This was a program of short films that, as I look at the date, ought to have come before the items above, chronologically. Probably before my entry about The Tattooed Potato, too. Oh well. Anyway.

I had seen many of these, but not all of them, before, a few years ago at another screening (and a few in some very low-quality files online), but this was a rare opportunity – plus I wanted Beth to see them. I can’t seem to find the program – and it wasn’t quite the lineup promised in the press release linked above – so, thankfully, I can’t/don’t have to address each film separately. Many of the individual films shown, especially the earlier items, were experiments in the rawest sense of the word – fragments (or, sometimes, extended loops) without much form (form through time, that is).

Basically, my feelings about Oskar Fischinger are that his visual ideas are wonderfully obvious – seeing one of his films for the first time, you think, “ah, this sort of thing,” as though you’ve always been aware that it existed, and this particular execution of it is just a historical detail. I suppose I could say that this reveals the ways that Fischinger’s work has been quietly and broadly influential, that it feels familiar because we’ve encountered its offspring – but I actually think it speaks to something more interesting than influence; I think this work elicits a response of “of course there’s this” because the particular visual elements Fischinger chose – zooming arcs and expanding planes, gliding circles, bouncing bars, etc. etc. – these speak at some primal level to the way we conceive of kinetics. I’ve seen (and attempted to produce) other work in the same vein – visual abstract movement inspired by music – and I can assure you that not everything connects the way most of Fischinger’s imagery does – not just any bunch of dots rhythmically boinging around seems as inevitable as his generally do.

And, for all that, that’s also one my reservations about Fischinger’s work – it doesn’t always connect. His spirit of experimentation seems to have prevented him from ever really nailing it – to me, each film has a couple concepts in it that don’t quite pop. His moire-patterns and rippling spirograph vortices, for example, are so much less communicative and interesting than his circles and curves, and yet he keeps trying to find a place for them in films where they end up being distracting and frustrating.

My other major reservation about these films is the way they handle their music. At some level, Fischinger was obviously very sensitive to the nature of musical flux – bursting or accumulating or contracting or approaching, etc. etc. But the ideas he created in this visual language, which is immediately recognizable as musical, seldom seem to work completely in sync with the music they purport to accompany. It’s as though Fischinger couldn’t help but let the visuals order themselves according to their own principles – music-like principles, yes, but not necessarily the music of the soundtrack. The little arcs and circles and whatnot frequently do not illustrate or serve the music; they perform a duet with it. I don’t think this is quite what he had in mind, since quite often the visual and the music will seem to line up exactly and speak together – and it’s thrilling! – but then at the next instant, the visuals have begun to do something that’s lovely in itself but seems to have its own agenda. That offers a different kind of satisfaction, and I wish I didn’t have to switch between them over the course of the film.

This is probably why my favorite of his films, by far, is Motion Painting No. 1 (1947), which, though it has a Brandenburg Concerto playing throughout, is not a “music” piece, and in fact employs a different and simpler sort of time-logic, one with much richer implications. The film is, as titled, a painting, one which is continuously painted and repainted. Nothing “moves” and nothing is “taken away”; Fischinger simply adds more and more paint, simultaneously adding to and covering up that which came before. The process, as it plays out, is absolutely abstract and yet full of possible significance. My first association is with the process of pencil doodling, which in its purest, least self-conscious form, is improvisatory and additive. These parallel lines, what do they demand? How about some concentric circles? After a certain point the concentric circles reach capacity and it suddenly becomes opportune to add radii. Etcetera. Everyone who has ever doodled has a taste and talent for making these decisions, but the pomp of “art” often prevents us from feeling that it’s appropriate to bring these instincts to bear in thinking about abstract art, though in fact they ought to be our first point of access. Watching Motion Painting, that identification is immediate, and we experience the joy of deciding how many circles is enough circles, or we savor the irreducibly abstract experience of a number of circles that is slightly beyond “enough”; truly aesthetic thought, in the purest sense. This kind of thought is implicit in abstract painting, but here it plays out openly, and everyone is involved. The film almost teaches us how to think unpretentiously about abstraction.*

