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).
I have been describing my own working process as 'using the computer like an optical printer' since I made the digital transition in 2000. This approach is based on the fundamentals described by Raymond Fielding at the very end of his book Special Effects Cinematography that I read during the two month faculty strike that happened my first semester as an undergraduate at Temple University. Since I wasn't able to take classes, I spent my time reading things that interested me.
With the revolution in digital video that started in the 1990s, the historical basis for these technologies is now quite distant. But these technologies evolved from an application of the digital computer to historical techniques and approaches, thus enabling ever greater control over the image. Writing in 1984, Raymond Fielding considers the optical printer as a variety of mechanical, analog computer. We can recognize the limiting factors of analog mediamost especially generation loss, grain, and errors (dirt, etc)that disappear when producing these same effects with digital means:
Saul Bass (1920 1996) was the first of the new title designers to emerge in the 1950s, setting the precedent for those who followed. He moved to Hollywood in 1946 after spending time in New York as a student working and learning graphic design. Once in Hollywood, he worked as a graphic designer, title designer, visual consultant, and director of both short films and one feature, reflecting the basic paradigm shifts underway in the 1950s and continuing through the 1970s as Hollywood production abandoned the industrial model of the studio system. He would ultimately produce fifty-nine title sequences between 1954 and 1996, revealing the influence of Modernist graphic design in his engagement with both static and motion elements on screen.
Kenneth C. Knowlton (1931 ) worked in the Computer Techniques Research Department at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey starting in 1962; he collaborated with experimental animator Stan VanDerBeek (1927 1984) on film experiments done in the artist-in-residency program. This was concerned with the use of computers to create graphics, and while there he produced twelve films between 1963 and 1967. He developed the first programming language specifically meant for animation: BEFLIX, a portmanteau of bell flicks. The animations this language created used a limited number of pixels arranged into a grid 252 by 184 in size, with seven shades of grey. Finished films had color added through optical printing.
