In the heart of Oporto one can find Film—grafo, the Portuguese animation studio that, with a trajectory of thirteen years, has succeed in getting international recognition with such films as Est—ria do gato e da Lua (official selection, Cannes 95), Os Salteadores (Golden Espiga, Valladolid 94) or A Noite. Lleida joins the list of cities that, like Stuttgart, Rio de Janeiro or Granada, show a retrospective of the most representative works of this Portuguese studio. In addition to film showings, Animac 2001 will have some special guests, as Abi Feij— -the soul of the Film—grafo project- and the young talented Regina Pessoa, producer of A Noite.

In a conversation fragmented by film showings and restaurants Abi Feij—, producer, director of Film—grafo and president of Asifa International, talked to us about his job. Born in Braga in 1956, Abi Feij— graduated in the Oporto Design and Graphic Arts School in 1980. After attending various workshops organised by the Cinanima Festival and getting some experience in the National Film Board of Canada (Oh quŽ Calma, 1985), Abi made impossible things possible, as for making a living out of professional animation and allowing other artists to do the same thanks to the creation of the Film—grafo studio.

"I had attended several workshops in Cinanima, but in Canada I was taught to lose my fears and to give everything in a film. I understood I had to work in the project with all my heart. That's what I learned and what I try to keep on doing in every new film."

Film—grafo is born in 1987, the same year its short A Noite Saiu ˆ Rua was born. From that moment on, the studio has produced about fifty titles, a selection of which is shown in this showing, such as Eggs, JosŽ Miguel Ribeiro's first short (he is the director of A Suspeita). In spite of having one of the best international animation festivals, Cinanima, Portugal lacked an animated cinema industry, which constituted an additional difficulty to the beginning of Film—grafo. Nevertheless, Abi's experience in Canada was not useless: being conscious of the technical limitations he would have to face back in Oporto and fascinated by the direct techniques of some of the NFBC films, such as The Street, by Caroline Leaf, or The Sand Castle, by Jo Coedeman, he decides to learn in his first film Oh quŽ Calma a whole range of simple techniques -up to eight different techniques-, such as sand, cut-out pieces of paper, painting, etc., which allowed him to produce films back home. "I wished to keep on animating in Oporto, but the panorama was that there was no money, no schools, no producing companies... Thus, I tried to gather people who had attended workshops in Cinanima with the idea of doing what we enjoyed doing." The first resulting works: a short for the MDP (Portuguese Democratic Movement) and the presentation trailers of the cinema festival Fantasporto were the spark that lighted the Film—grafo project. "The MDP asked us to create an image opposing Salazar's regime. Jo‹o Abel Manta had published caricatures of the dictatorship's regime and the idea was to make a panoramic film out of these drawings. In the end, the party decided not to carry out the production, but then we had already decided to bring the project into effect. This is how the film A Noite Saiu ˆ Rua was created. We presented our film at the Oporto fantastic cinema festival Fantasporto 87 and its director asked us to do the presentation trailers of the festival. We were not paid for our work, but at least the second time expenses were covered and, in addition, we could buy some equipment."

Thanks to further requests, the Film—grafo team started to grow. Nevertheless, at that time, making movies was just a job made for love and animators still needed further jobs to make a living of. The situation changed with the subventions provided by the Portuguese Culture Department from 1991 and its policy supporting animated shorts. From that moment on, Film—grafo was able to grant better conditions for the authors to produce their films.

In addition to directing the studio, producing and supervising most of the projects performed by Film—grafo, Abi Feij— still finds some time and energy to produce his own shorts, which are fundamental pieces of the young history of Portuguese animated cinema. They include such titles as Os Salteadores, a hard story about the post-war crimes in the Portuguese border with Spain; Fado Lusitano, an amusing story of Portugal, or the recent Clandestino, adapted from JosŽ Rodrigues MiguŽis' short story on a ship's stowaway who reaches the port with no papers. In all these films, Portuguese culture and history is there as a backdrop of tales, which are sometimes heartbreaking.

"I started to write Os Salteadores before A Noite Saiu ˆ Rua. I produced a storyboard -a scene by scene graphic script- on my own and I searched for financial support in vain. I was fortunate, however, because that year (1989) the SACD (which is similar to the Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers, but in France) created a grant in the frame of the Annecy festival, and I got funds to develop my short. I made a shot of the film and I calculated that, working on my own at that level, it would take me about 20 years to finish it. Luckily, in 1991 Portuguese subvention to animated shorts arrived and I was able to improve the production at a professional level and finish it in a reasonable time of three years." Os Salteadores is the adaptation of a tale by the Portuguese writer Jorge de Siena telling various views of three men remembering the murder, twenty years ago, of a group of Spanish people who die at the hands of Portuguese fascists when trying to escape to the neighbouring country, after the Spanish Civil War. "I liked Jorge de Siena's tale basically for three reasons. Firstly, because his way of writing appeared very visual to me and I could adapt it to animation without any problem. Secondly, because of the topic; I was interested in what happened in Portugal after the Spanish Civil War, as it is a matter in recent history that, as many other young people, I scarcely knew. In addition, my family opposed the popular regime and they were very conscious of the social and political events that happened during those years. The third reason is the most academic; I took this short as an approach to the cinematographic language. I developed the film's style in the storyboard. I liked the type of pencil drawing for the final art and that was the image I tried to maintain in the whole film."

