Although La Marseillaise (1938) or The Elusive Corporal (1962) may be the best films in the astonishingly well-packaged (and priced) 3-disc Jean Renoir Collector’s Edition released earlier this year by Lionsgate, The Testament of Doctor Cordelier (1959)–based on the Jekyll and Hyde story–is undoubtedly the most Halloween-friendly. It’s also a pretty fun and fascinating film, both as a dark variant on Renoir’s typical themes and as a technological experiment: the film was shot with multiple cameras and long takes to capture the actors’ energy with few interruptions and prove that feature films could be made cheaply with television methods. (Hitchcock would himself use a black-and-white television crew to film 1960′s Psycho.)

Foremost among its pleasures is actor-director Jean-Louis Barrault’s (Children of Paradise) performance as the Jekyll/Hyde character Cordelier/Opale, oscillating between the stately, aristocratic scientist and his diabolical alter ego. It’s the kind of role that can inspire brilliance (see Fredric March in Mamoulian’s adaptation), and Barrault is remarkable, suggesting a deranged mime who moves in a series of spasms and ticks before breaking into wild, inexplicable violence. Yet over the course of the film, Opale also seems tinged with tragedy, a victim of his own unchecked passions.

“I wanted to tell a story about rich people,” Renoir said in 1961, ever the chronicler of social relations. Cordelier is a wealthy psychiatrist obsessed with proving the existence of the soul. He develops a serum that transforms him into Opale, who saunters through Parisian suburbs, attacking children, babies, prostitutes–even a man on crutches. But the story’s true protagonist is the aptly named Mr. Joly, an affluent lawyer who insists on believing in Cordelier’s innocence and best of intentions, and attempts to resolve conflicts with a combination of isolating, hushing and paying off bystanders. Cordelier’s real nemesis is his colleague SÈverine, who opposes his ideas in the name of modern science in an office jammed with chic, abstract art. Not that the film is a simple satire of the rich; Renoir’s notorious empathy merely shows the flaws in his “good” characters and suggests elements of nobility even in his “evil” ones.

Renoir is famous for his long shots, and much of Cordelier is framed at a distance from the action with actors moving in clusters; but this time out, the visual tone compels less of a Bazinian appreciation for the complexity and depth of the image than a horrified feeling of helplessness in the face of random violence. Yet the film doesn’t feel like a horror movie–Renoir never downplays the savagery of Opale’s actions, but he does offer darkly humorous counterpoint in the form of a jagged, loopy score that sounds like a woodwind circus juxtaposed with a theremin. The jaunty music underlines the absurdity of Opale’s prancing, nonsensical, almost cowardly attacks on the defenseless in a way that flirts with black comedy.

Unlike previous versions of the Jekyll/Hyde story, Renoir’s version effectively becomes a narrative about intervention–how far will Cordelier’s friends and associates tolerate his behavior and how willing are they to look closely enough to discover the truth and its consequences? In learning about and accepting Cordelier’s predicament, Joly must also accept the fallibility of his own aristocratic idealism and the darker recesses of the human psyche in his friend, and (perhaps even more provocatively for him) a great philanthropist. “I can’t go back to being a good person,” Opale laments near the end of the film, “but I can’t stay like this.” Renoir’s ultimate jumble of character sympathies, ethics, and rationalizations results in a film as thought-provoking as it is technically adventurous.

Raymond Bernard has been described as a forgotten director, and judging from the references I’ve checked (a handful of film encyclopedias, newspaper archives, and several English books on early French cinema) it certainly appears to be true. A few mention him in passing, conceding that he was a critical and commercial success in France at the time, a maker of polished superproductions. According to the notes in Criterion’s Eclipse release a few months ago of Bernard’s Wooden Crosses (1932) and Les MisÈrables (1934), his obscurity is partly due to the collapse of the French prewar film industry during his creative peak, as well as Hollywood’s misappropriation of his work (instead of releasing Wooden Crosses, the film’s startling footage was used to pad out various American war films).

