colour which shows skill and technique while also allowing the movement to be seen as the hand dances over the violin strings and bow.
The work of Marcel Duchamp too shows this movement and while I like it less than Balla’s work It does have more of an abstract charm. Focussing on shapes and linework which upon first glance looks indecipherable, but then on closer inspection it is a ladies form descending the stairs.
This then lead to artists wanting to explore trying to animate this paintings, taking the movement on canvas one step further and start creating movement on screen.
European Pioneers
Walter Ruttmann (1887=1941)
Walter Ruttman was born in Frankfurt, and was the first practitioner of experimental film (animation). All of his films are animated with musical structures, having a fast-paced rhythm and the interplay of colour. These ended up being donned as a ‘New Art’ being called the Vision Music of Films as it combined the stiffness of fine art with the rhythm and movement of music that create life. These would be accompanied by a live orchestra.
This film (Lichtspiel Opus I) was thought to be the first screening of an abstract animated film in the world, shown in Frankfurt of Spring 1921.
Following the previous movie, Lichtspeil Opus II, III and IV were all screened in London in 1925. These were all described by the London Times as ”Absolute Film- A series of moving patterns, which produce the liveliest response in the spectator”.
Ruttman’s contribution, while small in number, was undeniably important to the animation industry. They showed that one can translate art to film and from this influenced a new wave of artists at the time.
While I can say that these short films have little interest to me, I can see how revolutionary they were to the industry today, how new and exciting creating this new form of expression must have been and how the audiences could be enamoured.
Viking Eggeling (1880-1925)
Born in Sweden in 1880, he moved to Switzerland in 1915 and established contacts with Dadaism artists leading him to become friends with Hans Richter. Both of them explored the depiction of movement in Germany from 1919-1921.
Eggling bought a motion picture camera in 1922 and wanted to create new universal language of abstract symbols, searching for ”the rules of a plastic counterpoint”, striving to create fluidity and movement.
Work on Diagonale Symphonie began in 1923 and ended in 1924, it was shown as a private screening in Berlin on Nov. 5 of 1924 and was only shown publicly to Germany on may 3rd of 1925.
Eggling really worked to explore opposites in his work, top/bottom, one/many, light/dark, and how these could be expressed in his film. The way he approached hsi film was by creating black lines on a white background and using a ruler and compass to almost mechanically and very precisely create movements. He would then shoot them one by one on his camera. Something interesting is how he would invert some of his forms, something which is very common in his work. The way he made this was be shooting the lines in a mirror so that they would be flipped instead of re-drawing them as it was important for him that his work be precise. The lines themselves were timed with certain elements of movements, curved lines followed strings and the blockier lines followed percussion and piano.
Overall this made his work very flat, very precise and mechanical and graphic. Relying on shape and surface to create form and how this is timed to the music.
Hans Richter(1888-1976)
Hans Richter was born in Berlin, beginning as a cubist painter before contributing to the founding of Dadaism in Zurich. This brought him together with Eggling where they collaborated in abstract animation experiments from 1919-1921.
Richter dedicated his first years of making film in creating these abstract animations, where he created Rhythm 21, Rhythm 23 and Rhythm 25 from 1921-1925.
Richter’s approach to animation was a lot different to Egglings. Instead of the more graphic style and line work, Richter instead explored 3 Dimensional space through the gradation of colour, instead of just black and white we have grey introduced here. This is seen in Rhythm 21 where you get the sense of growing scale, sweeping in space and moving from black to white in this space. This all worked to produced this dynamic effect of depth. This freed Richter from the art of before, breaching out into a more interactive form of art with dimension and depth.
A dutch artist/architect, Theo Van Doesburg, saw Richters work as an opening to the 4th Dimension, as movement combines with 3-dimensionality. As it focusses more on depth it allows itself to break from the 2D plane and branch into architecture and time. This meant that film became a system of mutation, as Richter showed the transformation of his art from drawings, to film, to architecture.
Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967)
Oskar Fischinger was born in Gelhausen, Germany. He composed a series of abstract animated short Studien (studies) from 1929-1931, all accompanied with different kinds of music. Studies 5 through 12 were sold and shown in theatres throughout Europe, as well as Japan and the US. This shows the wide reach that his works inspired and influenced a variety of animation around the world.
