AWN’s Tribute to Dr.
William Moritz
A Collection of William Moritz’ Articles
A Lifetime of Animation: The Glamorous Dr. William Moritz
In Animation World Magazine’s look at independent
animators, Cindy Keefer profiles Dr. William Moritz, an
academician who enthusiastically studies and teaches
about these producers.
BY CINDY KEEFER Originally published 6/24/03
A Gesture of Serenity
Dr. Robin Allan reviews Optical Poetry, a book about the
great animator, Oskar Fischinger, written by the
remarkable animation historian and teacher, William
Moritz.
BY DR. ROBIN ALLAN Originally published 2/17/04
Talking with Con Pederson
William Moritz and Con Pederson, special effects
supervisor on 2001: A Space Oddysey, talk about his early
years, Stanley Kubrick and crosswords.
BY WILLIAM MORITZ Originally published 6/1/99
The Influence of Sound/Music on the Image
Just as different techniques create different images,
different sounds alter the perception of all images and
films. Bärbel Nebauer and William Moritz investigate and
even provide moving examples.
BY BÄRBEL NEUBAUER AND WILLIAM MORITZ
Originally published 6/1/99
In Passing… Elfriede Fischinger
William Moritz recalls the life of Elfriede Fischinger, wife
of Oskar, who made significant contributions to the
preservation of animation industry.
BY WILLIAM MORITZ Originally published 5/1/99
The Spirit of Genius: Feodor Khitruk
William Moritz discovers Otto Alder’s excellent
documentary on Feodor Khitruk, where Alder uncovers not
only the life and works of the elusive Cold War Soviet
master, but also sheds light on the Soviet animation regime.
BY WILLIAM MORITZ Originally published 3/1/99
The Films Strip Tells All
William Moritz discusses Richard Reeves’ Linear Dreams
and Bärbel Neubauer’s Moonlight and helps to put them in
perspective.
BY WILLIAM MORITZ Originally published 9/1/98
Stuttgart: A Splendid Festival
William Moritz reviews the ninth Stuttgart Animation
Festival which took place from April 3 to April 8, 1998 in
Stuttgart, Germany.
BY WILLIAM MORITZ Originally published 5/1/98
ON THE COVER: Dr. William Moritz. Photo courtesy of William Moritz.
© AWN, Inc. 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2003, 2004. All rights reserved. No part of the periodical may be reproduced without the consent of Animation World Network.
05 Digital Harmony: The Life of John Whitney 41
William Moritz profiles the career of John Whitney and his
significant contribution to computer animation.
BY WILLIAM MORITZ Originally published 8/1/97
The Dream of Color Music, and Machines that Made it Possible 44
William Mortiz gives a quick and dazzling historical overview
09 and attempts to create visual music using “color organs.”
BY WILLIAM MORITZ Originally published 4/1/97
Anima Mundi 4 50
William Moritz reports back from Anima Mundi, a festival,
he says, allows attendees a chance to relax and enjoy
animation.
11 BY WILLIAM MORITZ Originally published 9/1/96
The Hunchback of MTV 53
William Moritz looks at Disney’s adaptation of The
Hunchback of Notre Dame and reflects on Max Fleischer’s
statement: “If it can be done with live-action, it’s not
22 animation.”
BY WILLIAM MORITZ Originally published 7/1/96
The Mighty Animator, Frédéric Back 60
The director of such films as Crac!, The Man Who Planted
Trees and The Might River talks with William Moritz about
filmmaking, the environment and his teacher, Mathurin
Méheut.
27 BY WILLIAM MORITZ Originally published 7/1/96
Lotte Reiniger 65
The long and varied career of Lotte Reiniger, best know for her
exquisite Adventures of Prince Achmed, one of the first
feature-length animated films ever made, is detailed by
30 William Moritz.
BY WILLIAM MORITZ Originally published 6/1/96
Mary Ellen Bute: Seeing Sound 72
William Moritz chronicles the work of pioneer experimental
animator Mary Ellen Bute, whose films gained an unexpected
acceptance by both Hollywood and the public.
33 BY WILLIAM MORITZ Originally published 5/1/96
The Case of Hans Fischerkoesen 76
Hans Fischerkoesen, Germany’s leading producer of
animated commercials, was ordered to make theatrical
cartoons by the government in World War II, William
37 Moritz notes, he produced a trio of films which were not
exactly Nazi propaganda.
BY WILLIAM MORITZ Originally published fall 1992
XX
2
 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

PUBLISHERS’ NOTE

Putting together this special issue of Animation World Magazine was much
more of an emotional ordeal than we ever imagined. What started originally
as a publication honoring Bill’s lifetime of achievement, as well as the release
of his new book Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger, sadly
An ANIMATION WORLD NETWORK Publication
became a posthumous tribute with his tragic passing halfway through the
project. For all of us at AWN, working on this tribute gave us a much truer AWN, Inc.
sense of the way Bill lived his life, how much he cared for “animation” as an art 6525 Sunset Blvd.
Garden Suite 10
form, an industry, an academic discipline and means of creative expression. Los Angeles, CA 90028
His influence on a generation of animation filmmakers, historians, educators, United States
students and fans is obvious. He was unique as much for his incredible passion [T] 323 606-4200
[F] 323 466-6619
and ability to share his enthusiasm with others as for his immense knowledge
info@awn.com
of animation history and vision as a filmmaker.
www.awn.com
Over the years, Bill wrote 13 articles for AWN, all of which are republished
here in their entirety. That doesn’t touch on all the translating he did for us, the PUBLISHING
questions he answered, the people he introduced us to, the great stories he PRESIDENT
told us and the knowledge he shared with us. In addition, we’re republishing Ron Diamond
CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER
the original version of an amazing article he wrote on German animator Hans
Dan Sarto
Fischerkoesen originally published in the premier issue of the Animation
Journal (Fall 1992) and excerpted by AWN, in October 1996. We’ve also OPERATIONS
included two recent articles – Cindy Keefer’s June 2003 profile on Bill as well GENERAL MANAGER
as Dr. Robin Allan’s February 2004 review of Bill’s wonderful new book. Gina Ruiz
This issue also includes special tributes of all shapes and sizes from
EDITORIAL
more than two dozen individuals and organizations that were all influenced AWN EDITOR
and touched in some way by their association and friendship with Bill. Some Sarah Baisley
were written before Bill passed away, others soon afterwards. They all reflect MANAGING EDITOR
genuine respect and affection. Reading them helps us all get a more intimate Rick DeMott
EDITORIAL ADMINISTRATOR
glimpse into Bill’s life and work.
Darlene Chan
One final note – though we weren’t able to present this finished tribute to
Bill before he died, he did take comfort in the knowledge that so many people CONTRIBUTION
were getting involved in its creation and that AWN was focusing so much AUTHORS
energy in helping not only to further celebrate his tremendous legacy, but to Dr. Robin Allan
Cindy Keefer
introduce his work to an entire new generation of animation professionals,
Dr. William Moritz
students and historians. His passing leaves a big void in our community, one Bärbel Neubauer
that will not be filled for quite some time. While we may mourn Bill’s passing,
we can smile and take comfort in enjoying the truly remarkable gifts he gave WEB DEV/ART
to us before he left. WEB MASTER/DEVELOPER
Mike Dunlop
ART DIRECTOR
With respect and admiration, Deron Yamada
Dan Sarto and Ron Diamond
ADVERTISING
Personal Tributes to Dr. William Moritz SALES
Dan Sarto - dan@awn.com
Dr. Robin Allan 08 Amy Halpern 48 Nicole Feenstra - nicole@awn.com
Yann Beauvais 20 Linda Anne Hoag 43
Jerry Beck 08 Adam Hyman 48
Giannalberto Bendazzi 26 Cindy Keefer 52
CalArts 21 Marsha Kinder 56
John Canemaker 29, 47 Mark Langer 57
John Canemaker/Joe Kennedy 21 Miles McKane 58
Karl Cohen 32 Bärbel Neubauer 85
Harvey Deneroff 32 Christine Panushka 49
Janeann Dill 36 Gary Schwartz 52
Myron Emery 35 Society for Animation Studies 86
Barbara Fischinger 36 Vibeke Sorensen 71
Maureen Furniss 40 University of Southern California 64

© AWN, Inc. 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2003, 2004. All rights reserved. No part of the periodical may be reproduced without the consent of Animation World Network. 3
 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

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This book is by a master of an equally serene disposition

and is really an extended memoir of both Fischinger and his
remarkable wife Elfriede.
— Dr. Robin Allan

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4

ANIMATION ACADEMICIAN
A Lifetime in Animation:
The Glamorous Dr. William Moritz
John Canemaker and Giannalberto Bendazzi both cite William
Moritz as an important film historian and writer. All photos
courtesy of William Moritz, unless otherwise noted.
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
by Cindy Keefer
“He gave a lot to culture without asking anything, just for
free, just because it was worth it.”
— Giannalberto Bendazzi
ILM HISTORIAN, PROFESSOR AND AUTHOR DR. Wil-
liam Moritz has spent his lifetime in animation.
Although his significant contributions are not eas-
ily summarized, as he would say, the external
facts are simple enough.
Moritz is a world-renowned expert on animation,
experimental film and visual music, and has authored
more than100 articles, chapters and program notes. His
upcoming definitive biography of Oskar Fischinger is the
culmination of more than 30 years’ work with the Fisch-
inger Estate. Moritz has curated dozens of film shows,
preserved historical animation and amassed an impres-
sive research collection, as well as lectured at film fes-
tivals, conferences and institutions worldwide. He’s
taught film and animation for almost 30 years, and is
teaching at CalArts. He was past president of the Society
for Animation Studies, and was honored with a Lifetime
Achievement Award for his contribution to visual music
by the Royal Academy of the Netherlands in 1993.
“Bill Moritz is one of our greatest film historians
and writers. His dedication to preserving the work and
documenting the lives of film artists — such as Oskar
Fischinger, James Whitney, Berthold Bartosch, Hans
Fischerkoesen, among others — is an inspiration to his
colleagues…. His clear, compassionate, factually-ac-
curate writing has an added twinkle of sly humor that
always make his essays a delight to read.” (John Cane-
maker, 2003).
PRELUDE
Bill Moritz was born in 1941, and raised in desert
towns of California and Arizona. His father Edward was
well-read, fluent in several languages, loved opera, and
5

PART OF HIS TRAVELING PRESENTATION,
“TOWARDS A VISUAL MUSIC,” WAS
PUBLISHED IN CANTRILLS FILMNOTES IN
1985, AND THIS THOROUGH HISTORY OF
VISUAL MUSIC REMAINS UNSURPASSED.
had been a pianist in Germany. Edward had traveled
throughout Europe, emigrating from Germany to Cana-
da in 1929, then to the U.S. several years later. Bill lis-
tened to radio broadcasts of opera as a child, while
studying his father’s librettos in several languages. Bill
and his father took the train to Los Angeles or Phoenix to
see operas (Edward worked for the Santa Fe Railroad,
so they could take the train for free). Bill also went to the
movies often with his older brother. He remembers,
I saw a lot of animation in movie theatres, while growing
up (there was no television then), like Mickey Mouse,
Donald Duck, Porky Pig, Woody Woodpecker cartoons,
character animation made by studios. This was a vital
part of everyday life. The big transformation for me was
seeing interesting animation — the UPA cartoons in par-
ticular were really a completely different change. I saw
things that were actually art, and not just cartoons.
In 1958, as a student at USC’s School of Cinema, Bill
recalls, “I saw my first Fischinger film, and it popped all
my buttons!”
Moritz earned his Ph.D. at USC in Comparative Lit-
erature, with a minor in Cinema. He began teaching at
Occidental College in 1965, and continued teaching film
and humanities at institutions including Otis Art Insti-
tute, Pitzer College, American University Center (Cal-
cutta, India), UCLA, Art Center College of Design, and
CalArts. He also worked at the Creative Film Society
distributing animation, and at radio station KPFK as a
film and music critic. He promoted experimental film
and animation through venues like Los Angeles Film-
maker’s Cooperative, Theatre Vanguard and Los Ange-
les Film Oasis; and was a member of the Visual Music
Alliance in the ‘80s. In his spare time, he toured giving
poetry readings. Two of his plays were produced, and
his numerous poems were published.
His own 34 films screened in one person shows at
the Museums of Modern Art in Paris, Amsterdam, Stock-
holm and Tokyo, and also at Pacific Film Archive, Anthol-
ogy Film Archives, LA Institute of Contemporary Art,
Academy of Fine Arts (The Hague), and San Francisco
Art Institute. His most recent film, All My Lost Lovers,
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
In the 1970s, Moritz developed his theory on visual music.
Photo © Harry Frazier.
was made with an AFI Independent Filmmakers Grant.
ACT I
Moritz began writing about animation in 1969. Also,
in 1969, he began working with Oskar’s widow Elfriede
to identify, organize, and make safety negatives from
Oskar’s materials. Their decades of work are detailed in
his soon to be published Fischinger biography. Moritz’s
first major critical biographical work on Fischinger was
published in Film Culture in 1974. This decade also be-
gan his prolific writing on visual music.
Part of his traveling presentation, “Towards a Vi-
sual Music,” was published in Cantrills Filmnotes in
1985, and this thorough history of visual music remains
unsurpassed. The development of the tradition of “color
organs” is traced in this presentation, culminating in its
influence on contemporary abstract animation. Simpli-
fied, Moritz’s visual music theories (expressed in nu-
merous essays) encompass “the desire to create a
moving abstract image as fluid and harmonic as audi-
tory music,” while incorporating Pythagoras and Aris-
totle’s ideas of the correspondence between the musi-
cal tone scale and the rainbow spectrum scale, also
defined as “music of the spheres.”
A few of Moritz’ published articles include: “Visual
Music and Film-as-an-Art in California Before 1950,”
“United Productions of America, Reminiscing 30 Years
Later,” “The Surrealistic World of Max Fleischer,”
“Some Observations on Non-Objective and Non-Linear
Animation,” “Resistance and Subversion in Animated
Films of the Nazi Era: The Case of Hans Fischerko-
esen,” “Jules Engel, Post-Modernist” and “Abstract
6

Film and Color Music.” For the Absolut Panushka web-
site in the 1990s he authored 200 pages of “The History
of Experimental Animation.” He’s published other piec-
es on Fischinger, Fleischer, Jordan Belson, the Whit-
neys, Bruce Conner, Harry Smith, Hy Hirsh, Mary Ellen
Bute, Pat O’Neill, Stan Vanderbeek and other artists.
His bibliography of published work is eight pages long.
ACT II
Moritz has done preservation work on many ani-
mated films, beginning with Fischinger, and continuing
with films by Walther Ruttmann, Viking Eggeling, Hy
Hirsh, Harry Smith and Sky David, among others. Re-
cently he consulted with the Academy Film Archive on
its restoration of the Fischinger films from the original
nitrates. He curated many of these new prints for the
KINETICA 2 Fischinger Centennial traveling exhibition
organized by The iotaCenter.
He’s curated many other film shows starting from
the 1970s, and most recently Iota’s KINETICA 4 pro-
gram, the latest of its traveling film exhibitions (see
www.kinetica.org/K4). Some of his notable programs
include his 3D show, and a variety of visual music shows
presented worldwide.
Throughout his career, Moritz amassed an impres-
sive research collection including hundreds of books,
journals, program notes, articles, photographs, films
and videotapes.
In 1987, Moritz began teaching at CalArts where his
courses today include “History of Experimental Anima-
tion,” “History of Animation” and “History of Experi-
mental Film.” At USC, he’s an adjunct professor, co-
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
Bill and Oskar’s widow Elfriede share a light
moment. Courtesy of The Fischinger Archive.
teaching “The History of Animation” with professor
Christine Panushka.
For this article, Bill compiled his Top 10 ‘Desert Is-
land’ Animated Films. In his inimitable style, he cannot
be constrained to just 10.
1. Oskar Fischinger – Study No. 6 and Motion Painting
No. 1
2. Jordan Belson – Chakra and Light
3. James Whitney – Yantra and Lapis
4. Anthony Gross – Joie de Vivre and Foxhunt
5. Hans Fischerkoesen – Weatherbeaten Melody and
The Snowman
6. Paul Grimault – Little Soldier and King and Mr. Bird
7. Barry Purves – Screenplay
8. Lejf Marcussen – Public Opinion and Tonespor
9. Frédeéric Back – Crac!
10. Yuri Norstein – Tale of Tales
11. Priit Pärn - Picnic
12. Jules Engel - Gerald McBoing-Boing, Wet Paint, Co-
araze, Villa Rospigliosi
“And I have decided to move to that desert island
and just watch these films forever!” he exclaims. Other
films he’d take, which didn’t make the “official” list, in-
clude Bartosch’s L’Idee; Night on Bald Mountain (Alex-
andre Alexeïeff and Claire Parker), Lotte Reiniger’s The
Adventures of Prince Achmed, Looking for Mother (Te
Wei and Qian Jajun), Robert Darroll’s films and several
Betty Boop cartoons. And if there’s room, the complete
works of several of the above, including Fischinger — on
film or DVD please.
7

ACT III
Beyond his many accomplishments, the internal
facts of his life are another matter. His spiritual interests
include Buddhism, and James Whitney’s and Jordan
Belson’s beliefs have influenced him. He’s well-read,
fluent in French, German, Spanish, Greek, Latin, Czech
and Italian, with some Russian. He’s an avid viewer of
The History Channel, and still attends opera. And he
continues working with the Fischinger legacy today.
First, I want to stress that Bill is a wonderful human be-
ing: honest, generous, true to his friends. Second, he’s
an extremely intelligent, cultivated and open-minded
film critic and historian. Third, he gave a lot to culture
without asking anything, just for free, just because it was
worth it. Bill taught me all I know about some great film-
makers. Not only Oskar Fischinger (which is obvious) but
also James Whitney (an underestimated genius), John
Whitney, Hy Hirsh, Pat O’Neill. And he also taught me a
lot about UPA.
— Giannalberto Bendazzi, 2003
Personal Tribute by Robin Allan
William Moritz:
A Sonnet in Celebration
Brave Bill, your courage shines before us all,
You smile at Fate’s harsh sentences of pain,
And now the world pays tribute and will call
To mind your generous wisdom, clear and plain.
Your friends of many years from school or college
Have all gained insights through your gentle art.
Renaissance Man indeed with radiant knowledge
Of music, language, film and oriental lore - just part
Of your wide-ranging breadth and nobleness of mind.
Your witty humor also brightens up our days,
Enabling us to see the fads and follies of mankind.
Bright star, may your brave spirit shine and blaze,
Giving illumination when our roads seem stark,
And making light for us when all our ways are dark.
— Robin Allan
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
He now lives in Hollywood with his cats, and re-
mains the glamorous Bill Moritz.
In 2003, Moritz moved his research collection to
The Center for Visual Music. For more about the films
above, Dr. Moritz’s work and Fischinger, please visit
www.centerforvisualmusic.org and
www.oskarfischinger.org. Be sure to check out the many
articles Bill Moritz has written for Animation World
Magazine over the past years. 
CINDY KEEFER is director of The Center for Visual Music,
and has worked with Moritz and his collection since 1997.
Her recent projects include the preservation and exhibition
of films by John and James Whitney, Jordan Belson, Jules
Engel and other animators. She is a member of ASIFA and
AMIA.
Personal Tribute by Jerry Beck
Bill Moritz was a trailblazing animation
historian.
He dug deep into uncharted territory
to bring recognition to important but
unheralded animation artists. He was always
very gracious and helpful to me and his
enthusiasm for his work was an inspiration
to me. I will miss his further research, his
insights and his presence.
— Jerry Beck
www.cartoonresearch.com
8

WILLIAM MORITZ, AN INCREDIBLE
AUTHOR, HAS WRITTEN A REMARKABLE
BOOK ABOUT ONE OF THE GREAT
ARTISTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY:
OSKAR FISCHINGER.
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
BOOK REVIEW
A Gesture of Serenity
by Dr. Robin Allan
illiam Moritz, AN INCREDIBLE AUTHOR, HAS
written a remarkable book about one of the
great artists of the 20th century: Oskar Fisch-
inger. Moritz’ book, Optical Poetry: The Life
and Work of Oskar Fischinger, is a testament to both
men, both artists and both devoted to the creative spirit
in man. Indeed, Fischinger’s tenet (p. 129) might equally
well apply to his biographer:
I feel sorry for Jackson Pollock, and the other ab-
stract expressionists, who are so maladjusted, so tor-
tured in ways they can’t resolve, that they have to express
themselves with violent gestures, with aggressive chaos
or sudden glaring gestures haphazardly colliding with
other spills and spasms of anxiety. I make abstract ex-
pression, too, but for me, I feel such inner peace that I
can reach out calmly and draw a perfect circle or a
straight line in a gesture of serenity.
This book is by a master of an equally serene dispo-
sition (who has been suffering with great courage and
dignity from cancer for the last nine years) and is really
an extended memoir of both Fischinger and his remark-
able wife Elfriede. We have long awaited a full account
of Fischinger and Moritz is the ideal biographer, follow-
ing up his earlier magisterial study of the artist’s life in
Film Culture (No 58–60, 1974) and elsewhere. His con-
tinuing research on Fischinger is demonstrated in this
book’s bibliography, and he has now been able to give a
wide–ranging account of both the artist’s life and his
work.
9

THE BOOK IS WARMLY RECOMMENDED NOT ONLY TO DEVOTEES OF FILM AND
ANIMATION IN PARTICULAR BUT TO ALL WHO LOVE THE “INNER PEACE”
EXEMPLIFIED IN THE WORK OF OSKAR FISCHINGER.
We learn of Fischinger’s early love of music, which
was to be a passion throughout his life, of his graphic
ability and technical facility, all of which would assist
him in his pursuit of the ideal in abstract expression
both in film and in painting. We also learn much about
the culture of pre–Nazi Germany and the difficulties
arising from the new regime’s suppression of individu-
alism. The hardships suffered by Fischinger and his
family are clearly shown in context with the new Ameri-
can — and particularly Hollywood — society in which
the Fischingers found themselves.
Moritz lightly touches upon the resilience of both
Oskar and Elfriede and there are some charming anec-
dotes, which I won’t spoil for the reader, though the
meeting between Elfriede and Mrs. Merrill is particu-
larly delightful.
Moritz also describes the films of Oskar Fischinger
with lucidity, so that we can relate to the individual
works even if we haven’t seen the films. There is no
gobbledygook here, no newspeak so beloved by the
theorists of our day. Instead there is lucidity and clarity,
which shows the author’s immense range of knowledge
in many fields. Supporting the text are some splendid
photographs from many sources, including frame en-
largements from the films, some of which have never
been reproduced in color before. My only regret is that
we are not treated to more reproductions of the exqui-
site paintings that occupied Fischinger during his latter
years (see especially those on pages 140 and 142).
I should also have welcomed a little more detail
about the family photographs. There is a useful filmog-
raphy, testimonials from other filmmakers and artists,
some of Fischinger’s own statements and an excellent
bibliography. There is no index, however, which is a pity,
and the publisher has told us nothing on the cover or
elsewhere about either the subject or the author; how-
ever, these are minor cavils.
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
Oskar Fischinger, influencing such masters as
Alexeieff and Parker (who actually met at a screening of
one of Fischinger’s films), Len Lye, Norman McLaren,
Jules Engel to name only a few, has been honored with
a fine record by a remarkable writer and artist. The
book is warmly recommended not only to devotees of
film and animation in particular but to all who love the
“inner peace” exemplified in the work of Oskar Fisch-
inger. 
Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger
by William Moritz. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 2004, 256 pages and London, England: John
Libbey & Company, Ltd., 2004, 246 pages. ISBN:
0253343488 ($65.00)
DR ROBIN ALLAN has written widely on Disney and his doc-
toral thesis was expanded into book form as Walt Disney And
Europe: European Influences On The Animated Feature
Films Of Walt Disney (London: John Libbey, 1999). This was
shortlisted for the prestigious Kraszna Krauss Award for the
best book on the moving image in 2001 and it won the Norman
McLaren/Evelyn Lambert Award for the best scholarly book
on animation from the National Film Board of Canada. Robin
has lectured widely on Disney in the USA, Canada and Eu-
rope.
10

Con Pederson. Photo by William Moritz.
Left to right: Con Pederson, Douglas Trumball, and Benjamin Jackson
working with a multi-plane apparatus for Graphic Films’ To the Moon
and Beyond. Photo courtesy of Graphic Films.
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
Talking with
Con Pederson
by William Moritz
N EARLY MAY 1999, WILLIAM MORITZ VISITED WITH CON
Pederson, a visual effects pioneer, who worked
closely with Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odys-
sey. Credited as one of four Special Photographic Ef-
fects Supervisors on the film, he and Doug Trumbull
created a myriad of stars, planets and space ships,
plus the unforgettable stargate sequence.
William Moritz: So, when and where were you born?
Con Pederson: I just turned 65, which means I was
born in 1934, just as the Depression was easing up. We
lived up in the woods of Minnesota, but then we moved
to California in 1943. So from then on my childhood was
spent amongst airplanes; both my parents worked
building bombers and fighters. Where the LAX airport
is now was just bean fields, artillery emplacements,
barrage balloons and that sort of thing. I was selling
newspapers during WW II and it made an effect on me
in two ways: I think I’m very conscious of the global
character of the 20th century, and also I learned how to
scavenge, which I’ve been doing ever since.
WM: What led you into the film world?
CP: Accident! I think the fact that I grew up in Inglewood,
which isn’t far from Hollywood. After a couple of years
at City College, I went to UCLA, 1951 to ‘53. I eventually
worked on my M.A. but never quite finished because at
that point I discovered the animation school over in The-
ater Arts at UCLA. Somebody told me that it was a lot of
fun doing animation so I thought I’d try it, and made a
couple of student films. The next thing you know, I was
vacuumed up by Disney.
11

IN THE SUMMER OF ‘65 HE [KUBRICK] HIRED US TO GO OVER TO ENGLAND,
DOUG TRUMBALL AND MYSELF.
Con Pederson, along with Douglas Trumball, was hired to do star effects, but ended up doing much
more for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. © 1968 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc.
WM: What were your student films like?
CP: They were little cartoons, inspired by UPA, which in
those days was the avant-garde of animation. John
Hubley and the other UPA guys were doing two-dimen-
sional design with flashy colors, like Rooty Toot Toot.
Hubley was kind of an icon.
WM: So Disney hired you?
CP: Yes, I took my student films there. My instructor at
UCLA, Bill Shull, who had worked at Disney, thought
they might be interested in hiring me, primarily because
at that point I’d already written science fiction and got-
ten heavily immersed in rocketry and that sort of thing.
I don’t think they had ever hired a college kid before, but
they decided to take a chance on me for story. I began
working on their space documentary series, which got
me even more deeply involved. Their technical advisor
was primarily Werner von Braun, who was at Redstone
Arsenal at that time. It turned out to be fortuitous, be-
cause I was drafted into the army in fall of ‘56, and by a
circuitous route I ended up in Alabama working for
Werner von Braun. They had shipped me off to the First
Armor Division in Louisiana, from which nobody was
ever known to escape short of their time, but Walt Dis-
ney personally brought me to the attention of Werner
von Braun because they had just got an animation cam-
era there and didn’t know how to use it. The next thing
you know I was in a nice outfit of scientific and profes-
sional personnel at the Redstone Arsenal Army Post
and Missile Agency doing very short films to present
ideas to Congress, to explain what they were doing —
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
mostly secret undertakings of
the Cold War, atomic testing in
the Pacific for which we sup-
plied short-range missiles. I got
a look at what was going on in
astronautics at that time, which
was mainly propulsion sys-
tems.
Von Braun was primarily a
chemist. He had a couple of
hundred Germans there, whom
they had managed to get before
the Russians did. They had quite
a level of expertise. These peo-
ple were at White Sands for a
while in ‘46 and eventually end-
ed up in Alabama. We were involved with all the test
procedures for Cape Canaveral. We launched the first
satellite in February ‘58. It was an answer to Sputnik,
but it took us 40 months to put something up in space.
The first Explorer satellite was kind of fun. I worked in
graphic engineering, which did illustrations. Mostly we
worked on how to get to the moon. It was called Project
Nova, but actually everything about it was used by the
Apollo project. Our rocket was a much tubbier thing,
more like the Soviet rockets, but basically the plan of
taking off with a booster rocket, going around the earth,
going around the moon, landing on the moon, and then
going back up to the orbiter and bringing it back to
earth, plus, the propulsion system based on unsym-
metrical dimetholidozyne (which was von Braun’s fa-
vorite rocket fuel) — all of that was worked out at
Huntsville in 1957 and ‘58. We also did a lot of stuff
about Mars. Everyone was interested in rockets for
military use, and they were so efficient at testing things
that they were able to squirrel away hardware and stuff
that could be used at the advent of NASA.
WM: You were right in the heart of things there.
CP: Yes, but when I got out, I went back to UCLA to finish
my graduate work, moonlighting part time at Disney for
awhile. Then that petered out because General Motors
didn’t want to sponsor some of the stuff Walt wanted to
do, primarily a series on conservation which Walt
thought was necessary at that time. General Motors
said, ‘We don’t think that’s a good idea.’ Literally. So
Walt broke up the unit that had been doing the docu-
mentaries, and I worked on Pluto [the animated dog]
12

and stuff, but I really wanted to go back to school so I
took off. A couple of days after I began school full time in
‘59, I was hired by Graphic Films. They made me an of-
fer that was too tempting. I stayed there for six years,
doing mostly Air Force films on space.
WM: Was Graphic Films a private company?
CP: Yep. They’re still in business.
WM: Were you animating for them?
CP: I was directing for them at that point. That’s when
my son was born, so that would be ‘61. He’s now a pro-
fessor of psycho-linguistics at Oregon University. He’s a
world traveler, which I am not.
WM: You were a natural person to work on 2001 since
you had such an extensive background in both Space and
animation. How did you actually get onto 2001?
CP: We did some work at Graphic Films in ‘63 and ‘64 for
the New York World’s Fair, Flushing Meadows. It was
called To the Moon and Beyond. Such stuff was being
made a lot then because of Kennedy’s plan to go to the
moon within the decade. This was around the time of
Mercury and Gemini. I both wrote and directed To the
Moon and Beyond which was projected on a dome sur-
face in 10 perforation 70mm film. We did the film in
about five months. It was rather a rush. They had built
the theater, and were building the projectors but they
didn’t have anything to project. We, foolishly maybe,
leaped into the breach. It happened that Kubrick saw
the film later that year — it ran for awhile. He was inter-
ested in the space aspect of it and contacted our com-
pany. He then invited me to New York to see the script.
He had a studio apartment on the West Side which was
filled with storyboards, the development of 2001. It was
a great script.
WM: Were the storyboards a lot like the finished film?
CP: Not really, because an awful lot of them were atmo-
spheric. The original plan called for a large sequence of
other worlds, very imaginative, but very specific types of
worlds all over the place, to show the multiplicity of the
cosmos. There were hundreds and hundreds of pic-
tures of concepts and worlds, but it didn’t really look
like the story itself, the actual script, which nobody re-
ally saw. He had sold the film at that point to MGM. Bob
O’Brien, who was the President of MGM then, was
pretty much batting for him. It had a five and a half mil-
lion dollar budget, which was a lot of money in those
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
days. Now, you couldn’t get an actor for that. The script
itself was pretty neat. I was impressed and all excited
about it. The trouble was, Kubrick stayed in the north of
London and we were north of Los Angeles. (laughs) It
was difficult to provide ideas and layouts and concepts
Con’s first version of the Discovery spacecraft in 2001: A Space
Odyssey, an 18-inch model. Courtesy of Con Pederson.
for him, and he couldn’t really see tactically how we
would be able to work on the physical film with that dis-
tance between us, so in the summer of ‘65 he hired us to
go over to England, Doug Trumball and myself. Doug
was a young guy whom I had hired in ‘62 or ‘63 to do
airbrush work. He was a terrific artist, just out of
school, and fit immediately into the animation business
doing backgrounds.
WM: So he was working at Graphic with you?
CP: Yes. We worked together on quite a few jobs there
over a couple of years, and we both ended up going over
to England to do lots and lots of stars and planets for
starters.
WM: And the other two people who have credit: Wally
Veevers and Tom Howard?
CP: Wally Veevers was an old time special effects direc-
tor. He went way back to Hitchcock as one of the most
preeminent special effects directors in England. He
knew everything about movies you needed to know to
get things moved around. He was really terrific. I’d say
he was the main ingredient in the special effects with-
out a doubt, because every set up on every stage he had
engineered the way it was going to work, working
13