Nevertheless, it’s almost certainly true that Bernard’s nearly five-hour version of Les MisÈrables is the most novelistic and engrossing of the book’s many adaptations, and that includes the capable version–also recently released on DVD–shot by Gregg Toland the following year for Fox. That version boasts fine performances by Fredric March and Charles Laughton (whose babyfaced petulance was never put to better use), but it’s undeniably reduced and simplified by Hollywood dramatic codes. Bernard takes the time to develop characters and themes with much more nuance, and cinematographer Jules Kruger (Napoleon, PÈpÈ le Moko) makes extensive use of expressionist, canted frames 14 years before The Third Man etched them in the popular memory.

The basic story of Victor Hugo’s novel, which took him over 20 years to write, is widely known: in 19th century France, ex-convict Jean Valjean is inspired by a gracious priest to lead a moral life; attempting to escape his past, he becomes a wealthy factory owner who opposes Royalist-era social inequalities as he hides from the law-obsessed Inspector Javert; the drama leads to the historic 1832 student uprising against the monarchy. The novel is divided into five parts, the movie into three, feature-length chapters–Tempest in a Skull, The ThÈnardiers and Liberty, Sweet Liberty–that follow the book closely despite necessary conflations and pruning. The film never seem rushed or slow, but offers a perfectly-paced melodrama with natural rises and falls in the action. (It has appeared in shorter lengths over the years, but Criterion’s print is based on Bernard’s personally restored cut for French TV, completed only months before his death in 1977.)

Bernard is aided considerably by what seems like unlimited production resources (elaborate street sets, rich decor, detailed miniatures) and a talented cast, particularly Harry Baur, who expresses Valjean’s shifting guises, ages, and interior perspectives with tremendous cohesion. Baur takes advantage of his large, burly frame to suggest subtle physical manifestations of the conflicting forces teeming within his character. (His extended acting career began in 1909, but ended on a highly tragic note: his torture and death at the hands of the Gestapo in 1943, a fact that unavoidably intensifies his portrayal, for those in the know, of a beleaguered man who maintains his integrity at all costs.)

The film is also cinematically conceived in ways that impress beyond the realm of resources. Bernard pays particular attention to visual transitions, such as when he matches prison papers rejected by Valjean with party invitations for the bourgeoisie, or when he juxtaposes an empty fireplace with a roaring fire to suggest the changing of the seasons. One sequence is particularly striking: Bernard cuts–Bressonlike–from Javert’s hand grasping Valjean, to a prison window, to its busted bars, back again to Javert’s hand as he knocks on the door of Valjean’s newly suspected hideout, compressing an entire subplot to four shots. Expressionist effects are used to suggest Valjean’s emotional turmoil (handheld, chaotic shots during a personal tantrum, doubly-exposed names on a map that reverberate in his conscience). Drawing from Bernard’s experience with past epics (including the visually impressive but dramatically cumbersome The Chess Player, available on DVD from Milestone), the film stages its climactic scenes of social unrest with startling cinÈma vÈritÈ-like immediacy.

Previous film versions of Les MisÈrables have tended to morph the narrative into a classic protagonist/antagonist structure between Valjean and Javert, but one of this adaptation’s more pleasurable aspects is the way it tempers easy categorizations. Like the book (and unlike many interpretations), Valjean’s inner transformation doesn’t occur immediately during his encounter with the priest, but later as he discovers his own propensity for self-delusion; unlike Laughton’s imperious fanaticism or Anthony Perkins’ simmering determination in the 1978 TV adaptation, Bernard’s Javert is a quiet, introverted presence who shambles through the film like an ordinary policeman merely doing his duty. The most villainous characters are two conniving and opportunistic innkeepers, the ThÈnardiers, whose machinations reach such pathetic extremes, they often seem more tragically absurd than malevolent. In general, Bernard’s adaptation shuns good and evil stereotypes for characters living out their conflicting values formed during their country’s turbulent, post-Napoleonic milieu.

