article

Pure Sensations? From Abstract Film to

Digital Images
Patrícia Castello-Branco

Abstract This article is a study of ‘film as sensation’. It provides

a new approach to abstract cinema practices and demonstrates
that they include the idea of ‘pure sensation’. Therefore, abstract
cinema should not be interpreted as purely structural and
conceptual. The author argues that ‘film as sensation’ has been
part of the essence of cinema since the very beginning. The
argument proceeds from a brief rewriting of the history of
abstract cinema with a view to demonstrating how ‘film as
sensation’ is present in the essential moments of cinema’s
history. Furthermore, it is argued that this concept of ‘film as
sensation’ does not correspond to an idea of cinema or visual
effects as ‘pure entertainment’ but should be understood as
‘critical rupture’. This idea of ‘critical rupture’ finds its theoretical
justification in the concept of ‘perceptive shock’ or ‘perceptive
trauma’ from which Walter Benjamin justified the aesthetic
intentions of the new-born art.

Keywords Absolute cinema, abstract film, animation, digital

image sensation, editing, image manipulation, pure cinema,
rhythm

animation: an interdisciplinary journal (http://anm.sagepub.com)

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Vol 5(1): 1–16 [1746-8477(201003)]10.1177/1746847709356644
2 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 5(1)

Benjamin’s view of cinema as a ‘physical shock’

In the mid 1930s, Walter Benjamin’s view of the experience of cinema

offered a radical new way of understanding film. According to
Benjamin, a film is mainly about violent change, motion and defragmen-
tation. His interpretation strongly suggests that, due to movement and
editing, a film’s audience lives through a ‘traumatic experience’, where
presence of mind is replaced by physical shock. This shock is prima-
rily sensorial and perceptive. Unlike a painting, which allows the
viewer’s eye to dwell and to adapt itself in order to address external
stimulation, cinema’s audience is exposed to a film’s rhythm and
shocking juxtapositions of images. Benjamin even compares the
experience of cinema to the traumas of Dadaism, and considers that
cinema goes further. As Benjamin (1936) himself states: due to its
technical structure ‘film has taken the physical shock effect out of the
wrappers in which Dadaism had, as it were, kept it inside the moral
shock effect’. Film is imbued with actual physical shock and physical
trauma, whereas Dadaism is confined to moral shock and moral
trauma. Moreover, whereas traditional works of art were ritualistic and
demanded the viewer’s concentration, film is experienced as a
‘distraction’.
This concept of distraction, as used by Benjamin, is also of great
importance as it establishes the possibility of merging the physical and
the critical – that is, it offers a way of being critical through physical-
ity without being totally conscious of it.Accordingly, cinema’s audience
is critical, but distracted. From Benjamin’s point of view, the potential
power of distraction is located in mobile, oblique perception, rather
than in representative or cognitive levels. As film can be speeded up
and slowed down, providing us with different angles and times, the
distracted viewer physically experiences reality as malleable. The
audience sees what the camera sees and therefore acknowledges that
it can reshape the world. Rather than accepting the world as it is, film
incites the viewer to go out and produce the world. Broadly speaking,
this is Benjamin’s depiction of film’s ‘physical shock effect’ and its
consequences.
This article will focus on this concept of ‘physical shock’ and discuss
how it coincides with the idea of ‘film as sensation’. Its main theory is
that film as sensation has always been present ever since abstract films
were first made. Therefore, it has been part of the essence of cinema
since the very beginning. Through rhythm, editing and visual effects,
film has been considered by film-makers as a way of aesthetically crit-
icizing everyday perceptions and offering new perceptive bodily expe-
riences. Subsequently, the so-called eminently structural interpretation
of abstract film practices should be open to reconsideration. The defi-
nition of this idea of ‘film as sensation’ entails rewriting the history of
abstract cinema in this new light. Starting with Leopold Survage’s
‘coloured rhythm’, this narrative will then focus on some of the first
 Castello-Branco From abstract film to digital images 3

French Vanguard and German Absolute cinema experiments, moving

on to the animation cinema of Oskar Fischinger and Len Lye, then to
the developments of film-makers such as Harry Smith and Jordan
Belson. It concludes with John Whitney’s advance into digital imagery.

