Origins of animation Early animation and abstract film in Europe

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Origins of animationEarly animation and
abstract film in Europe
Marcel Duchamp Fernand Leger Lotte
Reiniger Viking Eggeling Hans Richter Walter
Ruttman Len Lye Oskar Fischinger
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Origins of animation

• 1645 The magic lantern is invented.
• The Magic Lantern is the earliest form of slide
  projector. The first published image of the
  device appeared in Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, by
  Athanasius Kircher in the late 1600's. Images
  were painted on glass and projected on walls,
  cloth drapes, and, sometimes, on a wet cloth from
  behind the "screen". Naturally, to see images
  appear, either from a lantern, that heretofore
  was a light source only, or onto a screen, was
  "magical" in those early days.
• 1794 The magic lantern theatre, the
  Phantasmagoria, opens in Paris.

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Origins of animation

• 1824 Peter Roget presented his paper 'The
  persistence of vision with regard to moving
  objects' to the British Royal Society. The work
  explained that an image was retained by the
  retina for fractions of a second before being
  replaced by another image and that if these
  images appeared at a sufficient rate of a change,
  the viewer had a perception of motion when
  looking at still images.

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Origins of animation

• 1831 Dr. Joseph Antoine Plateau (a Belgian
  scientist) and Dr. Simon Rittrer constructed a
  machine called a phenakitstoscope (fantoscope).
  This machine produced an illusion of movement by
  allowing a viewer to gaze at a rotating disk
  containing small windows behind the windows was
  another disk containing a sequence of images.
  When the disks were rotated at the correct speed,
  the synchronization of the windows with the
  images created an animated effect.
• 1834 Horner developed the zeotrope from Plateau's
  phenakistiscope

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Origins of animation

• 1872 Eadweard Muybridge, british photographer
  started his photographic gathering of animals in
  motion and invented the zoopraxiscope.

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Origins of animation

• 1887 Thomas Edison started his research work
  into motion pictures.
• 1889 Thomas Edison announced his creation of the
  kinetoscope which projected a 50ft length of film
  in approximately 13 seconds.
• 1889 George Eastman began the manufacture of
  photographic film strips using a nitro-cellulose
  base.

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Origins of animation

• 1892 Emile Renynaud, combining his earlier
  invention of the praxinoscope with a projector,
  opens the Theatre Optique in the Musee Grevin. It
  displays an animation of images painted on long
  strips of celluloid.
• 1895 Louis and Augustine Lumiere issued a patent
  for a device called a cinematograph capable of
  projecting moving pictures.

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Origins of animation

• 1906 James Stuart Blackton 1875 -1941 makes the
  "HUMOROUS PHASES OF FUNNY FACES."
• This film is usually considered the first known
  example of animation as some of the drawn
  sequences are shot frame by frame. Blackton used
  a combination of blackboard and chalk drawing and
  cutouts to achieve animation. The film's motif
  was based on the lightning or quick sketch
  routine from vaudeville where a drawing is done
  in front of an audience.

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DADA

• Dada is one of the most important avant-garde
  movements of the twentieth century. Responding to
  the disasters of World War I and to an emerging
  modern media and machine culture, Dada artists
  led a revolution that boldly embraced and
  criticized modernity itself. Pursuing innovative
  strategies of art making that included
  abstraction, chance procedures, collage,
  photomontage, readymades, performances, and
  media pranks, the Dadaists created an abiding
  artistic legacy for the century to come.

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DADA

• Reacting to the pervasive and destructive
  nationalism of its day, Dada was a definitely
  international movement, and the first to
  self-conscioulsy position itself as an expansive
  network spanning countries and continents. Dada
  took hold in Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, New York,
  Paris and Zurich the six principal cities between
  1916 and 1924.
• Dada emerged simultaneously and independently in
  Zurich and New York, two cities during the early
  years of World War 1, provided neutral havens for
  the iconoclastic refugees who launched Dada.
• Dadaist opposition to the war, and their deep
  criticism of the political and cultural
  institutions that had given rise to it, fueled
  their assault on artistic tradition.