Criterion’s Eclipse label debuted early this year, and as fine as their collection of late Ozu films is, those titles have been readily available as import DVDs for some time; Bernard’s Les MisÈrables is my favorite discovery of the series so far, a richly conceived and fully-formed adaptation that does admirable service to the novel’s timeless moral and social themes. A forgotten masterpiece not to be missed.

Edition Filmmuseum is a Munich-based, joint project of film archives in Europe (mostly German-speaking) that is publishing a fantastic series of films of “artistic, cultural and historical value” on all-region DVDs; their latest release is Straub and Huillet’s masterful Class Relations, and aside from the film itself, the DVD offers a bounty of significant, archive-quality supplements.

There are two major short films on the two-disc set that offer rare and illuminating glimpses of the filmmakers’ working methods, both of them by filmmakers who acted in Class Relations: Harun Farocki’s 65-minute Work on ‘Class Relations’ by DaniËle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub and Manfred Blank’s 42-minute Work in Progress. If one includes Pedro Costa’s Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?, the number of films on DVD (with English subtitles) about Straub and Huillet now outnumber the films on DVD by Straub and Huillet, which is unfortunate given the importance of their work. Happily, all three documentaries focus on different aspects of their work–conception, shooting, and editing–and may be a fine place to start. This is true especially in conjunction with titles like The Chronicle of Ana Magdalena Bach and Class Relations, films that are highly structured and rigorous in their aesthetic form yet also highly pleasurable to watch (the first is musically invigorating, the second is a sublime black comedy; both are visually stunning).

Farocki’s film captures the filmmakers in rehearsal and later on the set of the film, and it highlights their obsessive attention to the slightest details of line delivery and the arrangement and movement of their actors. Rhythm is all-important, as the directors gently but firmly call for take after take, encouraging, refining, and slowly shaping their actor’s performances word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence. “You can tell you’re struggling to shorten the old pause without giving the sentence any momentum,” Straub says. “Why do you wait so long, Manfred, after ‘come’? I’d like to feel the colon there, even though Kafka used a comma.” Lead actor Christian Heinisch recites, “I will give you money, but only on the condition that you leave immediately and never again visit me here.” The filmmakers then converse about the proper way to intone “visit me here.” “Three words with breaks,” Straub eventually concludes. “No pauses, just breaks.”

Scholar Barton Byg–who also appears in Class Relations–provides a moving memorial tribute to Huillet (who died earlier this year) in the DVD’s liner notes, and he stresses Huillet’s supreme sensitivity to language and the lengthy process of translation required whenever he would help her write English subtitles. “In English more than in French,” he writes, “it is possible to find linguistic correspondences with the origin, sound and form of the German words, even if the meaning would be somewhat strained….whenever I suggested an English ‘equivalent’ for a saying or phrase unique to German, DaniËle would reject it….[her] concern was always with the material specificity of the words: ‘It’s better to be awkward than inexact.’”

Blank’s film catches Straub-Huillet in a more reflective mode while sitting on a patio, and anyone who has watched the filmmakers together will be able to predict their dynamics. Straub: highly talkative, free-associating and pontificating; Huillet: observant, concise and essential. Blank questions the filmmakers (generally through title cards) about their connection (like the character of Class Relations) to themes of exile and emigration. Huillet quotes a worker they interviewed: “If you have to work in a place, you can live in a place.” Straub says that was his answer, too, but then embarks on a meandering–but fascinating–consideration of the relationship between text and adapter, the importance of personal attraction as well as distance, and touches on Godard, artistic personas and the nature of interviews in general. This defines the film’s pattern, and though Huillet appears to be on the verge of falling asleep throughout, she is always quick to insert brief, striking observations. It’s an illuminating portrait of the filmmakers’ influences (Stroheim), thoughts (they hate the tag “minimalist”), and inclinations (for Class Relations they tried to keep the camera’s perspective somewhat consistent to suggest a merging of subjective and objective points of view).

