Abstract animation

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Abstract film or absolute film is a subgenre of experimental film and a form of abstract art. Abstract films are non-narrative, contain no acting and do not attempt to reference reality or concrete subjects. They rely on the unique qualities of motion, rhythm, light and composition inherent in the technical medium of cinema to create emotional experiences. [1] The French Cinéma pur movement is closely related to absolute film, originating in the same period and based on very similar concepts, but its films are seldom fully abstract; they usually contain recognizable figuration.

Experimental film, experimental cinema or avant-garde cinema is a mode of filmmaking that rigorously re-evaluates cinematic conventions and explores non-narrative forms and alternatives to traditional narratives or methods of working. Many experimental films, particularly early ones, relate to arts in other disciplines: painting, dance, literature and poetry, or arise from research and development of new technical resources.

Abstract art Art with a degree of independence from visual references in the world

Abstract art uses a visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. The arts of cultures other than the European had become accessible and showed alternative ways of describing visual experience to the artist. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse, and reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of Western culture at that time.

Non-narrative film is an aesthetic of cinematic film that does not narrate, or relate "an event, whether real or imaginary". The aesthetic is non-representational. It is usually a form of art film or experimental film, not made for mass entertainment.

Contents

The history of abstract film often overlaps with the concerns and history of visual music. Some films are very similar to music visualization, especially when electronic devices (for instance oscilloscopes) were used to generate a type of motion graphics in relation to music.

Visual music, sometimes called colour music, refers to the use of musical structures in visual imagery, which can also include silent films or silent Lumia work. It also refers to methods or devices which can translate sounds or music into a related visual presentation. An expanded definition may include the translation of music to painting; this was the original definition of the term, as coined by Roger Fry in 1912 to describe the work of Wassily Kandinsky. There are a variety of definitions of visual music, particularly as the field continues to expand. In some recent writing, usually in the fine art world, visual music is often confused with or defined as synaesthesia, though historically this has never been a definition of visual music. Visual music has also been defined as a form of intermedia.

Music visualization

Music visualization or music visualisation, a feature found in electronic music visualizers and media player software, generates animated imagery based on a piece of music. The imagery is usually generated and rendered in real time and in a way synchronized with the music as it is played.

Oscilloscope type of electronic test instrument

An 'oscilloscope', previously called an 'oscillograph', and informally known as a scope or o-scope, CRO, or DSO, is a type of electronic test instrument that graphically displays varying signal voltages, usually as a two-dimensional plot of one or more signals as a function of time. Other signals can be converted to voltages and displayed.

Many abstract films have been made with animation techniques. The distinction between animation and other techniques can be rather unclear in some films, for instance when abstract objects were filmed in motion or with camera movement when very similar results could have been obtained with stop motion techniques.

Animation Method of creating moving pictures

Animation is a method in which pictures are manipulated to appear as moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Today, most animations are made with computer-generated imagery (CGI). Computer animation can be very detailed 3D animation, while 2D computer animation can be used for stylistic reasons, low bandwidth or faster real-time renderings. Other common animation methods apply a stop motion technique to two and three-dimensional objects like paper cutouts, puppets or clay figures.

Stop motion animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own

Stop motion is an animated-film making technique in which objects are physically manipulated in small increments between individually photographed frames so that they will appear to exhibit independent motion when the series of frames is played back as a fast sequence. Dolls with movable joints or clay figures are often used in stop motion for their ease of repositioning. Stop-motion animation using plasticine figures is called clay animation or "clay-mation". Not all stop motion, however, requires figures or models: stop-motion films can also be made using humans, household appliances, and other objects, usually for comedic effect. Stop motion using humans is sometimes referred to as pixilation or pixilate animation.

History

Before cinema

A number of devices can be regarded as early media for abstract animation or visual music, including color organs, chinese fireworks, the kaleidoscope and special animated slides for the magic lantern (like the chromatrope).

The term color organ refers to a tradition of mechanical devices built to represent sound and accompany music in a visual medium. The earliest created color organs were manual instruments based on the harpsichord design. By the 1900s they were electromechanical. In the early 20th century, a silent color organ tradition (Lumia) developed. In the 1960s and '70s, the term "color organ" became popularly associated with electronic devices that responded to their music inputs with light shows. The term "light organ" is increasingly being used for these devices; allowing "color organ" to reassume its original meaning.