WE WERE REALLY ORDINARY PEOPLE, EXCEPT THAT STANLEY HAD THIS SENSE OF
ADVENTURE WHEN IT CAME TO FILMMAKING.
closely with the art department. The other name, Tom
Howard, was head of the lab, so his primary assignment
in the last year of production was to coordinate with
Technicolor because they did all of our film work.
WM: It is wonderfully done. All the work in the special
effects is seamless and there are no ugly borders show-
ing anywhere...
Con’s final version of the Discovery spacecraft in 2001: A Space
Odyssey, an 11-foot model. Courtesy of Con Pederson.
CP: Thanks to Tom Howard. See, it was conceived as an
art film, and the fact that we were pretty far away from
Culver City made us pretty free as far as doing the work.
Ultimately the film was printed in Culver City, of course,
at MGM. Harry Jones was the timer there. They had a
wonderful lab. I’d worked with them before. The final
cut was done at MGM after a run here for a few weeks.
Stanley cut 25 minutes from the film to tighten it up.
There are no dissolves in the film, no opticals, it was all
A and B cut, 65 negative. They made a protection inter-
negative, but everything was done in original Eastman
negative, so it has high quality. Stanley was always con-
cerned. He would call me up years later whenever they
would bring it out again to go look at the print to see if it
were scratched or anything. He was fanatical about
print and projection quality.
When I came back in ‘68, I took a couple of years off.
You know, that was a long time ago but I was kinda worn
out already. (laughs) I just started writing science fiction
and getting to know the High Sierras like the back of my
hand.
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
WM: 2001 is certainly different from the sort of science
fiction that they have made since then. The pacing is so
slow in a way and very grand, whereas the things they
are turning out now, like Armageddon, there is a cut ev-
ery two to three seconds.
CP: A lot of what looks like science fiction these days is
really car chases. They make as many car chases as
they can in Hollywood. It’s the concept of action. The
idea of doing a film that is an art film — that’s a dirty
word in Hollywood because nobody would go see it if
they thought of it that way. As a marketing thing, I think
it was an accident that 2001 was successful. I never
understood that. The first reviews, I have a stack of
them, were mostly negative. No one quite knew what
they were looking at, and they didn’t know how to view it.
But the generation of the ‘60s and ‘70s was such that it
became a psychedelic sort of model, which had never
occurred to us because I didn’t know a single person in
England that used drugs. We were really ordinary peo-
ple, except that Stanley had this sense of adventure
when it came to filmmaking. He was a cameraman. He
was a photographer. He was an extraordinary film-
maker. I once asked him kind of stupidly how he thought
a certain director would have done something we were
discussing, and he said, “How would I know? I’ve never
seen anyone direct.” That’s a good point. He was a self-
educated director. I also asked him why he ended up
producing all the time, because we had gone through a
couple of producers on the job, and he said, “You can’t
get a good producer. They can’t read your mind.” So he
was a do-it-yourself-er. He was a micro-manager. I
have nothing against that. We got along great.
Sometimes it worries me because I wonder how he
would have done something when I think of doing it my-
self, which you can’t predict. I think that unpredictability
is a big part of art, and basically Stanley was infatuated
with the lenses and cameras. He spent a lot of time
looking through cameras, the thing he knew best — un-
like, say, Hitchcock, who didn’t bother with that. He
would leave it to the DP. I quit directing after I left
Graphic and I never wanted to direct again, because I
considered it (if you’re ready for this) to be not a very
creative position. Too much of it is management. In or-
der to direct you have to spend a lot of time managing
and that means managing human relations, details, lo-
gistics, all of that stuff. Plus, I hate telephones. (laughs)
I went without a phone for two years after that project.
14

WM: I knew John Whitney pretty well and he had his little
sort of wire-frame version of the monolith and he
claimed that he had invented the monolith.
CP: Not quite.
WM: Well, I thought not, but he was so passionate about
things.
CP: We were trying to figure out a way to get him to work
on it because he had worked on a show I did in New
York, and oddly enough‚ the thing he was most inter-
ested in contributing to the film was sound. At that point
in his career he had started doing a lot of sound work,
music, and he was hoping to get involved in that aspect
of it. Doug and I were interested in the slit scan process,
although we hadn’t really gotten into it. There came a
point on 2001 when we were trying to devise a couple of
effects that needed some sort of stop-motion smearing
effect. We fiddled around with some things, but then
Doug went off and bought a Mechano set. The British
have incredible engineers. You can get stuff there that is
just remarkable. For about £100, we bought this huge
kit, like a tinker toy sort of thing, with which you could
build just about any kind of mock up of a mechanical
device. Doug actually built a little analog mechanical
computer out of it. One thing led to another and he
ended up using the same bug-eyed camera that we had
used to make the dome show for the New York World’s
Fair, which we had coincidentally brought over with us,
and built this big machine to do time lapse on a very
large scale. A five foot slit with stuff passing through it,
artwork on a big conveyor belt — and that is how the
stargate sequence came about, because we were look-
ing for something besides the wet paint stuff that Stan-
ley had done in New York, which was really his primer
for the film, no pun intended. It was a paint effect that
was done by a couple of guys from the Carolinas called
Effects Y’All. They had done this sort of carnival medium
of oil and water. They used different kinds of paint and
chemicals and shot it at about 60 frames a second. The
stuff was terrific. They shot an awful lot of stuff in New
York in ‘65 and that was some of the stuff he’d shown me
in ‘65 before the production started in England. It was
really beautiful. Most of what we saw became the foun-
dation of the Stargate sequence in 2001. One good story
about that: Stanley got those guys, or one of them, back
over to England to Borehamwood at MGM where they
took a big chunk of Stage 5 and built a big enclosure with
a kind of airlock, like a regular dark room. Wouldn’t let
anybody in. They didn’t want anybody to know how they
were doing this stuff, no matter where they were. They
spent about a month, shooting and shooting and shoot-
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
ing the same exact effects of paint swirling and that sort
of thing. They had thousands of feet of new stargate
material. Finally, they just closed it down, decided we
had enough so we could pick what we needed. Well,
later on Stanley’s wife, my wife, and I sat down and
culled through several hours of that stuff and I don’t
think we used a single frame of all that stuff that they’d
shot in England. Everything that was shot in New York
magically just seemed to work so much better, and we
never knew why. It was just amazing looking, and we
didn’t have to do anything to it. Although we did use
some of it, and retreated it optically. In fact, we spent
about a year making what we called ‘purple hearts,’
which were colorized versions of different effects that
were composited sort of primitively together.
That whole Stargate sequence replaced what origi-
nally was a trip through the cosmos to see where the
extraterrestrials were coming from. We had toyed with
the idea of the extraterrestrials being defined and ex-
plained by a narrator. We thought of different narrators
and I suggested a guy named Doug Raine who had done
a film on astronomy in Canada that was really great. I
got the film and Stanley liked Doug’s voice, but it turned
out that he had to have a new voice for Hal, the com-
puter, which was originally a woman called Athena in
the first version. Anyway, Hal 9000 needed a voice and
Stanley tried quite a lot of people for it, and didn’t care
for any of the voices. At that point, we threw out the nar-
rator — decided it was going to be too preachy, too
stodgy to have a narrator, and too much of a documen-
tary — so we tried Doug Raine as the voice of the com-
puter and the rest is history: he was perfect for it! But
originally he would have been the narrator of the film:
there was even a prologue in black-and-white, along
the lines of Cinerama, where you started in black-and-
white and open up, which is by now a well-entrenched
cliché, to mix a metaphor. For that we shot Carl Sagan,
and a lot of the eminent astronomers of the time, talking
about the cosmos. That whole thing was thrown out —
again it was too dry, too didactic. Went through a lot of
permutations, there was a stack of scripts. Arthur
Clarke would come from Ceylon and spend a few weeks
until he’d get worried about taxes and then he’d have to
leave the country and go on tour. It was entertaining.
I wish now I’d kept some of that stuff. I didn’t keep
anything from the picture. When we were still planning
to do a lot of other-worldly stuff, I spent several months
just painting pseudo-Bonestall “science fiction” things.
I don’t know what happened to those. They were proba-
bly destroyed, because everything Stanley could, he
destroyed. We had all these scripts and one particular
script I really wish I’d kept — I had no interest in keeping
that stuff at the time — but in this one, the first page, if
15

you turned it over, there was all this scribbling on it that
was obviously written during a conversation that Stan-
ley was having with Arthur and up at the top there were
a lot of doodles and in this scribbling handwriting were
sort of ideas: there was “2001” here and “an odyssey”
there, and then “an odyssey in space,” and there were
all these little trial balloons and down at the bottom
there was “2001: A Space Odyssey” underscored a
couple of times, all of this in Stanley’s ball-point. I just
realized a few years later that I should have kept that.
He burned everything that he could for a reason.
One day I was walking around toward Stage 3 and I
saw this airplane — they were making Battle of Britain
or The Dirty Dozen I think it was, because they had a
whole bunch of football players there from the NFL that
were portraying the dirty dozen. Jim Brown was there,
and I walked by this plane and thought, “That really
looks familiar.” I saw Stanley later on for lunch, and I
said, “You know, they got a plane out there that looks
like the bomber in Doctor Strangelove.” He says, “What?
Where?” I said, “Right over by Stage 3. They’re setting it
up for The Dirty Dozen or something.” So he says,
“Come on. Show me,” and we ran over and he looks at it
and he said, “Oh, my God!” You could just visualize Slim
Pickens hanging out of that thing. Stanley just freaked.
He called the studio and said, “You can’t do this.” At that
point he began to realize that he had a lot of stuff that
he’d shot in England on other projects that was in jeop-
ardy of being used again, so from then on he instituted a
policy of destroying everything.
WM: Slash and burn.
CP: Slash and burn so nobody could use anything that
we built again, including a lot of the models, some of
which were actually salvaged I guess. It’s funny because
you don’t know how to think about props in a movie.
They become valuable; antique collectors pick them up.
People sell autographed stuff. You see all this stuff and
you get a kind of scummy feeling about it. You don’t
know how to think about something that is, you might
say, a second-generation celebrity, in that there is a
cliché that has to do with people who are famous be-
cause they are famous and they are usually on the cover
of People magazine. Don’t ask me to name names.
(laughs) The idea of celebrity in America, and possibly
other places, is to me a little warped. (laughs) It is a little
frustrating because it isn’t a matter of envy that actors
get all the glory and all the money for speaking lines
that someone else writes. No one knows who writes a
picture unless they are famous for something else. So
as a one-time would-be writer and someone who has
done a lot of writing (and I’m sure you can sympathize
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
with this), I have a lot more respect for the writer any-
time than I do for somebody who follows after to per-
form it.
WM: One last question about 2001. Is the pacing all Ku-
brick’s? The Stargate sequence is really long; it is lei-
surely and grand and sort of builds and has a whole dy-
namic of its own. It’s much longer than any kind of
special-effect sequence would be in any other movie that
I can think of.
CP: Everything in that film was Stanley’s. Although we
did storyboards and planned everything out, we never
really had a sense of how long the overall film would be.
We estimated it to be pretty close to what the first re-
lease was, which was 2 1/2 to almost 3 hours. There
was an intermission. Though I once asked Ray Lovejoy,
who was the editor and everything else in the office, I
asked him some naive question about a rough cut and
he looked at me kind of cross-eyed and said, “Stanley
doesn’t do rough cuts,” (laughs) and I said, “Oh, really.
That’s a new one on me.” Of course he makes rough
cuts, everyone does — by definition it’s pretty hard to
start with a finished product! But I watched 2001 being
cut (because our offices were all right together, so we
were cutting in the same little building). It was going on
all the time. He would be cutting one sequence before it
was finished, while we were working on another se-
quence, and obviously it was episodic, but Stanley had
the last say on the timing of everything.
Also, the sequences were done out of order. The
last sequence shot was “The Dawn of Man,” which
ended up being the first sequence in the film. It was
entirely different from anything else, so it was shot with
an entirely different frame of reference. Prior to that,
the last sequence was really the ending, which was the
bedroom scene. The Stargate sequence that proceeded
that was made all through ‘67. The first stuff that we
shot, in December of ‘65, mostly at Shepperton because
they had the biggest sound-stage in England, was the
block, the monolith sitting in the big excavation, the
TMA1 site, the Tycho Magnetic Anomaly One. We shot
the film, I remember, Wally Veevers had the film in the
can from that set in December of ‘65, latent film images
that were not developed, locked off cameras, a lot of
footage, and Doug and I had to put earth and stars in
that later on. It sat in a can on the roof of the lab building
for two years, exposed film, undeveloped, and we finally
got around to doing the mock-up plaster work for the
horizon and put the stars and the Earth in there, and we
said, “Gee, I wonder how this footage is going to work.”
We had some test footage and it looked okay. Would it
be steady? Would the color have changed? Because
16

people are not in the habit of leaving film in the can for
two years. But it was perfect. Perfect. One of the things
that I did was to keep track of all those things, the foot-
age, the film itself, the negative. We had a lot of stuff up
on the roof in a vault that you had to walk across a board
on the roof to get to it. Kind of bizarre. (laughs)
WM: So what did you do after 2001?
CP: Well, I worked on a novel that I am still working on
after 30 years, but I don’t take it seriously. The trouble
with writing is that I always sort of enjoyed treating it as
a kind of cartoon. I like the fact that I started out as a
cartoonist more or less, advertising art and commer-
cials not withstanding, so I guess what writing I’ve done
has been sort of verbal cartoons, sort of tongue-in-
cheek maybe. I felt that if I wrote really serious stuff,
which I have a drawer full of, when I’d look at it later, my
mind set was so different that I thought, “This is crap.”
So I guess I didn’t have to be a writer for any particular
reasons. My verbal skills were sufficient so that now I
entertain myself by constructing crosswords. I started
high class crosswords last year. I have had several in
the Wall Street Journal, a couple in the Washington Post.
Crossword construction has been the hobby that has
replaced stamp collecting. It’s an unappreciated craft,
because it’s exceptionally difficult and there are only a
few people who are really good at constructing cross-
words, by that I mean the Sunday puzzles, the good
ones that are always entertaining because of the theme.
That’s kind of replaced any thoughts of making a movie
someday.
WM: Are you still doing special effects here now?
CP: Yeah. It is all computerized now for the last twenty
years. I started doing a lot of programming back in the
mid-seventies and early eighties. I guess it has been as
the computer, specifically the micro-processors, got
cheaper and the cost of using them for graphics be-
came less and capacity grew, it has been one of the
more thriving industries in the world. The interesting
thing to me is that we end up hiring so many people
from abroad. That will probably change but I think there
are a lot of other countries that give you the impression
they are ahead of us in some way. This company, Metro-
light Studios, has been here almost twelve years, and
it’s such a polyglot place. We have people from Spain,
Italy, South America, the Orient. It’s just remarkable
what an international thing the computer is. It probably
symbolizes not only the computer itself but computer
graphics in particular. The methodologies have been
established pretty rapidly. That might be true of Edi-
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
A model of the space station used in “The Blue Danube Waltz” section
of 2001. Courtesy of Con Pederson.
son’s time too because it didn’t take long for the tele-
graph to establish itself, and electric lights, the tele-
phone, film and the automobile — so there was a period
of growth in the late last century. It was extremely rapid
just as it is in the last 20 years of this century. I think
there’s a punctuated equilibrium, as it were, about the
evolution of technology that is kind of elastic; there will
be sort of bursts, the silicon chip made a burst, then
kind of eased off. Other things took off, now it’s all pe-
ripherals that are trying to match the speed of the chips,
because the big problem is getting out of that micro-
world and into something that is tangible, so everybody
is trying to figure out what kind of storage material is
the best. I’m not a technological person, I only dare
dabble in it because I don’t make my living in the me-
chanical aspects of computers at all. I couldn’t put one
together. Strictly software. But yeah, we do a lot of film
work. It’s fun.
WM: Computers also actually make animation and spe-
cial effects international. Just recently in Animation
World Magazine we had an article about an animation
studio in Madagascar which is linked to Korea and
France. They can instantaneously, on-line send what
they are doing to the three different places, all of whom
are participating on the same film...
CP: When we were working last year on a Tom Hanks
project for television, the Apollo project, From the Earth
to the Moon, which was the same title of course at the
Jules Verne book, we had some Russians, they were
17

based in San Diego, and had done some exploratory
work together with them and we ended up sending stuff
in a trial job to Moscow. It turned out, not only did they
have the same software and hardware, Silicon Graph-
ics, that we had, they had the newest stuff. They had
better stuff than we did. And they were complaining
about how hard it was to get into L.A. because of the
electronic traffic on the Internet here. It’s so slow. I
thought it was amusing that here’s a country virtually in
shambles and they are first class when it comes to
computer graphics. That is the anomalous aspect of
Russia. They were the world leader in sound technolo-
gy, music and sound effects, and then they have these
soft spots economically. This whole global thing is fas-
cinating, but Madagascar! That is wild.
WM: Yeah, it is amazing. At the time that 2001 was made,
did anyone actually think that computers would end up
doing the sort of things they have done in terms of this
global village?
CP: If you look at the brain room scene in 2001, you see
we had little Plexiglas modules that were keyed in and
out of the memory — that was kind of an abstract rep-
resentation of the brain room of a computer, it was as
though you were down inside of a chip. I remember that
was virtually pre-chip.
WM: Oh yeah. They still had cards.
CP: Yeah, it was much later that I learned how to use key
punch and paper tape. I learned to read paper tape
when we were running our motion control stuff because
we were not ready for computers yet. Our first com-
puter in the ‘70s was an old, hand wire-wrapped core,
16 kilobyte memory surplus computer that had a lot of
flashing lights on it, but was like a calculator. That’s how
I learned. I learned FORTRAN on one of them things.
But the brain room sequence, I think, showed you a
world which is totally unlike what we are going to have
in a year and a half! Maybe if it had been called “3001” it
might have been more accurate, but less saleable. That
was true of 1984, the Orwell book. When 1984 came
around, everybody said, “Gee, look how different it is.
It’s nothing like that! There’s no Big Brother and all of
that stuff.” So you have a problem in dealing with a large
audience, apart from science fiction people, when you
put science fiction out in front of a larger audience, the
dates are too small. You are not looking far enough
ahead. Most science fiction movies in Hollywood are
made so that we are in the year 20-something or the
year 23-something. My goodness, that is incredibly far
in the future, but I spent a couple of years working on a
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
script which is a billion years in the future and I thought,
“I’m never going to be able to sell this, will I?” (laughs)
WM: I wonder if you are right, about how it’s going to be.
CP: Nobody wants to think that far ahead. It’s because,
when you look at it, Star Wars for instance is kind of a
western. It is kind of a morality play, which has an awful
lot of mythological models for the kind of story that it
usually involves and I remember an incident when Ku-
brick called me just after he’d seen Star Wars, it was I
think almost two years after the first Star Wars and he
had just seen it, believe it or not. And he said, “It’s a
comic book! It’s a comic book!” and I said, “Stanley, it is
making a fortune.” And he says, “Well, think of what we
could do now. They got all these computers. You got all
these computers now. Think of what we could do. You
got any ideas?” And of course, I had just finished this
thing that takes place a billion years in the future, but I
had no desire to go back to England to do another sci-
ence fiction film. So I said, “No, Stanley. I haven’t been
keeping up with science fiction lately and I really don’t
have any ideas.”
He had sent me a copy of The Shining shortly before
that. In fact, he wanted me to kind of comment on what
I thought about it, because he knew I was into science
fiction. Well, I had never read Stephen King. I didn’t con-
sider him a science fiction writer at all, because it was
more horror stories. I don’t begrudge him all that fame
and success, but when you come out of science fiction
and see somebody on the edges of it making a lot of
money and nobody, Arthur Clarke included, as good as
he is, makes any money in science fiction. But I read the
book, The Shining, in a snow storm. It snowed six feet
that night up in Mammoth. I read the whole book cover
to cover in a night. That was a very sympathetic way to
read the story, it takes place in the Rocky Mountains in
a hotel. So I wrote a letter to Stanley and I made some
suggestions, I don’t remember all, but one thing, I
pleaded with him, knowing him, “Don’t shoot in Scot-
land. Don’t shoot in the Swiss Alps. Shoot in the Rock-
ies. You gotta get real Rockies.” He said, “I know the
Rockies. You know they are different from any moun-
tains in the world. They are distinctive.” Surprisingly he
did a second unit shoot in the Rockies and that was
good, because he is so, was so, kind of hermetically
sealed as it were, kind of isolated. He wouldn’t fly even
though he went about getting a pilot’s license at one
time. He will only come off the island on ship. That was
his way of thinking and of course, he never did leave
England. So I thought maybe he would try to build a set
that was too big. But he did do everything in sets in Eng-
land. Everything he did was under control because it
18

I THINK ART INVOLVES TOO MUCH MYSTERY
AND I DON’T REALLY WANT TO KNOW WHY WE
DO ART...
Con Pederson and a model of the spaceship Discovery used in 2001: A
Space Odyssey. Courtesy of Con Pederson.
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
was more important to him to be able to walk from one
room to another, or from one place to another and have
it all there. He didn’t want to go very far for anything. I
resisted going back to England, even though I some-
times had the urge, just because three lousy winters
there and that’s why I didn’t live in Minnesota anymore.
(laughs) I didn’t like the weather.
Well, be that as it may, he was great. He was won-
derful. A generous man. Brilliant guy and surprisingly
folksy. Probably when you think about Hollywood very
few people knew him here. People would go over there
briefly and maybe work on a picture or something like
that, but working with him for 2 and a half years very
closely was a very special thing. He made an effect on
me and oddly enough I think I made an effect on him too.
I sort of sometimes made sense to him which I am sur-
prised to say. He often needed somebody to bounce off;
he was always asking questions about whether he was
doing the right thing. People don’t know that about him
but he was not like most artists; they are always kind of
adventuring, they are always sort of wondering how this
is going to work. He was always doing things where
there was a high probability of failure but he substituted
something for fear and I don’t know what it was. You
could say it was bravery or recklessness but I don’t
know that much about human nature, and I decided
when I flunked psychology in college that I wasn’t going
to find out. I think art involves too much mystery and I
don’t really want to know why we do art, and why we’ve
been doing art for 35,000 years that is as sustainable as
the ice age paintings that communicate so well to us
after all those years that we say, “That’s an old master-
piece, that’s really amazing!” What drives us to draw
with sensitivity, to communicate something that we see,
not just what it looks like but what it is. It’s the visual
arts and the correlative verbal arts of writing and ex-
pressing ideas, like poetry for instance. I think all art-
forms are equally wonderful. I wouldn’t have said that
when I was younger. I like film less now than I did then,
and I like the avant-garde and experimental less now. In
the long run, my favorite films are really from the 1940s
— John Ford’s things, but Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and
the Beast is really the most perfect, wonderful film ever
made. Why would anyone dare to make a cartoon ver-
sion of it? And, by the way, 2001 isn’t even my favorite
Kubrick movie: I’m afraid that’s A Clockwork Orange. 
19

Personal Tribute by Yann Beauvais
Tribute to a Friend Bill Moritz
I have a memory of Bill arriving to do a show in the late
70s in Paris. It was at la Maison des beaux-arts and he was
presenting the LA Coop. The show was really amazing. In
contrast to the people who were listening to him, hardcore
filmmakers, structuralist groups, he appeared like a kind of
smiling elf. He spoke about different issues that we were
not much aware of in France at that time, like his references
to the light shows, and the music scene in California. He
showed a group of films, and there was this incredible
impression of someone coming from another space, another
time. Already one could feel his incredible generosity
towards the audience as much as towards the works. I was
impressed by the attention and respect that he had for the
work he was showing. I was not used to seeing someone
presenting and not being aggressive, Bill was generous and
camp. One of the first memories I have of Bill.
I don’t think he spoke of Fischinger at that time. The show
was about the west coast films of the late ’70s. This was a
rare opportunity, as usually what was shown reflected the
domination of the east aoast. Later we started to share a
mutual enthusiasm for visual music, and that occurred while
I curated a show called Film Music 1986. I got in contact
with him and from then we started a friendship. At that
time I did not know that much about his own writing. Bill
helped us (Deke Dusinberre and I) to access a text of Oskar
Fischinger for our publication. Not knowing so much about
the field, I did not realize he had already written extensively
about it.
Then I start to see him with Elfriede Fischinger, to
distribute Oskar Fischinger’s films (that was in the late ’80s).
At that time we had already the Len Lye films and some
other works related to visual music. I have fond memories
of Bill discovering that we screened Laszlo Sandor’s
Magyar Triangulum and that he had not seen it. I gave him
some photos, different things and we started to exchange
information, documents...
In 1987 I began seeing Elf and Bill in Los Angeles. Each
time I went either to the west coast or to New Zealand, I
would stop in Los Angeles to see them. It was not only for
business.
They came to see us (Miles and I) when in Paris. Bill would
stay sometimes when their hotel was not part of their visit.
He knew that he could stay whenever he wanted. He wanted
to know a lot about some of the filmmakers he’d met in
the mid 70s that he was fascinated by, like Jakobois, Michel
Nedjar, etc.
One thing that I noticed about Bill that was funny. He
was shocking people by affirming his gay identity thru little
gestures. I have a memory of scent and the color floating.
He would put on musk oil - the scent was quite present,
as well as the color of purple and violet floating around the
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
room. It appeared as a statement, for him to speak at these
academies, these formal institutions. His appearance did
not seem serious enough for these academic circles, which
require less nonchalance and more reverence. I found it
delightful.
I really enjoyed spending time in L.A. with Bill, not only
that he drove us around and showed Miles and I different
places that were important for cinema, but also for gay
culture. I remember us going to a cemetery to see some
famous tombs, going to Griffith Park and so on. But we also
went to see the houses of filmmakers and he would tell us
unknown stories about abstract experimental filmmakers
who were gay. And that I thought was quite important of Bill
to have never put aside the sexuality of the filmmaker that
he was dealing with. He always paid attention and tried to
contextualize them with that aspect when needed. I thought
it was important to know that James was gay. It made a lot
of sense. I know that it will not change the way I look at his
films, but it brings me something that was lacking in the
comprehension.
It did explain how Bill’s films were received. In his
filmmaking, when he was framing gay issues, automatically
those films were put aside, (by many of his contemporaries,
visual music filmmakers and scholars) because they were not
pure enough because they were sexual.
All those films that he did about the fairies, each time
we screened them in France, they upset people, including
the gay community, especially because they were not
showing cute young icons but were showing bears. It was
very shocking for people to see that type of men naked on
screen. It didn’t fit the myth of the gay culture. This was
another landscape for France in the ’80s. The only film they
could relate to was Star Trick, with all the people coming
out of theater. At least in France, as well as in Los Angeles,
people saw him more as a scholar than a filmmaker, and
did not know how to handle his own work. I thought it
was contradictory to what he was promoting with his
scholarship.
But one has to understand that he loved opera and that
opera has to do with staging. Look at his films. In Star
Trick, he gets to the core of gay representation artifice not
that far from art deco. One can easily find another linkage
to abstract art — these are different patterns of exploring
aspects of oneself.
Another memory I have is when Elfriede and Bill did a
fantastic performance of the Lumigraph at the Louvre. They
arrived dressed in black. It was extremely strange to see Bill
without color. However, they produced very beautiful colors
and shapes during the performance. It was really amazing to
see their live performance of Fischinger’s machine. I was like
seeing one of the Studies live. And [See Beauvison page 21]
20

[Beauvais from page 21]
you could recognize when Bill was doing the movements
and which were Elfriede’s, because he was taller.
I remember seeing Wu Ming, at Wonderland, on a tape.
We were mesmerized not just by the film but also by what
he explained after the screening. That was the quality of Bill,
his ability to share his love and passion and make you feel
it also, to embrace it. And so often along with it he had this
kind of “naughty” smile.
In ‘97, Miles and I were helping Bill to sort through his
collection of posters to be included in the shooting. We were
staying at his place, which was the Fischinger house. He was
supposed to shoot a scene the day after in one of the halls at
CalArts, which was deserted on that summer day.
Earlier in 1996, I did a recording session for the French
version of All My Lost Lovers. I came to L.A. from San
Francisco to spend two days with Bill. At the airport I was
quite shocked. Bill had lost a lot of weight. We ate at a Thai
place and went to see Hall of Mirrors. The day after, early in
Personal Tribute by John Canemaker
Contratulations, Bill, on
publishing Optical Poetry and
for a lifetime of achievement in
protecting and promoting
experimental film!
Love,
John Canemaker/Joe Kennedy
Joseph Kennedy, William Moritz and John
Canemaker at abstract expressionist Jackson
Pollack’s house (now a museum) in Springs, Long
Island, New York, Summer 2000.
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
the morning, we went to CalArts to record the soundtrack in
French. I decided to not read too much in advance of what I
was to say, to have a freshness in it. I read it once to double
check that the French was correct (Bill had already translated
it). It was a nice session. Then I flew away home.
The next time I met him, in July 2001, he was really sick. I
spent a week with him, going different places. It was already
difficult for him to do anything other than teach, but his
book project was stimulating. The red car that I rented was
everything but discreet, which he loved. When I saw him in
Paris in 2002, Bill was no longer in good shape. He could
not go to places by himself. We decided at that time that I
would go back to L.A. when I will need him.
Then, last January, Cindy Keefer asked me to come. Bill
hoped to see me one last time. I succeeded in getting to L.A.
at the end of February to say farewell him.
See you soon, Bill.
Yann Beauvais
Personal Tribute by CalArts
CalArts
Mourns the passing
of our beloved colleague
Dr. William Moritz
21