Finally, the DVD is rounded out by a 20-minute “genetic analysis of the sign structure and rhetoric” of the opening shots of Class Relations, produced by the Filmmuseum M¸nchen, which includes outtakes, script excerpts, and texts tracing their development. A collection of 44 beautiful production stills complete what is surely a must-own package for anyone remotely interested in the work of Straub-Huillet.

For many of us who have seen it, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977) remains this year’s best distributed film. Although it was his thesis project at UCLA and one of the first movies chosen for the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 1990, it wasn’t until this year that the music rights were cleared by Milestone Films for national distribution, and Burnett’s belated praise has been something to savor. Better still, Milestone is also releasing the director’s cut of Burnett’s second feature (with its own difficult history), My Brother’s Wedding (1983), on DVD next month (along with Sheep and some acclaimed short films). It screens at the UCLA film archive this week, and it’s not to be missed as a rare and important portrait of black, lower-middle class life in south central Los Angeles during the early-’80s; its seriocomic tragedy suggests provocative consequences to the kind of existential pressures so memorably introduced in Sheep.

As such, My Brother’s Wedding is a more narrative-driven film than its predecessor, though it still largely plays out in a matter of vignettes that suspensefully converge in the final act. Pierce (Everett Silas) is a 30-year-old, frustrated but well-meaning idealist who works at his parents’ dry cleaning shop after dropping out of the industrial workplace. He gets along with his principled, churchgoing mother and playfully cantankerous father, but he bristles at his brother’s fiancÈe, Sonia, an upper class black woman intent on climbing the social ladder. Pierce would rather spend his life free of attachments, hanging out with his ex-con buddy named Soldier, and he remains spiritually immobilized between romanticized notions of the lower classes and his hatred of “selling out” to the system.

The film develops breezily, following Pierce as he pals around with friends, visits relatives, encounters eccentric customers, and generates his family’s ire by getting into arguments with Sonia. Rich humor abounds: Pierce and his father maintain what seems like an intermittent wrestling match regardless of their location; an enormous man asks for his Sunday pants to be repaired but Pierce’s mother suggests they “lose” them and give him an unclaimed pair; a sassy adolescent prematurely and ineffectively flirts with Pierce. Juxtaposed is the film’s awareness of more difficult elements: families answer doors holding a pistol behind their back; random threats become unexpectedly serious dangers; competing loyalties between friends and family compel irreconcilable differences. The film teems with sociological detail without ever feeling studied; it simply reflects the air breathed by Burnett shooting in his childhood neighborhood and it’s personified by a multitude of charismatic nonprofessional actors.

The film’s authenticity is achieved not only in its real locations, but also in its surprising rejection of mainstream codes; in an era of violent Blaxploitation cinema, Burnett develops his own tonal vocabulary to reveal the lives and aspirations of his everyday characters. The acting rhythms are slower and less polished than Hollywood productions, but their offbeat sincerity is so consistently rendered that like the greatest of films, its rigorous assertion of new ways to characterize people is ultimately moving and refreshing. Watch the scene when a young woman haltingly tells someone over the phone of a relative’s death, the actress underplays the scene with simmering emotion in a way that speaks volumes.

I’ve only seen this 82-minute director’s cut, so I can’t speak for how the film has changed from the 115-minute assembly that toured a few festivals in the early-’80s, but its opening images of an elderly man singing “Amazing Grace”–removed from any narrative context–is precisely the kind of thing apt to enrage distributors, and it’s also the key to Burnett’s offhanded brilliance. It’s a thematic prelude to the film’s underlying preoccupation with personal values and their relationship to modernity. In his attempts to shirk responsibility, Pierce ultimately finds himself in a crisis of conflicting obligations, and it’s a testament to the film’s social and emotional honesty that his conflict holds as much dramatic weight as it does; Pierce is adrift between equally forbidding realms without sufficient bearings. Unlike so many films ostensibly about black life in the late-’70s and early-’80s, My Brother’s Wedding isn’t about high stakes drug-dealing or hit men, it’s about the difficult and ambiguous day-to-day living that ultimately supports a community and the individual search–humorous and distressing–for effective commitments.