Chinese fireworks or paper fireworks, also known by the more distinct French terms feux pyriques or feux arabesques, is a type of optical toy box that displays pictures with twinkling light effects. The pictures are partly printed or painted and partly perforated into plates that are made of paper, parchment or cardboard. Different plates can be placed in the front of the box, one by one. A wheel with a spiraling pattern on coloured transparent paper is made to rotate between a light source and the picture plates, causing the light to flicker and move in different colours through the perforations in the plates.

Kaleidoscope cylinder with mirrors containing loose, colored objects such as beads or pebbles and bits of glass

A kaleidoscope is an optical instrument with two or more reflecting surfaces tilted to each other in an angle, so that one or more objects on one end of the mirrors are seen as a regular symmetrical pattern when viewed from the other end, due to repeated reflection. The reflectors are usually enclosed in a tube, often containing on one end a cell with loose, colored pieces of glass or other transparent materials to be reflected into the viewed pattern. Rotation of the cell causes motion of the materials, resulting in an ever-changing view being presented.

Some of the earliest animation designs for stroboscopic devices (like the phénakisticope and the zoetrope) were abstract, including one Fantascope disc by inventor Joseph Plateau and many of Simon Stampfer's Stroboscopische Scheiben (1833).

Joseph Plateau Belgian physicist

Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau was a Belgian physicist. He was one of the first people to demonstrate the illusion of a moving image. To do this he used counter rotating disks with repeating drawn images in small increments of motion on one and regularly spaced slits in the other. He called this device of 1832 the phenakistiscope.

Earliest examples

Four frames from "Diagonal-Symphonie" Diagonal-Symphonie.jpg
Four frames from "Diagonal-Symphonie"

Abstract film concepts were shaped by early 20th century art movements such as Cubism, Expressionism, Dadaism, Suprematism, Futurism, and possible others. [2] These art movements were beginning to gain momentum in the 1910's.

Italian Futurists Arnaldo Ginna and his brother Bruno Corra reportedly made hand-painted films between 1911 and 1912 that are now lost. In 1916 they published The Futurist Cinema manifesto together with Giacomo Balla, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Remo Chiti and Emilio Settimelli. They proposed a cinema that "being essentially visual, must above all fulfill the evolution of painting, detach itself from reality, from photography, from the graceful and solemn. It must become antigraceful, deforming, impressionistic, synthetic, dynamic, free-wording." "The most varied elements will enter into the Futurist film as expressive means: from the slice of life to the streak of color, from the conventional line to words-in-freedom, from chromatic and plastic music to the music of objects. In other words it will be painting, architecture, sculpture, words-in-freedom, music of colors, lines, and forms, a jumble of objects and reality thrown together at random." Among the proposed methods were: "Cinematic musical researches", "Daily exercises in freeing ourselves from mere photographed logic" and "Linear, plastic, chromatic equivalences, etc., of men, women, events, thoughts, music, feelings, weights, smells, noises (with white lines on black we shall show the inner, physical rhythm of a husband who discovers his wife in adultery and chases the lover – rhythm of soul and rhythm of legs)." [3] About a month later the short film Vitta Futurista was released, directed by Ginna [4] in collaboration with Corra, Balla and Marinetti. Only a few frames of the film remain and little else of any Futurist Cinema work seems to have been made or preserved.

In 1913 Léopold Survage created his Rythmes colorés: over 100 abstract ink wash / watercolor drawings that he wanted to turn into a film. Unable to raise the funds, the film was not realized and Survage only exhibited the pictures separately. [5]

Mary Hallock-Greenewalt used templates and aerosol sprays to create repeating geometrical patterns on hand-painted films. These extant films were probably made around 1916 for her Sarabet color organ, for which she filed 11 patents between 1919 and 1926. The Sarabet was first publicly demonstrated at John Wanamaker’s New York department store in 1922. [6] The films were not projected, but one viewer at a time could look down into the machine at the film itself.

