From Sensation

to Synaesthesia
in Film and New Media
From Sensation
to Synaesthesia
in Film and New Media
Edited by

Rossella Catanese,
Francesca Scotto Lavina
and Valentina Valente
From Sensation to Synaesthesia in Film and New Media

Edited by Rossella Catanese, Francesca Scotto Lavina

and Valentina Valente

This book first published 2019

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2019 by Rossella Catanese, Francesca Scotto Lavina,

Valentina Valente and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-5275-1924-4

ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-1924-4
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures.......................................................................................... viii

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... x

Introduction ................................................................................................ 1
Rossella Catanese, Francesca Scotto Lavina, Valentina Valente

First Section: Perception

Chapter One .............................................................................................. 16

Affect in Perception: Cinematic Fascination and Enactive Emotions
Enrico Carocci

Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 32

The Magic of Cinema: Perception, Cognition and Empathy
in the Cinematic Vision
Chiara Castelli

Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 44

Color Outside the Lines: Animating a Model of Synaesthesia
Jennifer M. Barker

Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 58

The Sublime Spittle of the Opera Singer
André Gaudreault, Philippe Marion

Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 72

The Theatricality of Alain Resnais’ Films: ‘Mèlo’ and ‘Smoking/
No Smoking’
Valentina Valente
vi Table of Contents

Second Section: Movement

Chapter Six ............................................................................................... 86

Mechanical Sensations: Étienne-Jules Marey, Charles Frémont
and the Issue of Automatism
Linda Bertelli

Chapter Seven......................................................................................... 102

‘The Underlying Gesture’: Towards the Notion of Gesture
in Jean d’Udine and Sergei Eisenstein
Irina Schulzki

Chapter Eight .......................................................................................... 116

Film as Synaesthetic Object: The Affective Sensorimotor Coupling
of Cinematic Image
Francesca Scotto Lavina

Third Section: Senses

Chapter Nine........................................................................................... 132

Olfactory Experience and the Exploration of Space in Cinema:
Alexander Sokurov’s ‘Alexandra’ and Jan Jakub Kolski’s ‘Jasminum’
Malgorzata Bugaj

Chapter Ten ............................................................................................ 143

Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin: Cinematic Clash of Affection
and Surface
Laura Jacob

Chapter Eleven ....................................................................................... 151

The Electricity of Blue Roses: Shorting the Senses and Sensing Film
Mood in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
Saige Walton

Chapter Twelve ...................................................................................... 167

Dust Gets in Your Eyes: Representations of Dust and Debris
in Documentary Film and Video from Mainland China
Mariagrazia Costantino
 From Sensation to Synaesthesia in Film and New Media vii

Fourth Section: Abstractions

Chapter Thirteen ..................................................................................... 182

“The Murmur of Existence”: Siegfried Kracauer between Aural
and Visual Noise
Tommaso Isabella

Chapter Fourteen .................................................................................... 193

The Poly-expressive Symphony: Futurism and the Moving Image
Rossella Catanese

Chapter Fifteen ....................................................................................... 205

From Painting to Film: Abstract Cinema and Synaesthesia
Marie Rebecchi

Fifth Section: New Media and Media Art

Chapter Sixteen ...................................................................................... 218

A Return to the Techniques of the Body: On the Reenactments
of Zoe Beloff
Christa Blümlinger

Chapter Seventeen .................................................................................. 229

Inventing the Senses: Polish New Media Art and Synaesthesia
in ’60s-’80s
Karol Jóźwiak

Chapter Eighteen .................................................................................... 238

The Sensory Experience of Drone Piloting in Omer Fast’s
‘Five Thousand Feet is the Best’
Calvin Fagan

About the Authors .................................................................................. 249

 CHAPTER FIFTEEN

FROM PAINTING TO FILM:

ABSTRACT CINEMA AND SYNAESTHESIA

MARIE REBECCHI

From Painting to Cinema

This chapter addresses the concept of synaesthesia––a simultaneous mix of
sensations, usually experienced in separate ways––which is at the roots of
the genealogy of abstract cinema. Abstract film, especially its early
developments in the 1920s, offers a significant chance to develop a new,
deeper understanding of the status of the work of art and its reproducibility, and
of the various experimentations in synaesthetic abstract art made possible
by the technical potential of the cinematic medium.
Abstract films blended painting, music, movement, images, sounds,
forms, and colors in order to create a unique audiovisual work of art, which
was no longer aiming to a single perceptual level (vision), but rather pointed
towards a fusion of vision and hearing. In this sense, the experimental and
technologically innovative role of the abstract film can be made clear
through a comparison of cinema’s original properties and the new
synaesthetic work of art. The products of experimental abstract cinema can
be seen as aspirations to a decisive reorientation of models of perception in
a technical sense, contributing in this way to redefine the role of
cinematographic experience within the framework of a broader cultural,
aesthetic, and technological transformation brought about by the new
optical media.
From this point of view, the pioneering technical tricks upon which
abstract films were based, constituted the construction material for a new
language and an unprecedented form of expression founded on the specific
technical properties of the cinematic medium: a universal language
(Universelle Sprache)––as it was ambitiously defined by Hans Richter and
Viking Eggeling in a writing of 1920 that has been lost (Richter and
206 Chapter Fifteen

Eggeling 1920; Foster 1998, 185-239)1––where sound, image, rhythm,

color, and movement would be condensed in a single work. The abstract
cinema fulfilled the experiences of the early avant-garde theorists, painters,
sculptors and poets, and tried to set in motion a significant process of
aesthetic upgrading and expansion of the expressive possibilities of the
language of film. In order to show the importance of abstract cinema from
an aesthetical and technological point of view, my paper shows a vast array
of images (paintings, drawings, scrolls), which are at the origins of the very
first abstract films of the 1920s.
Within this theoretical framework, according to László Moholy-Nagy,
the most convincing examples from the technical and expressive point of
view were definitely to be sought in the works of Walter Ruttmann, Viking
Eggeling and Hans Richter: “The efforts of Walter Ruttmann (Germany),
who early enlisted the aid of the film camera in his experiments, represented
an important advance in this direction. The forms he drew for animated
cartoons marked the beginning of a cinematic composition with still
unforeseeable possibilities of kinetic development. Most important,
however, were the works of Viking Eggeling (Sweden), who died
prematurely. Eggeling – the first after the Futurists to do so –further
developed the importance of the time problem, which revolutionised the
whole existing aesthetic and formulated a scientifically precise set of
problems. On an animation desk he photographed a sequence of movements
built up from the simplest linear elements and, by correctly estimating
developmental relationships in size, tempo, repetition, discontinuity, etc.,
tried to render the complexity which grow out of simplicity. (...) In
Eggeling's hands the original colour-piano became a new instrument which
primarily produced not colour combinations but rather the articulation of
space in movement. His pupil Hans Richter has – so far only theoretically –
emphasized the time impulse even more strongly and has thus come near to
creating a light-space-time continuity in the synthesis of motion.” (Moholy-
Nagy [1925] 1973)
In this sense, the two films made by Richter and Eggeling respectively
in 1921 – Rhythmus 21 (first of a series of experiments on the dynamism of
geometric shapes that would be continued with Rhythmus 23 and Rhythmus
25) and Diagonal Symphony (Szendy 2005, 158), attest the evolution of the
“rolls” from their initial pictorial form to the abstract, dynamic and musical
plasticism proper to the pure cinematic form.

1H. Richter and V. Eggeling, Universelle Sprache (1920). The original text has not
survived; all that remains is a draft republished in English under the title
Demonstration of the ‘Universal Language’.
 From Painting to Film: Abstract Cinema and Synaesthesia 207

Abstract Choreographies and Audiovisual Music:

From Fischinger's Early Studies to Disney's Fanstasia
From the end of the twenties, with Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger,
abstract films and “optical music” began to emerge from experimental
laboratories and the narrow circles of the artistic avant-garde to be screened
regularly in movie houses, thereby reaching a wider audience and allowing
the echo of experimental research into abstract cinema to be heard across
the ocean. The path that led Fischinger, over the course of the thirties, to
explore thoroughly the technical and expressive possibilities of the abstract
animated film followed in part the one taken by Richter and Eggeling: after
approaching the cinema through the technique of visualization of literary
poems by means of drawings on rolls of paper, the shift to animation––due
in particular to the need to bring dynamism to the effects obtained with
painting on rolls––was almost inevitable. In his 1929 film, Studie Nr. 1,
Fischinger already experimented with the use of sound in relation to the
rhythmic articulation of lines and surfaces, basing his studies precisely on
the relationship of identity-difference, at the structural and compositional
level, between the language of music and that of the cinema and paying
particular attention to the aspects of melody and harmony in the “animation”
of the abstract figure. As he will observe in 1947: “The flood of feeling
created through music intensified the feeling and effectiveness of this
graphic cinematic expression, and helped to make understandable the
absolute film. Under the guidance of music, which was already highly
developed, there came the speedy discovery of new laws––the application
of acoustical laws to optical expression was possible. As in the dance, new
motions and rhythms sprang out of the music––and the rhythms became
more and more important.” (Fischinger [1947] 2006, 110)
In 1932 Fischinger made a work entitled Tönende Ornamente (Sound
Ornaments), with the aim of presenting publicly his research into the
production of synthetic sounds drawn directly onto film. In that way,
Fischinger had imagined study of the acoustic equivalents of the various
ornamental styles that had emerged over the course of the history of the arts
(Somaini 2012, 88).
The use that Fischinger made of music in the “visual ballets” he created
for his Studien was often a preparation for vision itself: in these works the
music is synaesthetically shaped as an acoustic weft on which to weave a
multicolored concert of images. It is from this perspective of
experimentation on sound and moving image that we can also view
Fischinger’s aim to go down the road of giving visual form to celebrated
and engaging pieces of music: from Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 5 to
208 Chapter Fifteen