This is the second part of an article exploring the first two DVD releases of the Center for Visual Music. Part 1 can be found here.

“This is a different kind of DVD,” Cindy Keefer, the director of CVM warned me, adding that she and Belson were wary of reviewers who 1) might expect something similar to Oskar Fischinger, or 2) were unfamiliar with the work of Jordan Belson and might criticize the DVD as being blurry or out of focus. Hard to believe, but I’m sure they’ve heard it. She encouraged me to watch the DVD on as big a screen as possible, and I’m glad she did. Although I haven’t owned a television in years, I do have a video projector at home, and seeing Belson’s extraordinary work in a large format on my wall with a decent audio system was one of the most transcendent experiences of my viewing year. I’m passing on the recommendation.

Samadhi

Jordan Belson: 5 Essential Films

This DVD is an elegant, spartan affair; it contains a black and white menu featuring just what it says (five essential films) and no more, yet the disc’s minimalism–like Belson’s famed reticence to explain the sources of his films’ imagery–merely accentuates the sense of mystery that permeates his work. “Idle curiosity about how I produce the images can only spoil the experience of the films, as far as I’m concerned,” Belson told Scott MacDonald in A Critical Cinema 3. “Although there is a dominance of a certain kind of imagery, I’ve always tried to include as many different elements as possible.”

A member of the Beat Generation, Belson began his career as a painter, moved into animation and experimental film, and later joined electronic composer Henry Jacobs to create psychedelic Vortex Concerts at a planetarium in San Francisco in the late-’50s. Like many Beats, Belson was highly influenced by Eastern mysticism and he began formulating abstract, audiovisual presentations that often utilized circular motifs, solar imagery, lasers, star fields, and billowing, ethereal vapors. “I’m involved with the kind of imagery that has been dealt with in Tibetan art and in some Christian art of the Middle Ages,” he told MacDonald, “the windows in Gothic cathedrals, for example. Such circular and symmetrical shapes have always been associated with the quest for spirituality, even to the extent that some people believe that such shapes, mandalas or the designs inside Moorish mosque domes, can precipitate spiritual feeling.” P. Adams Sitney qualified Belson’s approach, writing: “The aesthetic use of oriental thought is a Romantic tradition, and a particularly fertile one in America. Belson is closer to the Emerson of Circles as an artist than to Ramana Maharshi or Tibetan iconographers.”

Allures (1961) is largely considered a culmination of Belson’s Vortex period, and it was widely seen on the 16mm circuit before Belson removed all his films from distribution in 1978 (one of several “renunciations” of the cinema the filmmaker would assert over time). Set against a pulsing, electronic soundtrack (created in collaboration with Jacobs), multicolored light tunnels and spiraling designs fade in and out of the film; shapes and particles recede into infinity. It might remind contemporary viewers of the finale in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), but it firmly predates it (and both were inspired by the work of James Whitney). Allures is more stroboscopic and graphically intense than some of Belson’s later work, but its endless stream of enigmatic motifs is genuinely immersive.

Samadhi (1967) begins with stunningly lit, turbulent clouds shifting through the color spectrum before gradually revealing a circular center that becomes a template for a variety of morphing imagery. A rumbling hiss comes and goes on the soundtrack (which Gene Youngblood identified in a Film Culture article as “the inhaling and exhaling of Belson’s own respiration”) before blending into lingering electronic sounds. It’s a haunting, organic tone poem.

