Oskar Fischinger was the foundational figure of abstract animation and "visual music", a German-American filmmaker, painter, and inventor whose short films synchronizing non-representational geometric form to musical structure preceded the appearance of computer graphics and music videos by decades and shaped the possibilities of postwar abstract cinema.
Oskar Wilhelm Fischinger (June 22, 1900 – January 31, 1967) was a German-American abstract animator, filmmaker, and painter, widely regarded as the foundational figure of "visual music", abstract film synchronized to music. Born in Gelnhausen, near Frankfurt, he apprenticed first at an organ-building firm and then as a draftsman in a Frankfurt architect's office, eventually completing a diploma in engineering. His decisive early encounter came in 1921, when the theatre critic Bernhard Diebold introduced him to the work of the abstract filmmaker Walter Ruttmann, and Fischinger soon began to develop the technical inventions, including a wax-slicing machine that synchronized progressive cross-sections of molded wax with a movie camera, that would underlie his early experiments in animation.
Across the 1920s and 1930s in Berlin he produced his celebrated Studies series, twelve short abstract films set to popular and classical music, and contributed special effects to Fritz Lang's 1929 Woman in the Moon. He emigrated to the United States in 1936 and worked, often unhappily, for Paramount, MGM, and Walt Disney; his designs for the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D Minor sequence in Fantasia (1940) were heavily altered before release and he left the project without credit. His Motion Painting No. 1 (1947) was inducted into the National Film Registry of the U.S. Library of Congress, and across his career he made more than fifty short films and painted approximately eight hundred canvases. His work is held in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim, the Centre Pompidou, the Tate, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the Deutsches Filminstitut in Frankfurt, among other major collections.