Dukas’s The Sorcerer's Apprentice, passing through popular music and

jazz2. From this point of view, Fischinger’s opening to popular culture, on
the one hand, and the interest of the American motion picture production
companies (from Paramount to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) in his abstract
films, on the other, allow us to reconstruct the contacts, exchanges and
influence of the European avant-garde on the American artistic and cultural
scene of the thirties and forties. The first signs of this opening came from
Hollywood: in one of Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies (1929-39)––The
Skeleton Dance (1929)––it would not be going too far to point to the
presence and development of the concepts of “eye music,” “ornament
dance” and “optical poetry” that characterized the experiences of “living
painting” and abstract animation on which Fischinger was working in the
same years. In addition, in his attempt to identify the cultural contexts and
cinematic works that could be used to trace the decisive influence of the
European avant-gardes on the Hollywood production of the thirties,
Fischinger’s biographer William Moritz saw in the abstract geometric
choreographies of Studie Nr. 5 and Nr. 7––a film made by Fischinger in
Germany in 19303 and licensed by Universal Pictures to be distributed as a
short to be used in the Universal Newsreels and shown before the screening
of their full-length movies––a possible source of inspiration for the
kaleidoscopic and floating choreographies created by the director and
choreographer Busby Berkeley for his films: from Whoopee! (1930) to 42nd
Street (1933), directed by Lloyd Bacon; from Gold Diggers of 1933 to the
spectacular musical number By a Waterfall in Footlight Parade (1933)
again directed by Lloyd Bacon (Moritz 2004, 212)4.

2 In connection with Fischinger’s use of popular music and jazz in his abstract films

it is worth mentioning: the popular foxtrot “I've Never Seen a Smile like Yours”
utilized for Studie Nr. 5 (1930); the famous ballet Die Puppenfee that provided the
soundtrack to Muratti Greift Ein (1934); the jazz symphony Radio Dynamics by
Ralph Rainger (composer of film music for Paramount Studios) for Allegretto
(1936).
3 It should be pointed out that Studie Nr. 5 was presented at the Congress for Color-

Music Research organized in Hamburg in October 1930 by the psychologist and

expert on music, art and synesthesia Georg Anschütz (a congress at which Walter
Behm had presented a paper with the title Über die Abstrakte Filmstudie Nr. 5 von
Oskar Fischinger (Synästhetischer Film).
4 In this connection Moritz declares: “Fischinger transforms the dance into a

fantastic abstract ballet in which two levels of 'dancers' flow past and through each
other: regular and orderly groups of thin-line, hard-edged figures (unmistakably
male and female) which move in a patterned configuration reminiscent of Busby
Berkeley's later choreography [...].”
 From Painting to Film: Abstract Cinema and Synaesthesia 209