Survage’s film as ‘coloured rhythm’

Those familiar with abstract film will recall Survage’s famous article
published in 1914, in which the artist’s argument focuses on a concept
of cinema as a dynamic art whose main element is ‘coloured visual
form’. According to Survage (1988[1914]), this coloured visual form is
determined by three factors:‘Visual Form – that is, abstract . . . Rhythm
– that is, motion and the changes that visual forms undergo; [and]
Colour’ (p. 90). Two interconnected ideas are highlighted in Survage’s
essay: on the one hand, the concept of a cinema that is free from
narrative, expressive or representative bias; on the other hand, the
importance of image manipulation and rhythm. To Survage, film is
actually rhythm, abstract forms and colour. This view is, of course,
aesthetically aimed at conforming to the revolutions that were taking
place in Abstract and Cubist painting, of which Survage was one of the
main representatives. But it is also a way of establishing what ought to
be the essence of cinema; i.e. to determine what ought to be truly cine-
matographic. For Survage, there is no doubt: cinema is not a translation
of literature or of theatre into visual form. Cinema ought to be a truly
visual art focused on the treatment of the image that uncurls in and
through time. Survage praises a new type of cinema, far from narrative
elements or registers, in which imagery, composed of motion colours
and forms, functions like the notes or sounds in a musical composi-
tion. As the artist puts it: ‘it is the mode of succession in time that
establishes the analogy between sound rhythm in music and coloured
rhythm, whose result I call cinematographic means’ (p. 90).
In his concept of cinema, Survage insinuates another idea – one that
is very important and ought to be emphasized here: coloured rhythm
has the capacity to truly destabilize ordinary perception and it does so
in a much more successful way than Cubist or Abstract painting.
Compared to films, ‘motionless form does not express much, since it
only produces an extremely “confused sensation” due to the fact that
“it is no more than a simple graphical notation”’ (p. 91). This notion of
film, as developed by Survage – mainly emphasizing the alliance
between visual form and rhythm – is in line with Benjamin’s idea of
cinema’s physical shock, i.e. the belief that cinema has a disruptive
effect on the visual and perceptive systems. In both cases, sensations
produced by film are connected to total disruption of the common
order of perception. Film provokes local catastrophes (Walter
Benjamin speaks of a perceptive trauma with regard to film), and this
is the ‘way out’ from the cliché of ordinary everyday imagery.
4 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 5(1)

Although he was never able to finish his projects, Survage’s

concepts played an important role in the future developments of
cinema, opening doors, not only to totally abstract cinema but also to
non abstract ‘pure cinema’ (see Haas, 1985: 131–4). In both cases,
images, freed from a primary concern with representation, were
manipulated in order to explore ‘pure sensations’. Once again, this idea
of ‘pure sensations’ is primarily perceptive and physical and not repre-
sentative, cognitive or emotional. As mentioned earlier, this is directly
dependent on the ideas of motion, rhythm and visual effects. The next
section gives a distinct view of Survage’s ideas with regard to the first
French Vanguard and German Absolute cinema.

German and French Vanguards:

plastic and musical analogies

In the 1920s, under the name of French Vanguard, we find an amalgam

of impressionist theories of cinema, such as those of Germaine Dulac
and Jean Epstein (just to name a few); surrealist trends (such as those
developed by Man Ray, for instance); perspectives of a more realistic
trend and of social and political intervention (like those of Vuillermoz
and Louis Delluc); as well as plastic and abstract views (Henri
Chomette, Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Léger). In fact, theorists have
found it very difficult to define this movement or, for that matter, to
decide whether it should really be considered a movement at all.
However, although these opinions and projects are different, they all
share the belief that the uniqueness of cinema as a form of art is not
due to the importation of theatrical or literary paradigms, but to the
exploration of eminently visual effects. Underlying these concepts is
the perspective that film is mainly about violent change, motion and
defragmentation. And this is a view that was present in both photo-
indexical and animation films of the same period. Generally speaking,
film-makers in both trends believed that films had the ability to
provoke new sensations, which would disturb and disrupt our habits
of perception, freeing us from the cliché relationship with the world,
operating firstly at a physical level rather than a mental or cognitive
one. By advocating that cinema is all about forms and colours in
rhythmic movement, even ordinary objects of the world (a tree, a chair
or a face) can acquire their aesthetic value only as coloured forms that
show a specific rhythm. Based on the audience’s experience, all these
film-makers believed that such cinema entailed clear physical shock. It
is this physical shock that is usually referred to as ‘pure sensation’
(Porte, 1926: 10).
Let us consider this idea of ‘pure sensation’ in some detail. It was
supported by two key notions: photogeny1 and kinetic vision. The
former was considered to be a cinematic effect that arises from
combining recordings (i.e. what is in front of the camera), mechanics
 Castello-Branco From abstract film to digital images 5