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DADA
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DADA
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DADA
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DADA
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Anemic Cinema 1926
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)

• Marcel Duchamp, French Dada artist,
• whose small but controversial output
• exerted a strong influence on the
• development of 20th-century avant-
• garde art. Born in Blainville Duchamp
• began to paint in 1908. After producing
• several canvases in the current mode of
  Fauvism, he turned toward
• experimentation and the avant-garde,
• producing his most famous work, Nude Descending
  a Staircase, No. 2 portraying continuous movement
  through a chain of overlapping cubistic figures,
  the painting
• caused a furor at New York City's famous Armory
  Show in 1913.

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Anemic Cinema
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)

• Duchamp pioneered two of the main innovations of
  the 20th century sculpture kinetic art and
  ready-made art. His "ready-mades" consisted
  simply of everyday objects, such as a urinal and
  a bottle rack. His Bicycle Wheel an early example
  of kinetic art, was mounted on a kitchen stool.
• After his short creative period, Duchamp was
  content to let others develop the themes he had
  originated his pervasive influence was crucial
  to the development of surrealism, Dada, and pop
  art.
• Duchamp became an American citizen in 1955. He
  died in Paris on October 1, 1968.

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Anemic Cinema
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1967)

• The Rotoreliefs first appeared in the film
  Anemic Cinema where they alternate with discs
  bearing inscriptions. The discs were meant to be
  placed on a record-player according to the
  following instructions
• "The disc should turn at an approximate speed of
  33/ 3 revolutions per minute, this will give an
  impression of depth, and the optical illusion
  will be more intense with one eye than with two!
  M.D.

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Anemic Cinema
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1967)
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Ballet Mecanique 1924
Fernand Leger (1991-1955)

• Fernand Leger was born into a peasant family in
  Normandy, apprenticed to an architect, and then
  went to Paris in 1900 to study painting. His
  early work in Paris was in a style that mixed
  Impressionism with Fauvism, but quickly came
  under the influence of Cubism.
• Leger depicted an expanding industrial world,
  employing his own form of dynamic Cubism in
  paintings dominated by contrasts of color and
  forms. During World War I, Leger served in the
  front lines. He said these experiences
  strengthened his sense of reality and reinforced
  his interest in modern mechanical forms he knew
  from guns and airplanes. After the War and his
  return to Paris, Leger's paintings seem to be
  inhabited by machine forms and robot-like
  figures, all rendered in primary colors.
• During the last twenty years of his life, Leger
  concentrated on a few basic themes in which he
  summed up theories about people and the
  contemporary industrial world. He painted divers,
  cyclists, construction workers and circus themes
  in the series La Grande Parade. He was in New
  York from 1940-1945, painting murals and
  teaching, and in the 1950's, he had a number of
  large mural commissions, including one for the
  United Nations.

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Ballet Mecanique
Fernand Leger (1991-1955)
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Ballet Mecanique
Fernand Leger (1991-1955)
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Ballet Mecanique
Fernand Leger (1991-1955)
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Ballet Mecanique
Fernand Leger (1991-1955)
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Ballet Mecanique
Fernand Leger (1991-1955)
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Ballet Mecanique 1924
Fernand Leger (1991-1955)

• Photographed and edited by Dudley Murrhy. First
  shown in October 1924 in Vienna at the
  Internationale Ausstellung Neuer Theatertechnik.
• Leger wrote The idea for the film came to me
  in order to be certain of the plastic
  possibilities of new elements expressed in
  movement. The repetition of shapes, of slow or
  rapid rhythms, allowed extremely rich
  possibilities. An object could become, all on its
  own, a tragic, comic, or spectacular sight. It
  was an adventure in the land of wonders.
• One of the most influential experimental works
  in the history of cinema. It demonstrates Legers
  concern with the mechanical world. In his vision,
  however, this mechanical universe has a human
  face. Repetition and multiple imagery combine to
  give an aesthetic raison d-etre of everyday
  lifecombined with shots of a woman carrying a
  heavy sack on her shoulder, condemned like
  Sisyphus (but through a cinematic sense of wit)
  to climb and reclimb a steep flight of stairs on
  a Paris streetThe dynamic qualities of film
  reach a significant level of accomplishment in
  this early masterpiece on modern art.

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Lotte Reiniger (1899-1955)

• Born in Berlin in 1899, Lotte Reiniger developed
  a distinctive method of animating with cut-out
  paper silhouettes. She was also a pioneer of the
  multiplane, where layers of glass under the
  camera allow the animator to add depth and
  complexity to two-dimensional animation.