Another point of contact between Fischinger and Berkeley should be

sought in Muratti Privat (1935), a work realized in the wake of the success
of the color film from the year before entitled Muratti Greift Ein, recognized
at the time as one of the most prodigious examples of the technique of
abstract animation. The fascination exercised by the promotional film made
for Muratti cigarettes (in particular on Ernst Lubitsch, who had emigrated
from Germany to Hollywood in 1922), which Fischinger had finished a year
before his departure for the United States (in February 1936), certainly
helped his introduction into the world of American cinema, and thereby
contributed to fostering the interest of European abstract filmmakers in
American artistic and media imagery (Brougher 2005, 105).5 In this three-
minute-long black-and-white advertising film shot in 35 mm we are
presented, in fact, with an original and alluring abstract ballet in which the
cigarettes, like the geometric shapes of the early Studien, dance ironically
to the rhythm of Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca, lining up in mobile
checkerboards with the same inviting and undulating motion as the legs of
the dancers in some of Berkeley best-known musical numbers (Rebecchi
2012; 2013).
In this connection Cecile Starr, in an article examining the question of
the influence of European abstract film on Berkeley’s swirling and
geometric visual ballets (Starr 2001, 78–83) argues that the abstract models
of Dames––a musical made by Berkeley in 1934––had had no rivals until
1936, the year in which Fischinger, moving to the United States following
Hitler’s rise to power, signed the contract with Paramount for the making of
Allegretto, then titled Radio Dynamics (1943), a film in which the
combination of mostly geometric forms that expand and contract in a
hypnotic visual symphony immediately calls to mind Berkeley’s style of
spectacular choreography. As Starr points out, it would therefore be possible
to discern the influence of Berkeley’s seductive musical numbers on the
works Fischinger produced during his American period: in this case, the
channel through which this second line of mutual contaminations would
have passed, should be identified as the film made by Fischinger in 1937
for MGM, An Optical Poem––presented as a visual transposition of Liszt’s
Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2––to which an active contribution had been
made by a German migrant to the United States, William Dieterle, who, in
turn, had just made the musical entitled Fashions of 1934, for which
Berkeley had orchestrated some exceptional musical numbers.

5 In fact, as Brougher points out, it was Ernst Lubitsch who, after seeing Komposition

in Blau (1935) and Muratti Greift Ein (1934), “convinced the executives at
Paramount to bring the experimental filmmaker to Hollywood.”
210 Chapter Fifteen

It is also possible to detect the presence of the sinuous geometry of

Fischinger and Berkeley’s abstract choreographies in some celebrated
sequences of Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940): on the one hand, the episode
of the Dance of the Reed Flutes set to the notes of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker
Suite seems to be a transposition in a ‘liquid’ and floral key of the musical
numbers coordinated by Berkeley’s visionary talent.6 On the other,
Fischinger’s quest for a total interpenetration between geometric-choreographic
and chromatic-musical elements found one of its most successful
expressions in his troubled collaboration with Disney on the Bach episode
of Fantasia.
Walt Disney was planning an animated feature illustrating several pieces
of classical music and engaged the conductor Leopold Stokowski, who
knew that Fischinger had been making animations pegged to music for some
time. Study no. 8 (1931), for example, devised images for Paul Dukas’s The
Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a scherzo Disney would later use in Fantasia. Unlike
Disney, Fischinger did not illustrate Goethe’s story, but rather translated the
textures and movements of the sounds into tumbling black-and-white
shapes. In 1938–39 Fischinger was hired by the Disney studio as a “motion
picture cartoon effects animator” Having animated the sparkle of the blue
fairy’s wand in Pinocchio, he produced sketches and try-outs for Bach's
toccata and fugue section in Fantasia. In one major sequence, turquoise and
green-grey waves were superimposed by a flow of geometric figures in
browns, orangey-red and yellow oranges. His twenty seconds’ worth of film
was worked over by Disney staff and the shapes made simpler, for the
assumption was that only then would audiences accept them.
So, according to William Moriz, as a result of Disney’s statements and
suspicions about the colour of the sketches, Fischinger designs were
simplified, so that only one figure moved at any one time, and everything
was altered to make it resemble some natural form, from a violin to a cloudy
sky. Then the Fischinger’s colour were tamed to suit the economics of
inking and painting, against Fischinger’s idea of showing the film's
soundtrack to demonstrate how various noises and tones actually looked
visually. Finally, the non-figurative forms were concretised, recalling real-
world objects. Fischinger quit the film in disgust, and a decade later,
reflected on the state of cinema, attacking the usual “photographed surface
realism-in-motion” that destroys the deep and absolute creative force”:
“Even the animated film today is on a very low artistic level. It is a mass
product of factory proportions, and this, of course, cuts down the creative

6Many years later, in 1991, Disney’s homage to Berkeley’s aquatic musical number
“By a Waterfall” would be explicit in the musical sequence "Be Our Guest" in
Beauty and the Beast.
 From Painting to Film: Abstract Cinema and Synaesthesia 211

purity of the work of art. No sensible creative artist could create a sensible
work of art if a staff of co-workers of all kinds each has his or her say in the
final creation––producer, story director, story writer, music director,
conductor, composer, sound men, gag men, effect men, layout men,
background directors, animators, in-betweeners, inkers, cameramen,
technicians, publicity directors, managers, box office managers and many
others. They change the ideas, kill the ideas before they are born.”
(Fischinger [1947] 2006, 110)

Fig. 15.1. Oskar Fischinger, Drawing for Fantasia, tempera on animation paper, c.
1939. © Fischinger Trust, courtesy Center for Visual Music.