(camera, editing and projection) and the film-maker. The latter was
related to editing and to the rhythmic chaining of images. Because film
can be speeded up and slowed down, given different angles and times,
the viewer experiences new ways of relating to reality, and these work
primarily at a physical level. Film is de-familiarization and the opening
of new perceptive and physical realities. In fact, sometimes the
concept of photogeny gave total primacy to the idea of rhythm. Kinetic
vision then acquires purer and even more radical treatment as occurs
in Marcel Duchamp’s experiments in Anémic Cinema (1927), and
Henri Chomette’s abstract films, such as Jeux de reflets et de la vitesse
(1923) and Cinq minutes de cinéma pur (1925) – where the artist
tries to put into practice his theories about the possibility of cinema
‘creating a kingdom of light, rhythm and forms, together with sound’
(Chomette, 1988[1925]: 372). Kinetic vision is directly linked to the
idea that cinema is actually movement and rhythm. This idea is clearly
expressed by Germaine Dulac (1926) who argues, for instance, that:
‘Cinematographic movement, in which visual rhythms corresponding
to musical rhythms give to the total movement its meaning and
power’, is the main element in cinema (p. 36).
Cinema is rhythm, editing and visual manipulation and is aimed at
addressing the film viewer’s perceptive system and destabilizing it as
a physical shock. This is the core of the ‘film as sensation’ of French
Vanguard films and insists that cinematic sensory experience, espe-
cially rhythm and motion, should act first at a physical level. This is
what ‘film as sensation’ means. It sustains the view that cinematic
sensory experience must be understood in terms of its success or
failure to open visual fields where precise references are abolished:
physical sensation and new perceptions are the important elements of
cinematic experience. This opinion was widely shared by Vanguard
artists of the time, who rejected the idea that cinema’s raison d’être
lay in its expressive capacities: ‘I do not believe in cinema as an
expressive means’ (Duchamp, 1990: 117).
Cinema has the capacity to destabilize vision, to provoke effects that
act directly on the physical, working openly on the audience’s body.
As Picabia (1985[1924]) states: ‘cinema should offer us a vertigo; it
should be a kind of artificial paradise, a promoter of intense sensations,
surpassing the “looping” of the airplane and the pleasure of opium’
(p. 137). These same concerns are still the core of Abel Gance’s over-
prints and polyvision techniques that we find in Napoléon (1927), or
the accelerated rhythm of the famous sequence of La Roue (1922). In
fact, due to the same focus on kinetic vision, radical experiments of
visual rhythm and a tendency to treat visual forms simply as forms and
colours in movement and not as indexical realities, photo-indexical
films shared some of the same concerns and aesthetic goals of abstract
animation. Sometimes the two techniques coexisted in the same film
as we can see in Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy’s Ballet
Mécanique (1924), in which Man Ray also collaborated.
6 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 5(1)

In fact, the French film-makers’ use of time lapse, speed and rhythm
coincided with animation’s abilities to change and condense time and
allow inanimate objects (forms, paintings, etc.) to move and acquire
new values, as seen in German Absolute cinema films, such as those of
Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richer and Viking Eggeling. Furthermore, the
importance attributed to editing and to rhythm brought both trends
closer to musical structures, in an attempt to accomplish visual musical
compositions. We can find this desire in Ruttmann’s ‘visual
symphonies’ that function as a translation of the visual domain of
musical sensations produced by sounds. Clear examples are
Ruttmann’s first films – Opus I (1921), Opus II (1923), Opus III (1924)
and Opus IV (1925 – which are totally abstract and deliberately
constructed in order to explore the rhythm of images. And, although
Ruttman used photographic images in Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großs-
tadt (1927), the film is constructed as a symphony of rhythm and
musical relationships. It is not the city of Berlin itself but rather its
transformations and its rhythm that are the main subjects of the film.
The same desire is present in Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling’s
works. They used music as a model to explore the effects that
movement imprinted on simple visual units – conceived by Richter as
rectangles, and by Eggeling as lines – focusing on the relationships and
interactions of these elementary units. In Symphonie Diagonale
(l924), for example, Eggeling worked on a theory of opposition, gener-
ating opposing poles of tension and motion. The film is comprised of
white abstract shapes placed on a black background; that is, lines,
curves and counter-curves that are sometimes symmetrically opposed
and symmetrically based on a diagonal axis. But opposition and tension
also appear frequently as a result of editing, with the alternation of
frames in which the same shapes draw opposing trajectories: an
ascending diagonal line appears in the following frame descending in
a diagonal direction. The notion of rhythm makes a decisive contribu-
tion to generating the effects of contrast and tension reinforced by the
enlargement or shrinking of the figures. Like Eggeling, Richter’s main
interest was not in photo-indexical objects or visual form per se but
rather in the potentials of exploring movement and establishing new
relationships between forms. In Richter’s own words: ‘we were not
interested in “form”, but in a principle governing relationship’ (Richter,
1997: 64). The first film by Richter suggestively entitled Rhythmus 21
(1921) is composed of squares and rectangles that play with their
different tones (white, black and grey) and uses a principle of relation-
ship between forms, which Richter referred to as ‘contrast-analogy’.
The relationship between the surfaces establishes a constantly
changing movement, a specific rhythm. Richter insists on the original-
ity of the movement performed by the film:‘It is not natural movement
that, in the film, gives expression to objects, but artistic movement, i.e.,
a rhythmic movement, in which variations and pulsations are part of
an artistic plan’ (Richter, 1927: 70). From Richter’s point of view:
 Castello-Branco From abstract film to digital images 7

‘rhythm is not a definitive or regular succession in space or time but

the unit that joins all parts into one’ (p. 52).
Curiously enough, this concern with visual rhythm was also a major
objective of the French Vanguard’s photo-indexical films of the same
period, and it explains why films are almost unanimously defined
through musical analogies, either as ‘musical symphonies’ or as ‘plastic
music’, or even, using Gance’s famous expressions, as ‘light music’
(Gance, 1923: 4) or ‘Light Symphony’ (Gance, 1959: 73). Sometimes, the
terms are used as synonyms.As Marcel L’Herbier (1978[1931]) says:‘To
make a film is to invent a music of images, of sounds, of rhythms; it is
to compose visual values that have no equivalence in any other form
of art’ (p. 28).
So, music, on the one hand, and painting and pure visual values, on
the other, were the core of both trends. Cinema is conceived accord-
ing to plasticity and movement. This is also clear in the radical exper-
iments of Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy’s Ballet Mécanique with
its juxtaposing and dissolving forms, as well as in Ruttmann’s Opus II
and Opus III, whose main concern is image illusionism, exploring
two-dimensionality or, on the contrary, investigating the illusion of
depth. Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic Cinema (1927) explored the kinetic
illusionism that can also be found in Ruttmann’s Opus IV: through the
playful opening and closing of horizontal shutters, the artist demon-
strates the two-dimensionality of the screen through its fractioning and
shuttering, or, by showing squares that seem to disappear on the screen
and return to the surface, producing three-dimensional illusionism.The
same happens in Richter’s Rythmus 21, where the different contrast-
ing tones of the surface generate a complex illusion of space, created
by precariously balanced interconnections and by the adaptation of
pictorial experiences to unique cinematographic features, such as the
two-dimensionality of the screen, the limits of cinematographic
illusionism and the use of parts of negative film.
Increasingly convinced that film is actually the edition of rhythm and
images, the French Vanguard and German Absolute animation cinema
prompted de-familiarization and the opening of new perceptive and
physical realities. In cinema, the viewer experiences new perceptions,
pre-cognitive ones, which work primarily at a physical level. This
perspective of film and this use of abstract shapes and of animation
techniques as a way of exploring the different potential of speed,
different possibilities of relationships between forms, understanding
the role of motion in the construction and dissolution of forms, is quite
consistent with the exploration of the effects it produces: a truly
perceptive shock in which ordinary speed and ordinary relationships
between forms are subverted. Cinema’s focus on these new dimen-
sions of speed and relationship between forms offered the audience a
totally new and revolutionary aesthetic experience.
While ‘film as sensation’ almost disappeared from the French scene
with the appearance of sound films, it has survived in the practices of
8 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 5(1)

two of the most creative film-makers in the history of animation

cinema: Oskar Fischinger and Len Lye.These film-makers integrated the
previous concepts of ‘film as sensation’ with new mystical tendencies.
Once again, abstract painting trends played an important role in this
change, with film-makers exploring how specific cinematic effects
added new developments to painting visual experiments. ‘Film as
sensation’ came to acquire a new meaning, supported by the invention
of new radical techniques for image manipulation.

Oskar Fischinger and Len Lye:

mysticism and visual motion form

Partly because of his belief in the potential of cinema to trigger new

perceptions and to radically question everyday relationships with the
world, Fischinger invented and explored a set of new cinematic tech-
niques, enhancing and launching new experiments for animation
cinema. This is the case in his wax experiments, developed between
1921 and 1926, and a six-minute version of a selection of these is
entitled Wax Experiments (see Moritz, 1974: 83–5).The exploration of
rhythmic structures was another of Fischinger’s concerns, which was
evident in his experiences characterized by ‘the basic imagery of hard-
edged parallel bars moving up and down in rhythmic patterns’ (p. 85),
prepared with cut-outs from paper or wood, and shown under the title
Orgelstäble (Staffs) (1923–7). Optical illusion seemed to remain one
of Fischinger’s main concerns. In Orgelstäble, for instance, he some-
times used a complex editing procedure, combining five super -
imposed layers of imagery, each one with its own separate and
independent movement. The very same device was also used in
Seelische Konstruktionen (Spiritual Constructions) (1927) and in a
compilation of fragments, entitled Spirals (1924–6), with images
composed of circles and concentric spirals drawing movements in
order to produce optical illusions.
As in German Absolute cinema and the first French Vanguard cinema,
Fischinger also intended to physically involve the viewer. Images were
manipulated in order to explore ‘pure sensations’. Once again, this idea
of ‘pure sensations’ was perceptive and physical, and not representative,
cognitive or emotional. Resembling Abel Gance’s overprints and poly-
vision techniques, Fischinger developed multiple projection tech-
niques, this time with abstract shapes. In fact, Fischinger’s Fieber
(1926–7), of which apparently no copy has survived, was conceived as
a multiple-projector show. Fischinger designed a multiple projector
system which projected three images simultaneously, side-by-side, on
three parallel screens. Fischinger’s only surviving multiple-projector
systems (with three or five projectors and several overlapping films)
was called R-1 ein Formspiel (1927) and featured Fischinger’s expertise
in the many aspects of animation techniques.
 Castello-Branco From abstract film to digital images 9

Experimenting with colourful forms was also one of Fischinger’s

main goals. In a way, we can find in his work an exploration of the cine-
matographic principles that Survage praised: cinema is a dynamic art
whose main element is ‘coloured visual form’, determined by three
factors: visual form, rhythm and colour.This interest in colour is respon-
sible for Fischinger’s contribution to the invention of the colouration
method called Gaspar Colour, used in the abstract film Kreise (1933).
Colour is, in fact, an essential element in Fischinger’s geometrical
abstracts, and the artist experimented with several colouring processes
in his films. Fischinger worked directly with ‘film as sensation’ as it is
also directly dependent on the ideas of motion, rhythm and visual
effects. He shared the belief that visual manipulation of images opens
the doors to new fields of perception. In Fischinger’s films, however,
‘sensation’ came to acquire a new meaning. Whereas previous trends
were mainly focused on forms themselves and on their formal values
as sufficient to obtain this perceptive shock, Fischinger integrated this
very same objective with a complex collection of subsequent scien-
tific and spiritual interests. Besides Theosophy, Fischinger’s works
reveal a direct influence from different realities, such as Eastern mysti-
cisms like Tibetan Buddhism and Mandala’s meditative structures,
Einstein’s theory of relativity and Heinsenberg’s new physics.
These new influences also arose from the influence of abstract
trends in painting, such as Kandinsky’s abstractions and Mondrian’s
Plasticism, and attributed a new meaning to ‘cinema of sensation’.This
new meaning was a view of physicality (material inanimate objects and
the viewers’ bodies) to be conceived as a path to spirituality and to
connected cosmic laws – these underlying structures would influence
all materiality. Following Kandinsky and his Theosophical theories, it
was believed that the body as a material element had the ability to
physically connect with its interior material forces. ‘Film as sensation’
was aimed at allowing the reconnection of these links, amongst others.
This is evidently a result of strong mysticisms such as Theosophical
theories (that were well-known to be determinant for Kandinsky) and
Eastern mysticisms.
Moritz explicitly explains how Radio Dynamics (1942) is perhaps
the best example of how all these influences came together in
Fischinger’s work. According to Moritz (1974), the film
has the structure of yoga itself: we first see a series of exercises, only
exercises for the eyes or the sense of vision – fluctuating and stretching
rectangular objects; then we see a statement of two icons representing medi-
tation, one an image of flight into an infinitive vortex defined by finite
movement, and the other the image of two eyes’ irises opening and expand-
ing/contracting while between them grows a third eye of inner/cosmic
consciousness. After a brief introductory exposition of these three themes,
each is repeated in a longer, developed version, the exercises working them-
selves up into complex stroboscopic flickers, and the hypnotic rhythms of
the expanding/contracting eyes unite with the motion of the passing rings
10 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 5(1)

of the vortex, making the flight become a two-way, inward and outward,
flight with the vortex as the eye of the observer as well as the eye of the
universe. The climactic moment expresses thorough its manipulation of
changing colours, sizes and sense of speed, one aspect of Einstein relativity
theory – the balance between energy, matter, and velocity – in clear but
emotional, simple but subtle and complex terms, wholly visual terms which
happen and can be understood directly with no intervening words. (p. 157)

