Concentric circles pop up and expand, giving way to smaller circles. Battalions of diamonds swarm the movie screen, then diminish toward a vanishing point dead center. Scooped-out shapes rotate in sync, inside-out, then outside-in.
The Visual Music series running Friday, April 9, through Tuesday, April 13, at Capitol Hill’s Northwest Film Forum (in conjunction with the Sprocket Society and the Center for Visual Music) isn’t long on shots of human beings, or even living beings. But it’s a masterful guide to crucial and often obscure filmmakers uniting images (often, though not always, abstract patterns) with music.
A ‘hidden history’ The filmmakers and the music stem from different eras and traditions. But the vivid mating of these disparate elements, to the exclusion of everyday cinematic traditions such as plot and acting, unites them.
“I’ve always been interested in the intersections and translations of different art forms that happen in film,” said Visual Music curator Peter Lucas from his office at the Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave. “The more I’ve investigated cinema from that angle, the more arrows have been drawn to this hidden history of Visual Music — artists throughout the past century who’ve used musical analogies not so much to represent music or accompanying it, but to create visual experiences that acted as music.”
Lucas calls animator Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967) “the real through-line in this history, having directly inspired generations of artists and filmmakers (certainly the artists included in this series).”
A German national who worked in Hollywood starting in 1936, Fischinger specialized in matching bright, abstract cell-animation patterns to (mostly) classical music. The Visual Music evening devoted to his work includes the short films “Circles” (1933), “Allegretto” (1936) and a re-creation of his “R-1, A Form-Play,” (ca. 1926-33), originally shown using multiple projectors.
Other figures highlighted during the series include Mary Ellen Bute (1906-1983), whose films resembled Fischinger’s but made more use of three-dimensional planes and sometimes manipulated photography of 3-D objects. Her “Mood Contrasts” (1956) captured patterns from an oscilloscope — one of the first uses of electronic images on film.
Jordan Belson (born 1926) sometimes uses classical music but often composed or co-composed spiky electronic music to match his sharp-edged visuals. More spiritually concerned than the aforementioned artists, many of his works, including “Samadhi” (1967) and “Chakra” (1972) aim to invoke meditational, transcendent states.
A different genre Of particular interest to local audiences is an evening devoted to “Seattle Psychedelics.” Explains curator Lucas: “The Union Light Co. was a group of artists who, between 1966 and ‘68, created improvisational light shows in Seattle and New York. It was born out of the first real light show in Seattle…. Their shows incorporated color projections and thousands of slides made from found images…. We’re really happy that founding members Carol Burns and Ron McComb will be here to talk about their work and experiences.”
An evening of “Sixties Synaesthetics” concludes the series. From a decade where filmmakers increasingly used electronics and the replication patterns of the optical printer, Lucas and his co-curator Spencer Sundell selected among others “OffOn” (1968), by Tom DeWitt, one of the first films to use video technology; “Peyote Queen” (1965), from Storm DeHirsch, who started out scratching and painting directly on film when she couldn’t afford a camera; and “The Flicker” (1965), from composer Tony Conrad, featuring strobe effects so severe the film starts with a printed title warning all moviegoers susceptible to seizures that they should move out to the lobby.
Lucas’ only lament is that he had to leave out a number of important and influential figures in this distinctive field. His concluding remarks: “I’m hoping that this series sparks a renewed interest in Visual Music here and spawns further presentations.”
For more information, call 829-7863 or visit nwfilmforum.org.