But as I said, the implications go well beyond that. The painting is always constructing itself, like a doodle, toward being a static, completed aesthetic whole, but that process is never, can never be, consummated. As a painting, it implicitly strives to be “finished,” but the only possible finished state is the obliteration that comes with the end of the film; the journey has been the point – and yet the journey was a process of construction. This paradox of purpose has a deep philosophical resonance. In the film’s coda, the processes of construction and destruction accelerate until they are indistinguishable from movement; as the scale of time shifts, we feel the poignant futility of the process, even as its beauty, captured on film, plays out before us. The phases of the abstraction are the cycles of life, of history: endless birth and endless death synthesized with the roving forward movement of a striving consciousness. A fundamental artistic vision, encapsulated in such a simply constructed work. It is forcefully simple.

Steve Reich wrote about the value of hearing “music as a process” and his better music has always given me some of that sort of pleasure; its beauty is not strictly musical but rather the beauty of the natural world, of mathematics. It is not a particularly human beauty, and though I’m very appreciative of the taste Steve Reich had to exercise in order to construct those forms and surfaces, I don’t really ascribe the beauty in his music to him. His music is to me like the photographer’s art – the art of delivering, extracting, or summoning beauty from the world rather than attempting it oneself. This is the generally the way with art attempting mathematical beauty; the purity is the point and so it’s best tapped at the source. Motion Painting No. 1 offers that beauty of natural processes, and of time, but is, to me, far deeper and more moving because it is also inescapably human – it is a performance of nature rather than a reproduction of it. And in these senses, it is in fact very well matched with the Bach that accompanies it, which in its own way is a sort of superhuman immortal order as conceived by a mortal. The beauty of Bach is its combination of the worlds of God and man, the infinitely perfect surrounding and sustaining the emotional and finite. But Bach’s music is sometimes too devout for me, too ready to believe that those two kinds of order belong with one another. Motion Painting No. 1 is the same combination but, in a sense, more arbitrary, more mortal. The infinite aspect is provided by Bach’s music, and by the quasi-geometric designs, and most of all by the inexorable forward movement of the film and of time. But the geometric designs are imperfect, hand-drawn attempts, and everything that emerges over the course of the film dies.

Then again it’s just a bunch of shapes. Doodle-y shapes, no less. It seems odd for me to feel so moved by these shapes, and maybe I ought to be saying that this reaction is probably peculiar to me. But I don’t think it is, and I don’t think it’s wrong to ascribe profundity to a work of art that uses the simplest means and leaves the depth to play out in the mind of the spectator. And then again, it’s simplistic for me even to feel the need to justify and ascribe that profundity to the art rather than to my own thought process; the art experience is, of course, always the result of the combination of work and audience, and even if an experience is more audience than artist, there’s nothing wrong with that. But in deciding how to value the work, I tend to want to decide how much it brought to the table; a kaleidoscope may be beautiful and thought-provoking but it brings little of its own, and it seems important to me to recognize that if I’m going to respond to it like this. Then again maybe that’s just a prejudice I should get past; I’m really not sure. Maybe the fixation on “value” is misguided. Anyway, this is a whole other discussion and maybe I’ll address it again whenever I finally get around to talking about the “Unseen Cinema” films and say some more about Portrait of a Young Man, which created an experience that seemed profound to me despite being almost entirely dependent upon the photographic method mentioned above.

A music professor of mine once gave a pre-concert lecture (that I missed), the gist of which was (I gathered, or perhaps simply imagined based on scraps) that in order to engage with a work of music, the audience must bring its own “compositional” opinions (of the “how many circles is enough circles” sort) into play; that asking “what would I do next?” and answering it with these sorts of instincts goes a long way toward making the meaning of a “difficult” work accessible. You know, maybe I completely made up that that’s what his lecture was about, but for some reason, real or not, I’m ascribing this idea to him; and I agree with it, possibly because I invented it.