R1 | RAUMLICHTKUNST
Everything in the world has a spirit which is released by its sound
– Oskar Fischinger
Oskar Fischinger, born in 1900 in Gelnhausen and deceased in Los Angeles in 1967, was a visionary German pioneer of abstract animation. Long before the emergence of computer animation, music videos, or video art, he explored the interplay of abstract form, color, and sound. His tools were those of his time: paint, paper, wax, chemical emulsions, lignite-powered electricity, artificial light, and early light-to-sound devices.
Beginning in Berlin 1925, he created works using up to five simultaneous 35mm projections accompanied by live music. Fischinger, the “Zauberer der Friedrichstraße” (Wizard of Friedrichstraße), envisioned a future in which all art forms would merge into a unified concept he called Raumlichtkunst (spatial light art).
Some of his multiple projections have been preserved: “One of these survives, R-1, A Form-Play, which contains elaborately edited mirror-image vertical patterns on the side panels and an equally intricate center montage of geometric shapes, cosmic symbols, organic wax and liquid oozes, and some drawn animation linking imagery. Most scenes are tinted in various colours. From the climactic moment, when the two extra projectors switched on, Fischinger took the original tinted strips and combined them onto Gasparcolor filmstock in 1933, when he was making the first tests with the new three-color-separation process. The brilliant colors are probably more vivid than the five overlapping projections of 1926/7, and indeed probably offer alternate color values because of the difference between additive overlapping of multiple projection on the same screen and the subtractive overlapping of three layered emulsions on the Gasparcolor film. In any case, Fischinger’s extravagant, complex R-1 remains an astonishing manifestation of integral cinema and Color Music.” – Dr. William Moritz
Elfriede Fischinger, Oskar Fischinger’s wife and collaborator, was involved in nearly all his films from the mid-point of Studie Nr. 8 onward. She painted and selected colors for Kreise, assisted frame by frame on the Muratti greift ein advertising film, and co-created sequences in Komposition in Blau, some entirely her own. She also managed the studio, solved practical problems, and shaped the shared creative vision of their work. Her training in tapestry design informed her artistic precision and visual sensibility and had a significant influence on Fischinger’s later paintings.
Fischinger’s films were considered so avant-garde that they were labeled “degenerate art” during the Third Reich, prompting the couple’s emigration to the United States.
Harald Pulch first met Elfriede Fischinger at the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. In 1993, she hosted Pulch and his cameraman Eckhard Jansen at her Long Beach home, where over five days she detailed the artistic life she shared with her husband, covering his career trajectory through Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin, and Hollywood.
Pulch’s documentary illuminates the lives and work of Oskar and Elfriede Fischinger, offering rare insight into their creative partnership. Having followed Oskar Fischinger’s career for four decades, Pulch collaborated with Ralf Ott to restructure and complete the film. After extensive digital restoration of Fischinger’s experimental animations and advertising classics, Oskar Fischinger – Musik für die Augen, which premiered in Fischinger’s birthplace Gelnhausen, emerges as a 90-minute historical document, reintroducing one of the 20th century’s most significant filmmakers to contemporary audiences.
In collaboration with Harald Pulch and Ralf Ott, we present R1 | RAUMLICHTKUNST as a variation and extension of Pulch’s film project Der Zauberer Oskar Fischinger. This immersive version is being projected onto the Bochum Planetarium dome with multi-channel audio during the DIVE Immersive Arts Festival.
We present Fischinger’s work to new audiences and generations, honoring the spirit of its creator:
What I invent belongs to the masses. I am merely a catalyst.
– Oskar Fischinger
Credits
R1 | Raumlichtkunst | Deep Data Dome Digital Documentary Derivative | 1927 | MMXXIII
Oskar Fischinger: Absoluter Film
Elfriede Fischinger: Partnerin, Mitarbeiterin, Zeitzeugin
Michael Saup: Director Deep Data Dome Digital Documentary Derivative
Pino Grzybowsky: Music and Sound Design
Livia Montalesi: Vocals
Harald Pulch & Ralf Ott: documentary “Musik für die Augen”, 1993/2023
The inventor of the music video.
– Deutschlandfunk Kultur
Directors’ statement
I remember being invited in 1990, as an emerging artist, to RENCONTRES INTERNATIONALES ART CINEMA / ART VIDEO / ART ORDINATEUR—a festival celebrating the finest independent art films from the first hundred years of cinema, held at La Vidéothèque de Paris in the subterranean Forum des Halles. I was there to show my work PARADAYS (1989). Among the program’s most contemporary offerings, one film stood out above all others: R-1, Ein Formspiel by Oskar Fischinger, created in 1927. Despite its age, it appeared as the most forward-looking manifestation of cinema in the entire festival—a triple projection in color, newly restored and presented by film historian William Moritz.
Moritz soon rented an apartment in Frankfurt am Main with my colleague and fellow film artist Thomas Mank, who had curated the 1993 exhibition Vom Experimentalfilm zum Videoclip at the Deutsches Filmmuseum. Mank and I had studied together in Helmut Herbst’s film class at the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) in Offenbach, formerly known as the Handwerkerschule, Kunstgewerbeschule, and Werkkunstschule, the same school that Elfriede Fischinger had attended. These connections and exchanges deepened my fascination with the film.
Fischinger’s R-1, Ein Formspiel became a conceptual seed for my own work R111 (1999), which was recognized in 2024 by the International Association of Art Critics Japan as a pinnacle of media art at the turn of the millennium. Collaborating with Harald Pulch and Ralf Ott on an expanded documentary about Oskar and Elfriede Fischinger was a highlight, introducing Der Absolute Film to audiences who had never encountered it.
R-1, Ein Formspiel endures. This gem of a film shines beyond cultural cycles, technological hype, ephemeral trends, archival confines, and the regime of the transient, like a sun on the horizon between art and the artificial. As its creator said, it belongs to the masses – to all of us. It remains, and will always remain, my favorite film.
Michael Saup, Berlin 2023
Despite the incredible support of today’s digital tools, the infinite amount of graphic animations we see on TV and digital media daily, they do not come close to the greatness of Oskar Fischinger.
– Leon Hong, Google Doodle
