The Center for Visual Music has recently released a great DVD of Oskar Fischinger films. These are the films that, from what I can tell, started it all off — the work of Harry Smith, Norman McLaren, Len Lye, Stan Brakhage.
If there’s any problem with this it’s that its greatness has also created a large following of people partaking in the creation of “Visual Music” that, in aspiring to this sort of perfection, must ultimately fail. A good example of this being the gathering in Boston this month for the Visual Music Marathon.
It’s not that that’s going to be an all bad event (there’s a posthumously completed Len Lye film, and I’m curious to see what Philip Sanderson has cooked up) it’s just that contemporary Visual Music doesn’t seem to be recapturing the exquisite craftsmanship and beautiful simplicity that Fischinger’s films possess, or the celestially controlled mania of Brakhage. And if it is elegantly created, it’s hard to tell behind all the technology. In other words, the whole process seems to be lacking a uniform elegance, which the early Visual Music definitely had.
The best recent example of Visual Music I’ve seen recently is the SNL short “Dear Sister.” While it’s a satire of the O.C., the reference is not implicit in the short. What you do get is a simultaneous breakdown and exploitation of classical as well as recent-popular film elements that is notably artful in its timing, personality, and sensitivity. It’s also so unentertaining in where it goes and how it finishes that it feels like a serious work.