Fischinger’s experiments with film as a physical entity, which

connects both material and spiritual elements, found an echo in Len
Lye’s radical techniques, such as the use of hand-painting directly on
film and the use of imprints left by material elements of the film. The
interesting point here is that Lye’s techniques were aimed at develop-
ing an awareness of the material aspects of film and film viewing as a
central basis for cinematic experience. Images were manipulated in
order to explore ‘pure sensations’. Once again, this idea of ‘pure sensa-
tions’ is directly dependent on the ideas of motion, rhythm and visual
effects linked to a perceptive, physical and material level.
In Lye’s works, the awareness of the materiality of the film as a
physical entity was accompanied by acknowledgement of the physi-
cality of the act of perception and of the film’s reception. In both cases,
the material was a path to the spiritual. It was believed that spiritual-
ity was present in the physical forces and elements, such as the
viewer’s body. This was a huge step away from the strictly formal use
of visual units and rhythms of the previous French and German exper-
imental cinema trends. However, as in these trends, according to Lye,
film viewing was a liberating experience felt through physical shock
or perceptive trauma. Moreover, Lye believed that this physical shock
could liberate repressed and productive energies. That is why in Lye’s
sometimes strong abstract style we can recognize a connection
between bodily responses and surrealist experiences. For instance, in
Free Radicals (1957) or in Particles in Space (1961–8), Lye uses a
series of instruments to draw parallel line bars by scraping on black
and white film. The movement of the lines is synchronized with
African ceremonial music, in structures similar to corporal move-
ments or tribal decorative drawings. Many of the sequences of his
films are painted in a spontaneous way, without premeditation, in
order to appeal directly to the subconscious mind and to the body’s
energies, and are directly dependent on the ideas of motion, rhythm
and visual effects in order to explore ‘pure sensations’. Once again,
this idea of ‘pure sensations’ is directly dependent on the ideas of
motion, rhythm and visual effects, at a perceptive, physical and
material level and is directly linked to later experiments of American
abstract film and digital image manipulation.
 Castello-Branco From abstract film to digital images 11

American abstract film: towards digital

images – sensation or mathematical intuition?

As in the experiments of Fischinger and Lye, ‘film as sensation’ in the

American context arose directly from the earlier European experi-
ments, but it did exhibit some differences. So, what can ‘film as sensa-
tion’ mean in the American context and how does it relate to previous
abstract films? Although some of the American abstract film-makers,
like Fischinger (when he was in Germany), were inspired by a strong
mysticism inherited from Kandinsky and Mondrian’s views in a way
that was not present in previous European vanguards, they shared with
them the interest in exploring rhythm and editing potentials as well
as the belief that cinema was a truly revolutionary way of altering
perception and opening new perceptive fields. Both believed that
visual effects, made possible by film and film editing, had the potential
to alter ordinary perception; that they had the potential for new ideas,
i.e. to disclose new dimensions. Moreover, some of them shared the
view that new ideas and the idea of previously unknown realities are
only accessible through new perceptive domains demanding new
physicality. This likens them to the French and German account of
‘sensation’ as a perceptive shock. Therefore, it is interesting to notice
how previous experimental cinema integrates a more explicit mystical
bias, and the previous concepts of de-familiarization and physical
shock are integrated here within hallucinating and perception-altered
experiments.
However, despite the obvious difference between the more formal-
istic ‘film as sensation’ of the European Vanguards and the more
mystical bias of some American film-makers, the key goal was very
much the same: to allow and to provoke new perceptions, and to
reach, through physicality, a new level of perception in order to merge
the critical with the physical, as advocated by Benjamin, in 1936. In
addition, the strong image manipulation present in these films is also
related to a concern which has influenced the idea of ‘film as sensa-
tion’ from its very beginning: the analogy between image and sound,
i.e. between cinema and music. The structures that govern visual
compositions were similar to the ones that govern music. That is also
how mathematical rigour could be integrated into image manipulation
in the quest for a specific rhythm, structure and pattern. And, most
likely, this can explain how the idea of ‘film as sensation’ finds its conti-
nuity into contemporary digital imagery.
Harry Smith is one example of how the American abstract film inher-
ited Walter Benjamin’s and the European Vanguard’s idea of ‘film as
sensation’ obtained by abstract imagery and its rhythmic treatment.
Smith’s first three films, entitled No. 1 (1939–42), No. 2 (1940–2) and
No. 3 (1942–6), are totally abstract and made with no photochemical
exposure. They used direct intervention in celluloid, similar to Lye’s
works, following a method called ‘Batik’. In ‘Batiked’ animation, Smith
12 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 5(1)