SOUND PERCEPTION
The Influence of
Sound and Music
on Images
by Bärbel Neubauer and William Moritz
UST AS MANY DIFFERENT TECHNIQUES CREATE MOV-
ing visual images, so do many different instrumen-
tations create musical sounds. Images (ie. colors,
forms, materials, juxtapositions and contrasts,
etc.), and sounds (ie. tones, melodies, rhythms, or-
chestral colors, harmonies and counterpoints) function
the same in different media.
The soundtrack has a lot of influence on the image,
and on how we perceive the imagery of a film. It might
be an animated or live-action film, long or short, docu-
mentary or abstract, music video or narrative — every
film has its own special character in its image and
sound, which together forge a dramaturgic develop-
ment, an “animation” that paces the piece.
Sound and music define and interpret the visual im-
age by expressing mood and directing our attention.
Sound is emotionally direct, so it is a powerful tool.
EXAMPLES TO CONSIDER
I have created some examples of the functions and
influence of sound and music on visual imagery. For the
basic picture, I made a simple animation of a kiss, a line
drawing that will remain open to several interpretations
influenced by the use of sound. Further versions with
more elaborate colors and animation demonstrate
other uses of music and sound. The story always re-
mains the same. See the basic drawing “Kiss Basic
Kiss.”
First I show how the image directs the sound, or,
vice versa, how the sound directs the image. In “Basic
Shot 1,” the visual image makes the couple kiss. In
“Shot 2 + Rhythm,” the kiss creates the shot and starts
the rhythm. These same systems are used in all kinds
of film. In music animations, a very skillful use of both is
necessary; just making the image and sound synchro-
nize is not interesting.
Next in “Kiss Basic Kiss,” “Cicadas,” “Kiss Basic
Start” and “Basic Snore,” I concentrate on sounds like
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
Kiss Basic Kiss
atmospheric noises and original sounds, including the
storytelling aspect of sound.
“Kiss Basic Kiss” and “Cicadas” both have a natu-
ralistic sound. Please note the difference: the line
drawing of “Kiss Basic Kiss” is funnier, so that it could
be used as a spot by itself. “Cicadas” works out both im-
age and sound naturalistically, in the action and the
surroundings — it tells all of the piece’s details, and
would demand a longer film and story. “Kiss Basic
Start” has no natural sound, but rather another noise
that describes what is going on inside the two heroes
— a subjective mode of storytelling. “Basic Snore” adds
a third person to the plot, telling the story from an ob-
server’s viewpoint. I’ve adapted the timing and se-
quence of animation to this end.
All sounds, especially atmospheric noises, can be
combined with or included in music. Techno uses many
sampled natural noises for rhythm.
MAKING MUSIC
The third section of examples deals with music as a
soundtrack. Music is built by using three main levels:
rhythm, layering and melody. Both in music and imag-
ery a certain rhythm must lead through the work and
give a constant consistent structure to the piece. The
rhythm defines the kind of “dance” that the animation,
and music and sound, are performing. It is much easier
to watch animation films if they are accompanied or di-
rected by a strong rhythm. The rhythm divides time into
many pieces, like frames. It directs our attention when
we watch the image moving and hear the music floating.
It is a pattern that serves our brain for orientation, rec-
ognition, and remembering.
Since this is music, it must not only be a technical
pattern, but must also express a certain feeling, by the
instrumentation, sequence, length, and dynamics of the
beats/tones. Many different instruments may play the
22

Kiss Jazz
rhythm, and which instruments are chosen determines
the character of the music. Older classical music often
had no separate section of rhythm/drums, but rather
played rhythm within the melody using strings and wind
instruments. This created a spherical or spiritual mood
— quite contrary to African drums, which have a really
strong body. The darker and rounder the bass notes,
the more reality and physical power the music gets. The
higher, brighter and lighter the sounds are, both in
rhythm and the music in general, the more spherical
and spiritual it becomes.
Basically natural instruments have more presence
in tone body than electronic ones. They sound nearer to
the spectator/listener and more personal. Electronic
voices do have more space; how wide and cosmic they
seem varies with panorama and stereo effects. Using
these aspects, you can again define space with sound.
If classical music contains a human voice, it gets
more body again, even if there are no drums. (See later
“Kiss Classic.”)
The speed of rhythms in general takes its orienta-
tion from the human heartbeat. Music that vitalizes you,
but does not upset you, has a speed like your pulse: over
60 beats per minute, but not more than 70 beats. These
numbers may be multiplied in layers, varying with the
density of rhythm elements in the music.
I made a simple song. “Shot 2 + Rhythm” starts the
rhythm. Then “Rhythm + Layer” adds a layer. The
layer(s) fills the space of the music. In this case, the
layering adds quite a bit of space to the heroes’ feelings.
Layers are multiple swinging voices, like strings, cho-
ruses, etc. Electronically, they are sampled sounds
from sound modules or self-sampled noises. Sampling
works well for layering, as it establishes large rooms/
spaces, and fills them easily. Also, as mentioned above,
one can attain additional definition to the event arena by
using stereo panorama effects. Layers are said to make
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
it easier to listen to music. On the other hand, layering
can also soften and subtract some of the music’s pro-
file. It depends on which message you want. If you don’t
have any layering, the solo voice has to be more elabo-
rate. (Later listen to “Kiss Romance”: the single voice of
the trumpet is stronger than either a layer, or the trum-
pet with a layer, would be.)
INFLUENCING THE STORY
In “Rhythm+Layer+Voice+Major,” a piano plays the
melody/voice. The voice plays/sings the melody of the
music. It tells the story of the piece.
“A Melody in Major” bears a happy harmonic mood.
However, in “Song in Minor,” I used the same music, but
played the layering and melody in a minor key: the
mood gets sadder and darker. The image is changed a
little, too.
In “Kiss Old Hit” the music interprets the line draw-
ing again, but differently from the other versions. This
led to the next step: still using the same story, I worked
out the images more specifically for different kinds of
music, so the image responds to the sound.
“Kiss Jazz.” Jazz music refers to universal/natural
laws and expressions. It is rather hard to play, because
the scales change very quickly. It is usually underlined
by a “walking bass” that goes on and on swinging. The
bass is quite differentiated, having many more tunings
than the basic tones of the melody. Therefore, the bass-
Kiss Romance
ist must master all musical knowledge of scales. The
piano must also continuously swing and swing, like wa-
ter. The percussive rhythm section — drums, hi-hats,
brushes, agogos, wooden sticks, etc. — changes
rhythms and instruments frequently. Plus, the human
voice is also frequently used like an instrument. In this
example, I used a simple instrumentation (though the
music is not simple), and a simple pattern of brush dots
23

in the image. With this music, the image seems light in
character.
“Kiss Romance.” The timing is soft and slow. The
main colors blue and pink. The music contains no layer-
ing. A sense of a large space is created by the very per-
sonal feeling and the expressiveness of the trumpet.
“Kiss Techno.” The music dictates a quicker timing,
and strong colors like red, black, orange, etc., as well as
hard contrasts, like black and white patterns. This ex-
ample was worked out on a computer, as a digital medi-
Kiss Classic
um seemed quite relevant. I used a rough soundtrack,
with very little melody, to contrast with the other music.
The difference between classical music, for example,
would not have to be so big. Techno melodies and har-
monies are very similar to classical ones, only slightly
reduced and set to a much stronger rhythm. Instrumen-
tation of layers are used percussively, as in the “orches-
tra hit” in “Basic Shot 1.” Also, as in Jazz, the whole
swinging can be turned around in reverse, gaining more
elastic tension. Certain Techno groups do use elements
of Jazz in their compositions and I like that a lot.
“Kiss Classic.” The voice lends a personal feeling to
the whole harmonic building and layering of strings. If
we heard only a string ensemble, the music, and there-
fore, the whole film would have less presence.
“Kiss Experimental.” The instrumentation of the
music is reduced and humorous with the voice of the
song experimenting with the upper tones, acting ani-
mal-like and rhythmic. The image is also reduced and
graphic, with drawings and colors that are applied ab-
stractly, as well as figuratively.
“Kiss Disco.” This animation could be used for sev-
eral different kinds of music. In this example, I used a
tension-filled but still ambiguous rhythm for demon-
stration. The image is — also ambiguously — narrative,
turning to abstract metamorphoses and back to figura-
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
tive. In both “Kiss Disco” and “Kiss Techno” I changed
from figurative to abstract and back. “Kiss Experimen-
tal” combines both abstract and figurative in the same
image.
SOUND, COLOR, IMAGERY AND ART
When I was working on my first abstract film in the
‘80s (I had done live-action and narrative animations
before that), I spent about half-a-year painting meta-
morphoses of colors and forms with oil pastels on
small sheets of half-translucent paper while listening
to music all day long. All of the images I painted came
from the subconscious. Sometimes shapes and colors
like creatures appeared in the paintings. I had no con-
crete plan of what should happen. I just went on painting
and it developed itself. After six months, the metamor-
phoses faded out. I don’t know what the “director” of
this piece was: whether it was the colors themselves, or
if the colors were engendered by the various music to
which I was listening. When I began the piece, I had only
the “A” of the tuning fork in my mind, with no sense of a
time or place, nor any orientation from a particular mu-
sical instrument. Musicians tell me that this “perfect
pitch” is quite rare, and much appreciated. I made a
soundtrack based on it, with a sung triad on this “A” and
recorded drops of water. When this project was finished
and I began to work on others, my perfect pitch “A” dis-
appeared as suddenly as it had come. This experience
told me what I had always known without ever trying to
prove scientifically: colors and sounds are the same.
They follow the same laws. These laws are natural, and
can be used for any purpose.
Meanwhile, I read in a book that the ratio between
color and sound frequencies is P x 1,000,000,000; the
vibration of colors is faster than the vibration of sounds.
The “P” stands for the Greek “Pi” which in geometry
represents the relation of the radius of a circle to its
circumference. Significantly, abstract animation works
with circles a lot. Moreover, we talk about tone colors. It
might be nice to construct a computer program that
would translate sounds into colors and vice versa.
(Maybe it already exists?) It would be of no use for mak-
ing live-action or animation that involved spoken dia-
logue and the representation of natural things. It would
only offer new ways of experimenting with visual music.
An Austrian writer recorded birds and played their
calls at different speeds. She found out that the music of
many classical composers can be assigned to different
kinds of birds. That was in the ‘70s. Today we can sam-
ple all possible kinds of sounds very easily. Sampling
allows one to vary the tempo of vibration. One can use a
pure sine-wave as a basic vibration. One can build up an
orchestra of natural sounds, using stones or tennis
24
 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

balls for percussion instruments. From these basic

frequencies of vibrations one can build up numerous
variations by using filters (like color filters...) and by
changing the tempo and direction of the vibrations. In
this way one can alter the “material,” the character and
effect of the tone. Sounds that have a lot of high-fre-
quency vibrations like Asian instruments, all natural
materials and percussion instruments/materials are
very suitable for sampling.
Laurie Anderson has been translating time, move-
ment and dance into sounds electronically in her per-
formances for the past 20 years. Meredith Monk deals
with the same artistic issues, using mainly the natural
voices of humans for experimenting with the upper fre-
quencies of tones. Her first tapes were of music made
entirely with her voice. Now she sings like a bird and
growls like an angry animal. The mood of her music is
quite precisely defined and the listener is encouraged to
generate their own images: singing like a bird suggests
very high trees where birds feel at home...
Meredith Monk now performs in theaters, together
with musicians and accompanied by surrealistic imag-
ery, dreamlike in their manipulation of light and shadow,
but still communicating a lot of serious issues, like as-
pects of social dialogue and communication.
Long before Meredith Monk, abstract animators
like Harry Smith and Hy Hirsh painted films for Jazz
concerts to accompany the music; to make the music
visible, and the paintings move. For abstract animation
both natural and electronic music, or a combination of
both, are fine. If one takes natural instruments, it dou-
bles the direct effect. For example, in live-action, it
would bring a close-up even closer. If one uses elec-
tronic sound, it may establish a brilliant contrast or
bring some neutral elements into the work. 

BÄRBEL NEUBAUER is an independent filmmaker based in

München, Germany.

25
 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
Personal Tribute by Giannalberto Bendazzi

The highest praise to Bill from a friend,

admirer and disciple.
— Giannalberto Bendazzi

26
 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

ILLUSTRATOR METAMORPHASIS

In Passing…
Elfriede Fischinger
by William Moritz

LFRIEDE FISCHINGER WAS BORN SEPTEMBER 17,

1910 in Gelnhausen (near Frankfurt), Germany.
Her father owned a prosperous drug store, and
she attended the prestigious College of Design
in Offenbach. In 1931 one of her abstract textile
Elfriede Fischinger. designs won a prize and was published in Em-
broidery and Lace magazine. It was also exhibited in
Berlin, and Elfriede went there for the week-end. Ani-
mator and painter Oskar Fischinger had borrowed a
considerable amount of money from Elfriede’s father,
who asked her to drop by for a surprise visit to find out
if Oskar was really working on worthwhile projects,
and not just squandering the borrowed money. It so
happened that on this particular week-end Oskar’s
Study No. 7 was playing as a short with the premiere of
a new Elisabeth Bergner movie, and Oskar took Elf-
riede to see it. Bergner happened to be Elfriede’s fa-
vorite movie star, and she was dazzled by meeting her
in person, but also thrilled by Oskar’s short animation.
She longed to stay in the glamorous capital, but one of
the conditions of her schooling was that she spend at
least a year’s time working in one of the government-
sponsored Durer Houses, which sold homemade arts
and crafts to help support folk handicraft traditions.
Afterwards, Elfriede did return to Berlin and began
helping with Oskar’s animation projects, along with
Oskar’s brother Hans, and Elfriede’s school chum,
Gertrude Gudjongs, filling in charcoal shapes, painting
colored forms on paper, and patiently clicking the sin-
gle frames of the camera after small changes had
been made in the artwork. Oskar and Elfriede were
married late in 1933.

27

ELFRIEDE ESSENTIALLY SUPPORTED THEIR FAMILY OF 5 CHILDREN
AS A FASHION DESIGNER...
The Nazi government was hostile to abstract art,
calling it “degenerate,” and Oskar’s outspoken leftist
sympathies placed him in real danger. Fortunately,
early in 1936 they were able to emigrate to Hollywood
where Oskar, who spoke no English, worked briefly for
Paramount (Oskar’s short Allegretto), MGM (Oskar’s
short Optical Poem), and Disney (designs for the Bach
episode in Fantasia). When the war began, although
they were refugees, had applied for U.S. citizenship
and even had children born in America, Oskar and Elf-
riede were officially designated as “enemy aliens,” and
Oskar was prohibited from working in any communi-
cations industry. Orson Welles hired him briefly and
paid him cash without listing him in the books, and the
Guggenheim foundation gave him very modest sti-
pends, but Elfriede essentially supported their family
of 5 children as a fashion designer for Mascot Studios,
Susie’s Sweaters and Andrea of Beverly Hills, as well
as countless jobs baby-sitting, cooking and other
household tasks. Even when Oskar’s film Motion Paint-
ing won the Grand Prize at the Brussels Film Festival
in 1949 (it was recently also added to the Library of
Congress’s list of artistic treasures), he still could find
little support for his animation, and more or less gave
it up in favor of oil painting which he could do easily and
cheaply at home.
After the death of her husband early in 1967, Elfrie-
de embarked on the project of restoring his films. When
they fled Germany, they were not allowed to bring any
film or equipment with them, so Oskar had only single
prints of some of his films that MGM and Paramount
had brought from Germany among their own film cop-
ies. Fortunately, their son Karl was in the American
army and was assigned to the occupation troops in Ger-
many. In the early 1960s he returned home to California,
and brought with him as “household goods” all the
films, papers and artworks that Oskar had had in his
Berlin studio. Elfriede had stored them in the basement
of her family’s drugstore in Gelnhausen — and they had
miraculously survived when Gelnhausen was bombed!
By the time they arrived in America, Oskar was already
in poor health, but he tried to go through all the films
and label them, though some of the labels were cryptic,
and some inadequate (one advertising film had the
simple notation “shit”). With seemingly tireless energy,
Elfriede set about reading all the documents, and with
the help of Bob Pike of the Creative Film Society and
William Moritz, she had new safety negatives made for
some 80 films, many of them made in the 1920s before
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
she had known Oskar. She received one grant, from the
National Endowment for the Humanities, which allowed
her and her daughter Barbara to restore an unfinished
film of Oskar’s from the 1940s.
Elfriede traveled widely, lecturing with Oskar’s
paintings and films at such venues as the Montreal Expo
of 1967, the Berlin Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art
in New York, Telluride, and the Venice Biennale 1982, as
well as major animation festivals such as Ottawa and
Zagreb. She received a Gold Medal from the President
of Italy, and lifetime achievement awards from the Royal
Academy of the Netherlands, the International anima-
tion society ASIFA and Women in Film. She was a juror
for the Montpellier Festival of Abstract Film and the
American Film Institute. She published half-a-dozen
articles in magazines and art exhibition catalogues, and
appeared in several television documentaries, includ-
ing the CBS Camera III profile of Oskar Fischinger, the
British Abstract Cinema, and the German Longing for
Color about the development of various film color pro-
cesses in the 1930s. She also gave generously of her
time and support to things in Los Angeles: hosting
many traveling filmmakers and scholars at her home in
Laurel Canyon and later Long Beach; supporting Fil-
mex, Theatre Vanguard, The Visual Music Alliance, The
Goethe Institute (where she performed on Oskar’s Lu-
migraph color organ); visiting classes at UCLA and Cal
Arts; participating in symposiums at the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Long Beach Muse-
um, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among
others. She was bright and active until her last days —
helping to mount a show of Oskar’s paintings at the Jack
Rutberg Gallery; travelling to New York in November
1998 for Anthology Film Archive’s “First Light” festival
of abstract experimental film; attending screenings at
the Goethe Institute of Baerbel Neubauer’s films, and of
Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon, for which Oskar had
done special effects.
Elfriede died quietly in her sleep at her home in
Long Beach on the night of May 13, 1999. She is survived
by two sons and two daughters, as well as several
grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She was bur-
ied next to her husband in Holy Cross Cemetery in Cul-
ver City on May 19, 1999. 
28

Personal Tribute by John Canemaker
Opitcal Poetry and Bill Moritz
Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger
(John Libbey Publishing and Indiana University Press,
2004) is the magnum opus of Dr. William Moritz, world-
class film scholar and peerless champion of experimental
film and animation. The book is a culmination of more
than three decades of research, study, writing and thinking
about the complex life and working methods of Fischinger,
the grand master of abstract film and painting.
Bill was destined to write this book and is uniquely
qualified to do so. Through the years, he has spread the
gospel not only according to Fischinger, but according
to numerous other experimental filmmakers as well.
His informative lectures have packed the house at film
festivals, museums, art galleries and universities around
the world, where he has elucidated on the work of Bertold
Bartosch, Hans Fischerkoesen, James Whitney, the
UPA. Studio, Maya Daren, Jules Engel, Len Lye, Harry
Smith and Mary Ellen Bute, among many others. His
History of Animation course is a popular mainstay of the
Experimental Animation curriculum at CalArts.
In part, Bill’s passion for experimental film in all its
forms comes from being an experimental filmmaker
himself and from his spiritual nature. Like Fischinger, he
is a Buddhist who has explored alternative ways of seeing,
communicating and interacting through the film medium.
Bill Moritz is a poet; an illuminating writer of sensitivity,
charm and wit, who is capable of making the most esoteric
processes of filmmaking accessible and exciting to both
the cognoscenti and the general public.
As an intimate friend of the filmmaker’s widow Elfriede
and the Fischinger children since 1970, he was granted
unprecedented access to films, articles, paintings and
eyewitnesses to the Fischinger story in America and abroad.
The result of their trust and cooperation is an articulate,
candid, keenly detailed and compassionate biography of a
20th century genius and pioneer of “visual music.”
“Midas Well,” the pseudonym Bill Moritz occasionally
Dr. William Moritz inside Jackson Pollack’s studio (left). Bill relaxing among the hollyhocks (center) at John Canemaker and Joseph Kennedy’s
Bridgehampton, Long Island home, Summer 2000. Bill with Elfriede Fischinger and John Canemaker on the CBS special Camera Three.
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
affects for his writings, perfectly describes his open, easy-
come/easy-go, ultra-relaxed approach to worldly affairs
and activities. But underneath lies a passion for his work
and a keen discipline that enables him to always meet the
deadlines for his often-challenging writing and lecture
commitments.
To have known Bill Moritz for over a quarter century
has been one of life’s great joys for me and my partner Joe
Kennedy. Bill’s droll humor, profound serenity and vast
knowledge of the fine and popular arts, culture, music and
film have never failed to inform, stimulate and entertain us.
Trips to Los Angeles over the years invariably began
with a visit and dinner with Bill Moritz and Elfriede
Fischinger. After her death in 1999, we continued to make
a beeline to see Bill first thing when in L.A.
We recall especially enjoyable conversations over green
corn tamales in season at El Cholo on Western Avenue or
a little Thai place in Studio City. L.A.’s The Independent
Magazine (April 2000) described Dr. Moritz as one of Los
Angeles’ “hidden secrets and special resources” and a “local
hero” for his film restoration and preservation activities.
All his many friends around the world love him for that,
of course, but also for his courage. Diagnosed in 1995 with
throat cancer, Bill fights a brave and wearying battle with
the disease. Yet he has never complained and strives to
keep his commitments, as well his dry wit about himself
and his condition.
When, after especially grueling sessions of radiation
and chemotherapy, we would ask how he was, he most
often replied with a chuckle and droll insouciance, “Still
hopelessly glamorous!”
We congratulate and salute you with love and
admiration, Dr. William Moritz — author, scholar, friend
and glamour puss!
— John Canemaker
3/2/04
29
 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

SOVIET MASTER

The Spirit of Genius:

Feodor Khitruk
by William Moritz

O MANY, FEODOR KHITRUK MAY BE MORE OR LESS AN

unknown quantity. His prime films were made dur-
ing the “Cold War” years, and did not find wide distri-
bution in the west, even though they won prizes at
film festivals like Cannes, Venice, Oberhausen and
New York. Khitruk himself was active in ASIFA, and
appeared at many festivals as a distinguished guest,
without his films being seen too often... Otto Alder’s
fascinating 1998 hour-long documentary, The Spirit of
Genius, goes a considerable way toward redressing the
situation. Spoken mainly in German, with an English
version that uses both subtitles and some voice narra-
tion, Alder’s film documents not only Khitruk’s life but
the whole milieu of soviet animation.

A BRILLIANT MAN
The Spirit of Genius . Photo © Otto Alder. At the very beginning of the film, some 10 people,
including prominent animators like Yuri Norstein and
Eduard Nazarov, give brief testimonials about Khitruk.
Their statements approach idolatry: Andrei Khrza-
novsky hails Khitruk’s films as “absolute masterpiec-
es,” Mikhail Aldashin says Khitruk is “the personifica-
tion of goodness” and Aleksandr Tatarsky says he is like
Christ... The viewer may suspect that some flattery or
blind adulation lies behind this acclaim, but when Kh-
itruk himself speaks, it is easy to understand. He is wise
and philosophical: “The animator, like God, breathes a
soul into his creations...,” “Animation contains all the
other artforms: the art of acting, the concentrated emo-
tion of poetry...,” “It takes two to make art: the artist and
the audience....” Moreover, he is generous, patient, wit-
ty, urbane, etc., etc., etc.
Khitruk’s life itself is fascinating. Born in 1917 of a
Jewish mother and an ardent Communist father, he
went to school in Moscow at the time when the great
films of Eisenstein were screening at the local cinemas.
In 1931 his father was sent to Berlin on goverment busi-

30
 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

AT THE VERY BEGINNING OF THE FILM SOME 10 PEOPLE...GIVE BRIEF TESTIMONIALS

ABOUT KHITRUK. THEIR STATEMENTS APPROACH IDOLATRY...

ness, so Feodor attended a school of commercial art in

Stuttgart and reveled in the glories of the classical mu-
sic of conductor Otto Klemperer and the great tenors
Josef Schmidt and Richard Tauber — and he saw them
banned with the rise of Nazism, before the family re-
turned to Moscow in 1934. A screening of Disney’s Three
Little Pigs made him want to be an animator, and he
joined the state-run animation studio in 1937, where he
worked primarily on children’s films. He was drafted
into the army, and served until 1948 since his knowl-
edge of German and Germany made him an ideal trans-
lator for the post-war occupation. By 1949 he was back
in the government animation studios, working as an
animator for the “Russian Disney” Ivan Ivanov-Vano on
features like The Snow Queen, and shorter films like the
delightful The Magic Toyshop and a version of Pinocchio,
Buratino. Around 1960 he became a director in his own
right, and began to produce art-films with serious mes- Norstein and his mentor, Khitruk. Photo © Otto Alder.
sages, creating for Russia (despite the stern censorship
of the arts) something like the revolution in graphic legendary unfinished The Overcoat, as well as a close
style of UPA and Zagreb, and the dark social criticism of look at the jointed cut-out figures with which Norstein
Polish animators like Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowc- works. Khitruk played a key role in protecting and fur-
zyk. The success of films like Story of a Crime, Film Film thering Norstein’s work during the gloomier soviet
Film, Man in a Frame and his Winnie the Pooh adapta- times, and Norstein’s fond warmth for Khitruk is evi-
tion, The Little Bear, made him the dean of a whole dent in their visit. Norstein reads from some of the witty
generation of young animators, whom he taught and Pushkin sketches which he had animated for Khrza-
supported tirelessly. novsky’s film, and he excuses his own tardiness in fin-
ishing The Overcoat with a marvelously appropriate
A FASCINATING PEAK joke: “A man in an asylum was writing a letter. Someone
Otto Alder uses many clips from Khitruk’s films asked to whom it was addressed. ‘Myself,’ he replied.
throughout the documentary, sometimes to express ‘What is it about?,’ the other man asked. ‘I don’t know, I
information about artistic matters or societal events. If haven’t received it yet,’ the writer replied.” When Kh-
one does not know the films as a whole, it would be hard itruk takes his leave of Norstein in front of his snowy
to get an idea of their individual structure or meaning. Moscow studio, Alder appropriately recalls the wintery
For example, when Khitruk visited the Disney Studios in sequence from Norstein’s Tale of Tales in which the boy
Hollywood, Woolie Reitherman told him that he thought remembers his father trudging through the snow. The
Khitruk’s version of Winnie the Pooh was better than the father in Tale of Tales, however, seems rather stern and
Disney version — but we would not be able to judge mean, while Khitruk (and Norstein) seems rather like
whether that were true from the excerpts in this docu- the personification of goodness. 
mentary. Ideally, the documentary should be distributed
(as the National Film Board of Canada did with Norman To obtain a copy of The Spirit of Genius, contact:
McLaren’s Creative Process) in a two-tape set, with one Tag/Traum. Cornelia Volmer. Weyerstr. 88. D-50676 Co-
containing a selection of complete Khitruk films. logne, Germany. Tel.: +49 221 235933 Fax: +49 221
In addition to Khitruk’s own work, the film contains 233894 E-mail: volmer@tagtraum.de
generous excerpts from a spectacular 1929 film Post,
animated by Mikhail Tzekhanovsky in the sleek dynamic
style of the soviet Constructivist art movement. The
closing sequence, in which Khitruk pays a visit to Yuri
Norstein, contains a few priceless minutes of Norstein’s

31
 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

Personal Tribute by Harvey Deneroff

Memories of Bill Moritz

Though I probably crossed paths with Bill when we both
went to the University of Southern California (USC) in
the 1960s, neither of us had any memory of each other.
Among other things, we both served as teaching assistants
to Arthur Knight in the Cinema Department at different
times. But by the time I arrived to pursue a Ph.D. in film
history at USC, he probably had left the department to get
his doctorate in Comparative Literature. (I don’t blame him,
as the Cinema Department really did not develop a credible
Cinema Studies program until the 1980s.)
I first recall seeing Bill when he gave a presentation at
New York’s Museum of Modern Art on the films of Oskar
Fischinger, probably in the 1970s. However, I only began to
know him after I returned to Los Angeles in 1979, where he
had become a fixture in local animation circles and was often
seen in the company of Elfride Fischinger, Oskar’s widow.
We started working together after I founded the Society
for Animation Studies in 1987. When I asked him to help
plan for the Society’s first conference, all he seemed to
want to know is where and when to show up. I’m delighted
he did, because his contribution to the first conference
at UCLA in 1989 was invaluable to say the least; and the
screening he organized of Los Angeles-based independent
animators was one of the highlights of an amazing
conference. And he continued to contribute and contribute.
After he helped organize an SAS conference in 1992
at CalArts, he ran for president when I announced my
resignation. His tenure as SAS president was less than
successful, and he stepped down after one year, but
I remain grateful he was able to take over what was
sometimes a thankless job.
Subsequently, as editor of Animation World Magazine,
I frequently turned to Bill as a writer and translator. (His
linguistic skills, as others have pointed out, were almost
as amazing as his knowledge of animation.) It was during
this period that he developed the cancer that would plague
his later years; he visibly lost weight, but he never lost his
sunny disposition.
My last encounters with Bill were when I was organizing
the 2002 SAS conference in Glendale, when he supported
my (ultimately failed) effort to stage a screening of Lotte
Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed with live
orchestral accompaniment, agreeing to write the program
notes if necessary. He was unable to present a paper at
the conference, but did show up to check out a panel
discussion on experimental animation. Although his
physical appearance had obviously deteriorated, he still
had that twinkle in his eye that seemed to be his hallmark.
And it is that twinkle and all it represents that I will
always remember about Bill.
— Harvey Deneroff, a former editor of AWN, Inc., is a
London-based freelance writer and consultant (through his
Animation Consultants International, www.deneroff.com).

Personal Tribute by Karl Cohen

Bill Moritz was an amazing guy. We rarely saw each other since I live hundreds of miles north of L.A. and rarely travel,
but when I contacted him with a research question he went out of his way to be helpful and to provide me with a wealth
of information. He knew my aunt and uncle who live in L.A. since the mid-’60s, so I’ve gotten a dose of his great dry
wit and rich knowledge of numerous topics on several occasions. I think it is great that Animation World Magazine is
honoring him as he has contributed a great deal to our knowledge of animation as a fine art medium.
A personal experience was my once asking Bill about a prewar German animator named Peroff. He provided me with
some information and much to my surprise a few days later I was sent a tape with one of the artist’s work on it along with
lots of other rare gems! Animator Steve Segal told me he had a similar experience. He said, “It’s sad to remember most of
those films were sent to me by Bill Moritz. I was just talking to him one day about some film or another. A few days later
a tape arrived filled with two hours of works like those. So as you watch that video have a pleasant thought for the very
generous Bill Moritz.”