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Lotte Reiniger (1899-1955)

• Although she worked with some of the pioneers of
  German experimental abstract film, her work was
  strongly narrative, taking its stories from fairy
  tales, opera, and A Thousand and One Nights. Her
  films are characterised by a mannered style that
  combines subtle acting with a rather frozen
  bloodless quality, and realism with elements of
  cartoon. The look developed out of a childhood
  enthusiasm for shadow puppets, and is usually
  designed in shades of grey and black on a white
  background. Her feature film, The Adventures of
  Prince Achmed (Germany, 1926), made between 1923
  and 1926, was a huge popular and critical
  success.

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Lotte Reiniger (1899-1955)

• In 1949 she moved to London, and from 1953 to
  1963 produced a prodigious amount of work. Made
  under great pressure of time, many of these
  films, although charming, do not have the special
  magic that made Reiniger an important artist.

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Symphonie diagonale 1924
Viking Eggeling (l880-l925)

• Born in Sweden to a family of German origin,
  Viking Eggeling emigrated to Germany at the age
  of 17, where he became a bookkeeper, and studied
  art history as well as painting. From 1911 to
  1915 he lived in Paris, then moved to Switzerland
  at the outbreak of World War I. In Zurich he
  became a associated with the Dada movement,
  became a friend of Hans Richter, Jean Arp, and
  Tristan Tzara. With the end of the Great War he
  moved to Germany with Richter where both explored
  the depiction of movement, first in scroll
  drawings and then on film.

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Symphonie diagonale 1924
Viking Eggeling (l880-l925)

• In 1922 Eggeling bought a motion picture camera,
  and working without Richter, sought to create a
  new kind of cinema. Axel Olson, a young Swedish
  painter, wrote to his parents in 1922 that
  Eggeling was working to "evolve a
  musical-cubistic style of film completely
  divorced from the naturalistic style." In 1923 he
  showed a now lost, 10 minute film based on an
  earlier scroll titled Horizontal-vertical
  Orchestra. In the summer of 1923 he began work on
  Symphonie Diagonale. Paper cut-outs and then tin
  foil figures were photographed a frame at a time.
  Completed in 1924, the film was shown for the
  first time (privately) on November 5. On May 3,
  1925 it was presented to the public in Germany
  sixteen days later Eggeling died in Berlin.

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Symphonie diagonale 1924
Viking Eggeling (l880-l925)

• Shown for the first time November 5, 1924 in
  Berlin
• Eggeling was interested in the creation of
  visual analogs to musical composition and in his
  notes, has cited the composer and music
  theoretician Ferrucio Busoni as an inspiration.
• Diagonal Symphony aspires to musical form.
  Eggeling conceived of the film screen as a
  network of axes two diagonal co-coordinates
  crossing the screen like X and extending in
  depth into the vanishing pointThe total
  evolution of the film occurs in waves, scenes
  become more complex or simplify sections of the
  film repeat themselves directly, or with some
  form of inversion.

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Rythmus 21 1921
Hans Richter (1888-1976)

• Painter, graphic artist, avant-gardist,
  film-experimenter and producer. In 1914 he was
  influenced by cubism. Contributed to the
  periodical "Die Aktion" in Berlin. First
  exhibition in Munich, 1916. In the same year he
  went to Zürich and joined the Dada movement.
  Richter propounded the thesis that the artist's
  duty was to be actively political, opposing war
  and supporting the revolution. First abstract
  works in 1917. Friendship with Viking Eggeling in
  1918, the two experimented together in Film.

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Rhythmus 21 1921
Hans Richter (1888-1976)

• In 1921 he made the first abstract film,
  "Rhythme 21," which today is considered a classic
  among avant-garde films. About Richter's woodcuts
  and drawings Michel Seuphor wrote "Richter's
  black-and-whites together with those of Arp and
  Janco, are the most typical works of the Zürich
  period of Dada."
• Hans Richter wrote of his own attitude of films
  "I conceive of the film as a modern art form
  particularly interesting to the sense of sight.
  Painting has its own peculiar problems and
  specific sensations, and so has the film. But
  there are also problems in which the dividing
  line is obliterated, or where the two infringe
  upon each other. More especially, the cinema can
  fulfill certain promises made by the ancient
  arts, in the realization of which painting and
  film become close neighbors and work together."