‘applied razor-cut masking-tape or manufactured gummed circles to

areas of the frame and then sprayed it with colour. The coloured areas
were then treated with a protective agent such as Vaseline, the masks
removed and the resulting unprotected areas sprayed in’ (Le Grice,
1977: 78). No. 1 is depicted by Smith as: ‘animation of dirty shapes –
the history of the geological period reduced to orgasm length’ (Smith
in Sargeant, 1997: 93), and No. 2 is explained as being ‘“Batiked” anima-
tion, etc., etc’. Action takes place either inside the Sun or in Zurich,
Switzerland’ (p. 94). According to Noguez, Smith’s No. 1 and No. 2 are
very similar to Richter’s Rhythmus 21 and 23. However, in the former,
the background is itself also constantly changing. The result is that of
extremely hallucinating images with very complex figure relation-
ships. Smith describes the film as follows:‘’’Batiked” animation, done of
dead squares, the most complex hand painted film imaginable’ (Le
Grice, 1977: 78).
In the following four films, No. 4 (1950), No. 5 (1950) – a film dedi-
cated to Fischinger and entitled Circular Tensions – and No. 7 (1951),
Smith abandoned the technique of working directly on film and started
using more conventional photographic imagery. According to Le Grice
(1977), in these films,‘motion was achieved by camera movement and
zoom rather than animation of visual elements before a static camera’
(p. 78). No. 7, perhaps the most complex of Smith’s abstract films is ‘a
prodigious psychedelic artifice fire’ (Noguez, 1985: 106) that is strongly
hallucinating. Smith states that the film was made under the effect of
cocaine and describes it as follows: ‘Pythagoreanism in four move-
ments supported on squares, circles, grille-work and triangles with an
interlude concerning an experiment’ (Smith, in Sargeant, 1997: 95).
It is very interesting to notice how, in all of these statements, Smith
describes his films as a mixture of mathematic reasoning and living
experience, of abstract thinking and material physicality, of sensation
and cognition. As in the French and German Vanguards, and later in
Fischinger’s and Lye’s animation experiments, here editing and visual
effects are explored as a way of provoking new sensations. The body
is therefore considered the path to achieving a different dimension of
both existence and conscience.
Smith’s mystical position regarding ‘film as sensation’ brings him
closer to Jordan Belson.Although not a term used by these film-makers,
‘sensation’ is a concern that is ever-present in their experiments, where
images were manipulated in order to explore ‘bodily sensations’
directly dependent on the treatment of motion, rhythm and visual
effects as a way of connecting to a perceptive, physical and material
level. In fact, Belson is one of the many who apply these ideas to
abstract cinema. His use of hallucinogenic drugs has even helped him
with his creative process2 – which is obviously suggested by the title
of one of his films: LSD (1954). Despite the obvious differences, his
techniques demonstrate a clear influence of European Vanguards,
which is evident when comparing the influence of the use of hallu-
 Castello-Branco From abstract film to digital images 13

cinogenic substances in his films with the ‘vertigo and opium’ state-
ment by Francis Picabia quoted earlier.
Another example of the influence of the European Vanguards can
be found in Belson’s first two films – Transmutation (1947) and
Improvisations No. 1 (1948) – which were made, as in Hans Richter’s
Rhythmus 21, with painted rolls, and each segment was divided into
a succession of photographic frames. His following films: Mambo
(1951), Caravan (1952) and Mandala (1953), with their circular forms
that, in some cases, approach cardiac rhythms, seem to portray ways
of meditation but actually reveal a strong influence from Fischinger. In
his contributions to the sessions of the Vortex Concerts (1957–9) –
Flight (1958), Raga (1959) and Séance (1959) – Belson used, in a
totally new way, a mixture of all types of luminous projections and
sonorous emissions to construct a total show, and described the
concerts as being ‘a new form of theatre based on the combination of
electronics, optics and architecture . . . a pure theatre appealing
directly to the senses’ (Belson, in Curtis, 1971: 58). Once again, cinema
evoked the European Vanguard cinema of sensation and even the
radical triple-screen techniques of Abel Gance, or Fischinger’s experi-
ences with multi-projection. In fact, Belson combined cinema of
sensation and surrealist trends. He advocated that the combination of
the images and the projected sounds appeal directly, on the one hand,
to the subconscious mind and, on the other, to the senses. The geo-
metric patterns of the lights and of the involving sound directly appeal
to the subconscious states of individuals.
This abstract cinema trend remained focused on image manipula-
tion and on exploring the rhythmic and formal relationships between
images. The film-makers’ technical innovations and experiments
integrated mystical goals with formal ones and always integrated the
objective of offering new and alternative ways of perception that still
function as a perceptive shock. They were not interested in the repre-
sentative, narrative or even photo-indexical potential of cinema, but
instead believed that formal relationships and rhythmic structures
were the core of their image manipulation. In this sense, they inher-
ited the European Vanguard idea of ‘film as sensation’. In fact, they were
directly dependent on the ideas of motion, rhythm and visual effects
in order to explore ‘new sensations’ and new perceptions. Together,
these artistic trends are responsible for an often forgotten account of
film history: a history that explores the eminently visual effects of
film and, in so doing, discovers and unveils the deep sensual and
subversive power of this image manipulation.
We saw how this very same insight inspired Walter Benjamin, in
1936, to speak of the cinema’s perceptive shock and trauma and to
advocate its subversive and liberating effects from ordinary everyday
life. Benjamin’s essay gives voice to several experiments in films that
focus on the idea of perceptive and physical disruption performed by
moving images. We saw also how this gave rise to a quest for an idea
14 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 5(1)

