Experimental Films

Like color organs, abstract cinema developed in direct response to the limitations of painting. Capable of setting abstraction into motion, film freed painting from its static frame and pushed the image into a new world of motion and spectacle. By capturing series of hand-produced images on black-and-white or hand-tinted films, artists in the 1920s such as Viking Eggeling and Walter Ruttman created elaborate visual sequences that transformed over time across the film screen and echoed the evolving sounds characteristic of music.

As the technologies of color film, recorded sound, and the synchronizable soundtrack advanced from the early 1930s onward, artists like Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye, and Harry Smith were able to fuse color and form with the sounds of pre-recorded music. Like earlier filmmakers, they used manual production methods, including drawing directly on film, to produce vivid transfigurations. Yet newer cinematic technologies enabled these artists to synthesize movements of image and sound, creating a synaesthetic experience unparalleled by earlier forms of visual music. Among the most inventive film visionaries were John and James Whitney, who utilized motion control devices and computer applications to compose lucent abstractions that translate their films’ soundtracks into visual form. This merger of sight and sound established an important precedent for the synaesthesia-inducing and consciousness-expanding effects of film—particularly those by Jordan Belson—as well as of psychedelic light shows and audiovisual synthesizers during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.