Fado Lusitano was a much more light film, made with a sense of humour for the prestigious British animator John Halas. John Halas was the producer of the serial Know your Europeans, in which animators all over Europe collaborated free-and-easily showing the nature and culture of their own countries. "John Halas, whom I knew in Spain during the shorts festival of the Canary Islands, saw the poster I had created for Fantasporto and he liked it, so that he asked me to do the Portuguese chapter of the serial. I investigated about what being Portuguese means, how we feel and what's our sense of humour. Fado Lusitano intends to be our own view of Portugal. The film worked very well in our country, although in other countries some subtleties might be lost."

Abi Feij—'s last work is Clandestino, the adaptation of the tale O Viajante Clandestino by the Portuguese writer JosŽ Rodrigues MiguŽis. An author who, like Jorge de Siena, took part in the creation of the Communist Party in Portugal and both went into exile in the United States, where they breathed their last. The story talks about the moment when a clandestine traveller has to land in a strange country on Christmas Eve, with fear and uncertainty as his only luggage. The project took Abi Feij— three years, due to delays caused by negotiations with the Portuguese television, and the alleged inclusion of the film to a documentary about MiguŽis for which Abi Feij— even drew several sand illustrations that were never incorporated. "The story had to be adapted. I decided to do it with no words, but in the end I included a text in off with extracts from the original text. It is an untemporal tale, I wanted it to be set in any place at any moment. In the original story, the ship reaches Boston, but in my film I have obviated this detail." Clandestino is done with the direct technique of sand animation, in which there are one or more glass levels on which backgrounds are drawn in sand and silhouettes are illuminated from the back with a diffused light. Each frame needs redrawing the scene by moving the sand very carefully, so that at the slightest mistake the whole shot has to be filmed again. Abi had already tried this technique in Oh quŽ Calma. "After Os Saltedores, in which, as it was an animated production, I had needed to co-ordinate a big team, I felt like doing something by myself. Only Regina helped me a little to animate certain scenes at the end. I also chose sand for its colour, I wanted to represent an old rusty cargo boat and the sand helped me to create the desired atmosphere. Sometimes you think of a story first and then you apply the technique you believe is more suitable to it; nonetheless, from time to time you feel that you want to make a film with a certain technique and you search a story to put it into effect."

Clandestino is a co-production of Film—grafo and the National Film Board of Canada. "I did the post-production of Clandestino in Canada, as they have better equipment than in Portugal. It was good to see the people from the National Film Board of Canada fifteen years later with a real project that became interesting to them."

At present, Film—grafo has in its production planning six animation projects of short pieces. Some of them are Caes Marinheiros, by AndrŽ Ferr‹o and Joana Toste; Os Olhos do Farol, by Pedro Serrazina, and CafŽ, by Alex Cao and Jo‹o Fazenda. "I must like professional projects to support them." Abi Feij— is so close to his projects as the bird to its chicks. He talks to the other directors about the script also about the artistic direction, the technique and so many other aspects to be taken into account by a good creative producer. Film—grafo does also some works for the television, such as A Ponpinhas do Catrina or Abecedario, which, nevertheless, have marked experimental and independent token.

In addition to his different sides within Film—grafo, Abi Feij— devotes much of his time to promoting animated cinema by organising seminars, courses for children, adults and arts teachers, of which we will also see a sample in this session. His recent nomination as president of Asifa -the international association of people devoted to animation-means a new challenge to this new author, director and educator who takes with enthusiasm the helm of the most prestigious international association in the field of animation.

The music movement is a concept that can only be imagined or felt by interpreters or listeners. But music keeps moving; if it were not like this it would not be totally alive and could not convey expression and energy, sense of humour or nostalgia, drama or madness. I believe that animation cinema is one of the visual arts that has best got jazz as a potential metaphor of movement, which has best adapted this music to the peculiar dramatic sense of its stories and even has combined common aspects of both artistic disciplines.

I have always admired the kind of animation cinema that tends to emphasize the magic of absurdity, improving the brilliant exercise of turning into normal situations that could be considered as surrealist. Concerning cartoons, it is curious how some extremely intellectual gags have the effect of plain humour within everyone's reach. In this sense, I would like to talk about the old jazz, both in its New Orleans version and in that of New York swing bands. Betty Boop's films with music by Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway could not be more successful. Implausible situations become habitual when you look at them on the TV screen. Specifically, the unlimited expressiveness of jazz, its multiple sound traces, its freedom when adapting the structure of themes to the needs of image are elements that, in my opinion, turn an object of cultural consumption into something unique, exclusive, of an unprecedented originality. In addition to these aesthetic considerations, we must not forget that, during the 30s and the 40s, these popularly accepted productions that included music -and sometimes musicians themselves- of the jazz stars of the time were probably also good for promoting a kind of music which, at that time, was the most popular and the most widely accepted by young generations.

During the years of silent cinema, the old ragtime by Scott Joplin was used to accompany the silence on the screen, but celluloid with a magnetic film did not kill complicity between jazz and images: it created new languages and ways of flirting with that deserve our admiration and respect.

