Outsider Cinema

Visual music

Moving abstraction composed like music, with shape, colour and rhythm in place of melody and harmony.

Form · Four filmmakers in the guide

The dream of a music for the eyes is older than cinema, from colour organs to painters like Wassily Kandinsky. Film made it possible: shapes could rise, fall and pulse in time with a score.

Oskar Fischinger is its central figure, from his Studies made in Berlin to his Hollywood work. Mary Ellen Bute, Norman McLaren, Jordan Belson and the Whitney brothers took the idea further, and it runs today through concert visuals and music videos.

Films to start with

In the order they were made. Runtimes are approximate.

  1. A still from Symphonie Diagonale.

    Symphonie Diagonale

    Viking Eggeling · 1924 · 7 min · 35mm, black and white, silent

    Lines, arcs and comb shapes sprout from tilted forms, vanish and start again in cycles of a second or two. Erna Niemeyer animated it from Eggeling's drawings by snipping tin-foil cut-outs a fraction at a time between frames.

  2. A still from An Optical Poem.

    An Optical Poem

    Oskar Fischinger · 1938 · 7 min · 35mm, Technicolor

    Released by MGM. Paper discs and shapes, hung on wires and filmed frame by frame, perform Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody.

  3. Still from Motion Painting No. 1 to come.

    Motion Painting No. 1

    Oskar Fischinger · 1947 · 11 min · 35mm, colour

    A single oil painting on Plexiglas, filmed after each brushstroke for nine months, unfolding to Bach's Third Brandenburg Concerto.

  4. A still from New Fancy Foils.

    New Fancy Foils

    Jodie Mack · 2013 · 12 min · 16mm, colour, silent

    Pages from paper sample books, thrown out when the businesses that used them closed, flicker past and then hold still, one pattern tested against the next.

Where it led

Lines from these films into work you may already know.

Nearby

Movements, forms and techniques that share filmmakers or methods with this one.

Every movement, form and technique