Light (1973) commences with violet droplets raining down upon swirling blue and crimson vapors, and develops into partially opaque superimpositions that layer colors upon colors, and textures upon textures; the soundtrack was created by Belson and features a halting, soft piano performance that later merges with more atmospheric and electronic sound effects. Again, circular imagery persists, but the film also incorporates the glittering motion of what seems like millions of particles moving across the screen, fading out, and reappearing in different orientations.

Fountain of Dreams (1984, previously unreleased) sets Belson’s swirling clouds of brilliantly-hued effluvium and various shimmering reflections to the stirring piano music of Franz Liszt. The motions in this film are closer to arcs; the quickly moving wisps of smoke appear and disappear with an entrancing rhythmic beauty, each carefully lit, eventually dissolving into particles that swirl in motion across the screen. (Belson was tapped to do some special effects for Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff in 1983, and if you remember some of the film’s phantasmagoric sky effects or the Aboriginal fire dance, some of this imagery may look familiar.) This is a particularly delicate film, one that could prompt endless contemplation.

Finally, the DVD ends with a special treat–Epilogue (2005), a film commissioned and installed at a recent Hirshhorn/Smithsonian exhibition on Visual Music. It’s clear from the outset that the 79-year old Belson hasn’t lost an ounce of his talent; the film is a dramatic cornucopia of chiaroscuro lighting and thick, tumultuous clouds, ambiguous physical formations, and beautiful lens flares set to Rachmaninoff’s deeply evocative “The Isle of the Dead” symphony. It was actually produced by CVM with additional support from the NASA Art Program, and taken on its own terms, it may be my favorite piece on the disc. Each infinitely complex, churning cloud and vivid hue seems organically rendered, and the overall pace of the film’s fades, dissolves, and overlapping elements generates considerable power.

This is the first part of a two-part posting that will explore the first DVD releases of the venerable Los Angeles-based Center for Visual Music: Oskar Fischinger: Ten Films (2006) and Jordan Belson: 5 Essential Films (2007). CVM is a nonprofit film archive, library, research and education center devoted to “visual music.” It’s directed by Cindy Keefer, who amiably gave me a tour of CVM’s facilities located in downtown’s historic Spring Arts Tower. The Center has a long history of organizing exhibitions and is hard at work on upcoming programs for several European museums and festivals. Keefer has described Visual Music as a “rapidly-expanding genre” that includes everything from “experimental filmmakers to video artists, animators, CG artists, VJs, installation artists, painters and musicians.” CVM’s tireless efforts to promote the work of key figures in the genre remains a fascinating, ongoing venture.

Motion Painting No. 1

Oskar Fischinger: Ten Films

This is a lovingly produced DVD with high-definition digital transfers and a host of extras. Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967) was one of the earliest pioneers of abstract animation, placing him in the company of filmmakers like Walter Ruttmann and Hans Richter, who were working only a few years after Kandinsky’s first entirely nonrepresentational painting in 1910. There’s an amusing anecdote about Fischinger making a presentation to a literary group in 1921, where he “visually illustrated” the emotional dynamics of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night on a chart like a dramatic seismograph. Apparently, confusion among his audience abounded, prompting him to consider the motion picture–with its built-in element of time–as a better medium to express his ideas.

Fischinger began experimenting with a wax slicing machine and camera that he invented (and later sold to Ruttmann as a special effects device for Lotte Reiniger’s famed 1926 silhouette film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed). The DVD contains Fischinger’s Wax Experiments: 1921-’26, which are genuinely beautiful in their organic, kaleidoscopic growth. The disc also contains two more early Fischinger works, a playful silhouette film of his own (Spiritual Constructions) and–for me the most engrossing–Walking From Munich to Berlin, both made in 1927. The latter is often described as a document of Fischinger’s 620-mile trek between the cities comprised of single-frame footage, but its imagery actually varies in tempo, fluidly combining isolated scenes with longer, time-lapse footage of clouds passing or wheat fields blowing in the breeze. Its sights are supremely evocative of rural Germany between the wars (children playing, pastoral compositions, farmers and workers) and the white flash frames he includes only intensify the feeling of being privy to the filmmaker’s personal memories.

