An Afternoon of Visual Music from CVM: Oskar Fischinger and Jordan Belson

Oskar Fischinger is the father of Visual Music. “Decades before computer graphics, before music videos, even before Fantasia (the 1940 version), there were the abstract animated films of Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967), master of ‘absolute’ or nonobjective filmmaking . . . who created exquisite ‘visual music’ using geometric patterns and shapes choreographed tightly to classical music and jazz.”  —John Canemaker, New York Times

This retrospective features 35mm preserved prints of his classic animated films including Spirals, Walking from Munich to Berlin,Spiritual Constructions, Studies 2, 5, 6, 7, and 8; Kreise, Allegretto, An American March, Radio Dynamics, and Motion Painting no 1.

New York premiere

Born in Chicago and raised in the Bay Area, Jordan Belson trained as a painter before turning his attention to filmmaking after discovering the abstract films of Oskar Fischinger, Norman McLaren and Hans Richter. Since 1947, Belson has explored consciousness, transcendence, and light in a visionary body of work that has been called “cosmic cinema”: brimming with vibrant color, mandalas, liquid forms and mesmerizing rhythms.

This program features rarely screened films including Caravan Séance (1959), Allures (1961), Cycles (1974), new preservation prints of Momentum (1968) and Chakra (1972), and more, including Belson’s last film, Epilogue (2005), funded by the NASA Art Program and commissioned by the Hirshhorn Museum for the 2005 Visual Music exhibition. 16mm/video