— Karl Cohen is a frequent contributor to Animation World Magazine, teaches animation history at San Francisco State
and is the author of Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons and Blacklisted Animators.

32
 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

FILMSTRIP ABSTRACTION

The Film Strip Tells All

by William Moritz

EN LYE AND NORMAN MCLAREN MADE SUCH AN

impression with their abstract films painted and
scratched directly onto film that when some other
cameraless film begins to screen at a festival one
often hears several disgruntled voices saying, “McLar-
en and Lye already did this” — as if nothing new could be
done with the technique. Drawing or scratching directly
onto film strips is just a technical means, and nobody
would think of saying, “Painting on cels? That’s already
been done, so I won’t watch this new film… ” Several
people like, the Italian brothers Arnaldo Ginna and
Bruno Corra, the German Hans Stoltenberg and the
Belgian Henri Storck, painted abstractions on film be-
fore Lye and McLaren, but these films do not survive for
us to see or judge. Films like Lye’s Colour Box and Free
Radicals or McLaren and Evelyn Lambart’s Begone Dull
Care are superb masterpieces that one can see over
and over, and remember fondly. Plus, the tradition of Linear Dreams . © Richard Reeves.
direct abstract film continues: the great Basque painter
Jose Antonio Sistiaga made a feature-length direct ab-
stract film, Ere Erera Baleibu Icik Subua Aruaren, re-
leased in 1970, while Lye and McLaren were still alive.
Believe it or not, all 75 minutes of it are fascinating, with
a cumulative satisfaction. Sistiaga’s 1989 7-minute Im-
pressions in the High Atmosphere is a breathtaking
masterpiece. A central circle, stable except for its fluc-
tuating enamel-like textures, is surrounded by rest-
less, swirling currents. His 1991 14-minute Nocturne is
again a deeply moving, and very beautiful, film.

TWO ADDITIONS TO THE TRADITION

Two younger filmmakers have also devoted them-
selves to making abstract films directly on the filmstrip:
Richard Reeves in Canada and Bärbel Neubauer in Aus-
tria and Germany. Their fine work demands special at-
tention both for its excellent craftsmanship and its
beauty. Richard Reeves had made five short works be-
fore the current Linear Dreams. The last of these, the
1994 one-minute Zig Zag, shows not only the fine sense

33

Richard Reeves working on Linear Dreams. Photo courtesy of Darlene
Amendt.
of rhythm and design necessary for the composition of
visual music, but also a nice sense of wit: an abstract
figure is buffeted back and forth between the geometric
swings.
RICHARD REEVES’ EVOCATIVE IMAGERY
Linear Dreams, at seven minutes, has an epic
sweep. It begins with a pulsating sound like a heartbeat
and images of a throbbing red circle with nervous,
scratched lines touching it from the sides, as if they
were electric or nervous impulses that were feeding it
vital energy. In rhythmic bursts we see a rich variety of
textures and mandala-like circular configurations
turning in counterpoint to linear formations. Occasion-
ally, we catch almost subliminal glimpses of strange
creatures, perhaps the totem animals of a shaman’s
visions. Toward the end, the abstract mandalas begin to
yield to images of mountains, single at first, then mov-
ing across a long range of peaks, again suggesting a
shaman’s flight. However, the “energy” mandala reap-
pears at the very end for a neat closure.
The sound, also hand-drawn by Reeves, consists of
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
very beautiful visual images ranging from simple con-
glomerations of circles and triangles to elaborate
structures like peacock feathers, snake skin, or spotted
hides of exotic animals. Occasionally these drawn
sounds were processed through regular electronic
sound equipment to give them an echo or reverbera-
tion, which works very well with the fast-paced, evoca-
tive imagery.
Reeves worked for three years on Linear Dreams,
from 1994 until early 1997, using a variety of techniques,
including scratching, painting in layers, and airbrush-
ing. All the work was well worth it. The film is fine, and,
like good pieces of music, bears seeing often, numer-
ous times, as each viewing yields new surprises and
fresh perceptions.
BÄRBEL’S LOVELY ABSTRACTIONS
Bärbel Neubauer made some 20 representational
short films in the 1980s. Her lovely 1993 Saturday After-
noon evokes the mood of a pleasant holiday by largely
abstract images, with occasional glimpses of a stair-
case, a window, or other objects woven into the abstract
textures as transformations, so that a cluster of dots fly
away as birds.
The 1994 Algorithms is wholly abstract, and the
animation exceptionally fine, with lush textures, some-
times like leaf patterns or butterfly wings, sometimes
plain, sometimes with colors, but almost always lay-
ered, with complex figures and motions on more than
one level at the same time. In one sequence, a three-
dimensional triangle (drawn with thickness) rotates
complete turns while other elements and background
textures all perform movements and changes of their
own—an astonishing accomplishment for imagery
drawn and painted directly on film. The sense of color,
by the way, is also exquisite, with an excellent balance of
delicate shades and robust hues on the various forms
and background textures.
The 1996 Roots continues in the same vein as Algo-
rithms but the complexity of layering is miraculously
even more intricate. A variety of figures—circles with
spokes, stars, clusters of lines, floral motifs—move at
the same time (up to 20 figures at once) in intersecting
trajectories, passing behind and in front of each other.
At one moment a ball with a reflection on it turns com-
pletely around while the complicated movement contin-
ues behind it.
34
 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

For all of these abstract direct films, Neubauer

composes and performs her own music: something
unique in the annals of absolute film (except, perhaps
for some of the middle Jordan Belson films). She com-
bines a mixture of rhythmic elements that she can pre-
record on electronic samples with live performance on
clarinet and other instruments. These compositions
have a very personal sound, casual and relaxed, and
well-fitted to the mood profile of the visual imagery.

MOONLIGHT AND CRAFT

Neubauer’s latest work, Moonlight, has taken a
new technical tack: it is scratched into black film stock
rather than painted on clear film stock. One is reminded
immediately of Len Lye, who made a similar change
from early painted films to the late black-and-white
scratched masterpieces such as Free Radicals. I am
happy to report that the analogy holds parallel in that
Moonlight has that same magical quality that Free
Radicals does, although it is fundamentally quite differ-
ent and wholly original. Stan Brakhage said that his film
Mothlight showed the world as a moth might see it, but
I always felt it was a little bit more frenetic than the
moths I knew. Neubauer’s Moonlight, however, does
have some authentic flavor of how a night creature
might see its world. Scratched into black emulsion, so
that little edges of green and gold remain around some
things, we seem to move through grasses and leaves,
see stars, and the reflection of the moon mirrored in a
pool of water. Intricate beaded strands, as if dewdrops
clung to a spider web, move past little blossoms and Moonlight . Bärbel Neubauer.
branches. A nocturne to reckon with.
One of the other miracles of Moonlight in particular,
Personal Tribute by Myron Emery
and all Neubauer’s abstract films: she does not use any
editing. All of the effects, the layerings and the preci- William Moritz
sion movements, are rendered directly onto the same
filmstrip, frame by frame, with no chance for mistakes. Gone,
This is a world away from McLaren who, at the National far too soon,
Film Board of Canada, could animate in short pieces of
film, painting in black on clear leader, then have the Gave
scenes colored by optical printing and edited so that more than most.
only the good parts were used. Not that McLaren wasn’t
an excellent artist who couldn’t do very precise work— Gracious
quite the opposite. However, he didn’t do everything that guide to countless young, old,
can be done with the direct film, and fortunately, we inexperienced and veterian.
have new brilliant artists like Reeves and Neubauer to
carry on in fresh territory.  Thankfully Bill was recognized as the immensely
important authority he was years before now.
We are certainly less without Bill Moritz

— Myron Emery

35

Personal Tribute by Janeann Dill
I am so deeply sad at this news, as many of you are as
well, I’m sure. Bill was my teacher at CalArts and was
solely responsible for placing me in the position of being
the official biographer of Jules Engel. Bill, who nominated
me for that position, and Jules would often say to me
(especially when I was feeling overwhelmed with the task
at hand... enough to scare anyone, I think, no matter how
experienced a writer). “Now don’t you forget! Bill Moritz is
the one who nominated you for this!” (Jules would pick up
on the smallest hint of loss of confidence and this was his
way to bolster that.)
I had written on Jules under Bill’s guidance in a class
that he and Christine Panushka instigated at CalArts in
1992 called The Aesthetics of Experimental Animation. I
well remember that they taught this class out of love for
our field and the absence of scholarly authorship. They
both took on this class adding to their teaching load for
no additional compensation by the institution. In that
class I wrote a paper on Jules for the SAS Conference and
presented it when SAS was held at CalArts the spring of
1993. Maureen Furniss subsequently published that article
on Jules in Animation Journal. I also well remember that
this newly created journal was birthed for similar reasons
as the class: an absence of published scholarship in our
field at that time. We have come a long way since.
Bill’s life and work informs in a visceral, pedal to the
metal way — for this, I am indebted to him as a brilliant
mentor from the depths of my heart. I thank him also for
Personal Tribute by Barbara Fischinger
We are deeply saddened at the passing of our dear friend
Bill Moritz. His passing leaves a great void in the film
world and in our hearts.
Bill became part of the Fischinger family beginning in
1969, ultimately becoming a special friend and brother,
in addition to his work on Oskar Fischinger. He took part
in all our ups and downs, celebrating and mourning. My
mother, Elfriede, came to depend on him to help her with
my fathers’ work; Bill had the time, devotion, passion and
knowledge.
Together Elfriede and Bill were able to garner more
attention for visual music and Oskar than either could
have alone. She opened some doors for him but he was the
film historian who sought and gathered the knowledge.
Together they traveled from venue to venue all over the
world. Bill could never resist a good book or music store
and they both were on the hunt worldwide for books about
visual music and related subjects.
Bill’s greatest loves were these films he showed to the
world. (Not just Oskar’s but Belson, Whitney, Jules and
others). He loved art in all its forms passionately, more
than a connoisseur — a worshipper, a lover. He was deeply
spiritual and also a hedonist, enjoying the pleasures of the
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
the impassioned and joyful spirit he brought to life in the
work of Fischinger as well as many other filmmakers in
animation. I remember Bill’s being asked to the Sorbonne
one semester for a visit. I asked him what he would be
doing there and he gently, unobtrusively commented that
he was serving on a doctorate defense committee for a
dissertation on Maya Deren. I was thrilled and floored at
the same time. Firstly, I was once in that doctorate program
until I bumped up against the French exam that I was
required to take before graduating. I had lived in France for
four years and that was absolutely of no help to me when I
saw that exam. Not only was Bill the extraordinary scholar
in film (at-large), his command of the French language
(along with about 5 others, including Sanskrit) was so
perfected that he could participate in a doctorate defense
in France in the mother tongue. I often told him I would so
love to download his brain! He always smiled when I said
that to him.
One last note, which somehow comforts me: Bill died
right after what would have been Jules’ 95th birthday,
March 11, 1909.
A gentle man, a gentle soul, and a very generous Dr. Bill…
Janeann
— Janeann Dill, M.F.A., M.A., B.A., Jules Engel biographer
and artist in residence for the Creative Alliance at The
Patterson, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
world. Material gain was never his concern. He would give
it all for free, to share with all.
Bill and I shared some of those loves, especially music.
We both loved Handel. He would make tapes for me
sometimes and we often discussed the limited availability
of Handel’s work.
Elfriede died thinking Bill had beaten the cancer
and that he would be here to continue his work with
Oskar’s legacy. She loved Bill. She felt she had a dear
friend to wander the world with. They talked daily; she
worried about him if he didn’t call. He made time for her
personally, not just about the archive, something she
had not always had from Oskar. I was pulled into their
relationship. I watched him nursing many friends in the
last stages of AIDS. Yet he resisted help from friends, never
asking, never complaining. Valiantly fighting, quietly, to
keep teaching, learning and spreading his love of visual
music.
I have lost a dear caring friend and brother. I shall miss
him always. There were so many sides of Bill — I was still
learning about him and from him.
— Barbara Fischinger, March 2004
36

Stuttgart:
A Splendid Festival
HE NINTH STUTTGART ANIMATION FESTIVAL TOOK
place from April 3 through April 8, 1998. I flew in on
Swissair, and I thought the festival had begun early
since the videos on passenger safety were all com-
puter animations, with svelte passengers who could
really bend double and curl up to get the life vests
from under the seats. Stuttgart is a fine old city, with
elegant palaces and gardens that were home to the
princes of the Swabian state of Baden-Wurtemburg,
and imposing modern skyscrapers from its more re-
cent hosting of major industry, like the Mercedes-Benz
company. It rests on the Neckar river which flows from
Heidelberg in the north to the Danube and the Black
Forest in the south, one of Germany’s finest vineyard
stretches. Stuttgart also boasts a superb Art Museum
that seemed to have two good examples of everything,
as well as a wonderful temporary exhibit of more than
100 photos and objects by Man Ray.
A WELL-OILED MACHINE
The festival centered around the huge Maritim Ho-
tel, where many of the festival participants stayed. The
main screening room, the Old Riding Hall, was in this
hotel, as was the festival information center. A portable
tent just outside provided drinks, light snacks, and a
convenient meeting or resting place for the festival go-
ers. The second main screening area was a concert hall
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
TRICKFILM FESTIVAL
by William Moritz
less than a block away which also contained a bar and
restaurant, as well as exhibition rooms (with a display
of Yoji Kuri’s artworks), a special animation book shop,
and a computer area where people could browse the
Absolut Panushka animation web site. Three other
screening places were a few blocks farther away in the
lively downtown business district. Plus, a few special
events, including demonstration workshops with the
jury members (I overheard one festival-goer say that
the highlight of the festival for her was being able to
touch Barry Purves’ puppets...) and an exposition of
Ladislas Starevitch puppets and designs, took place at
the more distant Film Academy in Ludwigsburg, which
was easily accessible by subway (as was everything
else...). The festival was well-publicized not only in local
media, but also in Germany’s major news-magazine
Spiegel. Some of the screenings were attended by at
least 40,000 people.
THE PROGRAMS AND EVENTS
The programs offered at the festival were rich and
diverse. In addition to the regular competition screen-
ings, a special Young Animation competition gave a
$20,000 prize to one of the student films from 39 differ-
ent schools worldwide. Another competition screening,
“Tricks for Kids,” provided an international selection of
films for children every afternoon. A “Best of Anima-
37

tion” series concentrated on the 20 years from Nor-
stein’s 1975 Heron and the Crane to David Anderson’s
1994 In the Time Of Angels. A series of feature anima-
tions included Raoul Servais’ Taxandria, Pierre Hebert’s
The Human Plant, and Svankmajer’s Conspirators of
Pleasure. Other programs screened films by the jury
members; a survey of Japanese art animation as well
as an anime retrospective; programs of commercials,
MTV videos, special effects and computer graphics;
retrospectives for Yoji Kuri, Magnus Carlsson, Marjut
Rimminen, Jiri Brdecka and Marv Newland; and mid-
night shows of classic American cartoons, from Dis-
ney’s Alice in the ‘20s through Betty Boop and George
Pal’s Jasper, Tashlin and Avery, to UPA’s Mr. Magoo. If
you’d already seen these, you could go to the usual mid-
night parties...
Some 60 films in competition screened in six pro-
grams, which were repeated a second time for the con-
venience of the audience. Aside from the excellent pro-
jection — a giant screen with clear focus in all the
various formats — the competition programs seemed
unique to me, a veteran of dozens of festivals, in that
obviously someone had looked at all the films carefully
and put them together sensitively into programs of a
certain common style, mood, and subject-matter,
which made for smooth viewing and a heightened, com-
parative critical discrimination. The program booklet
also listed filmographies for most of the filmmakers, so
one could see the difference between someone like
Daniel Szczechura who has made some 25 films since
1960, and others who just began a few years ago, or who
have made only a few films. The Jury consisted of Rus-
sian Garri Bardin, Dutch (Canadian) Paul Driessen,
German Thomas Meyer-Hermann, French Florence
Miaihle, and English Barry Purves. The choices could
not have been easy, because there were many fine and
diverse films among those selected for competition.
Since Stuttgart is held every-other year, films made in
late 1996 were eligible for competition, which meant
that a number of the films had been seen and won priz-
es at other festivals, an increasing problem with the
proliferation of festivals... The unfortunate results, I
suspect, is that those “deja vu” films really have a
harder chance at the prizes, even if they are obviously
the best.
THE PRIZE WINNERS:
The grand prize of $7,500 (15,000 DM ) went to How
Wings are Attached to the Backs of Angels by Craig
Welch, National Film Board of Canada — a chilling sur-
realist guignol in the tradition of Jan Lenica, finely de-
tailed cel animation, excellent Normand Roger sound.
Jury comment: “For its brilliant draughstmanship and
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
the density of the icy, nightmarish atmosphere it cre-
ates.”
State Capital Stuttgart Award: The equivalent of U.S.
$7,500 (15,000 DM) went to Pink Doll by Valentin
Olschwang of Swerdlowsk Film Studios in Russia —
tale, drawn on paper almost in a children’s style, of a
little girl whose mother has a lover and so, gives her a
doll as a present to distract her, which doesn’t quite
work...
Jury comment: “For its sensitive depiction of childhood
anguishes.”
International ProSieben Award for Animated Film (to
promote the acceptance of animation as an art form):
$10,000 (20,000 DM) to The Great Migration by Yuri Che-
renkov, produced by Folimage in France — a charming
story of migrating birds who get lost in a storm.
Jury comment: “For a film flawless in every element.”
Outstanding Children’s Film: $2,500 (5,000 DM) to
Charlie’s Christmas by Jacques-Remy Girerd of Folim-
age — very much in modern children’s book illustration
style, and nearly half-an-hour long.
Jury comment: “This complex story is full of humor,
humanity and touching observations.”
Three Public Prizes were awarded by viewers of the
regional television network (SÜDWEST 3), which broad-
cast a selection of films over a three-day period and
tallied viewer response:
$7,500 (15,000 DM) First Prize: Death and the Mother by
Ruth Lingford of the British company Ownbrand Anima-
tion Ltd. — a 2-D computer graphic which looked much
like Masereel wood-cuts, telling the tale of a mother
who pursues Death when he takes her child.
$5,000 (10,000 DM) Second Prize: The Devil Went Down
to Georgia by Mike Johnson, listed as a puppet film
(though PDI got a credit) - charming visualization of the
Charlie Daniels country music classic.
$2,500 (5,000 DM) Third Prize: Wheel of Life by the Brit-
ish artist Vera Neubauer — a very demanding 16-min-
ute mixture of live-action and object animation on bibli-
cal and mythological motifs, with feminist and ecological
overtones.
International Mercedes-Benz Sponsorship Prize for
Animated Film $20,000 (40,000 DM) scholarship-grant
to Un Jour (One Day) by Marie Paccou of the French
company 2001 — a sharp and moving 2-D computer
38

A NUMBER OF THE FILMS HAD BEEN SEEN AND WON PRIZES AT OTHER FESTIVALS,
AN INCREASING PROBLEM WITH THE PROLIFERATION OF FESTIVALS...
animation, in a simple black-and-white graphic style
again reminiscent of wood-cuts, depicting a woman’s
reminiscence about her husbands or lovers. This prize
includes the realization of an independent production in
conjunction with a one-year scholarship at the Fil-
makademie Baden-Württemberg.
Jury comment: “For a film that dealt with a bizarre idea
in a matter-of-fact way. We look forward to the next
film.”
Landeskreditbank Baden-Württemberg Award for the
most innovative film: $3,000 (6,000 DM) to Frühling
(Spring ) by Silke Parzich from the Film Academy of
Baden-Wurttemberg — an object animation synchro-
nized to Vivaldi’s music, in which chairs, a table and
forks cavort.
Jury comment: “Surprising images choreographed to
its soundtrack make a unique film.”
Stiftung Landesgirokasse Award for the best student
film: $2,500 (5,000 DM) to Willy, The Voice of Europe by
Marion Thibau from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in
Gent, Belgium.
Jury comment: “Even after several viewings by the jury,
the film had lost none of its intelligent lightness. [The
film] convinced the jury on the strength of its charming
protagonist, its delicate irony and contemporary sub-
ject matter.”
$1,500 for the funniest film to Bill Plympton’s Sex and
Violence
Jury comment: “The joke about the key was more than
enough to win this award.”
MY ANALYSIS...
Most of these prize-winning films were very good,
but I would have given some of the prizes to other films.
Alexander Petrov’s The Mermaid is an astonishingly
beautiful tour-de-force of painting skill, and lovely in its
romanticism. Though, it is two years old and has been
seen at other festivals before I would have given it a
prize nonetheless. Similarly, Hans Nassenstein’s
haunting evocation of war and its aftermath Fugue, with
its surreal settings for puppet animation seems to me a
great film, even if two years old. Solveig von Kleist’s The
Story of My Soul also explored adult emotions with a
striking graphic style and definitely deserved recogni-
tion with astonishing touches, like the birds settling on
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
the telephone wires to form musical notes. In addition,
Richard Reeves’ seven-minute Linear Dreams, with
both abstract images and music drawn directly on the
film, was obviously in the great Canadian tradition of
Norman McLaren. However, this independent, west-
coast production had a vitality and beauty all its own,
quite unlike McLaren, Sistiaga or other practitioners in
the field, and deserved some recognition.
The winners of some categories seemed prob-
lematic to me. Silke Parzich’s Spring is a delightful
film, but closely related to object animation pioneered
by the Quay brothers and others (and hence, not all
that innovative). Other competition films showed
much more unique, adventurous techniques and
ideas, such as Clive Walley’s combination of live-ac-
tion, animation and disembodied brush strokes of
paint in Light of Uncertainty, which fittingly evoked
Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty principle,” and ultimately
did it some justice. Aleksandra Korejwo’s Carmen
Torero, with its sinuous animation (using a feather) of
tinted salt was quite fresh. Most problematic for me
was “funniest film.” I’m no fan of sick and twisted, and
Bill Plympton seems very much of that school. I find
his gags mostly tasteless, vulgar, and (even worse)
predictable and repetitive. To me, the funniest film
was Igor Kovalyov’s Bird in the Window (another 1966
veteran), which may show that I’m sick and twisted,
but Igor manages to make fresh social criticism at the
same time he engenders real belly-laughs. I also pre-
ferred the quirky humor of Sylvain Chomet’s Old Lady
and the Pigeons, another subtle combination of fresh
social satire with outrageous spoof. Mike Booth’s
puppet animation The Saint Inspector (from England’s
bolexbrothers) also combined truly quirky images
with biting satire into very funny scenes. In addition
Mark Gustafson’s droll “puppet” animation Bride of
Resistor (from Will Vinton) broke new territory in so-
cial whimsy. It was a very rich festival for humor —The
Great Migration and Devil Went Down to Georgia were
plenty funny, as well — so it was disappointing to see
such a formula product win the prize. But I guess
that’s a small grumble against what was overall a
splendid animation festival.
Save up to visit Stuttgart X in April 2000. 
Visit the Stuttgart web site in Animation World Net-
work’s Animation village.
39
 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

Personal Tribute by Maureen Furmiss

Bill: There are events in one’s life that are all determining. Meeting you certainly was one of
them for me. I depended on you completely for my dissertation research. You were a mentor to
me, and I was — and still am! — awestruck by your brilliance. When I began Animation Journal,
you contributed an essay to the first issue and agreed to be on the editorial board. How happy
that made me! Over the years, you supported AJ so much, reading essays and contributing more
writing. With other things, too, you’ve helped me countless times, providing me with materials
and responding to my questions with answers that only you know. Sometimes I had to call you
just to hear your voice, as comforting as a cat’s purr, so calm, quiet, sweet and gentle. I dream of
being even half the scholar you are, and thank you for helping me become twice what I might
have been. Thank you Bill, for everything! You truly are having an incredible life of achieve-
ment — I’m so lucky that you have shared part of it with me.

With love from your friend and admirer,

Maureen Furniss

40
40

Pioneer computer animator John Whitney, Sr. in 1959,
operating one of the first computer-graphics engines, a
mechanical analog computer built largely from surplus
World War II anti-aircraft guidance hardware. The
camera is in the upper left, aiming down through the
apparatus that “paints” the film with light. Photo by
Charles Eames.
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
GRAPHIC PIONEER
Digital Harmony:
The Life of John Whitney,
Computer Animation Pioneer
by William Moritz
OMPUTERS WERE ORIGINALLY DEVELOPED AS
part of the British and American World War II
defense efforts. They were first known as “Tur-
ing Machines” after Alan Turing who invented
them to break Nazi codes — the film of Andrew
Hodges’ biography was recently broadcast as
Breaking the Code with Derek Jacobi portraying the in-
ventor. The young John Whitney worked in the Lockheed
Aircraft Factory during the war and while he was work-
ing with high-speed missile photography, he was tech-
nically adept enough to realize that the targeting ele-
ments in such weapons as bomb sites and anti-aircraft
guns calculated trajectories and produced finely-con-
trolled linear numerical equivalents, which could po-
tentially be used for plotting graphics or guiding move-
ments in peacetime artistic endeavors. A decade would
pass before he was able to buy some of these analog
computer mechanisms as “war-surplus” and construct
with them his own “cam machine,” which pioneered the
concept of “motion control.”
In the meantime, Whitney had made about two
dozen films in more or less traditional animation.
Among these were: in 8mm, a time-lapse of an eclipse
and several drawn Variations, in 16mm two Film Exer-
cises accompanied by electronic music composed by
Whitney with a system of pendulums he had invented,
and about 10 abstract musical visualizations using an
oil-wipe instrument he had also invented as well as
three 35mm cartoons for the UPA studios. He also did
various commercial assignments including the title de-
sign for Hitchcock’s feature Vertigo (in association with
Saul Bass), and the preparation (in association with
Charles Eames) of a seven-screen presentation for the
Buckminster Fuller Dome in Moscow.
41

Animated sequence from Variations .
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
MOTION GRAPHICS
With his computerized motion-control set-up,
Whitney could produce a variety of innovative designs
and metamorphoses of text and still images, which
proved very successful in advertising and titling of com-
mercial projects. By 1960 Whitney prepared a sample
reel of these and other effects he could produce, and
solicited work for his Motion Graphics, Inc. company.
This company kept him so busy he did not have time to
make personal films using the computerized motion-
control set-up. His sample reel was artfully edited and
ended with a lovely final image of a lissajous curve mul-
tiplied dozens of times, to appear twisting in waves,
suggesting the time-lapse of a blossoming flower. The
reel was released as Catalog and became a popular
classic of 1960’s psychedelica. John Whitney’s younger
brother James, who had collaborated with him on the
early Variations and Film Exercises, used John’s cam
machine to shoot his fabulous film Lapis. By multiplying
the hundreds of dots in his hand-drawn original art-
work into thousands of dots he described the most
complex mandalas writhing with life.
Not all of the motion-control effects business for
Whitney’s “cam machine” ventures went in his favor,
however. One of the possibilities demonstrated in Cata-
log is the slit-scan effect. Someone else duplicated the
effect for the feature 2001. Ironically, Whitney had sub-
mitted to them a proposal for a monolith as a comput-
er-generated effect that would have looked different
from anything else in the film. He was turned down.
Whitney had an opportunity to work on the new
high-powered digital computers between 1966 and
1969, when he was awarded a fellowship as artist-in-
residence at IBM. Jack Citron programmed the IBM 360
Digital computers for him. His first computer generated
film is rarely seen, but delightful. Whitney titled the film
Homage to Rameau not only because Rameau wrote the
baroque music heard on the soundtrack, but also to
reference Rameau’s book Treatise on Harmony. This
text focused the direction of Whitney’s aesthetic striv-
ings, culminating in his 1980 book Digital Harmony.
At approximately the same time that Whitney
worked at IBM in California, other artist-in-residence
programs in the East allowed Stan Vanderbeek and Lil-
ian Schwartz to work with Ken Knowlton at Bell Labs.
Vanderbeek’s Poem Fields mainly uses his clever texts
as subject matter, and Schwartz’s abstract music films,
though colorful and well-paced, seem too similar, ham-
pered by the limitations of the Beflix program. By con-
trast, John Whitney’s computer films grew continually
more intricate in their exploration of a genuine aes-
thetic goal: the establishment of a secure basis for
harmonic events in audio-visual presentation.
42
 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

JOHN WHITNEY’S ACTIVE FILMMAKING

CAREER ENDURED OVER 55 YEARS, AND
40 OF THOSE YEARS WERE DEVOTED TO
COMPUTER WORK.

HARMONIC PROGRESSION
In each of John’s next five films [Permutations
(1968), Osaka 1-2-3 (1971), Matrix I (1971), Matrix II
(1971), Matrix III (1972), Arabesque (1975)], he demon-
strated the principle of “harmonic progression.” For
example, in Arabesque (programmed by Larry Cuba),
Whitney experimented with the eccentricities of Islamic
architecture, which, though ultimately harmonic, con-
tain many characteristic reverse curves in its embel-
lishments. Whitney also made three documentary films
on the subject of digital harmony. In 1979 he completed
Experiments in Motion Graphics. His 1973 Hex Demo for
a lecture at Cranbrook was included on a laserdisc of
his works issued by Pioneer in 1984. He also completed
in 1993 A Personal Search for the Complementarity of
Music and Visual Art which is available through Pyramid
Film and Video.
In the later 1980s, Whitney concentrated on devel-
oping a computerized instrument on which one could
compose visual and musical output simultaneously in
real time. His first piece on this new instrumentation,
which was improved and updated constantly, appeared
as Spirals in 1987. Although the compositions were Sequences from Spirals , a piece of “visual music” created by Whitney
linked to the particular computer set-up, and defied on a computer program he designed in the late 80s.
many attempts to copy them onto film and video, Whit-
ney continued to compose new visual-music pieces un-
til his death in 1995. The Moon Drum series in 12 sec- Personal Tribute by Linda Anne Hoag
tions based on Native American ceremonial art was
most notable. Although less brilliant than the original 10 (Other) Things Bill Moritz is Really Good at:
computer monitor display, a satisfactory video version
of Moon Drum was released. 1. Wearing velvet suits
John Whitney’s active filmmaking career endured 2. Explaining the legends of King Arthur
over 55 years, and 40 of those years were devoted to 3. Dancing to Procol Harum
computer work. This is a remarkable record for any in- 4. Enjoying the operas of Richard Strauss
dependent filmmaker, but particularly astonishing for 5. Translating poems from Greek, German and French
the continued quality and vision of Whitney’s films.  6. Preparing banana curry
7. Singing risqué sea chanties
8. Driving a Deux Chevaux
9. Creating eccentric tours of Los Angeles
10. Kissing

Congratulations, Bill, on your wonderful book.