The evolution of artistic movements during the 20th century could not leave jazz and animation cinema unaffected. The avant-garde that was imposed from the beginning of the century would also find its essence, with connotations of agitation and social change, during the 60s. Music was then so changeable as the continuous experimentation concerning animation. Daring proposals in animation cinema found their voice in the innovating and restless work of musicians of the time. At that time, abstraction replaced the realist or caricaturised image that had led the immediate past, and in those years, shapes and colours danced at the rhythm of the best avant-garde jazz. The pedagogic purpose of animation cinema left also some room to try to explain that fascinating and complex music which is still called jazz.

A long music tradition linked with image supports any new experiment that can emerge in this field. Nevertheless, I think that new animated cinema productions destined to promote jazz music in the audiovisual media are often tributes or recreations of aesthetic movements that today have become old. This will undoubtedly help to keep glorious moments in the general memory, although we must hope that this dangerous eclecticism that today influences most arts does not lead to a standstill in a field that should still offer us authentic wonders.

Cartoon d'Or is the prize awarded to the best European animation short. The prize is awarded by Cartoon, the association of professional people in the world of Animation in Europe.

The session includes all the shorts awarded and the winner, A Suspeita, by JosŽ Miguel Ribeiro.

JosŽ Miguel Ribeiro is the first Portuguese who wins the Cartoon d'Or. This prize is the result of a great personal talent and impeccable production by Luis Almeida, but it is also the result of the Portuguese government's support to shorts, which began ten years ago.

A Suspeita is an amusing production in plasticine by Zeppelin Filmes that plays tribute to the cinematographic genres of psychological thriller and comedy with special care for production design. Four passengers travel in the same compartment on a train and one of them discovers there is a murderer on the train. Suspicions start to rise amongst everyone until reaching an unexpected end. The perfection of this film is reflected through a good structure and sense of rhythm of the movie, as well as definite characters with not many but intelligent dialogues, funny visual gags and all kinds of details in an animation which has nothing to envy the best titles of the Aardman company.

Although A Suspeita is not the first piece of work of this animator aged 33, it is in fact what the author considers as the most complete, as it tells a story from the beginning to the end, with a more cinematographic approach than his previous projects.

ANIMAC INTERVIEWS JOSƒ MIGUEL RIBEIRO, WINNER OF CARTOON D'OR 2000
-Where does the animator JosŽ Miguel Ribeiro come from?
As many other animators, he comes from entire nights at home and in other people's houses shooting films with a super-8 camera and a group of friends. We shot movies in plasticine, cartoons, or any technique within our reach. At that time I was fifteen or sixteen. It was exciting to get the three-minute scroll back from the German or Spanish labs. Then I studied at the Fine Arts College of Lisbon. I left animation for a while, as it was a discipline that was not taught and I concentrated on painting, comics and illustrating; I even worked for some newspapers in Lisbon.

-What was your first professional animated work?
I graduated in Fine Arts when I was 23 and I started to make some animations for Rua SŽsamo (the Portuguese Sesame Street). I did U Piau (The Spinning Top) a movie based on a popular children's song, produced by Optical Print. They liked it and they asked for more. Cinanima was very important for me. I started to go there from my second year at Fine Arts and I have never stopped going there. Through this festival I learned about animation in workshops and I met such people as Abi Feij— and Zepe, who offered me some works. I made some advertising in Lisbon with Zepe, and Abi Feij— invited me, together with other animators, to animate Os Salteadores; I made the whole sequence of the car, and that was my first experience with authorial cinema.

-How did the project of your first plasticine short Eggs start?
I did a stage in the studio Laznec Bretagne through the Portuguese studio Film—grafo. It was a nine-month plasticine animation course, which lasted five months in Brittany and four in Oporto. I made Eggs there, with Pierre Bouch—n, it was our project for the end of the course and we shot it in one week. Almost all the people in the course, as Philippe Jullien, author of Le Cyclope de la Mer, have kept on making movies. It was my fist experience with clay animation after many cartoons.

-Why do you prefer plasticine to other techniques?
When you make cartoons, in addition to movement, you have to pay attention in order to make a good drawing. In clay animation or volume, once you have constructed, you just have to care for movement; it is animation in its purest state. In my works, I have used many techniques. I made Triple Salto with Film—grafo for the Olympic Games, where I used a combination of drawing and volume; it was quite experimental. Again with Film—grafo, I made U Dragao, about the letter D; U Jardin, Da Celeste, for children, in which I tried volume in low relief. I made a generic for Rua SŽsamo with many techniques, but my favourite is still plasticine.

-How did the idea of A Suspeita occur to you?
I wanted to make a project with a story and its characters, not just a simple visual game, poetic images or a situation. The idea was born in the continuous trips I had to make by train from Lisbon to Oporto. The design of the train is inspired by one of the oldest trains, like one of those on which I travelled when I was a child to go to Espinho, they had compartments and I liked the idea of closing four characters in one of those. The characters are stereotypes of the usual people you find on a train: the talkative, the shy, the selective, the dropout·When we travel, we have much time to think and make up stories.
I knew it was important to create a good story and I searched for scriptwriters. I surrounded myself with a team of people very close to me. Scriptwriters, for instance, were ex-schoolmates in the Fine Arts College and the people in charge of making the puppets' dresses were my mother and my sister.

