Origins of animation Early animation and abstract film in Europe

1. 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

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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

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

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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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15. 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 BlainvilleDuchamp 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.

16. Anemic Cinema Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) Duchamp pioneered two of the maininnovations of the 20th century sculpturekinetic 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.

17. 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.

18. Anemic Cinema Marcel Duchamp (1887-1967)

19. 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.

20. Ballet Mecanique Fernand Leger (1991-1955)

21. Ballet Mecanique Fernand Leger (1991-1955)

22. Ballet Mecanique Fernand Leger (1991-1955)

23. Ballet Mecanique Fernand Leger (1991-1955)

24. Ballet Mecanique Fernand Leger (1991-1955)

25. 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 Leger’s 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 life…combined 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 street…The dynamic qualities of film reach a significant level of accomplishment in this early masterpiece on modern art.”

26. 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.

27. 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.

28. 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.

29. 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.

30. 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.

31. 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 point…The 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.”

32. 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.

33. 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."

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

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

36. Rhythmus 21 1921 Hans Richter (1888-1976) “Beginnning in 1921 with Rhythmus 21, generally regarded as the first abstract animated film…. Richter’s 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 ‘orchestrated’…In 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.”

37. Opus #1 1922 Walter Ruttmann (1887-1941) 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.

38. Opus #1 1922 Walter Ruttmann (1887-1941) 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.

39. 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.

40. 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.

41. Len Lye (1901-1980) Colour box 1:29 1935 Rainbow dance 14:22 1936 Trade tattoo 18:14 1937 Color cry 31:02 1952 Free radicals 36:08 1980