Love,
Linda Anne Hoag

43

The Dream of Color Music,
and Machines that Made it Possible
Fischinger’s Lumograph was licensed for use in the 1960s sci-fi
film, Time Travelers .
Mary Hallock Greenewalt with her Visual-Music Phonograph
(1919.) Photo by Shewell Ellis.
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
VISUAL MUSIC
by William Moritz
HE DREAM OF CREATING A VISUAL MUSIC COMPARA-
ble to auditory music found its fulfillment in ani-
mated abstract films by artists such as Oskar Fisch-
inger, Len Lye and Norman McLaren; but long
before them, many people built instruments, usually
called “color organs,” that would display modulated
colored light in some kind of fluid fashion comparable to
music.
Ancient Greek philosophers, like Aristotle and Py-
thagoras, speculated that there must be a correlation
between the musical scale and the rainbow spectrum
of hues. That idea fascinated several Renaissance art-
ists including Leonardo da Vinci (who produced elabo-
rate spectacles for court festivals), Athanasius Kircher
(the popularizer of the “Laterna Magica” projection ap-
paratus) and Archimboldo who (in addition to his eerie
optical-illusion portraits composed of hundreds of
small symbolic objects) produced entertainments for
the Holy Roman Emperors in Prague.
The Jesuit, Father Louis Bertrand Castel, built an
Ocular Harpsichord around 1730, which consisted of a
6-foot square frame above a normal harpsichord; the
frame contained 60 small windows each with a different
colored-glass pane and a small curtain attached by
pullies to one specific key, so that each time that key
would be struck, that curtain would lift briefly to show a
flash of corresponding color. Enlightenment society
was dazzled and fascinated by this invention, and
flocked to his Paris studio for demonstrations. The Ger-
man composer Telemann traveled to France to see it,
composed some pieces to be played on the Ocular
Harpsichord, and wrote a German-language book
about it. But a second, improved model in 1754 used
some 500 candles with reflecting mirrors to provide
enough light for a larger audience, and must have been
hot, smelly and awkward, with considerable chance of
noise and malfunction between the pullies, curtains
and candles. Besides, the grid color-for-note graph
44
 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

does not really correspond to how music is heard and

felt: a symphony floats in the air, surrounding, and
blending, with notes and phrases that swell up gradu-
ally from nothing, vibrate at intense volumes some-
times, and fade away smoothly. Nonetheless, Castel
predicted that every home in Paris would one day have
an Ocular Harpsichord for recreation, and dreamed of a
factory making some 800,000 of them. But the clumsy
technology did not really outlive the inventor himself,
and no physical relic of it survives.
Despite technical limitations, many others experi-
mented with clumsy machinery, including ones using
colored liquids and daylight filtered through colored
glass in a darkened tent. The Victorian era “philosophi-
cal toys” also had their color-music versions, including
“chromatrope” slides for Magic Lanterns, in which lay- Charles Dockum with his Mobilcolor V.
ers of colored glass could be rotated by a hand-crank to
produce moving mandalas, as well as abstract cycles
for Zoetropes, Phenakisticopes and Praxinoscopes.
Electricity opened new possibilities for projected
light, which were exploited by the British painter A. Wal-
lace Rimington, whose Colour Organ formed the basis
of the moving lights that accompanied the 1915 New
York premiere of Scriabin’s synaesthetic symphony
Prometheus: A Poem of Fire, which had indications of
precise colors in the score. Scriabin wanted everyone in
the audience to wear white clothes so that the projected
colors would be reflected on their bodies and thus pos-
sess the whole room.
A similar demand for white-clad audience was pos-
ited by the Italian Futurist artists Arnaldo Ginna and
Bruno Corra, who experimented with “color organ”
projection in 1909 and painted some nine abstract films
directly on film-stock in 1911.* The German Hans Stol-
tenberg also experimented with drawing abstractions
on film about this same time, and the Finnish/Danish/ Thomas Wilfred with the first home Clavilux (1950).
Russian Leopold Survage (then resident in Paris, and
friends with Picasso and Modigliani) prepared hun- Institute of Light in New York, and toured giving Lumia
dreds of sequential paintings for an abstract film concerts in the United States and Europe (at the famous
Rythme Coloré, which he hoped to film in one of the new Art Déco exhibition in Paris). He also built “lumia box-
multicolor processes that were being developed, but es,” self-contained units that looked rather like televi-
the onset of World War I prevented that; he sold a num- sion sets, which could play for days or months without
ber of the paintings, so that they were widely dispersed repeating the same imagery. When young animator
and have still not been filmed. Jordan Belson saw Wilfred’s Lumia in the late 1950s,
Two rival color-organ artists vied for American and they inspired him to alter his style to incorporate softer,
international audiences during the 1920s. Danish-born more sensuous imagery.
Thomas Wilfred came to America as a singer of early Mary Hallock Greenewalt had studied piano with
music, and got involved with a group of Theosophists the illustrious Theodore Leschetizky and had a concert
who wanted to build a color organ to demonstrate spiri- career, including recordings of Chopin for Columbia
tual principles. Wilfred called his color organ the Clavi- Records. Her desire to control the ambience in a con-
lux, and named the artform of color-music projections cert hall for sensitive music like Chopin’s led her to ex-
“Lumia.” He stressed polymorphous, fluid streams of periment with light modulation. She invented the rheo-
color slowly metamorphosing. He established an Art stat in order to make smooth fade-ups and fade-outs of

45

Matthius Holl’s designs.
light, and the liquid-mercury switch, both of which have
become standard electric tools. When other people
(including Thomas Wilfred) began infringing on her pat-
ents by using adaptations of the rheostat and mercury
switch, she tried to sue, but a judge ruled that these
electric mechanisms were too complex to have been
invented by a woman, and denied her case. She contin-
ued to perform on her color-organ, the Sarabet, for
which she created a special notation that recorded the
intensity and deployment of various colors during any
given musical composition.
Parallel in the 1920s, Walther Ruttmann and Oskar
Fischinger were pioneering visual music films in Ger-
many, using tinted animation to live musical accompa-
niment. The Hungarian composer Alexander Laszlo
wrote a theoretical text Color-Light-Music in 1925, and
toured Europe with a color organ of his own devising,
which contained switches for colored spotlights and
slide projections on the stage above his piano. When the
first reviews complained that the visual spectacle was
much tamer than the Chopin-like dazzle of Laszlo’s
virtuoso piano compositions, he contacted Fischinger to
prepare some filmed abstract images of greater com-
plexity and vibrancy. Fischinger prepared a dazzling
spectacle with three side-by-side movie projections
that were augmented by two more overlapping projec-
tors to add extra colors to the finale, and some comple-
mentary changing slide-projections around the borders
of the film projection. Much to Laszlo’s chagrin, the re-
views flip-flopped: the astonishing visual imagery was
much livelier and more modern that the old-fashioned
Chopin-style piano music. Fischinger subsequently
performed his multiple-projections several times un-
der the title R-1, a Form Play, with live music by a per-
cussion ensemble—a kind of predecessor to the light-
shows such as Jordan Belson’s Vortex Concerts of the
late 1950s and the Rock concerts of the late 1960s.
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
(Laszlo fled to Hollywood during the Nazi era, and
wrote lush symphonic scores for dozens of B-
movies and television shows, from Charlie
Chan and Attack of the Giant Leeches to My
Little Margie and Rocky Jones, Space Ca-
det.)
Four times (1927, 1930, 1933, 1936) the
University of Hamburg hosted an interna-
tional “Color-Music Congress,” which
brought together artists (music, dance,
film, painting, etc.), perceptual psycholo-
gists, and critics to explore issues of synaes-
thesia and multidisciplinary artforms. Color-
organ performances there included the Austrian
Count Vietinghoff-Scheel’s Chromatophon and the
elaborate Reflectorial Color Play by the Bauhaus artists
Kurt Schwerdtfeger and Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack.
The Swiss “Musicalist” artist, Charles Blanc-Gatti,
also visited the Color-Music Congress. He belonged to
an art movement that created paintings inspired by
specific pieces of music. Blanc-Gatti also invented a
color-organ called the “Chromophonic Orchestra,”
which contained images of musical instruments around
the screen, and displayed colors based on a system that
equated the frequencies of sound and color vibrations,
so “low” tones would be red, medium tones yellow and
green, and very “high” notes violet. In 1938, Blanc-Gatti
founded an animation studio in Lausanne, and was able
to make an animated film, Chromophonie, which pic-
tures Fucik’s “Entrance of the Comedians” at it would
have looked when played on Blanc-Gatti’s Chromopho-
nic Orchestra. In his book Concerning Sounds and Col-
ors, Blanc-Gatti says that Walt Disney came to an exhi-
bition of his paintings in Paris during the early 1930s,
and that he spoke to Disney about his ambition to make
a feature-length musical animation film. After the war,
when Fantasia was finally released in Europe, Blanc-
Gatti became outraged and attempted to sue Disney for
stealing his idea—something that also occurred to Os-
kar Fischinger, who was old friends with Leopold Sto-
kowski, with whom he had discussed plans for an ani-
mated musical feature in 1934.
In Fischinger’s Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s,
one of the few people involved in a pursuit similar to his
own was Charles Dockum, who had begun to build col-
or-organs in the late 1930s. Dockum’s MobilColor Pro-
jectors could produce hard-edged or soft imagery,
since it used prepared image sources that could be
modulated in color and movements. Both Fischinger
and Dockum received fellowships from the Guggen-
heim Foundation through the Baroness Rebay, curator
of the Guggenheim Museum of Non-Objective Painting,
and she specified that each spy on the other to make
46
 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

sure that he was really working on his grant project. (where Jordan Belson saw it, and was greatly im-
While Rebay’s grants helped Fischinger animate films pressed by the mysterious “presence” of its color).
like Radio Dynamics and Motion Painting, Dockum’s Fischinger hoped, like Castel long before, that
money went into preparing a larger and more complex someone would manufacture Lumigraphs, and that
projector that would allow multi-layered motion in sev- they would become common household items, used by
eral directions—a projector destined for the Museum, children for play and artistic training, by adults for rec-
since the rival Museum of Modern Art had a Thomas reation and party games. Although that has not yet oc-
Wilfred Lumia on display. curred, Oskar’s original Lumigraph does survive, in the
When Dockum installed the new MobilColor in the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt, where it is played
Guggenheim Museum, the Baroness was shocked to with some regularity, and it has been loaned to the Lou-
learn that it required one or two operators to perform it vre in Paris and the Gemeente Museum in the Hague for
(whereas Wilfred had developed automatic self-con- performances by Oskar’s widow Elfriede. Oskar’s son
tained Lumia). The projector was consigned to storage, Conrad also constructed two other Lumigraphs, one
and a few years later dismantled, with the light units large one that was used on an Andy Williams television
used for track-lighting in the galleries and the rest of special, and a smaller one to use in Los Angeles perfor-
the mechanisms trashed. This meant that all of the mances. The Lumigraph also appeared in a 1964 sci-
compositions that Dockum had created uniquely for ence-fiction movie The Time Travelers, in which it is a
that instrument were also effectively destroyed—about “love machine” that allows people to vent their sexual
10 year’s work! The animator Mary Ellen Bute shot a urges in a harmless sensuality. Maybe there should be
reel of documentary footage that preserves about 10 a Lumigraph in every home. 
minutes of short excerpts from Dockum’s performance
on the Guggenheim MobilColor, enough to show that it *See: Giannalberto Bendazzi, “The Italians Who Invented the
Drawn-on-Film Technique,” Animation Journal, Vol. 4, No. 2,
really did perform complex layered imagery.
Spring 1996, pp. 69-84
Dockum spent the rest of his life, into the mid-
1970s, building another model MobilColor, and compos-
ing about 15 minutes of material that can still be per-
formed on it, at his old studio in Altadena. While these
compositions are brief, they show three diverse types of
imagery—geometric forms, vibrating dot patterns, and
soft sensuous trails—and above all demonstrate why
someone would want to go to all this trouble when film Personal Tribute by John Canemaker
and slide projections are so simple: the light intensity
from the MobilColor is quite simply astonishing, the
vivid shapes and colors magically hang in the darkness
with a “living” glow more “real” than any image pro-
jected through cinema.
In the late 1940s, when Fischinger had lost the sup-
port of the Guggenheim Foundation, he also invented a
color organ instrument that allowed one to play lights to
any music very simply. His Lumigraph hides the lighting
elements in a large frame, from which only a thin slit
emits light. In a darkened room (with a black back-
ground) you can not see anything except when some-
thing moves into the thin “sheet” of light, so, by moving
a finger-tip around in a circle in this light field, you can
trace a colored circle (colored filters can be selected
and changed by the performer). Any object can be used:
a gloved hand, a drum-stick, a pot-lid (for a solid circle), Bill and Elfriede. Illustration by John Canemaker
a child’s block (for a square), etc. Oskar performed cer-
tain compositions (such as Sibelius’ “Valse Triste”)
publicly, at the Coronet Theater in Los Angeles, and at
the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1953, in connection
with a one-man show of his abstract oil paintings

47

Personal Tribute by Amy Halpern
Amy Halpern at Filmforum’s screening at the Egyptian
Theater, Hollywood 3/14/04
The last film we will watch is one that Bill Moritz made in
1975.
Bill Moritz was more than a great scholar, a filmmaker,
and a good friend.
He was a gentle fighter for mental liberation.
Many of us may think of Moritz as a solitary.
But he also spent many years as a generous host.
His green pea and banana curry was a masterpiece to
reckon with.
And we must remind ourselves, especially after his long
illness, that he was a crusader for the mental good of all.
He lived mostly as a radiantly healthy role model — he and
his partner of many years shared a fascinating and elegant
household. They occasionally had elaborate parties.…
And the friends and associates that they invited, in those
darker and more cloaked years of sexuality, ran the range
from the most ghettoized of gays, from flamboyant to
subdued in expression — to the most comfortable and out.
Also straight people.
Personal Tribute by Adam Hyman
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
And for all, Moritz and Bob Opel were beacons of health
and love – an ideal Normalcy of excellent relation — with
passion, collaboration, social commitment and creative
output.
Their film work together was very fine.
[One piece, a private commission — I don’t believe ever
publicly shown — has some of the most beautiful erotic
camerawork I have ever seen.]
As a model citizen, Bill Moritz was devoted to the
elevation, ease and delight of all.
We will now look at Star Trick, 7-minutes long, made
in 1975 by William Moritz and Bob Opel, a film of an
ecstatic audience leaving a theater.
With Goldie Glitters, Ken Rodriguez, Charlie
Airwaves, Blaze Lust, Lux Zircon, Tom O’Horgan,
Pristine Condition, Dimitrie Kabbaz, Lee Mentley and
the people of San Francisco, i.e. the audience during two
intermissions of the play Heartbreak of Psoriasis.
Here it is, a celebration for us from the lovely Dr. Bill
Moritz.
— Amy Halpern
Los Angeles, California
48
 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
Personal Tribute by Christine Panushka

49

William Moritz with the Anima Mundi Festival Director, Marcos
Magalhães. Courtesy of William Moritz.
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
BRASILIA FESTIVALE
Anima Mundi 4
by William Moritz
HE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL ANIMA MUNDI ANIMATION
festival took place in Rio de Janeiro August 16-25,
1996, overlapping a bit with Hiroshima. Unlike the
rather hectic pace and nervous business rivalry of
the older and bigger festivals, Anima Mundi offers a
relaxed and user-friendly atmosphere for discovering
and enjoying animation.
Naturally, it is rather hard to separate the event
from the city of Rio, which is one of the most dazzling
places, with its perfect weather, beautiful beaches, ex-
otic Amazonian fruits and vegetables, romantic 18th
and 19th century buildings sandwiched between mod-
ern skyscrapers and expansive parks. And the fabulous
Carmen Miranda Museum, with her astonishing shoes,
jewelry and hats on display together with movie stills
and snapshots showing them in their original setting.
Carmen’s sister Aurora (whose animation credentials
include singing and dancing with Donald Duck in Dis-
ney’s Three Caballeros) regaled us with anecdotes
about Walt and Mary Blair staying at the Hotel Gloria
(where the festival guests also stayed), and she at-
tended screenings, where she showed good taste by
pronouncing Barry Purves’ Achilles exquisite.
GUESTS, SCREENINGS, ETC.
The guests at previous Anima Mundi festivals in-
cluded Frédéric Back, Joan Gratz and Jan Svankmajer.
This year, in addition to Barry Purves, with his very
hand-made puppet films, a seminar on computer
graphics brought Bill and Susan Kroyer, Henry Ander-
son, Jane Flint DeKoven and Carlos Saldanha (who of-
fered workshops), and portfolio screenings by compa-
nies such as Digital Domain, PDI, Pixar and Rhythm &
Hues.
50
 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

Screenings are held in four state-of-the-art the-

aters housed in the Bank of Brazil and Post Office head-
quarters, large buildings across the street from each
other, which also permanently house an arts bookstore,
art galleries, a cafe, tea room and a restaurant. The
huge lobby of the Bank of Brazil was set up as an anima-
tion school, tended by real animation students, where
you could try out drawing-on-film or paper, clay model-
ing, or computer animation and see the results played
back on monitors (or in the case of the drawn-on-film,
on an “antique” moviola).
One of the galleries displayed the excellent exhibi-
tion Animagia, 100 Years of Animation, borrowed from
Annecy. It began with an uncanny life-sized automaton
of Émile Reynaud projecting his Théâtre Optique of Poor
Pierrot in 1892 and included models of most animation
techniques (pin-screen, scratch-on-film, paint-on-
glass, etc.) up to computer graphics. As a parallel, I
presented two two-hour programs of films tracing
masterpieces of animation over the last 90 years.

COMPETITION SCREENINGS
The competition screenings included some 60
films from 20 countries, with an enormous variety
ranging from Dave Borthwick’s harrowing hour-long
The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb to the hilarious
two-minute Dutch cartoon Safe Sex — The Manual,
from Igor Kovalyov’s dark surrealist vision Bird in the
Window to lyrical abstractions such as Clive Walley’s
Divertimento No. 3, Aleksandra Korejwo’s Carmen
Habanera and Amy Alexander’s beautiful computer-
graphic Unbroken Pieces. Prizes, including a $1,000
first place, were awarded entirely on the basis of au-
dience vote — a ballot came with each admission
ticket. All of the competition programs were screened
seven times, at least once in the afternoon, once in the
evening, once on a weekday, once on a weekend. This Barry Purves (top) with his puppets at Anima Mundi. Limbo by
meant that one could see everything leisurely, a few Bériou. Purves photo by William Moritz. Limbo image courtesy of
things each day, and still enjoy all the other delights of Anima Mundi.
the festival and Rio. The grand prize, not unexpect-
edly, went to A Close Shave, but second place was er-graphics program rather than in competition.
awarded by the audience to Michaela Pavlatova’s The most touching event of the festival was a
Repete, a much more experimental work. Third place screening of a fine Brazilian film, The Eight-Pointed Star
went to John Dilworth’s 7-minute cartoon The Dirdy by the elderly Fernando Diniz, who spent many years in
Birdy, which successfully recaptures and updates the a mental institution, and whose drawings and clay ani-
Tex Avery/Warner Bros. formula. The best children’s mations were documented on film by the Friends of the
film award went to a magnificent half-hour Iranian Museum of Images of the Unconscious. Diniz’s artwork
film, Kuh-e Javaher (The Jeweled Mountain), which is truly imaginative and interesting in its own right, and
rivaled the golden-age Czech puppet films in its the time-lapse footage of him painting is fascinating.
elaborate detail and truly cinematic storytelling. The The film had just won an award at another festival, and
Busby Berkeley “Blue Sky” musical cockroach num- he received the trophy at Rio in the presence of his long-
ber from Joe’s Apartment also received many votes, time doctor, now an ancient woman in a wheel-chair,
even though it appeared on an informational comput- and a wildly enthusiastic audience. 

51

Personal Tribute by Cindy Keefer
Bill and Oskar
One day almost four years ago, Bill strolled in bearing
an unassuming floppy disc. He asked if I’d email its
contents to France. This was not unusual, since he’d
never quite mastered attachments to emails and often
asked me to perform this mysterious function. When
I casually replied, “Sure, what is it?” his answer was
simply “It’s the first chapter of my book.”
Over the next few years, the book took form. He
finished chapter after chapter and we continued fact-
checking, editing and selecting photographs. Bill was
intent on including rarely seen images, particularly
frame stills from the lesser seen films and fragments.
We searched through a variety of sources, and he chose
more than100 photos and illustrations. Even after
delivery he was still looking for the ‘perfect’ Gelnhausen
photograph. Minor delays occurred; a CD of images was
lost somewhere in France, and some images needed to
be rescanned. The filmography took months, while the
timings, text and preservation details were checked
and re-checked. The process became so extenuated
that Bill began to adopt an “I’ll believe it when I see it”
stance toward the concept that the book might actually
be completed and published. Though his research had
occurred over 34 years, the actual physical production of
the book took four.
Pages of comments arrived in the readers’ report,
some of which he addressed though he scoffed at a few,
particularly those questioning translations. Months later,
Personal Tribute by Gary Schwartz
Dr. Bill was the closest personification of the Buddha I have ever had the privilege
to know and work with.
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
via email, the first proofs arrived! Three pdf files with
hundreds of pages; extensive corrections followed. Then a
second set of proofs, and at the last minute, there were two
long all-nighters double-checking yet another set.
Last December, when Bill first received the advance copy
shipped from Malaysia, he abandoned his skepticism. I had
the privilege of witnessing his ecstasy. He hugged the book
tightly, exclaimed, “It’s a miracle!” and commented on the
new book smell. I believe that is the happiest I’ve ever seen
him.
With the publication of Optical Poetry, it’s vital to
remember that it’s not just about the life and work of Oskar
Fischinger. It’s a huge portion of Bill’s life and work as well,
34 years’ worth — punctuated with anecdotes, stories and
comments about Bill’s path. It’s the story of Bill’s passion
and devotion to Oskar’s work, his journey to understand,
interpret, contextualize and share both Oskar’s and his
own work. Through his work on Fischinger, this path led
to Bill’s writing, screening and promoting the many other
experimental and avant-garde films he loved so. The
Fischinger quest expanded his cinematic consciousness,
and he in turn expanded ours.
Perhaps Bill is now talking with Oskar, continuing his
search, solving the remaining mysteries about the missing
films. I picture him surrounded by his old friends Elfriede,
James Whitney, Jules Engel and so many others.
I cherish his spirit and passion, his life and his legacy.
— Cindy Keefer
— Gary Schwartz
Associate Professor
College for Creative Studies
52
 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

CONSUMER ELECTRONICS

The Hunchback of MTV?

Frollo (left), narrator of The Hunchback of Notre Dame with

Quasimodo . All Hunchback of Notre Dame images © Walt by William Moritz
Disney Pictures.

AX FLEISCHER’S MOTTO WAS “IF IT COULD BE

done with live action, it’s not animation,” and
Dave Fleischer once griped to me about how
many thousands of times he had to repeat that
to the animators over the years to get them to improve
their work with those imaginative, visionary impossibili-
ties that belonged exclusively to the realm of creative
animation. What would the poor Fleischer brothers
think about the current animation scene, in which al-
most every animation studio is involved in duplicating
live-action stories?
One can hardly help asking that question about
Disney’s latest feature, The Hunchback of Notre Dame,
which has already been filmed several times as a live-
action feature, in addition to Franz Schmidt’s operatic
treatment (which supplied some of the music for the
Alfred Newman score to William Dieterle’s splendid
1939 version). The answer, however, is that Disney has
managed to make a wonderful movie out of Hunchback
(with one hideous blemish, which we’ll come back to
later), a film so moving and thrilling and inspiring that it
doesn’t matter whether it’s live-action or animation. It’s
just a good movie.
The adaptation of the story, credited to Gorillas in
the Mist screenwriter Tab Murphy, cleverly eliminated

53

some of the complexities of Victor Hugo’s storyline,
carefully sidestepping the brothels, tortures and philo-
sophical intricacies (the two heroes, one poet and one
warrior, are condensed to one sensitive soldier) and
other aspects of the original which would have been
unsuitable for younger viewers. Making Clopin a
narrator/master-of-ceremonies was also an excellent
idea that allows the basically adult story to become an
excellent childrens’ adventure tale.
Quasimodo releasing a bird atop the cathedral.
OF DIETERLE BORN
It must be noted that the adaptation is very much of
Dieterle’s Hunchback — in particular, Charles Laugh-
ton’s boyish Quasimodo with his one lumpy eye is
clearly the model, just as Sir Cedric Hardwicke’s thin,
pinched face inhabits the animated villain Frollo. But
this doesn’t really matter, because the Dieterle film is
so fine, it amounts to good taste to imitate it, and in most
cases the Disney version lives up to the high standard
set by the earlier film. For example, the brilliant scene
(not in Hugo, but created by Bruno Frank) in which Es-
meralda enters Notre Dame for the first time, and prays
to Mother of God to help her outcast people while the
“devout Christians” pray for money, sex and glory, the
Disney team have supplied a great musical number
“God Help the Outcasts” with knockout color visuals,
Esmeralda slowly walking through the shadows and
light-shafts of the cathedral until she finally stands
bathed in a mandala of light from one of the stained-
glass rose windows.
Art director Dave Goetz, layout supervisor Ed Gh-
ertner and background/color artist Lisa Keene deserve
special credit for creating and sustaining a medieval
atmosphere, and a clear sense of the antithesis be-
tween the sacred and profane which lies at the heart of
the story. Key staff visited Paris to study the real Notre
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
Dame cathedral and Victor Hugo’s own sketches of the
Paris he knew and imagined, while Disney’s unit con-
tinued to provide authentic detail, and this all pays off
superbly.
The musical score also helps support this re-
spectful treatment of Victor Hugo’s historical ro-
mance, with an almost operatic tone to the serious
numbers (including real chants, and use of a hun-
dred-year-old organ and a professional choir re-
corded in London). The orchestrator, Michael Staro-
bin, also employed some genuine instruments of the
late medieval period (such as hammered-dulcimer,
gittern and shawm) to give the profane scenes an
added sense of authenticity.
The computer-generated crowd scenes with an
active cast of hundreds are duly impressive, the Feast
of Fools full of lively whimsy, and the action-adventure
scenes with chases and fights very exciting. The quite
effective voice talents include Demi Moore as Esmer-
alda (in the animated visuals, by the way, a genuine
woman of color, intelligent and capable), Kevin Kline
as the blond-bearded soldier Phoebus, and Tom Hulse
as Quasimodo. Hulse himself sings quite well his op-
eratic aria “Out There,” but Esmeralda’s heart-rend-
ing aria “Outcasts” is supplied by a professional singer,
Heidi Mollenhauer, whose voice timbre blends seam-
lessly with Demi Moore’s speaking voice.
COMPOUNDING THE KITSCH
What a waste, what a shame, then, to find in the
middle of a magnificent, splendid film a set of charac-
ters and a musical number so vulgar, so tasteless and
so far removed from the medieval period that it com-
pletely spoils all the spellbinding adventure in this
special atmosphere. I refer to the introduction of three
gargoyle “comics,” and their song “A Guy like You,”
which attempts to lure Quasimodo out of the cathedral
by depicting a gambling casino (poker chips and rou-
lette wheel) and a low-cut gowned torch-singer
splayed across a bar piano. All of this takes place in the
cathedral of Notre Dame. If I were a good Catholic, I
think I would be offended-indeed, if I were a good pa-
gan, I would be offended, since the genuine historical
gargoyles actually represent the spirits of the old pre-
christian religions, and are much more imaginative
character. One of the gargoyles, Hugo, is particularly
offensive, compounding the kitsch of Phil Silvers and
the camp of Jim Carrey-totally obnoxious. In the offi-
cial The Making of The Hunchback of Notre Dame doc-
umentary, producer Don Hahn calls Hugo “a crazy frat
boy,” but what is Animal House doing in medieval Par-
is? Where was Dave Fleischer when they needed him?
The official Disney press release calls these gargoyles
54

“kind of the Disney mortar
that holds the whole story to-
gether,” but the effect is quite
the opposite-it makes the
carefully built magic of the
bygone era crumble. Other
official statements identify
this gargoyle episode as a
link with the Disney tradition,
and compare it to the pink el- The gargoyles (Hugo, Victor and Laverne) with Quasimodo.
ephant sequence in Dumbo.
Certainly not the Walt Disney tradition, for there are no
jalopy races (nor obnoxious creeps) in Snow White, nor
telephone calls or airplanes in Cinderella or Sleeping
Beauty. And the pink elephants are wholly integral to
Dumbo’s contemporary circus ambience and the par-
ticular plot point of the accidentally inebriated heroes. I
can see no real excuse for the “gargoylettes” in Hunch-
back, except as a bid for Broadway. Much of this same
team was responsible for creating Beauty and the
Beast, which is still running in its hit stage version. And
the press release describes this “showstopping tune”
as “in grand boulevardier style with a touch of Broad-
way panache.” If that was the case, it seems quite mis-
guided to me, since the audience for Broadway shows is
vastly different and more sophisticated than the very
much younger audiences for Disney movies. The num-
ber should be cut from the film and saved for the Broad-
way version of Hunchback, when it would be eligible for
a Tony as an original song.
In a mad hope that I could convince someone to cut
the gargoyle number before Hunchback opened in
movie theaters, I wrangled a phone interview with di-
rectors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise. They adamantly
defended the gargoyle sequence, insisting that it was
“deliberately anachronistic,” and since gargoyles were
fantastic creatures anyway, that seemed to give “a crazy
license for them just to go nuts for a minute.” Dramati-
cally, they said, it also set Quasimodo up for the disap-
pointment he was about to encounter in the next scene.
They seemed peeved at my suggestion that the number
might have been inspired by thoughts of a Broadway
version, and said Broadway was their last concern
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
while working on a film, when their only care was mak-
ing the best film possible. Why, I asked, did gargoyle
Hugo have to be so obnoxious, since no one else in the
film, even the villains, were really obnoxious? They said
they believed Hugo was in a Disney tradition of “loud-
mouth sidekicks” of which they offered the examples of
Baloo in Jungle Book and Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio.
Hugo reminds me more of Lampwick in Pinocchio, so
much so that during the climactic (genuinely touching)
moment in Hunchback , when a little girl reaches out to
touch Quasi, I felt like warning her, “Don’t get mixed up
with him; he hangs out with really bad friends.” In any
case, the directors suggested I wait until the film came
out on video or laserdisc, and then I could just cut out or
skip over the abominable gargoyle sequence.
I should have guessed by the way the gargoyles are
being pushed in the print ads and other promotional
materials that at some level “Disney” suffers from a
real lack of confidence in the true excellence and vir-
tues of their Hunchback of Notre Dame — even though
the same team did produce a Best Picture Oscar nomi-
nee without any obnoxious anachronisms. Or is it just a
triumph of an MTV era sensibility that doesn’t shrink
from snatching images and ideas from any source, and
doesn’t care if the mood and tempo changes completely
every five minutes, with no unity or direction beyond the
pleasure of the moment? In either case, it’s sad, be-
cause without the gargoyles, Disney’s Hunchback of
Notre Dame would have been a great film; with the ob-
noxious anachronisms it becomes an average compro-
mised committee-assembled piece of commercial
mishmash. Too bad. 
55
 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

Personal Tribute by Marsha Kinder

Memories of Bill

I first met Bill Moritz in 1965 when he was hired as an assistant professor in the
Department of English and Comparative Literature at Occidental College, where I
had just completed my first year of teaching. Though he was then a medievalist
and I a specialist in eighteenth century English literature, we shared a passion for
cinema and soon managed to sneak a film course into Oxy’s curriculum, which
we took turns teaching. Later we conspired to get independent filmmaker Chick
Strand hired to teach production. Together we spawned an expanding entourage of
enthusiastic film students who eagerly consumed the most radical films we could
find.
Part of our teaching load was a course on the History of Civilization, which
was taught by ten full-time faculty members who were required to sit in on each
other’s lectures. So we all knew what our colleagues were thinking and usually
had heated debates in the wake of each lecture. One of the course’s greatest
pleasures for me was hearing Bill’s amazingly broad repertoire of presentations —
from Beowulf to Beethoven to Brakhage and beyond. Not only was Bill a specialist
in literature from a wide range of periods, genres, and cultures but he was also very knowledgeable about
music, opera, film and the visual arts. And he could speak, write or read at least five or six foreign languages
— German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and a smattering of Serbo-Croatian.
At that time Bill was still married to Priscilla, who was considerably older than he was. Consequently he
always appeared as a brilliant young prodigy with a sweet open face. His expansive brow, his gentle eyes
and his sensual mouth — all of his facial features expressed a resounding, Yes! To everything! And so did his
musical laughter, which was always on the verge of erupting.
In those days he loved to dress up in extravagant costumes. For one faculty-student basketball game,
he came dressed as a nun. Not only was this drag totally convincing on the register of gender, but it also
functioned as a witty allusion both to Sally Field’s athletic flying nun (familiar to all viewers of popular
television) and Luis Buñuel’s notorious nun-drag during his surrealist days in Paris (recognizable only to
esoteric fans of the avant-garde). Bill and Priscilla frequently hosted wonderful costume parties. What I
remember most vividly is the way Bill would glide silently through the rooms, wearing a jeweled turban and
a Korla Pandit smile, and carrying an elegantly decorated tray that presented his guests with an array of
sensory pleasures — sweets, fruit, liquor, hashish and grass.
Years later — after he was out of his marriage and out of the closet — he did gender-fuck: a full-bearded
masquerade of Scheherazade, the ultimate meta-narrative Queen. He also continued to host lavishly generous
parties, but now they were more interactive. I remember one that started on a sunny afternoon and went
deep into the night, with scores of guests streaming through his airy rooms. As soon as guests entered the
apartment, Bill would hand them each a recipe for an exotic dish and escort them to the kitchen where they
were asked to prepare it for the other guests. To claim you didn’t know how to cook was no excuse: the fun
was in learning something new. Only when the dish was ready to serve could they then join the other guests.
In many ways these hosting strategies mirrored Bill’s distinctive approach to teaching. Instead of delivering
theoretical lectures laden with difficult post-structuralist jargon that was so fashionable at the time, he
immersed his students in the pleasures of the text — whether film, music or literature. Increasingly he showed
more and spoke less, embedding his implicit commentaries within the ever-widening selection of works and
the provocative sequencing of texts. During a hiatus in his teaching when he worked for a local distributor
of independent films, he mastered the entire collection through repeated viewings, an intensive absorption of
the texts that greatly enriched and deepened his own knowledge of cinema and eventually helped lead him
to make films of his own. He showed one of those early films at a costume party I hosted in the late 1960s
— an event I jokingly called the First annual Pandora Film Festival. Years later I was shocked to see that he
had listed the award he had won at that mock Festival on his CV. At first I considered it cheating, but then I
wondered why shouldn’t our circle of friends — who were primarily film critics and filmmakers — be capable
of launching an independent film festival of our own. His acceptance enabled me to see my own actions — as
well as his — in an entirely new light. This was the same kind of transformative experience that he tried to
replicate for his students, who would create as well as criticize, and for the guests at his [See Kinder on page 57]

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 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

[Kinder from page 57]

parties, who would cook as well as consume.
Yet Bill never abandoned serious scholarship. His own knowledge of certain specialties — the history of
animation, the visualization of music, the experimental works of Oskar Fischinger, and the history of German
cinema — continued to deepen. He has passed this knowledge along to others as his legacy both through his
writings and through the innovative screenings and retrospectives he has curated.
We will all miss Bill Moritz — for his rich savoring of life and texts and for his ability to arouse and satisfy
those tastes in others.

— Marsha Kinder
USC School of Cinema-Television, and
Director of The Labyrinth Project at
USC’s Annenberg Center for Communication

Personal Tribute by Mark Langer

Just now, an email from Maureen Furniss informed me that Bill Moritz died. Dan Sarto of Animation World
Network had asked me earlier to write a contribution to a tribute to Bill and I agreed, little thinking that I
would be contributing as much an obituary as a tribute. Others may detail the outlines of Bill’s life, but I want
to write about what Bill meant to me.
The most deeply embedded image of Bill in my mind is a photo of him placed over his bed in the apartment
he used to have in Silver Lake. I was in Los Angeles doing some research. Bill, who at the time was more of
an acquaintance than a friend, was going to be in Europe that summer, and offered me the free use of his one
bedroom flat for my month’s research. The picture over his bed showed Bill, surrounded by old growth trees,
wearing nothing but an owl strategically located to conceal his naughty bits. On the lower part of the matte
surrounding the photo was penciled, “Who could forget that night spent in the forest, with nothing but our
owls to keep us warm?”
I mention this because it sums up important aspects of Bill’s character. His generosity extended to a
relative stranger, his sense of humor was wonderfully quirky and his appearance was always augmented by
touches of flamboyance. Bill was easy to spot in a crowd due to his fondness for fedoras and the color purple.
Although I’ve had some academic disputes will Bill in the past, his disagreements with me were never marked
by malice. He greeted me with warmth when our paths crossed at conferences and festivals (Bill often arm-
in-arm with Oskar Fischinger’s widow Elfriede), no matter how bad our previous dust-up had been. And he
was quick to help out with research problems I encountered, or to provide copies of films for retrospectives
that I curated. My scholarly life would not have been what it was without Bill’s help. The same could be said
by legions of Bill’s students and colleagues over the years.
Few people working in the area of animation studies were as respected as Bill Moritz. His knowledge
covered all aspects of the field, but he was known especially for his work on experimental film in general
and Oskar Fischinger in particular. It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that Fischinger’s artistic
reputation today rests as much on Bill’s work in research, writing and film restoration as it did on Fischinger’s
genius. Thirty years after Bill’s watershed “The Films of Oskar Fischinger” article in Film Culture, his book
Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger was published. A book that has been anticipated for
thirty years has a particular burden of expectation to bear, and it was with some anxiety that I purchased a
copy in preparation for this tribute. Reading it, I am convinced that this is the capstone to Bill’s life, reflecting
his knowledge, passion and warmth on every page.
When turning the pages of Bill’s book, I was filled with a sense of loss and nostalgia when I came to the
parts on Elfriede Fischinger, who mothered an entire generation of animation scholars until her death in
1999. Like Bill, I also kept myself warm with a scarf knitted by Elfriede, as I suspect [See Langer on page 58]

57
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 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

[Langer from page 57] most members of our animation community of a certain age do. Now that sense of loss
and nostalgia associated with that object is extended to Optical Poetry as well. Elfriede’s scarf is treasured not
only for its utility, but also as a link to a now-absent person. I’ll treasure Bill’s book both for the wisdom it
contains, and because it reminds me of this man who touched so many of our lives.

— Mark Langer
Associate Professor
Carleton University
mlanger@ccs.carleton.ca

Personal Tribute by Miles McKane

A la recherché de Oncle Bill

When I was young, there was a TV series, whose name
I forget, that featured two cute young brats named Buffy
and Jody. They lived with their uncle in a large penthouse
apartment in New York. Until the kids came along, their
uncle, Uncle Bill, lived the life of a bachelor with his maitre
dom.
The maitre dom was played by an actor named Sebastian
Cabot, who was basically, in gay vocabulary, a “bear.”
Stout, with well-groomed hair and a rather fetching
beard, he’d be nattily dressed in his butler’s uniform. He
looked after the house, the laundry, the meals, his master
and their surrogate children. This was a nice American
nuclear family: cute capers from the kids, cultural
misunderstandings (Sebastian being British, of course),
lots of helpful hints for life (never cut lettuce with a knife,
it destroys the vitamins and tarnishes the silver) and the
occasional confused lady for square-jawed uncle.
It’s not that when I think of the series, anybody really
reminds me of William Moritz. But there was something
wickedly transgressive about the wackiness of the set up
that I’d associate with him and this is why I grew to think
of him as Uncle Bill.
Bill’s vision of things — be they trivial, cultural, the
bigger scheme of life, etc. — was kaleidoscopic, not so
much oil lights as overlapping crystals. Being with
Bill was a total learning experience, a juxtaposition
of stimulation - visual, aural, gustative or just plain
lowdown gossip, all of them often swirled together in an
afternoon, like a boysenberry yoghurt from Trader Joe’s,
a violet delight. There was always a sense of adventure,
exploration, curiosity and history, whether it be driving
around L.A., Paris or was it Budapest, my dear, a simple
trip to buy groceries over in the Valley in the biggest
organic supermarket that you ever saw, or back home on
Mulholland Drive via the driveway where Deren filmed
and the Frank Lloyd Wright Mayan house near the faux-
Greek temple homes, on the way to the gay and lesbian
shopping mall and then to Tower Records and finally to
Laurel Canyon still inhabited by coyotes and raccoons,
not forgetting Bill’s cats and the investigation into what
version of Les Pecheurs des perles would be best.
He seemed to treat all things with the same degree
of emphasis or energy, although certain things were
considered with varying degrees of seriousness or
levity. Bill had the knack of being able to put things into
perspective. He had the ability to attribute things their
appropriate degree of importance, whether on a mundane
level or by fitting personal and/or political events, art
history or creative activity into a cultural context. His
shifting viewpoint — the sign of an agile mind — often
related to the historical doubts about where some film tied
up with another, then would come how, why and who!
Bill’s wit and ironic sense of humor were often tools
to reveal and contextualize things, give them their just
proportion. They were also simply a part of his approach
to life. Whenever you did something together with him,
Bill always made it a shared experience. He could bring
hidden highlights to the most humble activity. He would
know some detail or snippet of information that would
transform a metro ride into a journey — to the heart of
decadent Paris in the early 1900s. Sometimes his most
throwaway remarks covered large stretches of cultural
history — cultural in the sense that they could encompass
not only historical fact or chronological moment, but
also personal or social contexts. We live within social
structures and, although we may deviate from them, we
are always contained within a larger social sphere. Our
love lives are as important as the government that “leads
us,” as is the creative act and its results. Bill was able not
only to interweave these threads of history together, he
had that ability to make this history live and transmit it
to you. Anecdote can be a powerful tool, both positive and
negative. Bill’s manner was essentially positive. Events
were relativized — publication [See McKane on page 59]

58

[McKane from page 58] dates, laboratory invoices,
postcards, diaries, souvenirs, slights and gestures all
work as a sort of giant cross reference system — thereby
allowing one to see a work or a person in the process of
living in a rounded, expansive, complex world.
Basically, yes, Bill could tell great stories that always left
you believing and wanting more - to see or hear the work,
to discover that book or painting, to have met that person
or seen that performance, to have seen the Huntington
Gardens without smog. Yes, Bill could be enchanting but he
never indoctrinated. He was passionate about things, about
film, about music, about abstraction, about spirituality,
about the Radical Fairies, about about. If you lose your
sense of curiosity and delight, of living within your time,
if you lose the child within you, then you lose the path
to certain enlightenment. Bill’s loyalties and habits and
friendships and cats and dislikes were all part of him and
they made him a close friend and cherished colleague. He
was generous with his knowledge, it was stimulating and
reciprocated. Any juicy lead to pin down a publication or
archive document, a print of a different version of a film
or bootleg Cindy Lauper tape were things shared, things
talked out, subjects worthy of a dinner.
For instances Bill’s three-and-a-half hour lecture at the
Pompidou Center was just great. After the presentation of
the official program, Bill talked and showed lots of films,
revealing the links between Fischinger, the Fischinger
family, Germany in the 30s, abstract filmmakers and their
practice as well the continuation in the west coast in the
50s. The myriad of fragments and trial restorations were a
visual and intellectual delight.
Bill managed to pull together so many strands of
information and make it a whole, the contradiction
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
between late 19th century opera and early 20th century
abstract film seem to be light years apart, but in fact it
became a succession of logical artistic steps when handled
by Bill, he was one of the unique few who could, along
with maybe Jack Smith, create a coherent tie between the
development of early cinema and the other total art form
of opera. From wildly over dressed divas to organic forms
whirling across a screen there was just a simple step of
cultural understanding, a suspension of disbelief and once
that applied it could be to any situation.
So where does this leave me, without my Bill, it leaves
me with a myriad of souvenirs, of memories, of shared
experiences, of questions answered and otherwise, with
a longing to ask another question of someone who was
so generous with his knowledge. But now it is too late.
I’ll never know what happened to Buffy and Jody, did
they grow up to be brat pack hangers on to the New York
underground and did Mr. Sebastian Cabot go on to star
in greater things? I know Bill could have filled me in on
such details, from what he told me about Grandpa Walton
of The Walton’s, you could never really look at the closing
sequences of that series with the same innocence.
So Bill what happens now, where do we find this
knowledge, have you left us with a collective heritage of
shards or with a sort of map not constructed of precise
directions but of possible points of reference? If we’re
smart we can pick up the thread, store your memories and
transmit yours experiences to others. Experiences of being,
experiences of giving, experiences of experience. I think
I’ll always be looking out for Bill somewhere. His passing
is certainly a serious handicap but not an impossibility to
coming close to my recherché of Uncle Bill.
— Miles McKane
Nantes, France
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 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

FILM MAKER

The Mighty Animator,

Frédéric Back
by William Moritz

-YEAR-OLD FRÉDÉRIC BACK, TWO TIME

Academy-Award winner for Crac! and The
Man Who Planted Trees, was recently in
Los Angeles for the opening of an exhibi-
tion of his animation drawings at the Acad-
emy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
The exhibition, with art work from nine of
his films, will run until August 25, although the panels of
The Man Who Planted Trees and The Mighty River will be
sent to the Hiroshima Film Festival after August 11. I got
a chance to ask Mr. Back a few questions just before the
opening night reception.

William Moritz: Do all your animation films, from Abra-

cadabra in 1970 until The Mighty River in 1993 belong to
Frédéric Back. the Société Radio Canada [the French language division
of the CBC]?

Frédéric Back: Yes, that’s right. I was an employee of

Radio Canada — sometimes a freelance, because de-
pending on how interesting I found the work, sometimes
I’d quit, and then return at a later date.

WM: Now they’ve closed down the animation section of

Radio Canada ...

FB: Yes. And it’s too bad. Hubert Tison at Radio Canada
really gave me the opportunity to work in good condi-
tions. Before that, I wasn’t so interested in animation.
The National Film Board was doing lots of fine anima-
tion, but no other place had good equipment and profes-
sional cameramen that could do that kind of work. Then
Tison built up a professional animation studio at Radio
Canada.
I had made many short pieces of animation for mu-
sic broadcasts and documentaries, so when I began
with Radio Canada, I made mainly short films. But the
improved conditions Tison offered meant a more com-
plex, higher standard of animation, and I gradually
learned to make better, more complex films.

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 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

One of the good ideas Tison proposed to

Radio Canada was an international exchange
of animation films. Before that, and still now,
there are regular exchanges of usual live-
action television programs, but nothing with
animation until Tison initiated it. It was very
important, because it meant you could pro-
duce high-quality animations relatively
cheaply, since for each film Radio Canada
made, they got an additional 20 or more —
one from each of the other participating
countries. This exchange functioned for
about 15 years, and it only stopped because
gradually too many people too often would
buy poor, cheap animation films just to have
something to exchange, and the countries
that worked hard for higher quality were dis-
appointed. It was really too bad it stopped, The Man Who Planted Trees.© Société Radio Canada.
since it gave work to animators in many
countries, as well as Canada, and encouraged the pro- WM: One terrifying thought to me is that since the same
duction of short films. Radio Canada which closed down the Animation Depart-
ment owns your films, they could presumably withdraw
WM: Is Hubert Tison still with Radio Canada? them from circulation, not show them, they could be lost,
decay in the vaults.
FB: No, he retired. After the animation department was
gone, I quit, and there was nothing really to interest FB: Well, at least now they show them quite a bit, espe-
Hubert. Closing down animation was such a waste. The cially at fesitvals, where they are in demand. And Man
wonderful computer-assisted camera, which allowed Who Planted Trees and Mighty River are available on
me to make so many camera movements, rotations and videocassette, so they are used by teachers and envi-
dissolves for The Mighty River (so that it seemed spa- ronmentalists continually.
cious, multiplane and flowing like the river), I was the
only person who ever got to use it. Where is it now? WM: But even now, your earlier films, like the two based
on Algonquin and Micmac myths, are hardly seen —
WM: At the same time, the National Film Board was also though the artworks from them in this exhibit are very
being cut back. beautiful. In any case, does the demise of Radio Canada
and the crippled National Film Board mean that you
FB: Unfortunately, yes. The problem today is that there can’t make any more animation?
are no more artists and thinkers at the head of organi-
zations, only bureaucrats who make notes and count FB: No, actually I could. I have had several proposals,
numbers. They have no ideas to offer. They don’t take even one from National Film Board, but I promised my
risks — and artistic creation is always taking a risk; you wife Ghylaine not to take on another large animation
can’t guarantee how it will come out, there’s no safety in project, because she became a sort of animation
art. And the bureaucrats actually don’t even seem to be widow during the long making of Man Who Planted
able to count numbers very well, because after Radio Trees and Mighty River. Now I have actually started
Canada dropped the animation department, I learned animation work on a 10-minute film sponsored by
that more than half of the money that comes back to Trees for Life, in Wichita, Kansas, which will promote
Radio Canada from sales of product comes from ani- planting fruit trees in third world countries. Also, I
mation films, which are actually few in number: I made never really stop working. Right after Mighty River I
9, Paul Driessen made 3, Graeme Ross made 2 — that made a number of book illustrations, one about Inuits,
means 15 or so animation films gave as much income to one about beluga whales, and of course The Mighty
Radio Canada as hundreds of hours of regular live-ac- River book itself. And I worked a lot with Greenpeace,
tion programs. And the animation films also won hun- and other organizations that protect animals, seals.
dreds of prizes at film festivals. There’s always a lot of work to do.

61

The Mighty River. © Société Radio Canada.
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
WM: After spending so much time making your filmed
images move and change, do you mind seeing them as
still book illustrations?
FB: No, I think they work very well as books, and I al-
ways make some special artworks just for the books.
Mighty River is particularly important as a book, be-
cause in 24 minutes you can’t give too many facts, since
the visual information is so rich, you would get dizzy if
there were statistics, too. But in the book there are
many details and facts that you can study at leisure, and
learn, perhaps intellectually, as you learn emotionally
from the film. The Mighty River book has been trans-
lated into Japanese, as well, so I hope the Japanese
fishing fleet read it and disappear.
WM: Surprisingly, even Crac! worked very well as a
book, I thought. One of the things that I liked most in
Crac! the film was the way great Canadian paintings —
Cornelius Krieghoff’s Merrymaking or Lucius O’Brien’s
Sunrise on the Saguenay, for example — just seem to
“happen” in the course of the action. When the ASIFA-
Canada Bulletin devoted an issue to you in 1988, they
printed a picture of your early art teacher, Mathurin
Méheut, with his class (including you) — and a few of his
sketches. He seems like such a romantic figure, you
should make a film about him in which his paintings
could also “just happen” in the course, since he is almost
unknown here.
FB: Not a bad idea. He’s getting better known in France:
there’s a museum devoted to him, and traveling exhibi-
tions. When he died, his wife gave some 4,000 drawings
to start the museum. His work is a rich documentation
of something that no longer exists. During the war,
when I was studying with him, Brittany was almost un-
touched, following its typical way of life for centuries. I
had the opportunity to go with him and make drawings
beside him. “Draw everything,” he told us, “it will all
disappear.” He was right. Now in Brittany, there is
hardly a port. No Bretons in traditional costume, no
fishermen, no fish. No colorful nets of string and rope,
no iron and wood tools and boats: everything is plastic.
It’s lost all its character and beauty. The Breton fisher-
men used to dress all in red or blue, and they would
repair their clothes with patches from other material so
they were like mosaics of colors, walking paintings.
What Méheut drew is a fantastic testimony, a documen-
tation of this lost world.
In France there is now a book about him, and I was
interviewed by the director of a television documentary
about him, but the program was not really very good, as
they did not have enough money to give the full impres-
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 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

sion of the scope and color of Méheut’s achievement.

That’s where I, too, would have trouble with such a proj-
ect: I’m not a good enough diplomat, a negotiator to
make a deal to support a project on Méheut, as it would
be another big film.

WM: That’s where we miss Hubert Tison.

FB: Yes indeed. I would have the idea, and he would

make it possible. My wife was also enormously sup-
portive and helpful — too few animators have such a
good, understanding helper.

WM: Are any of your children animators?

FB: No, but in a way, they are all involved with art. My
daughter is a painter, and she also works with batiks.
My younger son is an illustrator, who specializes in his-
torical costumes and settings. And my older son is a
biologist who worked for the World Health Organiza-
tion, for 10 years he was in Africa, and he teaches using
his knowledge of graphics, including computer graph-
ics: he’s very clever with computers.
I’m very honored and happy that the Academy is
making this exhibition. Radio Canada framed all these
artworks, and then they have been sitting around in a
cellar.
I hope this exhibition is a success, not just for me,
but because there are so many animators around the
world who do fine artwork that should be exhibited, too. Crac! © Société Radio Canada.
What you see on the screen is not a reflection of each
individual drawing or sculpture, so it’s wonderful to
have a chance to see the artworks, and it can be very
instructive to other artists.
When you’re in your little room by yourself drawing,
it can be depressing: it’s so repetitive, and you never
know, drawing after drawing, what will happen when
they get on film; you just have to have faith in your proj-
ect, and keep on. An exhibition like this should be a
stimulation to work hard, and keep steadfast in your
belief in the project, and give each artwork maximum
quality. 

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Personal Tribute by USC School of Cinema-Television
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

64
 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

FEATURE PIONEER
OTTE REINIGER, WHEN MENTIONED AT ALL, IS MOST

Lotte Reiniger often brushed off in a single sentence noting that

Portrait of Lotte Reiniger, Berlin 1918.
Images courtesy of William Mortiz.
by William Moritz
she apparently made a feature-length silhouette
film in 1926, The Adventures of Prince Achmed;
but since that was in Germany, and silhouettes
aren’t cartoons, Disney still invented the feature-
length animated film with Snow White. Anyone who has
seen Prince Achmed wouldn’t be convinced by this rea-
soning, but, alas, only a tiny fraction of the people who
see Snow White ever get to see any Reiniger film at all.
Few of her nearly 70 films are readily available—and
almost none of them in excellent prints; when Reiniger
fled Germany to England in the 1930s, she was not able
to bring her original negatives with her, so most modern
prints are copies of copies, which have lost much of the
fine detail, especially in backgrounds.
More than just noting that Reiniger’s Prince
Achmed, begun in 1923 and released in 1926, was a pio-
neer feature-length animated film, one must proclaim
that it is a brilliant feature, a wonderful film full of
charming comedy, lyrical romance, vigorous and excit-
ing battles, eerie magic, and truly sinister, frightening
evil. Our current prints of Prince Achmed were “re-
stored” in 1954 with a new (rather kitschy) musical
score by Freddie Phillips, which means that the images
move faster than they should (18 frames-per-second
silent speed versus 24 frames-per-second sound
speed). The original symphonic score by Wolfgang
Zeller, one of the great film composers, more correctly
supports the drama with a thrilling grandeur, exciting
suspense and lush romanticism. Furthermore, al-
though the “restoration” reestablished the tints of the
original, much of the fine background detail in most
scenes is lost. (Original nitrate prints are available in
Europe, so let’s hope that a more authentic restoration
becomes available soon.)
In addition to Prince Achmed, Lotte Reiniger made a
second feature, Dr. Dolittle, released in 1928 (unfortu-
nately just as the sound film began to triumph), with a
musical score by Paul Dessau, Kurt Weill and Paul Hin-
demith. Following Hugh Lofting’s 1920 book, The Story
of Dr. Dolittle, it tells of the good Doctor’s voyage to Af-
rica to help heal sick animals. Again, it is currently
available only in a television version with new music,
voice-over narration and the images playing too fast.

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 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

Lotte Reiniger actually worked on a third feature as

well. She loved Maurice Ravel’s 1925 opera L’Enfant et
les Sortilèges (The Boy and the Bewitched Things), which
tells of a naughty child who ruins his schoolbooks and
toys, hurts his pets, breaks dishes and furniture and
despoils the garden—but all the things he has damaged
come to life and accuse him until he repents. Both Co-
lette’s text (the “china” tea set speak the mock Chinese
of “Hong Kong, Mah Jong” while the torn arithmetic
book sings fragments of math problems) and Ravel’s
diverse music (from mock 18th-century shepherdess-
es, to jazzy fox trots to cat yawls to a symphony of gar-
den sounds) are magical. Lotte tried for seven years to
get the rights to the piece—a complex and expensive
matter, since Ravel’s music, Colette’s libretto and the
particular musical performance (singers, orchestra,
etc.) had to be cleared separately. When Ravel died in
1937 the clearance became even more complex, and
Lotte finally abandoned the project, although she had
designed sequences and animated some scenes to con-
vince potential backers and the rights-holders.
In 1929 Lotte Reiniger had also directed a live-ac-
tion feature, The Pursuit of Happiness, which involves
people who run a shadow-puppet theater in a carni-
val—and starred Jean Renoir and Bertold Bartosch;
unfortunately, it was begun as a silent film, and the at-
tempt to add voices afterward proved disastrous.
The Adventures of Prince Achmed, 1926.
A VERY THANKFUL PUBLIC
In addition to her feature projects, Lotte animated
dozens of shorts for children, and a few delightful ad-
vertising films. In a 1969 interview with Walter Schobert
(of the Deutsches Film museum in Frankfurt), Reiniger
said “I love working for children, because they are a
very critical and very thankful public.” She has reward-
ed her youthful audience with challenging interpreta-
tions of classic fairy tales, new stories and some oper-
atic motifs—all of which played successfully in cinemas
and on television in the early years before ratings and
commercial demands made children’s TV a branch of
the toy industry. Lotte also performed with live shadow-
puppet performances in England, and wrote a definitive
book about Silhouettes.
Galathea, 1935. Lotte Reiniger herself is the prime genius behind
all of her films. She had an astonishing facility with cut-
ting—holding the scissors still in her right hand, and
manipulating the paper at lightning speed with her left
hand so that the cut always went in the right direction.
She drew the storyboards and devised the plots and
characters, which were closely linked. If a figure need-
ed to make some complex or supple movement, it
would have to be built from 25 or 50 separate pieces,
then joined together with fine lead wire—as in the fa-

66
 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

First trick-table.
mous Falcon that Walter Ruttmann used to make (Berlin, 1920)
Kriemhilde’s dream sequence for Fritz Lang’s 1924 fea-
ture Niebelun≠gen. If a character needed to appear in
close-up, a separate, larger model of the head and
shoulders would have to be built—as well, possibly, as
larger background details to stand behind it. But Lotte
worked always with her husband, Carl Koch, who usu-
ally ran the camera. For the large projects like Prince
Achmed she had a staff of five: Carl for camera, Alexan-
der Kardan to check the exposure sheets, Walter Türck
who arranged the backgrounds, and two special-ef-
fects men, Walter Ruttmann and Bertold Bartosch; the
latter two were animators in their own right, who were
able to continue their own careers thanks to the help
Lotte gave them with this extra employment.
Even if the prints are not in the best shape, it is
worth trying to see as many of her films as you can, for
Lotte endowed every tale with enchanting touches and
droll social commentaries. The earlier films seem bet-
ter to me. Carmen (available in the U.S. through New
York’s Museum of Modern Art), gives a feminist reap-
praisal of the opera’s plot, making Carmen a capable
and self-sufficient woman, smarter and stronger than
the men who pursue her. The later films often have cided to return to France to salvage some of his father’s
color backgrounds (being originally designed for televi- paintings (and eventually fled to the US). Carl and Lotte
sion in England), the most easily available of them prob- worked on three features and a silhouette animation in
ably the National Film Board of Canada’s Aucassin and Italy before they were evacuated to Germany when the
Nicolette; the film follows a medieval tale of young lov- allied armies invaded Italy and the German forces be-
ers separated—and needless to say, it’s Nicolette who gan to retreat in 1944.
is brave and clever enough to get them back together Even during the blitz on Berlin (in addition to caring
again. for her aged mother and Carl, who suffered from “shell
shock”), Lotte was forced to work on a silhouette film,
REINIGER: A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE & FILMOGRAPHY which was finished after the war by the newly founded
Although not Jewish, Carl Koch and Lotte Reiniger East German DEFA studios. Carl and Lotte finally man-
were closely identified with leftist politics (Bert Brecht aged to emigrate to England in 1949.
counted them among their good friends) and deplored
the rise of Nazism. They immediately tried to leave Ger- All films listed in the following list , unless otherwise
many in 1933, but were not able to get emigration visas noted, are short silhouette animations by Lotte Reiniger.
into France, England or other European countries. Lotte
worked on a Pabst film in France in 1933, but had to 1916
return to Germany, where she made six more films, Rübezahls Hochzeit (Rumpelstilskin’s Wedding). Live-
between frequent “vacations” to England, Greece and action feature directed by Paul Wegener. LR does sil-
other places in search of asylum. In 1936, Carl and Lotte houette cut-outs for the dialogue-titles.
resolved to leave Germany for good, even if it meant a
transient existence, which it did. Jean Renoir employed Die schöne Prinzessin von China (The Beautiful Chinese
Carl in Paris, while Lotte found some backing for sil- Princess). Live-action silhouette film, actors only seen
houette films in England—but both had to leave the as shadows on screen, directed by Rochus Gliese. LR
country where they were every few months and re-en- does costumes, sets, special effects, etc.
ter on a new tourist visa, sometimes only meeting in the
terminals at Dover and Calais. 1918
With the beginning of the war, Renoir arranged to Apokalypse (Apocalypse). Live-action short directed by
take them to Italy, where he was contracted to direct a Rochus Gliese. LR’s silhouettes depict the horrors of
feature, which he soon turned over to Carl when he de- war.

67

Der Rattenfänger von Hameln (The Pied Piper of Hame-
lin). Live-action feature directed by Paul Wegener. LR
made silhouettes for dialogue titles, and animated
model rats.
1919
Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens (The Ornament of
the Heart in Love). First animated silhouette short by
Reiniger.
1920
Der verlorene Schatten (The Lost Shadow). Live-action
feature directed by Rochus Gliese. LR animated a se-
quence in which the musician has no shadow, but the
shadow of his violin is seen moving on the wall as he
plays his instrument.
Amor und das Standhafte Liebespaar (Cupid and the
Steadfast Lovers). Silhouette animation short with one
live actor who interacts with the cutouts.
Several advertising films for Julius Pinschewer agency,
including: Das Geheimnis der Marquise (The Marquise’s
Secret) for Nivea skin cream and Die Barcarole (The
Barcarole) for Pralinés Mauxion dessert. Also a com-
mercial for ink.
1921
Der fliegende Koffer (The Flying Trunk), based on the
Hans Christian Andersen tale.
Der Stern von Bethlehem (The Star of Bethlehem).
1922
Aschenputtel (Cinderella), from the Brothers Grimm.
Dornröschen (Sleeping Beauty), advertising film.
1923
Lotte Reiniger makes a complex silhouette figure of a
falcon for a dream sequence in Fritz Lang’s feature Die
Niebelungen. Walter Ruttmann (who is working on Rei-
niger’s Prince Achmed at the time) completes the
dream with various painted images, and it becomes
known as Ruttmann’s sequence.
1923-25
Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of
Prince Achmed), 90-minute silhouette feature, from
episodes in The Arabian Nights. Completed film submit-
ted to censorship board January 15, 1926, press screen-
ing May 2, 1926, Paris premiere July 1926, Berlin first
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
run September 1926. Original musical score by Wolf-
gang Zeller.
1926
Der scheintote Chinese (The Seemingly-Dead China-
man). Originally a 13-minute episode in Prince Achmed,
cut by the German censor, as well as French and Ger-
man distributors in the interest of keeping the film
within the attention span of children. Released as a
short in 1928.
1927
Heut’ tanzt Mariette (Today Marietta Danc-
es). Live-action feature directed by
Friedrich Zelnik. Silhouette effects by
LR.
1928
Doktor Dolittle und Seine Tiere
(Dr. Dolittle and His Animals), 65-
minute feature after Hugh Loft-
ings novel. At the Berlin premiere,
December 15, 1928, Paul Dessau con-
ducted a score with music by Kurt Weill,
Paul Hindemith and himself.
1929
Die Jagd nach dem Glück (The Pur-
suit of Happiness), live-action
feature co-directed by Rochus
Gliese and Lotte Reiniger. Tale of people who run a
shadow-puppet theater in a carnival. Includes a 20-
minute silhouette animation by Reiniger to represent
one of the theater performances. Stars Jean Renoir,
Catherine Hessling and Bertold Bartosch. Premiere
(with voices added by other actors): May 1930.
1930
Zehn Minuten Mozart (10 Minutes of Mozart).
1931
Harlekin (Harlequin), 24 minutes, to baroque music.
1932
Sissi, 10-minute silhouette animation prepared to be
shown during a scene change of the Fritz Kreisler oper-
etta Sissi.
1933
Don Quixote. Live-action feature directed by G.W. Pabst.
LR animated silhouettes for opening sequence in which
Don Quixote reads a book about knights’ adventures.
68

Carmen, based on the Bizet opera.
1934
Das Rollende Rad (The Rolling Wheel). Traces society
through the changing role of wheels from antiquity to
the present.
Der Graf von Carabas (Puss-in-Boots),
from the Brothers Grimm.
Das gestohlene Herz (The Stolen
Heart), from a fable by Ernst Keien-
burg.
1935
Der Kleine Schornsteinfeger (The
Little Chimneysweep), from a tale by
Eric Walter White
Galathea, from the classic fable.
Papageno, scenes from Mozart’s opera,
The Magic Flute.
1936
The King’s Breakfast, from the poem by
A.A.Milne.
1937
The Tocher (Scottish dialect for “The Dowry”), advertis-
ing film for the General Post Office.
La Marseillaise Live-action feature directed by Jean
Renoir. LR prepared a sequence of a shadow-puppet
theatre performance depicting the need for the French
Revolution.
1939
Dream Circus, after Stravinsky’s Pulcinella (unfinished
by the beginning of the war).
L’Elisir D’Amore, after Donizetti’s opera.
1944
Die Goldene Gans (The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs),
after the Brothers Grimm. (Unfinished.)
1949
Greetings Telegram. Ad for General Post Office.
Post Early for Christmas, ad for G.P.O.
Radio License, ad for G.P.O.
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
1950
Several advertising films for Crown Film Unit in Lon-
don, including Wool Ballet.
1951
Mary’s Birthday Black silhouettes over colored back-
grounds.
1953
Aladdin
The Magic Horse, from Arabian Nights. (Much of the
footage from this film and Aladdin seem to have been
culled from Prince Achmed.)
Snow White and Rose Red, from the Brothers Grimm.
1954
The Three Wishes, from the Brothers Grimm.
The Grasshopper and the Ant, from LaFontaine’s fable.
The Gallant Little Tailor, from the Brothers Grimm.
The Sleeping Beauty, from the Brothers Grimm.
The Frog Prince, from the Brothers Grimms.
Caliph Stork, from the fairy tale by Wilhelm Hauff.
Cinderella, from the Brothers Grimms.
1955
Hansel and Gretel, from the Brothers Grimms.
Thumbelina, from Hans Christian Andersen.
Jack and the Beanstalk, from the Brothers Grimm.
Color backgrounds.
1956
The Star of Bethlehem. Color backgrounds.
1957
Helen La Belle, after Offenbach’s operetta, La Belle Hé-
lène. Color figures and backgrounds.
1958
The Seraglio, after Mozart’s opera, Die Entführung aus
dem Serail. Color figures and backgrounds.
1960
The Pied Piper of Hamelim. Made for the Christmas
69
 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

Pantomime at the Coventry Theatre, where it played

between acts. Figures and backgrounds in color.

1961
The Frog Prince, for Coventry Theatre Christmas Panto-
mime. Figures and backgrounds in color.

1962
Wee Sandy Intermission piece for Glasgow Theatre
production.

1963
Cinderella Made for the Coventry Theatre Christmas
Pantomime. Figures and backgrounds in color.

1975
Aucassin and Nicolette, after the medieval cantefable.
Produced at the National Film Board of Canada, with
black figures and color backgrounds.

1979
The Rose and the Ring, after W.M. Thackery’s tale. In
color. 

70
Personal Tribute by Vibeke Sorensen

AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

71
 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

VISUAL AUDIO

Mary Ellen Bute:

Seeing Sound
by William Moritz

Mary Ellen Bute. Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art/

Film Stills Archive.

s with many pioneer animators, Mary Ellen Bute

Polka Graph (1952) Mary Ellen Bute. Images courtesy of
William Moritz unless otherwise noted.
is hardly known today, primarily because her
films are not easily available in good prints. This
was not always true. During a 25-year period,
from 1934 until about 1959, the 11 abstract films she
made played in regular movie theaters around the
country, usually as the short with a first-run prestige
feature, such as Mary of Scotland, The Barretts of Wim-
pole Street or Hans Christian Andersen — which means
that millions saw her work, many more than most other
experimental animators.
The diminutive Mary Ellen grew up in Texas, and
retained a soft southern accent and genteel demeanor
throughout her life. She studied painting in Texas and
Philadelphia, but felt frustrated by the inability to wield
light in a flowing time-continuum. She studied stage
lighting at Yale in an attempt to gain the technical exper-
tise to create a “color organ” which would allow her to
paint with living ligh — and also haunted the studios of
electronic genius Leo Theremin and Thomas Wilfred
whose Clavilux instrument projected sensuous streams
of soft swirling colors.
She was drawn into filmmaking by a collaboration
with the musician Joseph Schillinger, who had devel-
oped an elaborate theory about musical structure,
which reduced all music to a series of mathematical
formulae. Schillinger wanted to make a film to prove
that his synchronization system worked in illustrating
music with visual images, and Mary Ellen undertook the
project of animating the visuals. The film was never
completed, and a still published with an article by Schil-
linger in the magazine Experimental Cinema No. 5
(1934) makes it clear why: the intricate image, reminis-

72

Color Rhapsody (1951) Mary Ellen Bute.
cent of Kandinsky’s complex paintings, would have tak-
en a single animator years to redraw thousands of
times.
Mary Ellen continued to use the Schillinger system
in her subsequent films, often to their detriment, for
Schillinger’s insistence on the mathematics of musical
quantities fails to deal with musical qualities, much as
John Whitney’s later Digital Harmony theories. Many
pieces of music may share exactly the same mathemat-
ics quantities, but the qualities that make one of them a
memorable classic and another rather ordinary or for-
gettable involves other non-mathematical factors, such
as orchestral tone color, nuance of mood and interpre-
tation. In Mary Ellen’s weakest works, like the 1951
Color Rhapsodie, she is betrayed precisely by this prob-
lem, using gaudily-colored, percussive images of fire-
works explosions during a soft, sensuous passage —
perfectly timed mathematically, but unsuited to mood
and tone color.
EGG BEATERS, BRACELETS AND SPARKLERS
Mary Ellen made her own first film, Rhythm in
Light, together with Melville Webber, who had collabo-
rated with James Watson on two classic live-action ex-
perimental films, The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)
and Lot in Sodom (1933). Webber contributed his experi-
ence on those films with making models of paper and
cardboard and filming them through such things as
mirrors and a cut-glass ashtray to get multiple parallel
reflections of the shape. The cameraman, Ted Nemeth,
who worked commercially on advertising and docu-
mentary films, would soon marry Mary Ellen, and
worked on all her subsequent films. Rhythm in Light,
with black-and-white images tightly synchronized to
“Anitra’s Dance” from Grieg’s music for Peer Gynt, uses
not only Webber’s models, but also cellophane, ping-
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
pong balls, egg beaters, bracelets and sparklers to cre-
ate abstract light forms and shadows. Many of these
images are “out of focus” or filmed reflected on a wall
for soft nuance and distortion that conceals the origin of
the abstract apparition.
Mary Ellen made two more similar black-and-
white films, Synchromy No. 2 (1936) and Parabola (1938),
which also are not exactly animation, nor completely
abstract in the sense of Oskar Fischinger’s films. Syn-
chromy No. 2, synchronized to the “Evening Star” aria
from Wagner’s Tannhäuser, uses a statue of Venus to
represent the star. The effect of constant flowing forms,
however, is quite striking, especially in Parabola, which
is a bit long at nine minutes, and could well drop the
jazzy finale since the lovely middle slow section pro-
vides a satisfying closure.
In 1931, Universal had run one of Oskar Fischinger’s
Studies as a novelty item in their newsreel. Mary Ellen
had seen it, and proposed to Universal that they use one
of her films in a similar fashion. Since they could use
only two or three minutes, Mary Ellen made a special
piece, Dada, which Universal distributed in 1936.
Abstronic (1954) Mary Ellen Bute. Courtesy of The Museum of
Modern Art/Film Stills Archive
WORKING IN COLOR
Beginning with the 1939 Escape, Mary Ellen began
to work in color, and used more conventional animation
for the main themes in the music, but still combining it
with “special effect” backgrounds — sometimes swirl-
ing liquids, clouds or fireworks, other times light effects
created with conventional stage lighting, such as im-
ploding or exploding circles made by rising in or out a
spotlight.
For the 1940 Spook Sport, Mary Ellen hired Norman
McLaren (living in New York before he went to Canada)
to draw directly on film strips the “characters” of
73

ghosts, bats, etc., to synchronize with Saint-Saëns’
Danse Macabre. Mary Ellen kept McLaren’s painted
originals, and reused some of the images in later films,
including Tarantella (1941), Color Rhapsodie (1951) and
Polka Graph (1952), where they seem less at home sty-
listically than in their original context.
Tarantella seems Mary Ellen’s best film. Using an
eccentric modern composition by Edwin Gershefski,
Mary Ellen herself animated most of the imagery, using
jagged lines to choreograph dissonant scales. Even the
sensuous McLaren interlude is not totally out of charac-
ter. Another of her finest films, Pastorale (1953), reverts
to the technique of the early black-and-white films,
creating continuous flows of colored light, swirling in
various directions to mime the multiple voices of
J.S.Bach’s Sheep May Safely Graze. The music’s
conductor/arranger, Leopold Stokowski, appears at the
end superimposed over the abstract images — remi-
niscent of Fantasia!
Spook Sport (1940) Mary Ellen Bute.
COMBINING SCIENCE AND ART
In 1954, Mary Ellen began using oscilloscope pat-
terns to create the main “figures” in her films. In her
publicity, which is often repeated, she claimed to be the
first person to combine “science and art” in this way,
and she sold her last two films Abstronic (1954) and
Mood Contrasts (1956) on their novelty. Actually, Nor-
man McLaren used oscilloscope patterns in 1950 to
generate abstract images for his Around is Around,
which was screened at the Festival of Britain in 1951 —
and described in technical detail in American Cinema-
tographer. Hy Hirsh also used oscilloscope imagery in
his 1951 Divertissement Rococo in his 1953 Eneri and
Come Closer. The sort of shapes that Mary Ellen cap-
tured from the cathode ray tube for her films seems
somewhat simpler or weaker than the forms McLaren
and Hirsh use in their films. But she makes up for the
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
“slinky” look of her main figures by imaginative back-
grounds and animation supplements. In the 1954 Ab-
stronic, Mary Ellen uses her own paintings, with a kind
of surrealist depth perspective, zooming in and out in
rhythmic pulsations synched with the beat of “hoe
down” music. In the exciting Mood Contrasts (1956, in-
corporating animation from a 1947 film Mood Lyric), she
created her most complex collage of animation and
special effects, including a striking sequence of colored
lights refracting through glass bricks in oozing soft grid
patterns.
Mary Ellen made two more commercial shorts, a
1958 Imagination number for the Steve Allen television
show, and a 1959 commercial for RCA, New Sensations
in Sound, both of which are clever, sharply edited col-
lages of effects from her previous films. In 1956 she
made a live-action short The Boy Who Saw Through and
spent the next decade working on a live-action feature
based on James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. In the 1970s,
feminists “rediscovered” Mary Ellen as a pioneer wom-
an filmmaker, but by that time many of her abstract
films were no longer available in good prints, and the
original nitrates were dispersed to archives in Wiscon-
sin, Connecticut and New York. She was still, however,
celebrated justly for a major achievement in making her
films and distributing them herself, against all odds,
successfully. Mary Ellen is also quite important as a
formative influence on Norman McLaren. The kind of
titles Mary Ellen used to preface her films, explaining
them to an average audience as a new kind of art linking
sight and sound prefigure McLaren’s similar audience
— friendly prefaces to his National Film Board experi-
ments. Mary Ellen also proudly announced that she had
used combs and collanders and whatever else to make
the imagery in her films, encouraging a delight in sim-
plicity and novelty of experimentation. Surely this left its
mark on McLaren, too. 
Mary Ellen Bute Abstract Filmography
Synchronization (1934) collaboration with Joseph Schil-
linger and Lewis Jacobs [paper or cel animation; lost?
incomplete?]
Rhythm in Light (1935, b/w, 5 min.) in collaboration with
Melville Webber. Music: “Anitra’s Dance” from Grieg’s
music for Peer Gynt. Moving models with lighting: “cel-
lophane & ping-pong balls,” sparklers, egg beaters,
bracelets & barber poles, and some drawn animation.
Synchromy No. 2 (1936, b/w, 5 min.) Music: Evening Star
from Wagner’s Tannhäuser, sung by Reinald Werren-
rath. Light reflections from cut glass, collander, etc.
74
 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

“Gothic arches, a flowering rod, and stairs recogniz-

able.”

Dada (1936) 3-minute short for Universal Newsreel.

Parabola (1938, b/w, 9 min.) music: Création du monde

by Darius Milhaud. Based on a sculpture by Rutherford
Boyd. Small models and bent rods on a turntable.

Escape (1939, color, 5 min.) Music: Toccata in D Minor by

J.S. Bach. Comb, cut celluloid, mirrors & lighting. [cel
animation]

Spook Sport (1940, color, 8 min.) Music: Danse macabre

by Saint-Saëns. Cel animation + McLaren’s drawn-on-
film effects.

Tarantella (1941, color, 5 min.) Music by Edwin Gerschef-

ski. Drawn animation and cut-outs with light effects,
McLaren.

Color Rhapsodie (1951, color, 6 min.) Music: Hungarian

Rhapsody No. 2 by Liszt. “Paint on glass, fireworks,”
animation, fireworks and clouds optically colored.

Polka Graph (1952, color, 5 min.) Music: Polka from The

Age of Gold by Shostakovich. Cel animation over graph
pattern, using Schillinger system. cutouts and cello-
phane layered.

Pastorale (1953, color, 8 min.) Music: Sheep May Safely

Graze by J.S. Bach. “Kaleidoscope of ever-changing
shapes, colors, forms, vapors, illuminations and mobile
perspectives.”

Abstronic (1954, color, 7 min.) Music: Hoe Down from

Billy the Kid by Aaron Copeland and Ranch House Party
by Don Gillis. Oscilloscope patterns over drawn back-
grounds.

Mood Contrasts (1956, color, 7 min.) Music: Hymn to the

Sun from The Golden Cockerel and Dance of the Tum-
blers from The Snow Maiden by Rimsky-Korsakov. Os-
cilloscope over backgrounds, including colored liquids,
clouds, and grids of colored light shot through glass
bricks or cut-glass plate.

Imagination (1958, color, 3 min.) Collage of effects from

earlier films. [Abstract bit for Steve Allen]

RCA: New Sensations in Sound (1959, color, 3 min) Com-

mercial. Collage of effects from previous films.

75

GERMAN ANIMATION
Resistance and Subversion in
Animated Films of the Nazi Era:
The Case of Hans Fischerkoesen
The cover of Der Speigel featuring Hans Fischerkoesen.
Courtesy of William Moritz.
Note — this article was originally published in the Fall
1992 issue of the Animation Journal. AWN originally
published an excerpted version in October, 1996. The
images were added by Bill for the AWN article. Founded
in 1991, the Animation Journal is the only peer-reviewed
scholarly journal devoted to animation history and the-
ory. Its content reflects the diversity of animation’s
production techniques and national origins. Animation
Journal is edited by Maureen Furniss, Ph.D. and can be
found at http://www.animationjournal.com.
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
by William Moritz
HE AVERAGE AMERICAN TODAY KNOWS VERY LITTLE
about German film during the Nazi era, and even
animation scholars may not know what German ani-
mation existed between 1933 and 1945. Such a gap in
cinema studies reflects a larger problem in the
United States’ perception of this crucial period. Fifty
years after the Second World War, many Americans
naively accept simplistic stereotypes of the Nazis, such
as the demonic fiend whose appetite for sadistic cruelty
is matched only by his ravenous, perverse sexual ap-
petite (who inhabits such dramatic works as Visconti’s
The Damned), and the bumbling fool, somehow quaintly
charming (popularized by such comedies as “Hogan’s
Heroes”). A similar simplistic notion of the era itself —
everything from 1933 to 1945 was Nazi, everything be-
fore and after wasn’t — clouds and weakens our per-
ception of one of the most tragic and dangerous
episodes in human history. By distancing the Nazis into
the stereotypes of demons and fools, we can comfort-
ably say, “they weren’t like us,” and by containing them
so solidly in a particular time slot, we can assure our-
selves that “it can’t happen here.” Yet the complex truth
about the Nazi era is considerably more menacing.
While undoubtedly some Nazi demons and some
Nazi fools did flourish, many Nazis were average Ger-
man citizens who bought into an existing fascist scheme
— and many German citizens were never supporters of
Nazism, and actively attempted to resist the govern-
ment’s fascist rule. Germany, after all, had been a bril-
liant intellectual, scientific and artistic community for
two centuries before the Nazi era, and, during the 1920s
in particular, Germany had played a leading role in the
intellectual and artistic avant-garde, as well as produc-
ing many of the finest, most respected films of the era.
Not every creative, intellectual person could leave the
country.
Similarly, while the Nazi party legally ruled Ger-
many for only twelve years, from March 1933 until May
76

1945, the Nazi party existed as a minority party through-
out the 1920s — Hitler was jailed in the early 1920s for
terrorist activities. When the Nazis seized power over
the German government through a virtual coup d’état in
1933 (they were not elected by a majority vote, remem-
ber: Hitler was appointed by the senile Hindenberg and
the burning of the parliament building gave an excuse
for martial law), many Germans believed that they
could never pull it off, that they would fall from power
very quickly. After the disastrous inflation of the 1920s
and the Great Depression of the 1930s, Germany had
not really recovered from World War I, and unemploy-
ment hovered over six million — the same figure, ironi-
cally, that is usually given as the total number of people
executed in the concentration camps. If the Nazis were
to stay in power, they had to perform an economic mir-
acle, which many thought such a radical fringe group
(rather like our Ku Klux Klan) could never do. But the
Nazis did remain in power, and it was precisely their
economic success that lured many average citizens to
lend them increasing support.
The first few years, however, were still tenuous.
The mass arrests of gypsies, homosexuals and “politi-
cal dissidents” (socialists, communists and fringe reli-
gious fanatics like Jehovah’s Witnesses) went unchal-
lenged by many “nice normal” German citizens who
rather thought “those people” probably deserved to be
gotten rid of.1 New jobs created by the absence of those
minorities, and by the flight of many people to refuge in
other countries, helped cure unemployment, as did the
beginning of the massive public works projects such as
the building of a freeway system and the new “People’s
Auto” (Volkswagen) factories. And the 1936 Olympics
brought a windfall influx of hard currency from millions
of tourists. It was only after 1937 — after four years of
propaganda indoctrination and 4 years of increasing
economic growth — that the Nazis could launch major
anti-semitic campaigns, or the harassment of Catholics
and Protestants who resisted Nazi policies.
THE GERMAN FILM INDUSTRY DURING THE NAZI ERA
The Nazis intended the German film industry to
play a key role in their economic recovery. The interna-
tional success of German films had brought in enor-
mous amounts of foreign exchange during the pre-Nazi
days. Although quality productions could also cost mil-
lions of marks, the risk was worth it if some resulted in
great box-office profits. Therefore, the film industry
was placed under special surveillance, to make sure
that all vital talent was kept and used to the maximum.
In the first days after the Nazi takeover, everyone had to
register with an appropriate “union” (remember, Nazi
means “National Socialist German Workers Party”), so
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
Hans Held’s Troublemaker, a real Nazi cartoon.
Courtesy of William Moritz.
that each person could be monitored through weekly
and monthly reports to local and regional offices. For
the film industry personnel, this meant that you had to
continue doing whatever you were doing — scriptwrit-
ing, editing, costume-making and so on — or explain
why you were falling behind in your work. This vigilant
guard duty was necessary: as in the bohemian milieu of
stage (and screen) for centuries, many of the film world
people were eccentrics and liberals, leftists and radi-
cals, homosexuals and free lovers, lavish in use of li-
quor and drugs, fond of parties and extravagance. Very
few were Nazi sympathizers: even in the 1937 Degener-
ate Film catalogue Film Art, Film-Cohen, Film-Corrup-
tion, the desperate authors could list only a handful of
minor names as “good Nazis.”2 Key talent had to be
pampered and coerced. As some industry-related
people fled, others were forcibly promoted to fill their
jobs.
Despite the fact that about fifteen hundred people
from the German film industry did manage to flee the
country over an eight-year period — and the presence
of many of these exiles in Hollywood would leave a last-
ing mark on American film style — it was never easy to
leave Nazi Germany.3 No one was allowed to take mon-
ey out of Germany; unless you had connections in a host
country, or foreign bank accounts (as some film people
who had been involved in co-productions had), you
might not be able to leave. If you had a large family, you
probably could not leave, since a complete family leav-
ing at once would be too obvious. Although Fritz Lang
was fond of saying that he fled Germany the very day
that Propaganda Minister Goebbels offered him the job
of production head at Universum Film AG (UFA) Studios,
his passport reveals that it took twenty-five different
77

Weather-beaten Melody. Courtesy of William Moritz.
official stamps and a whole year’s time before he could
finally leave for America.4 Nor was it unusual that the
Jewish Lang should be courted for a major film industry
job at the very time anti-semitic employment policies
were being announced; so hypocritical were the Nazis
about money, that they would, for example, force a Jew-
ish director like Reinhold Schünzel to make film after
film (including the devastatingly subversive Victor and
Victoria - Viktor und Viktoria, 1933) just because every
one of his films was a money-making hit. Schünzel and
his family were not able to escape until 1937.5
The question of animation in the Nazi era has been
largely ignored or even falsified. In many texts and film
rental catalogues, the dates for films such as Fisch-
inger’s Composition in Blue (Komposition in Blau, 1935)
or Reiniger’s The Stolen Heart (Das gestohlene Herz,
1934) are given as 1932 or 1933, as if to suggest that
they had not been made in Nazi Germany. Similarly,
sound films by the Diehl Brothers (Ferdinand, Hermann
and Paul), Ladislas Starewitch, Paul Peroff and others
are available in silent prints, which can discreetly be
listed as from the 1920s, even though they were actu-
ally produced in 1937 or 1941 in Germany. In fact,
Starewich’s Reynard the Fox (Reinicke Fuchs, 1937 and
Le Roman de Renard) although it was largely shot in
Paris around 1930, has been completely ignored in dis-
cussions of “the first feature-length animation film”
because it finally received its finishing funds from Ger-
man sources (since Goethe had written a classic ver-
sion of the Reynard legend) and had its world premiere
in Berlin in April 1937 — still eight months before Dis-
ney’s Snow White (December 1937).6
In fact, dozens of animators worked in Germany
before and during the Nazi era, including such relatively
forgotten names as Kurt Wiese, Otto Hermann, Hans
Zoozmann, Lore Bierling, Toni Rabolt, Harry Jaeger,
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
Kurt Wolfe, Kurt Kiesslich, Curt Schumann, Kurt
Stordel, Richard Felgenauer, Bernhard Klein, Paul Per-
off, the team of Hedwig and Gerda Otto, the team of G.
Wölz & G. Krüger, the team of Schwab and Gerhardt —
as well as such slightly better-known figures as Louis
Seel, The Diehl brothers (who made more than fifty
puppet films), Rudolf Pfenninger, Wolfgang Kaskeline,
Lotte Reiniger, and the Fischinger brothers — Hans and
Oskar.7
Only one of these people seems to have Fischinger
emigrated in February 1936, but he made three of his
best films in Germany during the Nazi era: Circles
(Kreise, 1933), Muratti Gets in the Act (Muratti Greift Ein,
1934), and Composition in Blue. He also made several
other films, and was denied the right to make a color
abstract film Squares (Quadrate, 1934). Circles and
Composition in Blue were made in defiance of the Nazi
policy on “degenerate art” and only released with some
danger and some difficulty, involving the heroic coop-
eration of a number of sympathetic, anti-Nazi critics,
especially those centered around Dr. Anschütz’s Color-
Music Congress in Hamburg (there were four: 1927,
1930, 1933, and 1936), and the Waterloo Theater in
Hamburg, which managed to keep an “alternate” film
club open until they hosted the 1939 premiere of Hans
Fischinger’s abstract animation Dance of the Colors
(Tanz der Farben).8
Lotte Reiniger and her socialist husband Carl Koch
made seven films in Germany between 1933 and 1935.
These films continue Reiniger’s previous style, using
opera and fairy tales in general, but it is also easy to see
in a film like The Stolen Heart how the filmmaker has
carefully tuned the allegory so that it reads as an anti-
Nazi, resistance fable: when the wicked miser robs the
village of its joy in music, the instruments of joy them-
selves fight back by creating even more musical enjoy-
ment. Under the ruse of going on a vacation to Greece in
1936, Koch and Reiniger attempted to emigrate to
France or England. They were denied any permanent
status in either country, so they traveled back and forth
between the two every few months from 1936 until the
outbreak of the war in 1939, when they were declared
“enemy aliens” and refused refuge in either France or
England. They then chose a job (arranged by Jean
Renoir) in Italy rather than return to Germany, but a few
years later, when the Allied troops first landed in Italy,
the retreating Nazi occupation army forcibly evacuated
Reiniger and Koch back to Germany, where Reiniger
was forced to work on an animation film even as bombs
fell and troops invaded Berlin.
Other animators may have managed to flee Ger-
many but, in any case, emigration was not necessarily a
panacaea.9 Before 1933, Bertold Bartosch had fled to
78