-Was it easier to start a new project after the Cartoon d'Or award?
I have received subventions from ICAM (from the Portuguese government through the Institute of Cinema, Audiovisuals and Multimedia) and also from the Portuguese television, so that I can start a project on which I began to work at the same time I started with A Suspeita. It is based on a child's essay given to me by a teacher who is also a friend of mine and it talks about the relationship between a needle and a pair of scissors. This is the origin of the idea of creating a series of 26 chapters showing the alleged relationships between daily objects. Each chapter lasts 2 minutes and is like a video clip, sung by children themselves. The picture is made on plasticine and is inspired by the work of artists as Paul Klee o Mir—.

In addition to winning international awards and having his diary completely full, JosŽ Miguel still finds time to prepare workshops for children from which delightful animated works have arisen, as for O Vento. One more aspect that fits in his open and generous creating nature

Some of JosŽ Miguel Ribeiro's works previous to the short that won the Cartoon d'Or 2000, A Suspeita, can be seen in the show "Film—grafo, Portuguese Animation".

Born in 1900, Oskar Fischinger must count among the greatest artists of the 20th century, a century of astonishing achievements in technology, and horrific torments and upheavals that hindered his career at every turn. Despite all this, his films and paintings achieved the status of cult icons, influencing a whole generation of younger artists, and providing anonymous models for the music-videos and computer graphics of the last quarter of the century.

Oskar Fischinger was born in the idyllic medieval village of Gelnhausen (near Frankfurt am Main), in the same room that had born the great 17th-century writer Grimmelshausen, author of Simplicissimus. Oskar's family owned a brewery with a popular bar, and a drugstore that carried a complete range of goods including art supplies which many painters purchased before they went wandering in the neighboring romantic Spessart forest and mountains [site of some of the Grimm's fairy tales]]. Oskar early learned the fundamentals of oil-painting, as he would earn extra spending money by acting as guide for these painters, leading them to choice picturesque vistas or moody obscure corners of the woods, waiting attentively while they painted, then leading them back to Gelnhausen in the evening. At the same time, he took violin lessons, and apprenticed himself to an organ-builder in order to learn the mathematical principles of musical harmony.

When World War I began, the owners of the organ factory were drafted into military service, and the business closed down. Oskar then found employment as a graphic artist in the Municipal Architectural Office, preparing blue-prints and technical building designs, as well as fine drawing of houses, streets and landscaping. Although he was exempted from military service because of delicate health [mostly undernourishment], he was required to participate in a war-related activity, and went to work at a turbine factory in Frankfurt, where his natural mechanical genius was soon discovered, and he earned an official diploma as an engineer by 1922.

While working in the factory, Fischinger never lost sight of his artistic ambitions. He attended lectures and museums assiduously and joined a literary club devoted to the study of the dramatic art, where he met the influential critic Dr. Bernhard Diebold, who, in March 1921, took him to a dress rehearsal for a 13-minute abstract film hand-tinted in multiple colors by Walter Ruttmann, an abstract painter who had renounced oil-painting in favor of a new/modern living visual-music made possible by film. Ruttmann also played the cello in a string quintet that would perform the specially-composed soundtrack for the film. Fischinger was thrilled by the complex, dynamic film, and attended the public performance the following day, at which he admired the film even more, and regretted that he might never be able to create something like that.

Later than year, however, Oskar delivered a lecture at his literary club, on Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and an avant-garde anti-war theatre piece Generations by Fritz von Unruh. To illustrate the dynamic structure of the two plays, Oskar drew abstract patterns on long rolls of blue-print paper. Dr. Diebold pointed out to him that this sequence of flowing imagery constituted an independent artwork, a kind of "storyboard" for an abstract film, and urged him to follow in Ruttmann's footsteps. Oskar, however, was reluctant to do anything exactly in Ruttmann's style (and he felt that animating the play scrolls would probably be just that). He began experimenting with other techniques, such as modeled clay and wax. Quite by accident he discovered one. He had prepared some fifty small wax geometric figures which he hoped to animate by substituting one for another. He had arranged them in sequence on a tray and left them on a table by his bed. When his sister Maria cleaned his room while he was away at work, she placed the tray by a window, where the sun melted the wax figures together. As Oskar tried to scrape away the wax from the tray, he saw that some shapes were preserved and as he would scrape off each layer, subtle variations in form occurred in perfect animation style. He set about engineering a precision slicing machine (such as butchers used to make thin cuts of ham and cheese) to connect with a film camera in such way that each time a slice would be removed, the camera would film a single frame of the remaining block. By inserting a cone of different-colored wax in the center of a square block, one could make a circle appear or disappear, depending on whether the point of the cone faced toward or away from the camera. So soft supple organic shapes could mingle with hard geometric forms. In order to keep the consistency under the hot film lights, Oskar learned to mix the wax with fine porcelain clays. While still working at the factory, Oskar had developed a machine that he sold to a Dutch company for a substantial sum, which allowed him to quit working a job, and he moved to Munich to be near the film industry there. He shot a good deal of beautiful imagery with his "Wax Machine", some of the voluptuous shapes alluding to alchemical symbols such as the Ouroboros snake and the multifoliate rose, which shows that already in his early 20s he was fascinated by the mystical concepts which would remain in his work until the very end. Oskar sold a wax machine to Ruttmann, who used it to create some special effects for Lotte Reiniger's animated feature The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, which Ruttmann worked on from 1923 until 1925.

