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. 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, moving objects could either be animated with
stop motion techniques, recorded during their actual movement, or appear to move when being filmed against a neutral background with a moving camera.
History Abstract animation 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,
musical fountains, and
special animated slides for the magic lantern (like the chromatrope). 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).
1910s: Earliest examples Abstract film concepts were shaped by early 20th century art movements such as
Cubism,
Expressionism,
Dadaism,
Suprematism,
Futurism,
Precisionism, and possible others. These art movements were beginning to gain momentum in the 1910s. Italian Futurists
Arnaldo Ginna and his brother
Bruno Corra made hand-painted films between 1910 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)." About a month later the short film
Vita Futurista was released, directed by Ginna 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. Around 1911 Hans Lorenz Stoltenberg also experimented with direct animation, rhythmically piecing together tinted film in different colors. He published a leaflet about it and claimed that many people growing up with the hand-colored films of
Georges Méliès and
Ferdinand Zecca would try their hand on painting on film at that time. 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.
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 films were not projected, but one viewer at a time could look down into the machine at the film itself. The Sarabet was first publicly demonstrated at John Wanamaker's New York department store in 1922.
1920s: 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:
Walter Ruttmann,
Hans Richter,
Viking Eggeling, and
Oskar Fischinger. 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". 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. Viking Eggeling came from a family of musicians and analysed the elements of painting by reducing it into his "Generalbass der Malerei", a catalogue of typological elements, from which he would create new "orchestrations". In 1918 Viking Eggeling had been engaging in
Dada activities in Zürich and befriended Hans Richter. According to Richter, absolute film originated in the scroll sketches that Viking Eggeling made in 1917–1918. On paper rolls up to 15 meters long, Eggeling would draw sketches of variations of small graphic designs, in such a way that a viewer could follow the changes in the designs when looking at the scroll from beginning to end. For a few years Eggeling and Richter worked together, each on their own projects based on these ides, and created thousands of rhythmic series of simple shapes. In 1920 they started working on film versions of their work. Walter Ruttmann, trained as a musician and painter, gave up painting to devote himself to film. He made his earliest films by painting frames on glass in combination with cutouts and elaborate tinting and hand-coloring. His
Lichtspiel: Opus I was first screened in March 1921 in Frankfurt. The last abstract motion picture screened in the Third Reich was
Hans Fischinger's
Tanz der Farben (i.e.
Dance of the Colors) in 1939. The film was reviewed by the
Film Review Office and by
Georg Anschütz for the
Film-Kurier. The director Herbert Seggelke was working on the abstract motion picture
Strich-Punkt-Ballett (i.e. Ballet of Dots and Dashes) in 1943, but could not finish the film during the war.
Other artists in the 1920s Mieczysław Szczuka also attempted to create abstract films, but seems never to have realized his plans. Some designs were published in 1924 in the avant-garde magazine block as
5 Moments of an Abstract Film. In 1926 dadaist
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. In 1927
Kasimir Malevich had created a 3-page scenario in manuscript with explanatory color drawings for an "Artistic-Scientific film" entitled
Art and the Problems of Architecture: The Emergence of a New Plastic System of Architecture, an instructional film about the theory, origin, and evolution of
suprematism. Initially there were plans to have the film animated in a Soviet studio, but Malevich took it along on a trip to Berlin and ended up leaving it for Hans Richter after the two had met. The style and colorfulness of
Rhythmus 25 had convinced Malevich that Richter should direct the film. Due to circumstances the scenario did not get into the hands of Richter before the end of the 1950s. Richter created storyboards, two rough cuts and at least 120 takes for the film in collaboration with Arnold Eagle since 1971, but it remained incomplete. Richter had wanted to create the film totally in Malevich's spirit, but concluded that in the end he could not discern how much of his own creativity withheld him from executing the scenario properly.
1930s to 1960s 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 the first publicly released
direct animation entitled
A Colour Box in 1935. The colorful production was commissioned to promote the
General Post Office. Oskar Fischinger moved to Hollywood in 1936 when he had a lucrative agreement to work for
Paramount Pictures. A first film, eventually entitled
Allegretto, was planned for inclusion in the musical comedy
The Big Broadcast of 1937. Paramount had failed to communicate that it would be in black and white, so Fischinger left when the studio refused to even consider a color test of the animated section. He then created
An Optical Poem (1937) for
MGM, but received no profits because of the way the studio's bookkeeping system worked. Walt Disney had seen 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 and altered much of their designs, causing Fischinger to leave without credit before the piece was completed. Fischinger's two commissions from
The Museum of Non-Objective Painting did not really allow him the creative freedom that he desired. Frustrated with all the trouble with filmmaking he experienced in America, Fischinger did not make many films afterwards. Apart from some commercials, the only exception was
Motion Painting No. 1 (1947), which won the Grand Prix at the Brussels International Experimental Film Competition in 1949.
Norman McLaren, having carefully studied Lye's
A Colour Box, 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),
Hen Hop (1942),
Begone Dull Care (1949) and
Blinkity Blank (1955).
Harry Everett Smith created several direct films, initially by hand-painting abstract animations on celluloid. 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 very concerned about keeping documentation about his oeuvre and frequently re-edited his works. UP-graduated Filipino painter Rodolfo Paras-Perez created his only short film,
Conversation in Space, a 2-minute film with vivid and captivating abstract animation that used with
collage and
paint.
Musical influence Music was an extremely influential aspect of absolute film, and one of the biggest elements, other than art, used by abstract film directors. Absolute film directors are known to use musical elements such as rhythm/tempo, dynamics, and fluidity. 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. In her article "Visual Music" Maura McDonnell compared these films to musical compositions due to their careful articulation of timing and dynamics. The history of abstract film often overlaps with the concerns and history of
visual music. Some films are very similar to electronic
music visualization, especially when electronic devices (for instance
oscilloscopes) were used to generate a type of
motion graphics in relation to music, except that the images in these films are not generated in real-time. ==Cinéma pur==