Fischinger continued to experiment on various projects, including assisting with the special effects for Woman in the Moon, directed by Fritz Lang, who would remain a lifelong friend. He soon found enormous success producing hand-drawn charcoal animations (synchronized with records) advertising new musical recordings; these three-minute Studies were screened in theaters–and thus have been called the first “music videos”–and are serious works of art in themselves. The DVD contains Studies numbers six (1930) and seven (1931), the latter of which was choreographed to Brahms’ “Hungarian Dance No. 5,” and–according to William Moritz’s excellent 2004 biography, Optical Poetry–”proved so impressive that four filmmakers at least (Norman McLaren, Alexandre Alexeieff, Claire Parker and Len Lye) were encouraged to pursue a career in abstract musical animation after seeing it.”

Soon, however, Fischinger’s luck took a downturn, and the rise of Nazism and its hatred of abstract art forced him to immigrate to Hollywood in 1936, where his insufficient English and independent spirit continually frustrated attempts to work within the studio system. Paramount so butchered his initial contributions that he soon moved to MGM, who commissioned a short film, An Optical Poem (1938), but paid him so little he never made a profit despite the film’s limited theatrical run. (This film isn’t included on the CVM disc, but you can find it in Image Entertainment’s Unseen Cinema box set–disc seven–in all its vivid colors, circles, and movements; its most unusual aspect, however, may be the lion-roaring MGM logo that precedes the landmark avant-garde film.) Fischinger also worked on Disney’s Fantasia–a film he arguably inspired, not only in previous discussions with the film’s conductor, Leopold Stokowski, but also given the fact (as Moritz writes) that he “brought prints of his films, which were screened every week for nine months for the entire Disney staff during lunch and breaks.” Yet Fischinger’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” was so simplified and watered-down that he eventually terminated his contract.

Fortunately for Fischinger, the Guggenheim Foundation had its first exhibition of non-objective art in 1936 and dedicated a museum to it in 1939, and Fischinger was one of its first grant recipients. He used the money to not only buy back and finish his work at Paramount (which he turned into 1941′s Allegretto), but also to complete the silent Radio Dynamics (1942) and what many consider to be his masterwork, Motion Painting No. 1 (1947), all three of which are included on the DVD. Allegretto develops as an invigorating contrast between overlapping, expanding concentric circles and flocks of angular, foreground shapes that sail across the screen in time to Ralph Rainger’s jazzy score. Radio Dynamics–which opens with the hand-scrawled request, “Please! No Music Experiment in Color-Rhythm”–juxtaposes several short movements: quickly choreographed, angular shapes expanding before static, abstract paintings; vertical and horizontal swathes of shifting colors; circular fields enlarging independently of one another. It’s an energized and elegant expression of what Fischinger then termed “absolute film.”

Motion Painting No. 1 is set to Bach’s “Brandenburg Concerto No.3,” and it’s the closest Fischinger ever got to capturing the painting process itself, as dots and lines of oil paint on glass simultaneously branch off from various parts of the screen and build up from each other layer upon layer; unlike his previous work, however, the movement and rhythm of the lines and shapes flow more freely according to their own sense of form and composition rather than accentuate every nuance of the music. The resulting film is an immersive symphony of color that slowly generates a genuine sense of grandeur. The DVD provides a quote emphasizing Fischinger’s own satisfaction: “[In the film], for the first time, visual music was born, creating that deep, emotional, almost pleasurable feeling (as we know it) that we get from good music.”

Fischinger had already been painting offscreen to pre-plan his films, but he ultimately spent the last twenty years of his life largely devoted to the art, completing around 800 spectacularly modernist works that are still held in public and private collections around the world (including pieces at the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art). One of the best features on the CVM release is a sampling of his paintings, as lively and vivid as the films he left behind.