Gallery
All Pictures (2)Biography
Oskar Fischinger was born June 22, 1900, in Gelnhausen near Frankfurt/Main, where his family owned a drugstore and a brewery restaurant. While still at school, he took violin lessons and later apprenticed at an organ-building firm until the owner was drafted into World War I. Fischinger then started a new apprenticeship as a draftsman in an architect’s office in Gelnhausen. In February 1916, he moved to Frankfurt in order to resume his apprenticeship at a turbine factory. In August 1922, he eventually obtained an engineer's diploma.
At the 1921 world premiere of Walther Ruttmann's "Lichtspiel Opus I." in Frankfurt, Dr. Bernhard Diebold introduced Fischinger to Ruttmann. Fischinger told him about his idea to create a labor-saving animation tool: a so-called "Wax Slicing Machine" which synchronized a vertical slicer with a movie camera's shutter, thus enabling the efficient imaging of progressive cross-sections through a length of molded material. Although Ruttmann moved his studio to Munich, they kept in contact by letter, and in November 1922, Fischinger eventually licensed his wax slicing machine to Ruttmann.
In the meantime, Fischinger had started to experiment with three-dimensional, abstract wax figures and swirled colored liquids. Diebold encouraged Fischinger to make a movie using abstract charts and graphs, which he had designed in December 1921 within the context of a lecture on the dynamics in Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night, Or What You Will".
After obtaining his engineer's diploma, Fischinger moved to Munich in order to fully dedicate himself to filmmaking. In addition to his own abstract films, which he prepared by means of his wax slicing machine and other animation techniques, Fischinger produced half a dozen representational cartoons together with Louis Seel using the rotoscope technique. With the composer Alexander Lászlo he collaborated on "Farblichtmusik", a multi-projection light show which toured theaters and exhibitions.
By June 1927, Louis Seel's company was in financial trouble and Fischinger was forced to leave Munich. He walked to Berlin, where he experienced great difficulties in finding a job. In June 1928, the Ufa film studio asked him to shoot special effects for Fritz Lang's science fiction feature film "Die Frau im Mond" ("Woman in the Moon"). When he broke his leg on the Ufa lot a year later, he interpreted this accident as a sign to devote himself full-time to his own abstract film activities.
Over the next three years, he produced a series of black-and-white studies tightly synchronized to music. The films were screened with great success in Europe, Japan, and America, and by 1932 Fischinger was able to engage his brother Hans, his wife Elfriede as well as three other girls at his own studio.
Furthermore, the success allowed him to pursue his experiments with drawn, synthetic sound and collaborate with Bela Gaspar on the development of a subtractive three-color film process - "Gasparcolor" – which enabled him to finish his first color film "Kreise" ("Circles") in 1933.
Fischinger's subsequent color films, "Muratti greift ein" ("Muratti Marches On") and "Komposition in Blau" ("Composition in Blue"), gained so much critical and popular acclaim that Paramount offered him a contract. In February 1936, he went to Hollywood – and never returned to Germany.
Both Fischinger's independent temper and his language difficulties made it extremely hard for him to work at studios. Nevertheless, he accepted jobs at Paramount (1936), MGM (1937), and Disney (1938-1939). From 1941 until 1942, he worked with Orson Welles on a project that was never finished.
Frustrated at not being able to produce independent films as he had in Berlin, he turned to oil painting. Due to the success of his canvases, he came under the patronage of Hilla Rebay, curator of the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, who extended several grants to him during the difficult war years. In 1947, however, Fischinger and Rebay quarreled over the artistic merits of his film "Motion Painting No. 1" and Fischinger never again received adequate financial support to complete another film – neither from Rebay nor from other sources .
For the last twenty years of his life, Fischinger was forced to content himself with countless unfinished projects as well as with his oil paintings (displayed in dozens of exhibitions), and with the Lumigraph, a light-show instrument for domestic use, which he invented in the early 50s. However, the Lumigraph never found commercial distribution.
After some years of ill-health, Fischinger died on January 31, 1967, in Hollywood.