The absolute film movement

Some of the earliest abstract motion pictures known to survive are those produced by a group of artists working in Germany in the early 1920s, a movement referred to as "Absoluter Film": Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling and Oskar Fischinger. In 1926, Hans Richter stated that absolute film originated in the scroll sketches that Viking Eggeling made in 1917–1918. [7] The group of artists present different approaches to abstraction-in-motion: as an analogue to music, or as the creation of an absolute language of form, a desire common to early abstract art. Absolute film pioneers sought to create short length and breathtaking films with different approaches to abstraction-in-motion: as an analogue to music, or as the creation of an absolute language of form, a desire common to early abstract art. Ruttmann wrote of his film work as "painting in time". [8] [9] Absolute filmmakers used rudimentary handicraft, techniques, and language in their short motion pictures that refuted the reproduction of the natural world, instead, focusing on light and form in the dimension of time, impossible to represent in static visual arts.

The Nazis censorship against so-called "degenerate art" prevented the German abstract animation movement from developing after 1933.[ citation needed ]

In 1926 Marcel Duchamp released Anémic Cinéma , filmed in collaboration with Man Ray and Marc Allégret. It showed early versions of his rotoreliefs, discs that seemed to show an abstract 3-D moving image when rotating on a phonograph. The work is regarded as a film of the Cinéma pur movement, often seen as the French term for the absolute film movement.

1930s to 1940s

Mary Ellen Bute started making experimental films in 1933, mostly with abstract images visualizing music. Occasionally she applied animation techniques in her films.

Len Lye made his first publicly released direct animation A Colour Box in 1935. The colourful production was commissioned to promote the General Post Office.

Walt Disney saw Lye's A Colour Box and became interested in producing abstract animation. A first result was the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor section in the "concert film" Fantasia (1940). He hired Oskar Fischinger to collaborate with effects animator Cy Young, but rejected much of their designs, causing Fischinger to leave before the piece was completed. Disney altered the designs and Fischinger received no credits.

Norman McLaren, having carefully studied Lye's A Colour Box, [10] founded the National Film Board of Canada's animation unit in 1941. Direct animation was seen as a way to deviate from cel animation and thus a way to stand out from the many American productions. McLaren's direct animations for NFB include Boogie-Doodle (1941), [11] Hen Hop (1942), [12] Begone Dull Care (1949) and Blinkity Blank (1955).

1950s to 1960s

Harry Everett Smith created several experimental direct films, initially hand-painting abstract animations. His Early Abstractions was compiled around 1964 and contains early works that may have been created since 1939, 1941 or 1946 until 1952, 1956 or 1957. Smith was not concerned about keeping documentation about his oeuvre and frequently re-edited his works.

Musical influence

Music was an extremely influential aspects of absolute film and other than art, one of the biggest elements used by abstract film directors. Absolute film directors are known to use musical elements such as rhythm/tempo, dynamics, and fluidity. [13] These directors sought to use this to add a sense of motion and harmony to the images in their films that was new to cinema, and was intended to leave audiences in awe. [14] In her article "Visual Music" Maura McDonnell even compared these film's to musical compositions due to their careful articulation of timing and dynamics. [15]

Examples

See also

Related Research Articles

Hans Richter was a German painter, graphic artist, avant-gardist, film-experimenter and producer. He was born in Berlin into a well-to-do family and died in Minusio, near Locarno, Switzerland.

Norman McLaren Scottish-born Canadian experimental animator and film director

Norman McLaren, was a Scottish Canadian animator, director and producer known for his work for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). He was a pioneer in a number of areas of animation and filmmaking, including hand-drawn animation, drawn-on-film animation, visual music, abstract film, pixilation and graphical sound.

Futurism artistic and social movement

Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasised speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane, and the industrial city. Its key figures were the Italians Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, and Luigi Russolo. It glorified modernity and aimed to liberate Italy from the weight of its past. Cubism contributed to the formation of Italian Futurism's artistic style. Important Futurist works included Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism, Boccioni's sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Balla's painting Abstract Speed + Sound, and Russolo's The Art of Noises.

Drawn-on-film animation Animation technique

Drawn-on-film animation, also known as direct animation or animation without camera, is an animation technique where footage is produced by creating the images directly on film stock, as opposed to any other form of animation where the images or objects are photographed frame by frame with an animation camera.

Oskar Wilhelm Fischinger was a German-American abstract animator, filmmaker, and painter, 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 movies, and influenced 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.