As the crippling inflation of German money began in 1923, he also made a number of conventional animated cartoons for a producer Louis Seel , whose series Munchner Bilderbogen (Munich Comics) was distributed internationally. These offered a sophisticated animation for adults, including parodies of classics like Gulliver's Travels, caricatures of women's fashion, and Commedia dell'Arte bedroom farces. In response to the huge success of Prince Ahmed (for which Oskar's wax imagery was uncredited), Oskar also made a dazzling silhouette film, Spiritual Constructions which used the flexibility of his wax-clay mixture to make pliable opaque shapes on a glass plate so that the mental state of the two drunk protagonists (surely a reminiscence of the family brewery/bar from his childhood) could be expressed in constant metamorphosis.

Oskar also continued to prepare pure non-objective films of his own - films of swirling spirals, floating circles, and intricate layers of parallel bars - all still carefully differentiated from the supple painterly imagery of Ruttmann. And also different from the sparse linear forms that the Swedish painter Viking Eggeling had drawn on scrolls of paper, and when Oskar visited him in Berlin, the Bauhaus student Erna Niemeyer [later the famous photographer Re Soupault] was painstakingly animating them by cutting the shapes out of tinfoil.

In the 1926 the Hungarian composer Alexander Laszlo presented a "Color-Light-Music" concert, in which his musical compositions (performed by himself on the piano) were synchronized with projected visual imagery that tried to recreate pure synaesthesia. At his first concerts, Laszlo used primarily painted slides and ordinary stage spotlights with color filters to produce somewhat static color effects. When initial reviews criticized the imagery as too static to approximate music, Laszlo commissioned Oskar to arrange a film projection with another tour of Color-Light-Music. Oskar edited together footage from several of his earlier experimental films, arranging them for five 35mm projectors, three side-by-side to form a triptych, and two overlapping these to provide additional color effects. Painted slides were also used to blur the edges of the projections. The reviews changed to the exact opposite: the light-show [not credited to Oskar in the program] was much more dynamic and futuristic than Laszlo's genteel Chopinesque music. Laszlo called off the arrangement after a few performances. But Oskar recreated his multiple-projector performance several times, including a piece titled Fever I II III which reportedly had a musical score composed by Erich Korngold, and a screening at the prestigious Munich State Theatre in 1927, with the title R-1, a Form-Play, using a percussion ensemble as the music (which could drown out the noise of the several projectors).

By that time, the rampant inflation (and a business partner's shady dealings) had completely impoverished Fischinger, despite considerable success with his various projects, including elaborate special effects for a feature Noah's Ark (with landscapes modeled in wax and silhouette animals trudging toward the ark). He owed money to many, especially his landlady, who kept his wax machine and other equipment hostage. In the summer of 1927 Oskar took one of his 35mm cameras in a backpack and set out for Berlin, walking on less-traveled country roads so that no bill-collectors could find him. He shot single-frame images of people and landscapes he encountered on the way, and the resulting 4-minute film Walking from Munich to Berlin preserves a delightful glimpse of a vanished rural life.

Oskar found a variety of commercial film work in Berlin from an advertising film about yogurt and a promotional film for the Socialist Party to elaborate special effects on Fritz Lang's science-fiction extravaganza Woman in the Moon, which put him in touch with rocket scientist, which fed his dual fascination with the parallel between ancient spiritual cosmology (he subscribed to a Buddhist magazine) and new scientific discoveries of atoms and cosmic space phenomena. He also met Dr. Diebold again in Berlin, and Walter Ruttmann, who had given up abstract films in favor of intricately edited live-action films. While working at the UFA studio on the Lang film, Oskar tripped and broke his ankle, and while in the hospital he discovered a form of animation that seemed perfect for abstract film. He drew with charcoal on white paper, then filmed it and used the positive as negative, so that light figures would float around in a black background. Now that Ruttmann had retired from the field, Oskar felt free to design fluid choreography to music. He used his engineering skills to synchronize the drawing to phonograph records: scratching an "X" on the disc and calculating the resulting clicks whit a slide-rule. Since he had made most of his money on advertising films, he arranged for the first five of his Studies to have a title at the end reading: You have heard Electrola Record Number EG1663, "Vaya Veronica" - but it at your local phonograph shop! But as the optical sound-on-film process took over in the 1930's the matter of music rights became more problematic. Oskar failed to get the rights for the music to his Study No.6 since the composer wanted too much royalty money. His friend Paul Hindemith and two of Hindemith's students at the College of Music (Oskar Sala and Hans Gensmer, both of whom became prominent composers later) wrote alternative scores for the film, which were recorded onto phonograph discs, but never transferred to optical sound-tracks. Fischinger went ahead with Study No.7 and Study No.8 since his sound shorts became an international hit, from Japan to Argentina - and Universal Studios bought some as shorts for their programs in America. They also received a special Prize at the Brussels Film Festival.

