Visual Music On Film
Visual music and abstract film or video often coincide. Some of the earliest known films of these two genres were hand-painted works produced by the Futurists Bruno Corra and Arnaldo Ginna between 1911 and 1912 (as they report in the Futurist Manifesto of Cinema), which are now lost. Mary Hallock-Greenewalt produced several reels of hand-painted films (although not traditional motion pictures) that are held by the Historical Society of Philadelphia. Like the Futurist films, and many other visual music films, her 'films' were meant to be a visualization of musical form.
Notable visual music filmmakers include: Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye, Jordan Belson, Norman McLaren, Mary Ellen Bute (who made a series of films she called Seeing Sound films), Harry Smith, John and James Whitney, and many others up to present day.
In 2005, a US exhibition called "Visual Music" at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC included documentation of color organs and featured many visual music films and videos as well as paintings and some color organs.
The Center for Visual Music in Los Angeles has the world's largest collection of visual music resources, including the papers of Oskar Fischinger and the original research collection of visual music historian Dr. William Moritz. Their collections contain films, video, digital media, papers, monographs, clippings, artwork, posters, artifacts and much more. CVM distributes a number of visual music DVDs as well as curated film programs of visual music work, from historical to contemporary.
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Famous quotes containing the words visual, music and/or film:
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“And in the next instant, immediately behind them, Victor saw his former wife.
At once he lowered his gaze, automatically tapping his cigarette to dislodge the ash that had not yet had time to form. From somewhere low down his heart rose like a fist to deliver an uppercut, drew back, struck again, then went into a fast disorderly throb, contradicting the music and drowning it.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“His education lay like a film of white oil on the black lake of his barbarian consciousness. For this reason, the things he said were hardly interesting at all. Only what he was.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)