Giacomo Balla Italian artist

Giacomo Balla was an Italian painter, art teacher and poet best known as a key proponent of Futurism. In his paintings he depicted light, movement and speed.

Viking Eggeling Swedish artist

Viking Eggeling was a Swedish avant-garde artist and filmmaker connected to dadaism, Constructivism and abstract art and was one of the pioneers in absolute film and visual music. His 1924 film Diagonal-Symphonie is one of the seminal abstract films in the history of experimental cinema.

Walter Ruttmann was a German film director and along with Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling and Oskar Fischinger was an early German practitioner of experimental film. He also worked with sound alone.

William Moritz, film historian, specialized in visual music and experimental animation. His principal published works concerned abstract filmmaker and painter Oskar Fischinger. He also wrote extensively on other visual music artists who worked with motion pictures, including James and John Whitney and Jordan Belson; Moritz also published on German cinema, Visual Music, color organs, experimental animation, avant-garde film and the California School of Color Music.

Motion graphics digital footage or animation which create the illusion of motion or rotation

Motion graphics are pieces of animation or digital footage which create the illusion of motion or rotation, and are usually combined with audio for use in multimedia projects. Motion graphics are usually displayed via electronic media technology, but may also be displayed via manual powered technology. The term distinguishes still graphics from those with a transforming appearance over time, without over-specifying the form. While any form of experimental or abstract animation can be called motion graphics, the term typically more explicitly refers to the commercial application of animation and effects to video, film, TV, and interactive applications.

Cinéma pur avant-garde film movement, focused on the pure elements of film like motion, visual composition, and rhythm

Cinéma Pur was an avant-garde film movement begun by filmmakers, like René Clair, who "wanted to return the medium to its elemental origins" of "vision and movement."

Robert Carlton Breer was an American experimental filmmaker, painter, and sculptor.

Bruno Corra is the pseudonym of Bruno Ginanni Corradini, an Italian writer and screenwriter.

Arnaldo Ginna, also known as Arnaldo Ginanni Corradini, was an Italian painter, sculptor and filmmaker. He was born in Ravenna, 7 May 1890; he died in Rome, 26 September 1982.

<i>A Colour Box</i> film

A Colour Box is a 1935 British experimental animated film by Len Lye. Commissioned to promote the General Post Office, it is Lye's first direct animation to receive a public release.

References

Notes
  1. ↑ William Moritz, Optical Poetry. [Indiana University Press, 2004]
  2. ↑ "The Avant-Garde Cinema of the 1920s: Connections to Futurism, Precisionism, and Suprematism". Leonardo. 17 (2): 108–112. Jan 14, 1984 – via Project MUSE.
  3. ↑ http://391.org/manifestos/1916-futurist-cinema-marinetti-corra-settimelli-ginna-balla-chiti/
  4. ↑ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1626992/reference
  5. ↑ https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/moma/moma-1913-centennial-celebration/v/moma-survage-rhythm
  6. ↑ "Industrial Light and Magic". Topic. Retrieved 2019-07-26.
  7. ↑ G: Zeitschrift für elementare Gestaltung, nr 5-6, 1926, p.5. English reprint edition edited by Detlef Mertins & Michael W. Jennings; Translated by Steven Lindberg & Margareta Ingrid Christian; Tate Publishing, 2010.
  8. ↑ "C Keefer - Space Light Art excerpt". www.centerforvisualmusic.org.
  9. ↑ "Moritz-Absolute Films of the 1920s". www.centerforvisualmusic.org.
  10. ↑ Horrocks, Roger (1991). Composing Motion: Len Lye and Experimental Film-Making. National Art Gallery of New Zealand. ISBN   978-0-908843-06-0.
  11. ↑ McLaren, Norman (1941). "Boogie-Doodle". NFB.ca. National Film Board of Canada. Retrieved 2009-04-09.
  12. ↑ McLaren, Norman (1942). "Hen Hop". NFB.ca. National Film Board of Canada. Retrieved 2009-04-09.
  13. ↑ Rogowski, Christian (15 December 2018). "The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema: Rediscovering Germany's Filmic Legacy". Camden House – via Google Books.
  14. ↑
  15. ↑ McDonnell, Maura. "CEC — eContact! 15.4 — Visual Music by Maura McDonnell". CEC - Canadian Electroacoustic Community.
Bibliography
References
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