Paris, but in 1940 the invading Nazis destroyed St. Fran-
cis, a pacifist film he had been working on for nearly a
decade, along with other original negatives of his, in-
The Snowman. Courtesy of William Moritz.
cluding that of his masterpiece, The Idea (L’idée, 1932),
which fortunately survived through one release print in
England.
Almost all the animators who worked in Germany
between 1933 and 1945 had been making films before,
and most continued to make them after. Germany man-
aged to maintain an economically sound animation in-
dustry, largely because of advertising films. Before
World War I, in 1911, Polish-born Julius Pinschewer had
pioneered the use of animated films as advertising in
regular movie theaters, where projection of graphic
slides had been used previously. Pinschewer believed
that if a film were entertaining, the audience would pay
attention and respond positively to the product. There-
fore, he commissioned films from the best animators
(including eventually Guido Seeber, Walther Ruttmann,
and Lotte Reiniger) and allowed them a leisurely three
or five minutes in which to develop some charming
story or graphic idea. So successful was Pinschewer
that his films were sold and re-sold in countries all over
the world, usually adapted to other products by simply
changing the wording of the advertising slogan. The
Jewish Pinschewer fled to Switzerland in 1933 and took
with him several of his favorite animators, including
Rudi Klemm, but he also left many behind.10
GERMAN ANIMATION DURING WWII
Until 1937, Germany had been well supplied with
popular American-made cartoons. American produc-
tions had reigned supreme since the “Felix the Cat” and
“Out of the Inkwell” series had appeared in the 1920s,
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
and had impaired the expansion of the German cartoon
industry.11 Propaganda Minister Goebbels had paid Dis-
ney good money for Mickey Mouse shorts, Silly Sympho-
nies, and Three Little Pigs (1933) but he balked at the
high price Disney asked for Snow White and refused to
pay it. Goebbels predicted that Snow White would be a
flop, and when it turned out to be a sensational hit, he
set about trashing it in a series of well-planned critical
attacks in the German press. The criticisms stressed
how the pure German tale had been polluted by addition
of Hollywood kitsch, and were quick to point out (and
re-point out frequently) that the British censors had
banned Snow White for younger children because it was
too violent and frightening.12 In addition, Goebbels is-
sued a general call to German animators to step up
their production of color animated films for children,
and specifically commissioned a live-action feature
film of Snow White (Schneeweisschen, 1939) to be made by
the nature-documentarian Hubert Schonger, with
“documentary” fidelity to the original Grimm fairy tale
version (ironically, since most of the German märchen
originals contain far more violent and frightening de-
tails than any American version — text or film). This
“genuine German” Snow White turned out to be an awful
bore (and awkwardly made), but never one to admit a
mistake, Goebbels commissioned seven other live-ac-
tion fairy tales (three of them feature-length) from
Schonger, along with three short combined live-action
and animation films, and four drawn color fairy tale
cartoons — all, apparently, of a decidedly second-rate
quality, both in imagination and execution.13
The Diehl brothers, who had been making a variety
of romantic and lyrical puppet films earlier, were en-
couraged to turn their attention to folkloric subjects,
which they did with such charming fables as The Town
Mouse and the Country Mouse (Die Stadtmaus und die
Feldmaus, 1939), Puss in Boots (Der gestiefelte Kater,
1940), and Sleeping Beauty (Dornröschen, 1942). They
also managed to break out of the cycle with a rather
chilling Max and Moritz (Max und Moritz, 1941), based of
Wilhelm Busch’s original nineteenth century comic
strip, from which the later Katzenjammer Kids was de-
rived. The Diehls render the disgusting pranks of these
two evil children in such grotesque detail that it is diffi-
cult not to read the film as a protest against the willful
and petulant carnage of the Nazi overlords.
Thirty-five-year-old Hans Held, who had come
from the theater to being an assistant director for live
action movies at the Bavaria Studios (he specialized in
design and color consultation), was pressed into the
production of animated films and produced a rather
nasty thirteen-minute film, The Troublemaker (Der
Störenfried, 1940). The film demonstrates — in good
79

mock-Disney style — how the weaker animals of the
forest can band together to drive out the fox — all in
specific militaristic imagery (such as formations of
birds which dive-bomb the fox).14 Some sources list a
second Held film, Unity Makes Strength (Einigkeit Macht
Stark, 1941), but this might well be an alternate title for
The Troublemaker.15
There were other productions as well; Kurt Stordel,
for example, produced two very popular cartoons about
Purzel the Dwarf.16 But the trickle of cartoons produced
by German studios was not enough to cover for the loss
of Disney and other American product. To rectify the
situation, an official ministry plan of May 1941 called for
the establishment of a strong German animation indus-
try capable of producing not only a continuous flow of
color cartoon shorts, but also feature-length animated
films. At the behest of this goal, all able animators were
commanded to step up their production and focus on
theatrically viable entertainment cartoons.17 Among the
animators called into action at this time was Hans
Fischerkoesen, who was among the most distinguished
animators remaining in Germany between 1933 and
1945.
THE CASE OF HANS FISCHERKOESEN
Hans Fischer was born May 18, 1896, in Bad Ko-
esen, near Naumburg (with its famous cathedral), on
the road between Leipzig and Weimar. Because Fischer
was such a common name in the film world, he would
later add on the name of his birthplace in order to dis-
tinguish himself from the others. He was a delicate
child, plagued by asthma, so his parents allowed him
and his sister Leni to indulge their taste for fantasy and
spectacle by creating puppet shows and home enter-
tainments. After basic schooling, Leni and Hans at-
tended the Leipzig Art Academy together. Leni stayed
with Hans and worked with him on many films.
Because of his asthma, Hans could not serve as a
soldier during World War I, but he did work in army hos-
pitals near the front lines, where he experienced the
grotesque inanity of trench warfare. He dreamed about
making an animated film, The Hole in the West (Das
Loch im Westen, 1919), which would expose the War
Profiteer as the real cause of war — and the real ma-
nipulator of victory and defeat. When the war ended,
Fischerkoesen returned to his family home and spent
months drawing about sixteen hundred sequential im-
ages that made concrete the dream (or rather night-
mare) vision he had experienced in the trenches. He
took the drawings to a Leipzig movie company and paid
them (a borrowed) seven hundred marks to shoot them
onto film, but as it turned out, the company was near
bankruptcy and had never shot single-frame material
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
before. Hans lost that money, but he persevered to build
his own animation stand out of a wooden margarine
crate and shot the film himself. Fischerkoesen himself
described the film as a political cartoon brought to life,
and it certainly suggests something of Bartosch’s The
Idea, made a decade later. Fortunately, a Leipzig film
distributor bought The Hole in the West cartoon from
Fischerkoesen for three thousand marks, so he was
able to continue making animation films.
He made a successful advertising film, Strolling
Peter (Bummel-Petrus, 1921), for the Leipzig shoe fac-
tory Nordheimer, which led to a two-year contract with
Julius Pinschewer, after which he established his own
Fischerkoesen Studio in Leipzig to specialize in adver-
tising films. Fischerkoesen was perfectly suited to the
advertising industry; he had an irrepressible sense of
humor, a good sense of musical rhythm, and a charm-
ing, flexible cartoon style, as well as the obsessive
concentration necessary to work exhaustingly until an
animation production was perfected in every detail. He
also had the knack for seeing a pun or twist in some old
saying, common situation or popular song which would
fit right in with a product. He philosophized about ad-
vertising, proposing that the “if-then” formula (if you
use this product, then this will happen; if you have this
problem, then this product will help) was the best for-
mat for a succinct, cogent ad.18
In 1931, a Leipzig newspaper celebrated Fischerko-
esen, “the darling of audiences,” with a full-page article
entitled “Watch out, Mickey Mouse, Felix the Cat, and
Co.!” which contains delightful images of a cow with a
lyre built into her horns, a bull in a tuxedo, and an en-
chanting art-deco-style Kangaroo ballet — all popular
cartoon figures from his ads.19 By 1937, when he won
both first and second prize at a Dutch-sponsored inter-
national competition for advertising films (the runners
up included such luminaries as George Pal and Alexan-
der Alexeieff), Fischerkoesen had made around one
thousand publicity films. Unfortunately, all but a few of
his pre-war films seem to be lost, or languish unidenti-
fied in collections that do not consider advertising films
important.
For many years, Hans Fischerkoesen managed to
keep his production confined to the kind of commercial
work he did so well. But after the ministry plan of May
1941 was enacted, the Propaganda Minister, through
the UFA studios, had demanded that he move his staff
and studio from Leipzig to Potsdam, where he would be
near UFA’s “Neubabelsberg” studios, to be available for
consultations and special effects work for UFA features
and documentaries. When the forty-five-year-old
Fischerkoesen, loathe to become any more closely in-
volved with Goebbels than necessary, protested that he
80

did not really have the talent to invent ideas for story
films, he was assigned to work with thirty-five-year-old
Horst von Möllendorff, a popular Berlin newspaper
cartoonist who had just been “drafted” to work as a gag
man for the new German cartoon industry.
AN ASIDE: MÖLLENDORFF’S “AUTHORSHIP”?
Möllendorff received “story” credit on three films I
have seen: Fischerkoesen’s Weather-beaten Melody
(Verwitterte Melodie, 1942) and The Snowman (Der Sch-
neemann, 1943), and a film called Wedding in the Coral
Sea (Hochzeit im Korallenmeer, 1945), which was ani-
mated by Jiri Brdecka during the last year of the war in
Prague. How much Möllendorff actually contributed to
these films seems a moot point to me. Fischerkoesen’s
two films are sheer masterpieces, thoroughly witty and
inventive (in exactly the same ways his many advertis-
ing films are), and often the weight of the story is car-
ried by graphic brilliance and astonishing small details;
the bare bones of the story ideas (a bee finds an aban-
doned phonograph in a meadow, or a snowman hides in
a refrigerator in order to experience Spring) hardly tells
why they are such wonderful films.
The Brdecka Coral Sea is regarded by the Czechs
as a Czech film, since not only Brdecka, but also Eduard
Hofman, Stanislav Latal, Josef Kandl, and Jilis Kalas
worked on it (all of whom would continue in Czech ani-
mation production after the war). The film is a nice,
pleasant piece, well-animated, but overall neither ter-
ribly clever or witty — the story, in fact, is painfully
simple: a pair of fish are about to get married when an
octopus steals the bride, so the fish cooperate to get her
back. Nor is it very original, in that Friz Freleng’s 1935
cartoon Mr. and Mrs. is the Name has basically the
same story and style (replete with sunken ship), except
that the Warner Bros. “star,” Buddy, is the hero instead
of a boy-fish.20 Fischerkoesen also made a third car-
toon, The Silly Goose (Das dumme Gänslein, 1944) based
on his own story, which is again humorous, vivid and
touching.21 The fact that the Fischerkoesen films (and
remember that Hans’ sister Leni was an omnipresent
collaborator) demonstrate a consistent wit and inven-
tiveness, while the Möllendorff film made in Czechoslo-
vakia lacks those very qualities, suggests to me that
Möllendorff may have been merely a functionary, and
his contribution to the Fischerkoesen films was negli-
gible; the credit for these masterpieces rests with Hans
and Leni Fischerkoesen.
A CLOSER LOOK AT THE FILMS
Among the specific things that Goebbels mandated
for the new German cartoon industry was the develop-
ment of “three-dimensional” effects that could com-
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
pete with Max and Dave Fleischer’s stereo-optical pro-
cess (which combined model sets with cel animation) or
Disney’s multiplane camera (which filmed several lay-
ers of cels), both of which had been lauded in the
American and European press. Fischerkoesen had al-
ready been using, in his advertising films, a simple
multiplane-type effect derived from the multi-layered
glass animations that Reiniger had used in the 1926
animated feature The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Die
Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed) (and that Bertold Bar-
tosch, who had worked on special effects for that fea-
ture, continued to use in his exquisite half-hour tragic
allegory, The Idea). Fischerkoesen had also been work-
ing with puppet and model animation, and could hardly
have been ignorant of Oskar Fischinger’s brilliant simu-
lation of a deep-space traveling boom shot around the
Muratti cigarettes parading towards the Olympic stadi-
um in his classic ad film, Muratti Gets in the Act.
The opening sequence of Weather-beaten Melody
demonstrates a bravura mastery of both the multiplane
and stereo-optical processes — and a meaningful use
of depth, following the flight of a bee down from the sky,
flying through twelve layers of grass and flowers in a
meadow, and circling around an abandoned phono-
graph which lies, puzzlingly for the bee, in the middle of
the meadow. Behind this long traveling point-of-view
sequence is also the assumption that the bee is a per-
sonage worthy of following, and in fact she turns out to
be adventurous, resourceful, perceptive, talented, witty,
and friendly, among other admirable, even noble “hu-
man” characteristics. Fischerkoesen demonstrates
these personality traits in little episodes characteristic
of his style: she uses dandelion seeds as parachutes for
a joyous free ride, and when her game of tossing a blue-
berry ends in disaster (the overripe fruit bursts over her
head) she meticulously wipes herself clean on a daisy
petal. Fischerkoesen also delineates her personality
with unexpected complexities. For example, is she jeal-
ous of the hedgehog who takes over her place as “pho-
nograph needle” while she is away sharpening her
stinger, or is she merely exasperated at the confusing
quality of his multi-needle pickup? The very idea of am-
biguity was anathema for the Nazis, who could only
hope to maintain their fascist program by enforcing
strict, unbending codes of behavior, and absolute, invio-
lable “ideals and truths.” Precisely because of its tech-
nical brilliance, Weather-beaten Melody could contain
quite a bit of forbidden material. Ironically, inherent in
the “stereo” animation techniques, as Fischerkoesen
uses them, lies the most subversive metaphor: a sense
of freedom of movement, an affirmation of the multi-
layered nature of reality — of ambiguity and change —
which demands (even subconsciously) that the viewer
81

think for herself and consider other things as valid as
the subjective self — something truly forbidden by Nazi
doctrine as the most dangerous action of all.
To fully appreciate Fischerkoesen’s daring, one
must remember that the Nazis had forbidden Jazz and
Swing music as an Afro-Judaic plot to undermine tradi-
tional German culture. The catalogue of the 1937 “De-
generate Film” catalogue contained an anti-Jazz spread
entitled “Africa Speaks...?” which stigmatized “Al Jol-
son-Rosenblatt” among other black and black-face
jazz musicians, and the 1938 “Degenerate Music” exhi-
bition had on its cover the image of a black saxophone
player wearing a Star of David. Detlev Peukert chroni-
cles how the swing movement became a key symbolic
rebellion, while the British film Swing Under the Swas-
tika documents the sad and ironic fates of Jazz musi-
cians during this period.22
In this context, the discovery of an abandoned pho-
nograph takes on new meaning, especially when the
record left on the turntable is a swing number with lyr-
ics that say “the week wouldn’t be worthwhile without a
weekend when we can get away to enjoy nature.” Near
the phonograph lies an “abandoned” clasp from a
woman’s garter belt (with a “lucky” four-leafed clover
growing out of it!), which suggests that the interrupted
picnic that left behind the musical instrument had also
involved erotic play — something also strictly forbidden
by the puritanical Nazi codes. So from beneath the
charming surface of this cartoon emerges a subversive
message: women, far from the unNatural Nazi-desig-
nated stereotype of “children, church and kitchen,” can
escape into Nature to be self-reliant and adventurous,
erotic and free — they can rediscover or revitalize a
suppressed world of forbidden joy in music and friend-
ship between diverse creatures who may be brown or
white, frog or caterpillar — or even a pair of ladybug
beetles who may be a same-sex couple. Especially
compared to many American cartoons of this same pe-
riod (profligate with gratuitous violence and racist/
sexist stereotype victims), the entire community of ani-
mals depicted in Weather-beaten Melody is peaceful,
friendly, fun loving, imaginative and altruistic — quite
the opposite of the Nazi requirements for a dedicated
Aryan citizen.
The same spirit of ambiguity and subversive sub-
text pervades Fischerkoesen’s next film, The Snowman.
The opening sequence, as in Weather-beaten Melody,
establishes the filmmaker’s mastery of creating the il-
lusion of three-dimensional space. Behind the credits
are layers of snowflakes, with their elaborate abstract
patterns (including pure geometrical circles — all of
which justify “degenerate” abstract art as a natural
phenomenon!), falling down through the frame. As the
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
credits finish, the viewer flies down over a snow-cov-
ered twilight village, around the steeple of a church (a
stereo-optical-type model), down to a snowman that
stands in an open space — just as if we were seeing
The Silly Goose. Courtesy of William Moritz.
from the point of view of a snowflake. This point of view
is confirmed when snowflakes alight on the snowman
in the pattern of a heart — suggesting that he is a crea-
ture of feelings, rather than a military/political figure
(who would wear medals or insignia), or an ostracized
victim (such as the Jews and Gays who wore yellow
stars or pink triangles). Unlike the opening of Weather-
beaten Melody, which establishes the point of view as
that of the protagonist bee, The Snowman’s opening
sets us up as a visitor/observer of the snowman pro-
tagonist. The character of the snowman is more com-
plex and “humanly” equivocal than that of the bee, par-
tially because he is involved in more diverse actions, but
also because he operates in a parallel structure which
contrasts events in “winterland” with events in “sum-
merland.”
In the first episode, the snowman begins to play, by
juggling snowballs — a curiously appropriate pastime
since he himself is composed of snowballs. His game
angers a watchdog, who rushes in barking at him. In his
attempts to get away from the watchdog, he squashes
the dog into the snow and then laughs at the dog’s dis-
tress. When, in retaliation, the dog bites a chunk out of
his rump, the snowman pelts the dog with snowballs,
which finally hurts the dog and gets rid of it. The snow-
man tries to have fun again by skating on an icy pond
(using icicles as his skates), but finds the three snow-
balls of his body begin to bounce apart. Soon the ice
breaks and the snowman is melted down to a thin skel-
eton of his former self. He is able to restore himself by
rolling down hill until he accumulates his former bulk of
82

snow and, when his torso and head get mixed (just as
they did while skating), a crow helps find and assemble
his body parts into proper order. A tree laughs at him,
as he had laughed at the watchdog, so the crow shakes
its coat of snow away as revenge. While the snowman
tries to nap, a rabbit attempts to steal his carrot-nose,
so he decides to go inside to sleep where it will be safer.
As he walks into a nearby cottage, the viewer is treated
to a spectacular 180-degree stroll around the stereo-
optical building. Once inside, he disturbs a grumpy cat
in order to sleep on its couch, and we become aware
that many parallel events are occurring within the film.
Because he wishes to experience summer, the
snowman hide out in the refrigerator. When he attempts
to leave in July, however, his rump has stuck to the re-
frigerator shelf and he loses a chunk (which he regains
by turning down the temperature in the icebox). He
plays pranks on the chicken and cow, just as he had
teased the dog in winterland (yet when he finds that he
is freezing a ladybug, he becomes a ski run for her by
turning somersaults across a meadow — another daz-
zling animation feat). After he melts, singing “how
lovely summer is; my heart breaks from happiness,” a
rabbit eats his carrot-nose (and her bunnies frolic in his
hat, as if he had been a magician).
Parallel incidents reveal the complexities of the
snowman’s character and highlight the ambiguities of
the action as a parable: the snowman, an average per-
son with some good and some bad qualities, is trapped
in a given environment, winterland. Although it is func-
tional, it is cold and in some ways inhospitable. He reads
that there is another place, sunny and free, and ar-
ranges to escape to this summerland for some thrilling
moments of warmth and freedom, even at the cost of
his life, as we hear him gurgle in the death throes of
song, twisting and melting in the hot sun. The dog, crow,
cat, ladybug, rabbit, and others are characterized as
parallel human-like creatures, which supports an
open, thoughtful humanitarian worldview that was
anathema to the Nazis. The Snowman is also full of
beautiful, touching, affirmative and spectacular scenes,
such as the long pan across unfolding Spring.
Fischerkoesen’s third wartime film, Silly Goose,
provides another thought-provoking parable. Through
the bars of a wooden cage driving on a cart across town,
a young goose glimpses the seemingly glamorous al-
lures of city life: among them an exotic parrot, silhou-
ettes in a dance hall, and an elegant fox (stole) with
feathers. Back at the farm, while her brothers and sis-
ters receive their schooling in swimming, marching,
laying eggs and such, she dreams narcissistically by a
pond, swings on the gate like a parrot, uses the plough
as a mirror, and creates for herself a pseudo-sophisti-
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
cated costume by thieving and exploiting her neighbors:
a caterpillar stole, a straw bottle-cover hat, pollen pow-
der, a spider-web veil, cork high-heels, and pig-bristle
eyelashes. Her sashay through the barnyard creates
mixed anger and astonishment. The gander, however,
chooses to woo her instead of her more modest sisters,
though she rejects him and wanders off into the woods
where she is seduced by a fox. The fox’s sinister lair is
run by slave labor — a weasel cranking a spit, a cat on a
treadmill that makes xylophone music with dangling
bones — and a cage full of geese wait for slaughter. She
manages to escape, and the barnyard animals cooper-
ate to drive the fox away and free his victims. While, on
the surface, this film could satisfy Goebbels’ dictum for
“blood and soil” films that glorify the German peasant
life, Fischerkoesen creates a complex and ambiguous
narrative that confuses and contradicts Nazi policy.23
The city is glamorous — especially as seen in a long
stereo-optical, multiplane sequence from the goose’s
point of view — while the barnyard activities are quaint
and confining. At the same time, however, the silly
goose’s exploitation of the barnyard for her costume is
mean and thoughtless. When the goose is seduced by
the fox, we momentarily hear a crypto version of the old
(Yiddish) popular song “Bei mir bist Du scheen,” and
could think that the villain is being identified as a Jew.
Quickly, however, we see that just the opposite is true:
the goose herself is being exploited. The fox is using her
as he does various other animals, which seems to al-
lude to the Nazis’ exploitation of the Jews, as slave labor
and prisoners doomed to execution. This sub-text be-
comes even more obvious by comparison with two other
German films of the period: Held’s 1940 The Trouble-
maker (in which the fox is a simplistic villain, and the
farm animals drive him away in specifically militaristic
fashion) and Frank Leberecht’s 1943 Poor Hansi (Armer
Hansi) (in which the gratuitous violence that drives
Hansi the canary back home rivals the worst of Warner
Bros., truly supporting a “blood and soil” ideal). Very
much to the contrary, The Silly Goose warns against be-
ing seduced by the glamour of fascism, and encourages
the viewer to think carefully about home and the city
and responsibility — to realize what happens to victims
and to do something about it.
So, in these three wartime cartoon masterpieces,
we see how Hans Fischerkoesen demonstrated that
even at the darkest, most menacing hours of human
depravity, men of principle may resist by subverting,
with subtlety, the rules and prejudices of the tyrant.
CONCLUSION
At the end of World War II, the invading Russian
troops arrested Fischerkoesen (along with all other
83

film personnel) as possible Nazi collaborators. Al-
though he could prove that he was not only never a Nazi
sympathizer but actually a member of an underground
resistance group of artists during the war years, he was
kept in Sachsenhausen concentration camp for three
years before his case was tried and he was exonerated.
During that time, he worked in the kitchen, and painted
on the walls ironic allegoric al murals of vegetable
caricatures, which are now preserved as a national his-
torical monument. As in great animal fables, these
kitchen murals play out the daily trials and terrors of
prison living, yet provide an ironical perspective by en-
acting these traumas through vegetables that we hu-
mans would calmly eat without a second thought. A
parsnip inspects a carrot for “vermin” (in this case, a
worm), while another parsnip stands by, sharpening his
knife (surgical or punitive?): is it not absurd that pars-
nips should be in control of carrots, when they’re
clearly relatives? Another carrot gratefully showers
under a plain faucet spigot, while potatoes, eager for a
swim, peel off their own skins and dive into the soup. A
procession of happy cucumbers carries a pumpkin on a
palanquin, yet they also help each other to slice them-
selves away on a kitchen “guillotine”. These (and other)
paintings provided a glimpse of humanitarian warmth
in the grim camp where so many suffered and lost their
lives.24
By the time Fischerkoesen was finally exonerated
and released from prison in 1948, he had shown that he
was not a Nazi, but also that he was no communist, so
he was not allowed to work in film. Later that year, he
and his family made one of those daring nighttime es-
capes from East Germany, carrying only a camera, and
he reestablished an animation studio for advertising
films near Bonn in West Germany. I have viewed thirty
or so of his post-war ads and have found most to be
witty, lively, graphically interesting, and memorably
clever. Certainly, he received critical acclaim: by 1956,
he had won major prizes at commercial film festivals in
Rome, Milan (three times), Venice, Monte Carlo, and
Cannes. He also appeared on the cover of the 26 August
1956 issue of the prestigious Der Spiegel, which is Ger-
many’s equivalent of the American Time Magazine.25
Fischerkoesen continued to make advertising films
until 1969, and died in 1973. 
NOTES
In addition to the various written sources cited in these notes, I have
also used throughout information from interviews with the
following people: Alexandre Alexeieff, Maria Bartosch, Ali Benitz,
Thorold Dickinson, Dr. Hans Cürlis, Dr. Hans Fischerkoesen ,
Elfriede Fischinger, Dr. Leonhard Fürst, Henri Langlois, Gerd
Opfermann, Claire Parker, Lotte Reiniger, Paul Sauerländer, and
Hedwig Traub. In addition, after this article was written, I was able
AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz
to corroborate many details by reference to a term paper written in
1985 by Hans Fischerkoesen’s granddaughter, Stephanie McMillan,
which is now in the John Canemaker Animation Collection at the
Bobst Library of New York University.
1
Details and documents appear in the exhibition catalog Eldorado
(Berlin: Berlin Museum, 1984), and James Steakley, The Homo-
sexual Emancipation Movement in Germany (New York: Arno,
1975), among other sources.
2
Carl Neumann, Curt Belling and Hans-Walther Betz, Film-
”Kunst,” Film-Kohn, Film-Korruption (Berlin: Hermann Scherping,
1937). The list of 13 names, none important stars or directors,
appears on page 153.
3
A list of names appears in Ronny Loewy, Von Babelsberg nach
Hollywood: Filmemigranten aus Nazideutschland (Frankfurt-am-
Main: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 1987) 8-22.
4
The claim is quoted in Lotte Eisner’s biography Fritz Lang 1976
(New York: Da Capo, 1986) 14-15. The passport is reproduced in
Loewy’s Von Babelsberg nach Hollywood (27-31). Gösta Werner has
written up the incident: “Fritz Lang and Goebbels, Myths and
Facts,” Film Quarterly Vol. 43 (Spring 1990): 24-27.
5
William Moritz, “Film Censorship During the Nazi Era,” “Degener-
ate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (New York:
Abrams [Los Angeles County Museum of Art], 1991): 184-191.
6
Léona and Francois Martin, Ladislas Starewitch (Annecy: Annecy
Festival, 1991) 42-43. See also Hans Schumacher, “Starewitch in
Berlin,” Film Kurier 30 (27 April 1937) n.p.
7
Peter Hagemann and Herbert Schulz, Deutsches Trickfilm
Kaleidoskop (Berlin: Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek/Annecy
Festival, 1979). Reinhold Johann Holtz, “Die Phänomenologie und
Psychologie des Trickfilms,” Ph.D. diss., Hansischen Universität,
1940.
8
After the screening, the theater’s permit was withdrawn.
9
Paul Peroff, for example, was working in New York during the
1950s, but I have been unable to determine when he left Germany.
10
Roland Cosandey, Julius Pinschewer: cinquante ans de cinema
d’animation (Annecy: Annecy Festival, 1989).
11
The cartoon industry was affected in terms of growth, as opposed
to the “art animation” of Fischinger or Reiniger, or the advertising
films of Pinschewer and Fischerkoesen, which were not.
12
Items on Disney’s Snow White appear in the trade paper Licht-
Bild-Bühne: “Even protests in U.S. about Disney’s unreasonable
fees for Snow White” (26 January 1938); “Who cares if Snow White
is too expensive, since it’s so violent” (15 February 1938); “Snow
White banned in London for under age 14!” (31 May 1938); “Is Snow
White even an appropriate subject for a kids’ film?” (9 July 1938).
The Schonger film was already being promoted as “the real
German Snow White” on 9 June 1939, although it did not open until
October 1939.
13
A. U. Sander, Jugend und Film (Berlin: NSDAP, 1944) 26-29. This
first live-action film appears to be based on the Grimms’ fairy tale,
84
 AWN’s Tribute to Dr. William Moritz

Snow White and Rose Red, since a second Schongar Schneewittch-

en appeared in October 1942. Perhaps Goebbels wanted to avoid
immediate comparison with Disney, or wanted to avoid pointing out
how gruesome and violent the Grimms märchen really are. Personal Tribute by Bärbel Neubauer

14
Der Störenfried, The Troublemaker, had special connotations for
the Nazi era children: one of the most pervasive Hitlerjugend
posters declared “Drive Out All Troublemakers!”. Reproduced on
the dust-jacket of H. W. Koch’s The Hitler Youth (New York: Dorset,
1 975).

15
Reinhold E. Thiel, Puppen-und Zeichen-Film (Berlin: Rembrandt,
1960) 10.

16
The two films are Purzel (1939) and Purzel der Zwerg (1942).

Boguslaw Drewniak, Der deutsche Film 1938-1945 (Düsseldorf:

17

Droste, 1987) 33.

18
Erich Boyer, “Auf jeder Leinwand — ein Fischerkoesen-Film,”
Hobby (September 1955). Arne Andersen, “Hans Fischerkoesen —
der ‘Walt Disney des deutschen Werbefilms’,” Technikum 9
(November 1958): 396-98.

S. Ceha, “Achtung! Mickey Maus, Felix der Kater & Co.” Leipziger
19

Abendpost (5 August 1931): 5.

20
Even if this particular Warner cartoon was not distributed in
Germany, it is likely that a print was captured during the conquest
of other European countries, and Goebbels showed it to his
filmmakers in order for them to make a rival German version. Thus
the Disney Snow White was screened in 1939 for the students at the
Film Academy, and various Fleischer cartoons were in fact shown
to general audiences with the names “Kurt Fleischer” and “Carl
Fleischer” substituted for the “Jewish” names Max and David. Film-
Kurier 21 (28 October 1939): 2.

21
Ingrid Westbrock, in her study Der Werbefilm, suggests that Silly
Goose was not finished until after the war (“begun 1945, finished
1947,” she says), but that cannot be true, since the film was begun
immediately after the successful Snowman in 1943, and Fischerko-
esen was still in a concentration camp in 1947. Her mistake
probably arises from censorship notices, since the three Fischerko- Bill’s lovely giving personality will always be in my
esen cartoons were cleared and re-released in Germany in 1947. heart.
Ingrid Westbrock, Der Werbefilm, (Hildesheim, Olms, 1983): 45.
I am thankful for the moments I was allowed to
22
Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and spend with him.
Racism in Everyday Life (CT: Yale UP, 1987). John Jeremy’s 1987 He was very strong in his wonderful way to live
Swing Under the Swastika (BBC) was accompanied by a BBC with and for beauty, poetry, love, spirituality and
documentation book in both English and German editions. creativity, bringing lots of light to our film world, to
friends and artists.
23
Blood and soil films were just one category in Goebbels’ program
to commemorate German culture in film. Thank you so much.
Optical Poetry and so many of his poetic, colorful
The great actor Heinrich George, for example, died there in
24
texts are with us,
September, 1946. His lovely being and work will continue to be a part
of us.
25
“Minnesang auf Markenartikel,” Der Spiegel 10 (29 August 1956):
cover, 34 - 40.
— Bärbel Neubauer

85
 Personal Tribute by Society for Animation Studies

�����

SOCIETY FOR ANIMATION STUDIES

William Moritz
The Society for Animation Studies loses with William Moritz a prominent member of its community.
From the beginning William Moritz has been a very active member.
As a former president of SAS he was often present at the conferences.
He always presented inspiring papers at SAS conferences, which were later often published as articles or
books.

He will be greatly missed by SAS members and animation enthusiasts all around the globe.

Papers presented by William Moritz at SAS conferences

Walter Ruttmann, Viking Eggeling: Restoring the Esthetics of Early Experimental Animation
1989 University of California, Los Angeles, USA
FIRST SAS CONFERENCE

Norman McLaren in Context

1990 Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
SECOND SAS CONFERENCE

The Genius of Lotte Reiniger

FOURTH SAS CONFERENCE 1992 California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, USA

The Idea: Bartosch & Masereel

1993 Surrey Institute of Art and Design, Surrey, United Kingdom
FIFTH SAS CONFERENCE

N a r r a t i v e S t r a t e g i e s i n B o r o w c z y k / L e n i c a ' s H o m e , Priit Pärn's L e D é j e u n e r s u r l ' H e r b e and Yori

Norstein's Tale of Tales
SIXTH SAS CONFERENCE 1994 San Francisco State University, USA

Abstract Dreams
EIGHTH SAS CONFERENCE 1996 University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA

Absolute Film: The Next Generation

NINTH SAS CONFERENCE 1997 University of Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Jordan Belson: Last of the Great Masters

TENTH SAS CONFERENCE 1998 Chapman University, Orange, USA

sas@niaf.nl

86