As Esther Leslie observes in her essay entitled Oskar Fischinger /

Wassily Kandinsky. Where Abstraction and Comics Collide, “In 1948
Fischinger made seven collages. He clipped reproductions of paintings by
Kandinsky and Bauer from old Guggenheim catalogues and stuck on to
them cut-outs of Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse snipped from Walt
Disney comics. In one collage Mickey stares in horror at the black scribbles
at the center of Kandinsky's Black Lines 1913, while Minnie points
disapprovingly at the knotty mess behind her” (Leslie 2012, 89). So, along
here, the worlds of abstraction and mass commercial culture collide.
212 Chapter Fifteen

Perhaps the Kandinsky images mutilated by Mickey and Minnie Mouse

were a symbol of his final oscillation between two worlds and two utopian
aims: unmasking of social rejection of the civilised bourgeois subject by this
mouse-shaped figure of the collective dream, on the one hand, and
conceiving of cinema as an abstract and synaesthetic art, able to draw
directly on the creative and pre-logical dimension of the language of music,
on the other hand.

Towards Computer Art

In the designs that were to have constituted the visual scheme for the
musical composition of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor––
extensively modified in the version actually made for the movie in favor of
a more didactic imagery, one that would more accessible to the average
member of the public––Fischinger confirmed not just his role as a pioneer
of abstract animation, but also as a forerunner of the audiovisual music,
theorized in the forties by John and James Whitney, and he gave concrete
form in the Five Film Exercises: Films 1 – 5 (1943-45), in which the close
correlation between visual and musical ideas heralded the possibility of a
full integration between sounds and abstract animated. This history might
also be considered the origins of those sophisticated and innovative works
of the early sixties realized by John and James Whitney, including Catalog
(1961) and Lapis (1963-66); these are works that, in turn, announced the
experiments with electronic animation in the early seventies, such as Osaka
1-2-3 (1970), Matrix I (1971), Matrix II (1971) and Matrix III (1972). These
last works can certainly be placed on the same level as the experimental
research into computer art developed in the laboratories of Bell Telephone
in the early sixties by Edward Zajac and then continued with by Peter
Foldes, Stan Vanderbeek and, above all, Lillian Schwartz. In 1971 Schwartz
made Pixillation, an original experiment in animated abstract painting made
possible by advances in the field of electronic technology and by the
evolution of studies on synthetic sound. Thus technological progress in
electronic processing opened up a new field of studies in the area of motion
graphics and abstract animation.
 From Painting to Film: Abstract Cinema and Synaesthesia 213

Fig. 15.2. James Whitney, Still from Lapis, USA (1966), 10', 16mm, color, sound ©
Estate of John and James Whitney – Los Angeles.

Conclusions
This chapter brings to light the contribution made to history of the abstract
cinema and audiovisual music by these synaesthetic moving images. In
particular, the text examines how the genealogical reconstruction of the first
abstract films might be identified with the birth of an alternative perspective
on the history of cinema: a history based on the translation of a visual
grammar, consisting on a series of elementary graphic forms (painted on
paper rolls) into a dynamic vocabulary of cinematographic images. This
perspective facilitates a forceful interrogation of the crucial research
question. If, as in abstract films, the essence of cinema lies in an alternative
and synaesthetic language consisting in moving forms, sounds, and colours,
why one cannot imagine that even the device thank to which cinema is
reproduced and diffused might be pushed to take an alternative shape
compared to that of the traditional silver screen? Instances of “alternative
screens” of this kind are the “Poly-Kino” imagined by Lázló Mohly-Nagy
in the 1920s and the “Dynamic Square” suggested by Sergei Eisenstein; as
alternative and immersive projections environments, we can mention the
Movie-Drome theater designed by Stan Vanderbeek in the 1960s, and the
214 Chapter Fifteen

“Expanded Cinema” proposed by Gene Youngblood in the 1970s (in

particular the Multiple-Projection Environments).

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