At the University in Hamburg Dr. Anschutz organized a Color Music Conference once every third year, drawing together scientists and artists to investigate synaesthesia, perceptual psychology, notation and the interface of painting/dance/music. At the 1930 conference Oskar's Study No.5 was the subject of a special lecture, followed by three performances on Color-Organs by Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack of the Bauhaus, the Czech Zdenek Pesanek, and the Austrian Baron Vietinghoff-Scheel. Oskar's participation in the lively discussions spurred him on to explore the theoretical basis of sound and its visual correspondences in his 1932 experiments with Ornamental Sound, for which he drew hundreds of shapes onto the soundtrack area of movie film to find out how the outer form (triangle, star, zig-zag, rhomboid, etc.) would vary the tones produced - and if the chosen ornamentation styles of various époques and cultures might correspond with the favored musical style of the same people. All of this experimentation, however, ceased with the Nazi coup d'etat in 1933. Abstract art was declared "degenerated". The media were carefully censored and controlled: all the filmmakers had to appear at bi-weekly audits with an official from the Ministry of Culture, and must show some work. Oskar found that advertising films were not as closely scrutinized for style, mainly for social message content, so he was able to prepare such sensational films as Circles, using the new 3-color process GasparColor, in which the message "Advertising reaches all circles of society" was accepted as a suitable excuse for a dynamic flow of colorful circles. The black-and-white Muratti Privat cigarette commercial similarly used white cigarettes dancing about in front of a black background synchronized with Mozart music - a perfect simulation of the forbidden Studies. The color Muratti Gets in the Act commercial, picturing cigarettes parading into an arena and performing feats (in anticipation of the Olympic Games) was a huge success that brought him commissions from several countries, and ultimately led to a contract with Paramount in the United States.

While making the commercials for formal film requirements, and profit, Oskar secretly made Composition in Blue on the same animation table as the walking cigarettes. Small models of geometric shapes move about a stage in tight synchronization to Nicolai's "Merry Wives of Windsor" overture - enchanting, funny and dazzling in its dynamic passages. The film could not be legally screened in Germany, but Oskar risked a few test screenings that proved wildly successful. An official from the Venice Film Festival took a print to Italy, but the German government refused to let it be screened as an official German film in competition - though it met with wild applause at its one show in the secondary informational screenings. Oskar received a furious letter from the censorship board castigating him for illegal activities. He was already in trouble, having been arrested several times (for scorning a Nazi poster, refusing to fly a Nazi flag from his window during a parade, etc.). Fortunately talent scouts from MGM and Paramount also saw Composition in Blue and Muratti gets in the Act, and Oskar was able to leave Germany in February 1936 for Hollywood. His wife Elfriede disposed of all their goods - they were not allowed to take anything with them - and followed to Hollywood a month later with their 2-years-old son Karl. Fortunately Elfriede stored most of the films, artwork and documents in the cellar and attics of the Fischinger relatives in Gelnhausen, and in 1961 Karl was able to bring them with him to America after serving in the American occupation army in Germany.

The dislocation to America was very difficult for Oskar. He spoke no English (it took him several years to learn to speak fluently), did not drive a car, and understood the Hollywood milieu very poorly. At first he integrated into the large emigrant community, mostly of whom were political leftists - but Oskar alienated them by announcing that he thought Stalin was just as bad as Hitler [which historical hindsight has proved true] and most of them shunned him after that. Although he had a bilingual secretary at Paramount, he still did not understand how the studio worked. He was told to make an animated episode to fit in the feature Big Broadcast of 1937. Since Paramount had an animation unit, they employed union in-betweeners and inkers and painters who must do all the repetitive work - but Oskar wanted to paint his own cels, and even worse, wanted to paint in color, although the feature was to be black-and-white. Oskar naively assumed that if they just saw it in color, they would be overwhelmed and allow his color sequence to be spliced into the black-and-white feature. He was wrong. The studio people printed his abstract designs in black-and-white and used them as background for some of Oskar's special effects, including walking cigarettes. The resulting montage was eventually cut from the film.

After a mere six months, Paramount terminated Oskar's contract, so overnight he went from a salary of $1000 per month (quite a handsome sum in those depression years) to having nothing at all. Oskar began devoting himself more to oil painting, since he could do it quietly at home without special equipment, and he would continue this until his death, leaving some thousand fine canvases. Fortunately a European Relief Fund spearheaded by film industry people like agent Paul Kohner and Director William Dieterle provided emergency expense money, and also arranged for Oskar to get a contract with MGM in 1937 to produced an abstract color film for distribution in their theaters as a short. Oskar built a special set with a framework from which thin strings could suspend geometric paper cutouts, allowing them to be moved in tiny increments along a specific trajectory. He hired a young man named John Cage as an assistant - primarily to move the cutouts, and to steady each one with a chicken feather taped to a broomstick before the single film frame could be shot. During the tedious days of this exacting, exhausting labor, Cage and Fischinger discussed Oskar's theories of Ornament Sound, making a new music from everyday objects and sounds - discussions which had a decisive effect on Cage's life work.

When the MGM short An Optical Poem was finished and on its way to screenings worldwide, Oskar traveled to New York in hopes of getting a commission to prepare an animation feature based on Dvorak's "New World Symphony" for the upcoming New York World's Fair. Unfortunately he did not manage to get enough backing for the feature, but he did have two shows of his oil paintings in galleries, and he met the Baroness Hilla Rebay, curator of Guggenheim Foundation which offered grant money to help support worthy abstract artists. She urged Oskar to move to New York, and offered him stipends and purchased some of his paintings for the museum - and urged him to abandon his family (now three children) because true artists should be unfettered. But Oskar was recalled to Hollywood to work on Walt Disney's current project - Fantasia, a feature-length visual-music extravaganza.

