PROGRAM

Oskar Fischinger (1900–67) was a pioneer of abstract animation and visual music. Working in Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin and Los Angeles, he is known as the Father of Visual Music and the Grandfather of Motion Graphics. Fischinger made some of the first music videos in the early 1930s for Electrola Records, influenced John Cage’s theories of percussion, and the style of Disney’s Fantasia (1940). He has influenced generations of animators and filmmakers and continues to do so today. His ground-breaking 1930s Studies series synchronizing animation and music screened in first-run theatres worldwide.
Born near Frankfurt, Fischinger began his early animation experiments c. 1920. He moved to Berlin in 1927 where he made special effects in his animation studio for feature films such as Fritz Lang's Woman in the Moon. He continued to make his own abstract films and also made commercials. His Muratti cigarette commercials made him famous worldwide. Paramount Studios brought him to Los Angeles in 1936, where he had several unsuccessful encounters with Hollywood studios. Working briefly at Disney on Fantasia, he quit after his designs were greatly altered. He did manage to make several masterpieces (Allegretto, Motion Painting no. 1), primarily with support from the Guggenheim Foundation in New York. In his later years he could not find support for his films, making only a few commercials in the early 1950s for oil, gas and television sets. Thereafter he focused on painting, drawing, a stereo film test, and the Lumigraph, a light-play instrument. He died in Los Angeles in 1967. --Cindy Keefer, Curator/Archivist

Mary Ellen Bute (1906-83) was born in Houston, Texas, on November 21, 1906, the first of six children in a socially prominent family. From age 16 to 28, she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, the Yale Drama Department and the Sorbonne, traveled around the world, and apprenticed to numerous avant-garde artists, scientists and musicians in New York City.
Between 1934 and 1953 Bute created 14 short abstract films, working with cinematographer Theodore Nemeth, an expert in animation and special effects. First in black-and-white, then in color, then pioneering in oscilloscope-generated imagery, most of the films were shown commercially in art theaters around the country; six premiered on the huge screen of the Radio City Music Hall.
In 1940, Bute and Nemeth were married and he opened his own studio where she often wrote scripts for his documentary and advertising films. Two sons, Theodore Jr. and James, were born in 1940 and 1947 respectively.
Moving to live-action fiction films in the mid-1950s, Bute produced a half-hour featurette, "The Boy Who Saw Through," casting teen-aged Christopher Walken in his first leading role.
Bute devoted some seven years to the feature-length Passages From Finnegans Wake, which she directed and produced. Her AFI-funded film about poet Walt Whitman was unfinished at the time of her death on October 17, 1983, in New York City. --Cecile Starr, Film Historian

Filmmaker and artist Jordan Belson (1926-2011) created abstract films richly woven with cosmological imagery, exploring consciousness, transcendence, and the nature of light itself.
Born in Chicago in 1926, Belson studied painting at the California School of Fine Art (now San Francisco Art Institute), and received his B.A., Fine Arts (1946) from The University of California, Berkeley. He saw films by Oskar Fischinger, Norman McLaren and Hans Richter at the historic Art in Cinema screening series in San Francisco in the late 1940s, and later, films by John and James Whitney. Belson was inspired to make films with scroll paintings and traditional animation techniques, calling his first films "cinematic paintings."
Curator Hilla Rebay at The Museum of Non-Objective Painting exhibited his paintings, and upon Fischinger's recommendation awarded Belson several grants. From 1957-1959, Belson was Visual Director for The Vortex Concerts at San Francisco's Morrison Planetarium, a series of electronic music concerts accompanied by visual projections. Composer Henry Jacobs curated the music while Belson created visual illusions with multiple projection devices, combining planetarium effects with patterns and abstract film footage. His Vortex work inspired his abandoning traditional animation methods to work with projected light. He completed Allures (1961), Re-entry (1964), Phenomena (1965), Samadhi (1967), and continued with a series of abstract films. His varied influences include yoga, Eastern philosophies and mysticism, astronomy, Romantic classical music, alchemy, Jung, non-objective art, mandalas and many more.
Belson has produced an extraordinary body of over 30 abstract films, sometimes called "cosmic cinema," also considered to be Visual Music. He produced ethereal special effects for the film The Right Stuff (1983), and continues making fine art and films today, completing Epilogue in 2005.--Cindy Keefer, Curator/Archivist.

The young Norman McLaren began his filmmaking career in 1934, and the following year, two of his films won prizes at the Scottish Amateur Film Festival, where John Grierson offered him a job at the General Post Office Film Unit in London. In 1941, at the invitation of Grierson, who had become Canada’s first Government Film Commissioner, McLaren joined the National Film Board. The first films he made for the NFB were almost all intended to support the war effort. This didn’t prevent him from making several experimental films and founding an animation department. Over the course of his career, he mostly created experimental animation, with music as an important element. He also experimented with the use of dance and dancers. McLaren’s films have garnered more than 200 awards. Neighbours won an Oscar® in 1952, and Blinkity Blank received the Palme d’Or for short films at the 1955 Cannes festival. In 2009, Neighbours was added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, which lists the most significant documentary heritage collections. McLaren was a master and a source of inspiration for countless filmmakers, and audiences around the world consider his name to be practically synonymous with the NFB.

Andreas Hykade was born in the summer of love in Altötting, center of the Holy Mary cult. Since he´s been a grown-up, he´s created animated films for grown-ups. Now he´s a father, he creates animated films for children as well. Since 2015 he is the director of the Institute of Animation at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg.