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:
“Nowadays people’s visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will.”
—Robert Doisneau (b. 1912)
“The great challenge which faces us is to assure that, in our society of big-ness, we do not strangle the voice of creativity, that the rules of the game do not come to overshadow its purpose, that the grand orchestration of society leaves ample room for the man who marches to the music of another drummer.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)
“If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you’ve got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you’re dumb and blind.”
—Salman Rushdie (b. 1948)