Oskar had met Leopold Stokowski already in Berlin, when he purchased the rights to use one of his musical performances for a film soundtrack. Oskar also proposed to Stokowski at that time the possibility of their collaboration on a feature-length concert feature, though nothing came of it then. When Oskar arrived at Paramount a few years later, Stokowski was also working on Big Broadcast and Oskar again spoke to him about the concert feature. Now when Oskar went to work at Disney's and found Stokowski a major partner in Disney's concert feature, he could not stifle the feeling that Stokowski had betrayed him by selling Oskar's idea to Disney, and basically leaving Oskar out, except as a lowly employee (due to Kohner and Dieterle, actually). This gnawing resentment soured Oskar's time at Disney, but it was only one factor. Oskar still did not speak English perfectly, and could not understand when people spoke very quickly or used slang. All of the staff meetings were recorded by a secretary, so Oskar took them home and deciphered them with Elfriede's help each evening, after the fact - and he never spoke at any of these conferences. He made many designs for totally non-objective visual representations of the Bach "Fugue" that he was assigned to, but day by day he saw each one of them altered, changed slightly to be representational by adding a cloud, a ripple of water, or such. Oskar's actual motion phases were preserved, but he hated what they became. He was further angered that the section in which the film's soundtrack was shown - an idea he had worked on scientifically in Berlin - became a series of gags and jokes with no correspondence to actual sound or film technology. But desperate for the money, Oskar held on at his job until the sad day when Nazi Germany invaded Poland, launching World War II. That day as a joke someone painted a swastika on Oskar's door, and he formally quit his job. Each day Oskar's films had been projected for the entire staff during lunch hour, so everyone at the studio became familiar with his works, and traces of his inspiration occur in most of the Disney films of the early 1940's.

Baroness Rebay extended Oskar a grant to make a patriotic film which would presumably show that both he and she were pro-American. The resulting American March manages to be more than mechanical. When the U.S. entered the war, Oskar officially became an "enemy alien" since he did not yet have American citizenship. This meant that he could not work at any job connected with the media. Rebay offered Oskar another grant to buy back Radio Dynamics, the film Oskar had made at Paramount. Oskar was able to have it printed and released in color for the first time, and at Rebay's insistence, changed the title to the "more serious, more musical" Allegretto. Orson Welles alone among the Hollywood people offered Oskar employment despite the ban. Welles had two films in progress, one a semi-documentary about jazz, and one a film about South America commissioned by the government to improve relations in the hemisphere. Oskar worked for a while designing animation for jazz by Lous Armstrong and Duke Ellington, and then was switched to the Brazilian Samba. And he also worked on a film of his own, a purposely silent meditation film to which he would attach the title Radio Dynamics left over from the paramount Allegretto. But Welles' company finally went broke from the pressure of trying to do too much, and Oskar was again unemployed. Elfriede managed to support the family (now five children) with jobs including fashion design, hand-knitted clothes for Bette Davis' family, baby-sitting and such. Baroness Rebay continued to offer Oskar some stipends, but her demands were severe: she required him (and his daughter) to attend a religious group Institute of Mental Physics in whose guru she believed; she required him to go spy on Charles Dockum whose MobilColor color organ was also being purchased by the Guggenheim, etc. Fortunately Oskar also enjoyed a rich acquaintanceship with local artists ranging from Man Ray and painter Helen Lundeberg, sculptor Harry Bertoia, to filmmakers such as Maya Deren and the Whitney brothers (who had first met him at a gallery showing his paintings in 1939).

Baroness Rebay commissioned Oskar to prepare a film synchronized to Bach's "Brandenburg Concerto" No. 3, since she believed that only Bach had produced truly abstract music (and played recordings of Bach music in the galleries of the Guggenheim museum). Since Oskar was ever more concentrated on his oil painting, he created the film Motion Painting by setting up a camera behind him so that each time he made a brush stroke, he could shoot a single frame of the new alternation - so the resulting ten-minute film documents his making a typical Fischinger painting (though he himself is never shown). Unfortunately Rebay hated the film because it was not really synchronized tightly - one shape or movement for each note of music - as some of Oskar's earlier films were. Although Motion Painting enjoyed acclaim everywhere (including a Grand Prize at the Brussels Experimental Film Competition in 1949), Rebay never offered Oskar any further aid.

Fortunately he enjoyed a gradually increasing celebrity, both for his films and his paintings, which received one-man shows at several museums. In 1946 the San Francisco Museum of Art began a series of Art in Cinema screening, and invited Oskar to come show his films, including the new Motion Painting. A first generation of European artists including Norman McLaren, Alexeieff and Claire Parker, Mary Ellen Bute and Len Lye had been inspired by Oskar's work in the 1930's. Now a second generation of young artists including painters Jordan Belson and Harry Smith saw his films and turned to abstract animation. Oskar also invented a color organ, the Lumigraph, and performed with it at the San Francisco Museum in the early 1950's, inspiring Belson anew to work with soft flows of color rather than hard-edged geometrics.

Fischinger made no major films after Motion Painting. He experimental with 3-D stereo film in the early 1950's (as did Harry Smith, Norman McLaren, Hy Hirsh and Dwinell Grant), but never got to screen his 1-minute piece much, nor make a longer one. He also made a few starts for a Motion Painting No.2, but never carried it through. But he painted hundreds of canvases, up to his dying days when he completed a large serene painting entitled Nirvana. He died in 1967, but a third generation of his followers have already emerged among the practitioners of the new computer arts (such as Larry Cuba and Vibeke Sorensen) and video art (Michael Scroggins). So Oskar Fischinger remains the man of the century of Visual Music.