of ‘film as sensation’ in the French Vanguard, and to its theoretical

defence for the exploration of a physical sensation domain as opposed
to a verbal one. The approximation between film and music and their
disconnection from verbal or written language are of primary
importance here.
I would like to conclude by highlighting that this very same abstract
trend was the seed of what was the biggest revolution in cinema in
the past decades: digital image manipulation.The change from material-
based animation film-making to computer-generated imagery was
initiated in part by one of the ‘visual music’ experimenters as a result
of his interest in sound and image synchronization: John Whitney.
Therefore, we can establish a very direct line between European ‘pure’
and ‘absolute cinema’ and digital image manipulation. It is Whitney
himself who established this link:
I have never heard of this kind of film. I thought I had invented the concept
of an abstract film . . . It was only when I returned to California that I learned
about Oskar Fischinger and the vanguard film-makers of the early twenties
in Paris. (Whitney, 1970: 28)

John Whitney’s key ideas are based on the concept of audio-visual

construction, a notion which establishes a close connection to material
and bodily forces, patterns and sensations that can be directly
addressed by visual music and by image manipulation (Whitney, 1980).
Again, this idea of sensations is directly dependent on the notions of
motion, rhythm and visual effects. This establishes a direct link
between Whitney and the German and French Vanguards, and also
between American abstract film experiences and Walter Benjamin’s
concept of perceptive shock. However,Whitney added a revolutionary
new element to these. He introduced a whole new technology:
computer generation and manipulation of images. The fact that these
arose directly from the experiments of abstract and pure cinema is
also, in itself, a reality that only confirms the huge potentials of the
sensorial domain and helps us to understand the shift from this idea
of ‘film as sensation’ to new media.

Conclusion

Throughout the history of cinema, including its so-called hegemonic

trend – narrative or documentary cinema, where the linear chaining
of the scenes follows a logical sequence of events or facts – another
trend has always subsisted.This trend is responsible for an often forgot-
ten history of moving images: a history that explores the eminently
visual effects of film on viewers and, in so doing, discovers and unveils
the deep sensual and subversive power of this technological device.
This very same perspective inspired Walter Benjamin, in 1936, to
speak of cinema’s perceptive shock and trauma and to advocate its
 Castello-Branco From abstract film to digital images 15

subversive and liberating effects from ordinary everyday life.

Benjamin’s concepts are indeed the core of several experiments in
Vanguard films that consider that cinema offers us an expansion of our
sensitive being and a focus on the idea of perceptive and physical
disruption performed by moving images. This article discussed how
this very same idea influenced abstract film and how it should be
interpreted as ‘film as sensation’. It discussed how this aesthetic goal
can connect abstract cinema of the 1910s and 1920s to recent digital
moving images, and the way they can both be interpreted as relating
to ‘pure sensations’. It should be read as a manifesto for a radically new
way of understanding cinema.

Notes
1 Photogeny – a term first used by Louis Delluc and which resulted from his
interest in the mediated power of the camera and the screen (Delluc, 1920;
see also Epstein, 1924) – is seen as responsible for a profound perceptive and
physical shake.
2 It is Belson himself who recognized this influence, stating, in an interview he
gave to Gene Youngblood: ‘GENE: Do you feel your drug experiences have
been beneficial to your work? JORDAN: Absolutely. Early in life I
experimented with peyote, LSD, and so on. But in many ways my films are
ahead of my own experience’ (Youngblood, 1970: 174).

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Patrícia Castello-Branco is a post-doctoral researcher based at IFL,

Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, FCSH, Universidade Nova
de Lisboa, Rua dos Ferreiros à Estrela, no. 69, 3Dto, 1200–672, Lisbon,
Portugal. [email: [email protected]]