Kompostion in Blau is considered one of the most influential pieces of film, it was his most ambitious project and he worked on it from 1934-1935. In this film Fischinger links the 3rd dimension with colour, using stop motion and all of these individually crafted pieces that he painted and animated. I actually really enjoyed watching the full film in class, and I could only find an excerpt online to put here. But throughout the film there are a couple elements that I was able to pick out; Colour reflects the major and minor keys of the notes, and the movement on screen reflects the interactivity between the instruments. The sharp movements of the shapes reflect the strong, sudden beats and then the smoother movements highlight the melodies and build ups in the strings. The fact that it is stop motion and physical objects gives physicality and texture unlike the previous examples that just created or discarded the idea of depth.
It is very easy to see how much precision and care was put into this film and that the work definatley pays off as the movements gives this joyful life and expression, personality to the little cubes on screen as they dance to the music.
At the time, abstract art was prohibited, as Hitler has deigned them as degenerate, and Fischinger managed to continue his work under the guise of them being ‘decorative’ instead of abstract. He did decide to leave Germany for the US in 1936 upon being invited. He ended up in a contract with Disney due to Economic pressures. He joined the artists working on Fantasia, and since it represented an idea that he had for years he hoped that he could be satisfied with his time working here. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to convince Walt Disney, or other staff of his artistic values.
Despite this we can see how similar Komposition in Blau and Fantasia are. The differences here is that we are given characters with a bit more personality, which makes it a bit more receptible to wider audiences, as well as younger audiences without it being described as too abstract or artsy. The overall environment is more presentable and there is a rough narrative we can follow so it branches the divide of animation and abstract animation. I think this is a really fun idea, by changing these simple abstract shapes and forms for simple objects in nature and giving them some personality but still timing everything to the music and connecting their movements and actions to particular instruments and keys we can create these amazing pieces that can be understood worldwide. I just adore the below clip from the full film, where these little mushrooms dance along to The Nutcrackers- Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.
In 1946 he began his last work Motion Painting No.1 (1947), where he looked for strict mechanical correlations between sound and image- this was based on the constant transformations of paintings on Plexiglass. Then he ended up abandoning work on Motion Painting No.2 in 1961 before dying at the age of 66 in Hollywood.
It is undeniable how influential this man was to animation, and film. I think that he was the largest pioneer, especially as his work on Fantasia bridged the gap between more abstract and artistic films to what common audiences today can enjoy. As well as the use of only musical scores and lack of narrative being something that anyone from around the world can enjoy and understand equally, bringing everyone together in motion films and the emotion of sound.
Len Lye (1901 –1980)
Len Lye was born in New Zealand, and he made most of his animations in England from 1928-1938.
His first camera-less film was A Colour Box (1935), and this was considered the first animated film painted directly on film and shown to a general audience. Camera-less film was a technique where instead of using a camera to shoot paintings, etc, instead you take the film itself anf apply techniques straight on it to produce film (painting, scratching, stamping, sticking etc). This was a more financially conscious way to produce animation since camera’s were expensive.
I actually really enjoyed this animation, I thought it looked really fun and the bright colours and fluidity that were shown paired with the energetic music made this energetic piece. I think I think len Lye’s work not because of the animated results, but because the process to create them I imagine would be fun. I really enjoy experimentation and playing with media and this is the embodiment of that but placed on film and then played back.
Trade Tattoo (1939) was made by stenciling abstract patterns onto some discarded documentary footage, as a way to renew and show the new ideologies of the time. This animation had a couple different techniques; Vibration pattern superimposed over live action ( stippling and cross hatching); Live action that you can speed up and slow down with cuts; synchronising these all with sound accents.
Overall, I found myself enjoying abstract animation a lot more than I initially thought I would. I think the expressionism in this area seemed really fun and pushed the boundaries paving the way for more narrative animation that uses experimental means. My favourite works were definitely Komposition in Blau-Oscar Fischinger and a Colour Box-Len Lye. I think I might study this area of animation further and use it to have fun and just experiment with different media and movement (ignoring an overarching narrative and just being free to create).