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Oskar Wilhelm Fischinger (June 22, 1900 – January 31, 1967) was a German-American abstract animator, , and painting, notable for creating abstract musical animation many decades before the appearance of computer graphics and music videos. He created special effects for Fritz Lang's 1929 Woman in the Moon, one of the first sci-fi rocket films, and influenced Walt Disney's Fantasia. He made over 50 short films and painted around 800 canvases, many of which are in museums, galleries, and collections worldwide. Among his film works is Motion Painting No. 1 (1947), which is now listed on the National Film Registry of the U.S. Library of Congress.
During this time Fischinger shot many abstract tests of his own using the machine. Some of these are distributed today under the assigned title Wax Experiments.
In 1924, Fischinger formed a company with American entrepreneur Louis Seel to produce satirical cartoons that tended toward mature audiences. One survives in his film estate, Pierrette I. He also continued to make abstract films and tests of his own, trying new and different techniques, including multiple projector performances. "In 1926 and 1927, Fischinger performed his own multiple projector film shows with various musical accompaniments. These shows were titled Fieber ( Fever), Vakuum, and Macht ( Power)'".
Facing financial difficulties, Fischinger borrowed from his family, and then his landlady. Finally, in an effort to escape bill collectors, Fischinger decided to surreptitiously depart Munich for Berlin in June 1927. Taking only his essential equipment, he walked 350 miles through the countryside, shooting single frames that were released many decades later as the film Walking from Munich to Berlin.
The Studies — Numbers 1 through 12 — were well received and many were distributed to first-run theatres worldwide, as far as Japan and South America. His Studie Nr. 5 screened at the 1931 "Congress for Colour-Music Research" to critical acclaim. In 1932, Universal Pictures purchased distribution rights to one of the Studies for the American public. The special effects Fischinger did for clients' films and commercials led to his being called "the Wizard of Friedrichstraße". In 1932, Fischinger married Elfriede Fischinger, a first cousin from his hometown of Gelnhausen.
As the Nazism consolidated power after 1933, the abstract film and art communities and distribution possibilities quickly disappeared as the Nazis instituted their policies against what they termed "degenerate art". His brother Hans Fischinger showed his absolute film " Tanz der Farben" (i.e. The Dance of Colors) in Hamburg in 1939. Oskar Fischinger continued to make films, and commercials and advertisements, among them Muratti greift ein (translated as Muratti Gets in the Act, or Muratti Marches On) (1934), for a cigarette company, and Kreise ( Circles) (1933–34), for the Tolirag advertising agency. The color Muratti commercial with its stop-motion dancing cigarettes screened all over the world. Fischinger managed to complete his abstract work Komposition in Blau in 1935. It was well-received critically, and contrary to popular myth, was legally registered.Moritz. (2004). p.207 An agent from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer screened prints of Komposition in Blau and Muratti in a small art theatre in Hollywood, and Ernst Lubitsch was impressed by the films and the audience's enthusiastic response to the shorts. An agent from Paramount Pictures telephoned Fischinger, asking if he was willing to work in the United States, and Fischinger promptly agreed.
Most of Fischinger's filmmaking attempts in America suffered difficulties. According to Moritz, Fischinger composed An Optical Poem (1937) to Franz Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody for MGM, but received no profits due to studio bookkeeping systems. He designed the J. S. Bach Toccata and Fugue in D Minor sequence for Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940), but quit without credit because Disney altered his designs to be more representational. According to William Moritz, Fischinger contributed to the effects animation of the Blue Fairy's wand in Pinocchio (1940). In the 1950s, Fischinger created several animated TV advertisements, including one for Muntz TV.
The Museum of Non-Objective Painting commissioned him to synchronize a film with a march by John Philip Sousa in order to demonstrate loyalty to America, and then insisted that he make a film to Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, even though he wanted to make a film without sound in order to affirm the integrity of his non-objective imagery. Secretly, Fischinger composed the silent film Radio Dynamics (1942).
Frustrated in his filmmaking, Fischinger turned increasingly to oil painting as a creative outlet. According to Moritz, though the Guggenheim Foundation specifically requested a cel animation film, Fischinger made his Bach film Motion Painting No. 1 (1947) as a documentation of the act of painting, taking a single frame each time he made a brush stroke—and the multi-layered style merely parallels the structure of the Bach music without any tight synchronization. Although he never again received funding for any of his personal films (only some commercial work), the Motion Painting No. 1 won the Grand Prix at the Brussels International Experimental Film Competition in 1949. Three of Fischinger's films also made the 1984 Olympiad of Animation's list of the world's greatest films. On January 31, 1967, he died at the age of 66.
The Academy Film Archive has preserved many of Oskar Fischinger's films, including Motion Painting No. 1, Squares, and Spirals.
The device itself was silent, but was performed accompanying various music. Fischinger gave several performances in Los Angeles and one in San Francisco in the early 1950s, performing various classical and popular music pieces, and many were impressed by the machine's spectacular images. In 1964 the Lumigraph was used in the science fiction film The Time Travelers, in which it became a "lumichord", although this was not Fischinger's intent, but the decision of the film's producers. Fischinger's son Conrad even built two more machines in different sizes. After his death, his widow Elfriede and daughter Barbara gave performances with the Lumigraph, along with William Moritz, in Europe and the US.
Today one of the instruments is in the collection of the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt, and the other two are in California. In February 2007 Barbara Fischinger performed on the original Lumigraph in Frankfurt, and in 2012 in Amsterdam.
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