1935 Review of Oskar Fischinger

story © Michael Betancourt | published November 14, 2013 | permalink |  |  

The Last of the Mohicans: Oskar Fischinger’s “Symphony in Blue”

Rough translation of review originally published by FilmLiga, 15 November 1935, pp. 314-315

(314)​That the avant-garde as “movement” is dead no one will dare to doubt. They broke with confidence that a good-death are venturing with all sides the staff about her, and more or less officially has her first partisans agree “with the grave of the filmmaker” the deceased commemorated in FilmLiga. For us, that the avant-garde movement very dear have stood, falling from the contradiction of the judgments to ascertaining down two basic facts: first, that the “movement” within the limits of its experimental nature so useful and invaluable services has proven to aesthetics of the film that we miss only considering her labor at the stage of sound film. Second: that its continued existence, independently, was impossible purely due to reasons of the sound film at least, so it seemed. . . .

read more

story © Michael Betancourt | published September 4, 2011 | permalink |  |  

An Excerpt from The History of Motion Graphics:

Stan Brakhage (1933 – 2003) is exceptional, both in the sheer quantity of films he made, and in the innovative aesthetics and novel techniques he created that characterize the wide variety of his films. His work with abstract film that dominated his productions starting in the 1980s clearly demonstrates the close connections, continuously present in his film theories, between his films and visual music. Actively producing film work from the 1950s until his death in 2003, the last decade of his life was spent primarily working on abstract films whose finished form was created through a combination of direct hand painting processes and optical printing. These works reveal a direct linkage between the earliest abstract films and contemporary media art (such as VJ and the visual music renaissance brought about by digital technology).

read more

story © Michael Betancourt | published August 19, 2011 | permalink |  |  

This is a response to some misinformation being spread about my work on this site by the "Center for Visual Music."

This could be read as an example of how not to do history if you're supposedly an archive or other historical organization. Read on, and see the absurdity....

read more

story © Michael Betancourt | published July 24, 2011 | permalink |  |  

An Excerpt from The History of Motion Graphics:

The Paik-Abe videosynthesizer was a powerful video processing device. It enabled an experimental transformation of video, and was designed to create complex, visually dynamic imagery, but had only a limited ability to reproduce that imagery at a later time. Constructed by Nam June Paik and engineer Shuya Abe, the ability to recreate its imagery was systematically developed by another video artist, Ron Hays, who explored and documented what was required to create a specific range of visual forms on screen in order to produce a lexicon of forms to use the videosynthesizer as an electronic visual music instrument.

read more

story © Michael Betancourt | published June 19, 2011 | permalink |  |  

An Excerpt from The History of Motion Graphics:

Oskar Fischinger (1900 – 1967) is the artist most closely associated with the production of abstract animations using a direct synchronization of note to form.

read more