Thursday, February 20th, 2025

Time	Event
6:16a	Optical Poems by Oskar Fischinger: Discover the Avant-Garde Animator Despised by Hitler & Dissed by Disney 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.  (Comment on this)
10:00a	The Architectural History of the Louvre: 800 Years in Three Minutes Setting aside just one day for the Louvre is a classic first-time Paris visitor’s mistake. The place is simply too big to comprehend on one visit, or indeed on ten visits. To grow so vast has taken eight centuries, a process explained in under three minutes by the official video animated above. First constructed around the turn of the thirteenth century as a defensive fortress, it was converted into a royal residence a century and a half later. It gained its first modern wing in 1559, under Henri II; later, his widow Catherine de’ Medici commissioned the Tuileries palace and gardens, which Henri IV had joined up to the Louvre with the Grande Galerie in 1610. In the seventeen-tens, Louis XVI completed the Cour Carrée, the Louvre’s main courtyard, before decamping to Versailles. It was only during the French Revolution, toward the end of that century, that the National Assembly declared it a museum. The project of uniting it into an architectural whole continued under Napoleon I and III, the latter of whom finally completed it (and in the process doubled its size). The Tuileries Palace was torched during the unpleasantness over the Paris Commune, but the rest of the Louvre survived. Since then, its most notable alteration has been the addition of I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid in 1989. The pyramid may still have an air of controversy these three and a half decades later, but you can hardly deny that it at least improves upon the Cour Carrée’s years as a parking lot. It stands, in any case, as just one of the countless features that make the Louvre an architectural palimpsest of French history practically as compelling as the collection of art it contains. (Francophones can learn much more about it from the longer-form documentaries posted by Des Racines et des Ailes and Notre Histoire.) And how did I approach this most famous of all French institutions on my own first trip to Paris, you ask? By not going at all. On my next trip to Paris, however, I plan to go nowhere else. Related content: The Louvre’s Entire Collection Goes Online: View and Download 480,00 Works of Art A 3D Animated History of Paris: Take a Visual Journey from Ancient Times to 1900 How France Hid the Mona Lisa & Other Louvre Masterpieces During World War II Take Immersive Virtual Tours of the World’s Great Museums: The Louvre, Hermitage, Van Gogh Museum & Much More Japanese Guided Tours of the Louvre, Versailles, the Marais & Other Famous French Places (English Subtitles Included) Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall. (Comment on this)

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