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Rhythmus 21 1921
Hans Richter (1888-1976)
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Rhythmus 21 1921
Hans Richter (1888-1976)
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Rhythmus 21 1921
Hans Richter (1888-1976)

• Beginnning in 1921 with Rhythmus 21, generally
  regarded as the first abstract animated film.
• Richters first film was originally known as
  Film is Rhythm. In it , he experiments with
  square forms that appear in simple to complex
  compositions-from the opening shots where the
  squares occupy the entire screen, to compositions
  with squares within the frame. Richter commented
  The simple square of the movie screen could
  easily be divided and orchestratedIn doing so,
  I found a new sensation rhythm which is , I
  still think, the chief sensation of any
  expression movement.
• It was the first film to use negative as
  positive. Theo van Doesbsurg sponsored the
  premier in Paris, introducing Richter as a Dane
  because of post-World war 1 feeling against
  Germans.

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Walter Ruttmann (1887-1941)
Opus 1 1922

• Ruttmann was born on December 28, 1887 in
  Frankfort, Germany. He showed an interest in
  music early in his life, studying the cello
  starting at age twelve. In 1909, Ruttmann went to
  the Academyof Fine Art in Munich, where he
  studied painting under professor Angelo Jank.
  During this time Ruttmann was also acquainted
  personally with modern artists Klee and
  Feininger, and continued his study of music in
  addition to his study of painting.
• He served as a lieutenant in the German army
  durring the World War 1, and when the war ended
  in 1918 he became increasingly dissatisfied with
  the medium of painting. The main problem Ruttmann
  saw in the medium was its inherently static
  nature. A painter could attempt to capture some
  sense of motion in his paintings, but the
  paintings were, in the end, fixed in place
  forever. Ruttmann made a comment, shortly after
  the end of the war, to the effect that it made no
  sense to continue painting, unless the paintings
  could be set in motion.

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Walter Ruttmann (1887-1941)
Opus 1 1922

• In 1921, in Frankfort, Germany, he realized this
  desire with the release of his first abstract
  film, and indeed the first abstract film the
  world had ever seen Lichtspiel Opus I. The film
  was a great success, making a lasting impression
  on people such as Bernhard Diebold, film reviewer
  for the Frankfurter Zeitung, and Oskar
  Fischinger, future avant-garde filmmaker in his
  own right. Ruttmann went on to produce three more
  completely abstract films, Opus II, Opus III, and
  Opus IV, which were all well recieved at the
  time.
• In 1927 Ruttmann released what is perhaps his
  most famous work, the documentary Berlin,
  Symphony of a Great City, for which he recieved
  great acclaim.

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Len Lye (1901-1980)

• Born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1901, Lye
  was deeply interested in movement and wanted to
  portray kinetic energy within artistic works he
  also drew on aboriginal art, which for Lye again
  represented a 'pre-rational' artistic tradition.
• Between 1926 and 1929, Lye made drawings for
  what would eventually become his first film,
  Tusalava (1929). The film was a painstaking
  effort, involving around 4000 separate drawings,
  but the result was a unique animated film that
  dramatised active processes of a
  not-quite-concrete nature.

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Len Lye (1901-1980)

• Subsequently, Lye found it difficult to attract
  sponsors for his filmmaking, and only made one
  more film before joining the GPO Film Unit,
  Experimental Animation (aka Peanut Vendor, 1933),
  a three-minute puppet film sponsored by exhibitor
  Sidney Bernstein. He then began to experiment
  with painting directly onto celluloid, a
  technique that he pioneered. In order to satisfy
  sponsorship requirements he had to include
  advertising slogans in his first GPO film, A
  Colour Box (1935), but managed to do so without
  relinquishing his abstract objectives. After
  making a puppet film with Humphrey Jennings,
  Kaleidoscope (1936), he experimented with the
  Gasparcolour process in Rainbow Dance (1936).
• During the war, he made a number of propaganda
  films for the Ministry of Information as well as
  filming British material for the American series
  March of Time. In 1944, Lye moved to New York,
  where he co-directed four educational one-reel
  films with I.A. Richards. This marked a new stage
  in his career, and in the post-war period, he
  continued experiments in abstract filmmaking, as
  well as making a number of kinetic sculptures.
  Lye remained in America until 1968 before
  returning to New Zealand.

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Len Lye (1901-1980)
Colour box 129 1935 Rainbow dance 1422
1936 Trade tattoo 1814 1937 Color cry 3102
1952 Free radicals 3608 1980