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Hello abstract, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
(with apologies to Paul Simon, should he ever read this). We left the last line out, it didn’t fit, but hopefully you get the idea.
Our annual intro to abstract animation usually focuses on the value of the form more so than a run-down of specific films. It occupies an interesting space; devotees and converts readily inhale the films and form their own visions without much need of our roadmaps to meaning. And ‘meaning’ itself has much less meaning when trying to discuss individual abstract animated films.
Instead, these humble few scratchings try and work two sides of a not especially crowded street. On the one side, the choir of the converted might receive some passing entertainment along with a bit of positive reinforcement as they breeze through these ramblings whilst over on the other footpath we hope you gather up a few souls who are ready to see the light and embark on a whole new path.

Abstract art and animation, so the sacraments go, is a niche of a niche. At best, created and appreciated by those with uniquely elevated sensibilities or, at worst, by those who have children who could do that – apparently. That nicheness would be fair enough if it weren’t for the fact that we are surrounded by abstraction, it walks freely amongst us, hiding in plain view it defines much of the world we are immersed in. Like any liquid force held under great pressure, it bursts out of so many of the cracks of our world. Indeed, it infuses the very history of animation itself. It is the “vision softly creeping” par excellence.

The first instances of abstract animation were the works created by the frenemy collaborators Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling. Between them, they wrote the first book on abstract animation. The interesting thing is that, by and large, they weren’t really trying to be animators, they were trying to take painting to what they saw as its next logical level. Why shouldn’t paintings move? Why not indeed. However, if you create a painting that moves and if it’s any good, here at LIAF HQ we’ll call it animation and put it up on the big screen and claim you as an animator.

It is one of CGI’s seldom spoken truths that for years the only ‘computer animation’ that was produced was all abstract. The ‘computers’ built out of car parts and old clocks by the likes of John Whitney could produce nothing else. Even when computer animation moved out of the garage and into the bright white labs of Bell Telephones, the people they brought in to try and get anything at all out of these monsters spent years gleefully creating abstract animation and abstract artworks that have stood the test of time. Ed Zajac, Frank Sindon, Ken Knowlton, Michael Noll and of course the incomparable Lillian Schwartz must have thought they’d hit the jackpot when they found themselves being paid by a telecommunications monolith to spend their days making abstract films on the company dime. Just how this would ever encourage people to make more long distance telephone calls is the subject of another chapter.

Arguably, the first decent CGI animation that the wider, mass-market audience saw was abstract. The opening credits to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 classic “Vertigo” are a mesmerising piece of Saul Bass abstract animation that take us into the eye of the action. Even when mainstream CGI first tried to go ‘representational’ it sort of pulled its punches….coz abstract was still its best party trick. The sequences in Westworld (1973) in which we are treated to the environmental Point-Of-View of the killer cowboy robot played by Yul Brunner are best described as large scale pixelated versions of the way a human would see what he was seeing.

But go wider, look deeper, think weirder and a world that has looooong been saturated in abstraction emerges, like magic, before your very eyes. The Smithsonian Institute, the World’s largest museum, education and research complex, has a stunning collection of Screensavers that go back to when Bill Gates was wearing cheap suits. There are no shortages of ads that are more than happy to get their abstract on to try and flog us whatever their paymasters are selling. If we can ever get live music cranked up again, stand back and take in the tsunami of abstract animation a lot of them roll out to fill in the gaps that sound can’t.

The human capacity to reach for abstract and use it as a tool to create an alternative perception of the world as seen, felt or experienced is probably too complex to explain. Not that that stops people pursuing this meta-grail. In his epic masterpiece Modern Times, Modern Places: Life & Art In The 20th Century, cultural and social commentator par excellence, Peter Conrad, tries to divine just what it is that might have “provoked this disengagement from appearances?” He ponders if it could be a search for some kind of “godly freedom” or alternatively might it be a “destructive tantrum”?

Conrad goes deep, citing the late 19th/early 20th century art historian Wilhem Worringer in two papers released in 1907 and 1912*. “For Worringer, the ‘tendency to abstraction’ was a psychological puzzle, the symptom of a flaw in culture. He [Worringer] contrasted abstract art, motivated by ‘a feeling of separation from outside nature’, with the happy empathetic adjustment of man to the external world which underlays realism. Abstraction, he suggested, was the reflex of primal, abiding terrors. Modern artists shared the mental condition of our earliest forebears.”

Worringer had no idea what was about to hit. Leaving aside the wave of abstract expressionism that was about to hit in the decades ahead, the reality of cinema was just unfolding and would, inevitably, lead to artists co-opting the mechanical technology to try and create ‘moving paintings’. Instinctively, these pioneers knew that ‘realist’ moving paintings would be – ironically – expressionless and would not have enough substance and potential to truly render an amalgam of image and movement. Only abstract images were really going to get that ball rolling. Still, Worringer hit some raw nerves.

By the time the 1930’s were starting to yield their steadily rotting fruit, abstract animators (and abstractionists of all stripes) found themselves branded as ‘degenerate’. In 1937 the Nazi regime staged a massive exhibition in Berlin that featured more than 600 pieces of so-called degenerate art confiscated from galleries and private collections. The idea was that it would be the ultimate swan song of this particular field of artistic endeavour, putting on notice all those who appreciated this form of art and offering a sinister last warning to all those who created it.

Abstract artists and animators got the memo and poured out of Germany, perhaps best known amongst them being Oscar Fischinger who settled in the United States and created, against all the odds, a remarkable body of genre-defining films. He also scored a gig animating one of the sequences in Walt Disney’s Fantasia.
It is possible – just possible – that Worringer might have been overthinking it though. As right as he was about how some react to the constrained revolutionary capacities that an eye for abstraction might mask, maybe it is also true to say that abstraction can just be a ‘vision planted in our brain’. It is amazing where concepts of abstraction pop up. We collect odd specimens…. everyone needs a hobby. They are myriad, but a couple of grand examples make the point.

Airline pilot and aviation blogger Patrick Smith runs occasional – but normally hilariously caustic – commentary on his AskThePilot.com blog regarding what he sees as the ever-sinking lid on the design standard of passenger aircraft paint jobs. Fair enough too – but while he tends to come at it from the point of view of ‘meaning’, ‘marketability’ and a more generalist aesthetic appreciation, he often employs a host of language that places his observations and reflections somewhere within the realm of ‘abstract’ art analysis.**

Going a step further, one of the stranger deployments of abstract art HAS to go to the vessels known as “dazzle boats”. A simple google search on the term immediately opens the eyes to a bizarre alternative visuality that has to be seen to be believed. Abstract art on a truly massive scale. In World War I, the military were trying to find ways of foiling attacks on shipping. Regular camouflage can only achieve so much, especially once the ship is actually spotted. But paint these ships with a truly stunning cluster of irregular shapes and patterns and all of sudden it gets really hard for the enemy to really figure out just how far away you are, how fast you are moving and in which direction you are heading. More than 1200 ships received these astonishing make-overs…. 1200!!! They were all different and they could all find a place in the Tate Modern if you could figure out how to get them in there.
So there it is – another humble bunch of ways to contemplate abstract animation. LIAF is one of the very few generalist animation festivals that dedicates an entire programme to abstract animation. It makes total sense to us to do that, in very large measure because despite the rap abstract animation has as a niche or hidden artform, the monuments to it permeate the world we live in in so many ways. If you love this form of animating, congratulations, you’re ahead of the curve. If not, it’s never too late to join the converted.
* Abstraction And Empathy (1907) and Form In Gothic (1912)
** Check out a sample at:
askthepilot.com/the-nightmare-continues
askthepilot.com/american-to-keep-new-livery
Malcolm Turner, LIAF Co-Director