At a time when much of ani­ma­tion was con­sumed with lit­tle anthro­po­mor­phized ani­mals sport­ing white gloves, Oskar Fischinger went in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tion. His work is all about danc­ing geo­met­ric shapes and abstract forms spin­ning around a flat fea­ture­less back­ground. Think of a Mon­dri­an or Male­vich paint­ing that moves, often in time to the music. Fischinger’s movies have a mes­mer­iz­ing ele­gance to them. Check out his 1938 short An Opti­cal Poem above. Cir­cles pop, sway and dart across the screen, all in time to Franz Liszt’s 2nd Hun­gar­i­an Rhap­sody. This is, of course, well before the days of dig­i­tal. While it might be rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple to manip­u­late a shape in a com­put­er, Fischinger’s tech­nique was decid­ed­ly more low tech. Using bits of paper and fish­ing line, he indi­vid­u­al­ly pho­tographed each frame, some­how doing it all in sync with Liszt’s com­po­si­tion. Think of the hours of mind-numb­ing work that must have entailed.

(Note: The copy of the film above has become fad­ed, dis­tort­ing some of the orig­i­nal vibrant col­ors used in Fischinger’s films. Nonethe­less it gives you a taste of his cre­ative work–of how he mix­es ani­ma­tion with music. The clips below give you a more accu­rate sense of Fischinger’s orig­i­nal col­ors.)

Born in 1900 near Frank­furt, Fischinger trained as a musi­cian and an archi­tect before dis­cov­er­ing film. In the 1930s, he moved to Berlin and start­ed pro­duc­ing more and more abstract ani­ma­tions that ran before fea­ture films. They proved to be pop­u­lar too, at least until the Nation­al Social­ists came to pow­er. The Nazis were some of the most fanat­i­cal art crit­ics of the 20th Cen­tu­ry, and they hat­ed any­thing non-rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al. The likes of Paul Klee, Oskar Kokosch­ka and Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky among oth­ers were writ­ten off as “degen­er­ate.” (By stark con­trast, the CIA report­ed­ly loved Abstract Expres­sion­ism, but that’s a dif­fer­ent sto­ry.) Fischinger fled Ger­many in 1936 for the sun and glam­our of Hol­ly­wood.

The prob­lem was that Hol­ly­wood was real­ly not ready for Fischinger. Pro­duc­ers saw the obvi­ous tal­ent in his work, and they feared that it was too ahead of its time for broad audi­ences. “[Fischinger] was going in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tion than any oth­er ani­ma­tor at the time,” said famed graph­ic design­er Chip Kidd in an inter­view with NPR. “He was real­ly explor­ing abstract pat­terns, but with a pur­pose to them — pio­neer­ing what tech­ni­cal­ly is the music video.”

Fischinger’s most wide­ly seen Amer­i­can work was his short con­tri­bu­tion to Walt Disney’s Fan­ta­sia. Fischinger cre­at­ed con­cept draw­ings for Fan­ta­sia, but most were not used, and only one short scene fea­tures his actu­al draw­ings. “The film is not real­ly my work,” he lat­er recalled. “Rather, it is the most inartis­tic prod­uct of a fac­to­ry. …One thing I def­i­nite­ly found out: that no true work of art can be made with that pro­ce­dure used in the Dis­ney stu­dio.” Fischinger didn’t work with Dis­ney again and instead retreat­ed into the art world.

There he found admir­ers who were recep­tive to his vision. John Cage, for one, con­sid­ered the Ger­man animator’s exper­i­ments to be a major influ­ence on his own work. Cage recalled his first meet­ing with Fischinger in an inter­view with Daniel Charles in 1968.

One day I was intro­duced to Oscar Fischinger who made abstract films quite pre­cise­ly artic­u­lat­ed on pieces of tra­di­tion­al music. When I was intro­duced to him, he began to talk with me about the spir­it, which is inside each of the objects of this world. So, he told me, all we need to do to lib­er­ate that spir­it is to brush past the object, and to draw forth its sound. That’s the idea which led me to per­cus­sion.

You can find excerpts of oth­er Fischinger films over at Vimeo.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Sep­tem­ber, 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Avant-Garde Ani­mat­ed Films of Wal­ter Ruttmann, Still Strik­ing­ly Fresh a Cen­tu­ry Lat­er (1921–1925)

Night on Bald Moun­tain: An Eery, Avant-Garde Pin­screen Ani­ma­tion Based on Mussorgsky’s Mas­ter­piece (1933)

The Nazi’s Philis­tine Grudge Against Abstract Art and The “Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion” of 1937

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

Watch Dzi­ga Vertov’s Unset­tling Sovi­et Toys: The First Sovi­et Ani­mat­ed Movie Ever (1924)

Jonathan Crow is a writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions.