Review of An Optical Poem

Just about anyone who's ever made a music video — especially an abstract one — owes a debt of gratitude to Oskar Fischinger. This short film is a charming rendition of Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody set to a dazzling series of colored dots, lines, flashes and vivid visual effects that often look like a Piet Mondrian painting come to life. Paul Marquardt's often cheeky orchestration — far different from the one usually heard — adds a quite inventive series of tonal effects to the film that only underscores the rambunctious appeal of Fischinger's animation. I remember seeing films like this from the 1960's and not realizing anyone had done anything this imaginative with the same format thirty years earlier — and I can't for the life of me imagine what unsuspecting moviegoers who caught this in 1937 on a program headlined by an MGM feature of the period made of it!