What makes me chuckle about this short film is that MGM actually financed it! Who'd have thought that such attitudes were ever present at the big studios? The intertitle at the start calls the movie a "scientific experiment"*, gawd those guys were dumb. Anyway they let Fischinger get on with his business so I can't complain. The second time I watched it I really was dumbfounded by the MGM logo, for once, ars gratia artis actually meant something! Anyway the film is a visual accompaniment to Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody no.2. Fischinger chose his music really well because there are lots of sea changes within the piece that allows him to do something totally different at the mood switches. He uses coloured paper circles and stop motion animation, to create a geometrical ballet. He must have done a lot of work because the movements are all very smooth. In fact it's really a masterpiece of technical craft and almost unbelievable how synchronised the animation is to the music.
It brought a big smile to my face and that's really rare.
* "To most of us, music suggests definite mental images of form and colour. The picture you are about to see is a novel scientific experiment. Its object is to convey these mental images in visual form"
It brought a big smile to my face and that's really rare.
* "To most of us, music suggests definite mental images of form and colour. The picture you are about to see is a novel scientific experiment. Its object is to convey these mental images in visual form"