Synopsis

Allegretto stands as Fischinger's greatest achievement in ‘visual music’, in the strict sense of translating the full complexity of symphonic textures into visual equivalents. Here for the first time he used cels... the cels allowed him to make four and five layers of action for each frame, thus increasing their number to some 100 cels per second of film. (William Moritz)

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Oskar Fischinger

Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967) was a German filmmaker who made abstract animation films in the period from 1920s to 1030s. As a major figure in the development of filmic abstraction and ‘visual music’, as an inventor and experimentalist he was a pioneer in multimedia live performances and in introducing innovations to animation techiques. He emigrated to the US in 1936 where he lived until his death.