Just as black and white animation, Internet is made of lights and shadows, digital flashes of ones on a background of zeros. Animation on the net can be made in many different ways, and this year Animac offers a general view of some of them.

Any animator who begins knows that the production of a work represents just 5% of the total effort. The remaining 95% is used for distribution, to reach the public. For this reason, Internet's most important contribution is rather economic than artistic: Internet as a means of transport. The shorts awarded by the Academy (that is to say, those that got an Oscar) share space with graduation projects of students, and in the modems of Internet users both of them compete to get the public's attention with the work made by amateurs with a lot of enthusiasm and free time.

But the net leads not only to a cheaper distribution. It also creates new languages and possibly the easier way to such new types of expressing is a program called Flash. This animation system based on vectors (lines, traces, plane forms and degraded colours) has so much influence in the new languages on the net that we can almost talk about animation in Flash as a genre, rather than a technique or a means. A genre, but not a style. Flash films go from the art-comics minimalism in SexSlave, by Naoki Mitsuse, up to ripped futurism, heir of Zeek's MŽtal Hurlant tradition.

And there are not only films, but there are also whole web sites which interface depends totally on vectorial animations, such as meteosat.net, of the pop band Meteosat, or the version related to the net art, as the web in which Darren Aronofsky enlarges on the net the plot and texture of his film Requiem For A Dream.

Anyway, the genres integrated by animation on the net are rather witnesses of the economic constraints of its production than of the technology through which they are made, as well as rather debtors of the sociological profile of their authors and consumers than of the artistic technique that has given rise to them. Star Wars parodies, humorous shorts, classical science-fiction, soap operas, or the animation serials in the style between ingenuous and swine of Cartoon Networks are some of the influences that can be found in this shorts show.

On the net there are beginners, such as the teenager Raf Anzovin, and relevant masters as John Kricfalusi and Tim Burton. There are animators whose product and only aim is animation, and another kind of creators who use the means to promote other works. That is the case of Radio Head and the blips of its latest record, Kid A, or the above mentioned Meteosat and Darren Aronofsky

Those who know the means might miss in this show scientific animation, the animated interface, net art and experimental abstraction. At the risk of slanting the presentation, we have preferred to leave this kind of less explicit animation of formal experiments to another moment, maybe another Animac show full of other lights and other shadows.

As a matter of fact, the ones that will be present at the festival this year are videogames. Animation is a fundamental factor in the production and enjoyment of the modern 3D videogame. The demos -recorded games that the player can reproduce after at his discretion- are maybe the first example of animation working as a genre halfway between the report and the documentary.

"The street creates its own uses for things", says the writer William Gibson, and in the end videogames are used to make pure and simple animation. The resulting sub-genre is called Machinima, something like "mechanical cinema" and it shares features of traditional animation, puppet animation (many of these films are shot "live", with players/actors interacting at a real time) and of videogames aesthetics.

Technology revelations of future videogames show us towards where the field of animation at a real time goes: synthetic actors in virtual scenes, maybe moved by spectators themselves from home. But there will always be a master animator, a deferred puppeteer who has recorded in the system the register of gestures, the list of the dramatic expression of each character.

As a matter of fact, between the ones and the zeros of the animated figures, there is a Deux Ex Machina, a spirit between the gears. But it is human, and what gives life to what does not have it is called animation.

An interview to Jonathan Hodson, author of two of the most interesting shorts shown in Animac 2001: Feeling my Way (Animate! grant 1998) and The Man with the Beautiful Eyes, by Carolina L—pez

-Can you explain what Animate! is?
Animate! is a scheme organised by the Arts Council of England and Channel 4 T.V. to provide funding for artists, animators and filmmakers to make experimental animated films. About 5 films are commissioned each year with budgets of about £30K each.

-What was your intention when making Feeling my way?
To show the audience a visual representation of the thoughts and feelings I experienced whilst walking to work.

Animate! is in its 10th anniversary of funding the most experimental animations in Britain. What could the results be at a cultural level?
I don't think Animate! makes much difference to most people in Britain but it is very important to artist animators like myself. It does something to balance the cultural slide towards commercial entertainment.

-You have also worked on multimedia works (in fact you won the ZKM price), is this part of your need to experiment?
No. I always work with animation although I am integrating it with live action more and more.

How would you define "experimental animation"?
"Experimental animation" is animation that tries to push the medium further with new ideas, technology and approaches which are not necessarily intended for the commercial arena.

As far as I know you are going to produce your next film Camouflage with another Animate! fund. How hard is it to get this fund?
About 80-100 people apply to the Animate! scheme each year for about 5 grants. It is fairly hard to get funding but if you understand the criteria, write an exciting proposal and have a track record as an experimental animator it is a bit easier.

-What is you new film Camouflage about?
Camouflage looks at the experience of a child living with a schizophrenic parent. It combines documentary interviews with animation and live action recreations.

-Outside of Animate!, how hard is it to make experimental animation films? Does this fund give you total freedom as an artist?
Outside of Animate! there are very few schemes for experimental animators. Channel 4 commissioned The Man With The Beautiful Eyes, but I don't consider this to be an experimental film.