UC Berkeley Main Campus
Department of Art Practice, Center for New Media, Fall 2007
The illusion of motion in moving pictures is based on one sensitivity of human perception, flicker fusion. The flicker fusion rate or threshold is a concept in the psychophysics of vision. It is defined as the frequency at which all flicker of an intermittent light stimulus disappears, and the intermittant light appears to be continuous.
Like all psychophysical thresholds, the flicker fusion threshold is a statistical rather than an absolute quantity. There is a range of frequencies within which flicker sometimes will be seen and sometimes will not be seen, and the threshold is the frequency at which flicker is detected on 50% of trials.
The flicker fusion threshold varies with brightness (it is higher for brighter lights) and with location on the retina where the light falls: the rod cells have a faster response than the cone cells, so flicker can be seen in peripheral vision at higher frequencies than in foveal vision.
The flicker fusion threshold also varies between species. Pigeons have been shown to have higher threshold than humans, and the same is probably true of all birds. Many mammals have a higher proportion of rods in their retinae than humans do, and it is likely that they would also have higher flicker fusion thresholds.
Flicker fusion is key in all technologies for presenting moving images, nearly all of which depend on presenting a rapid succession of static images (e.g. the frames in a cine film or a digital video file. If the frame rate falls below the flicker fusion threshold for the given viewing conditions, flicker will be apparent to the observer, and movements of objects on the film will appear jerky. For the purposes of presenting moving images, the human flicker fusion threshold is usually taken as 16 Hertz. The frame rate used in cine projection (24 Hz) and video displays (up to 75 Hz, though often only half the display is refreshed on each cycle) therefore allows a reasonable margin for error or unusual viewing conditions.
Viewing: Ruttman, Walter, Opus 1 (1921) MRC DVD 64, Fischinger, Oskar: Studie 7 (1931), MRC DVD 5821 and Ice Age: Scrat's Missing Adventure (2002) MRC DVD 6714
In teams of two, photograph at least 150 frames of still photography from a fixed vantage point of a simple action. Merge these frames into a movie clip using a tool such as Vegas or Quicktime. Bring in your compiled movie file on a memory key and we will play and discuss it in class. The following naming conventions apply. First list your first name, an underscore, and then your last initial. Then list the assignment name. Then list the version number. Then, list the frame number, if applicable, and finally the extension.
Here's an example:
To capture your images, you are welcome to download the stop_motion software I wrote in processing. First, download processing, then open the .pde file which is in this stop_motion zip file. If you work with Quicktime pro, be sure to save your movie as a self-contained file, otherwise the movie will not play on the server. For QT, the recommended compressor is cinepak.
The movie should be encoded at 640 by 480 pixels, have a frame rate of 15 fps and a duration of 10 seconds. Grading is 1 point for timely and spirited completion of work for each team member. The movie is due next Wednesday. An example of a beautiful stop motion video is Soir de Fete, This sample movie was produced by alumna Kim Turner in 2002. Note that the smoothness of motions is generated very few well chosen keyframes "on the action".
Overview
The German painter Walter Ruttmann made this first abstract film, Opus I, between 1919 and 1921. It belongs to the few abstract films made in the 1920s by artists who had arrived at abstraction in their painting and were eager to experiment with a medium which visualized movement and the passing of time. Ruttmann made three further abstract Opus films, Opus II, III, and IV, and he made numerous advertisement films in the 1920s and 30s which incorporated abstract forms. He also contributed to feature films including the dream sequence for Fritz Lang's The Nibelungen, and produced his own longer film Berlin Symphony of a Great City. In 1934-5 he filmed the frame story for Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. This work was, however, not used in the end.
Despite the hopes of a number of avant-gardists at the time, abstract film remained marginal to the visual arts. Still, films like Opus I fostered and participated in a lively debate about the young medium's properties, aims, and destiny, and they helped to expand the possibilities for future filmmakers.
After two exclusive, silent previews, Opus I was screened for the public in April of 1921 in Berlin. On this occasion live music accompanied the film, written especially for it by Ruttmann's friend Max Butting. The contemporary review of this event follows:
Appearing in rhythmic succession were blue curves that swelled up and dispersed into elliptic formations. From the edge of the picture, harp forms pierced into the center of the visual field. Pink and light-green bands furled dance-like accross the screen. Like birds things fluttered, now in unnameable outlines, now round and angular forms pierced in prestissimo fighting spirit into one another. A red sun swung as in circles, a colored beam moved as though breathing; dice-like forms were flung into the center; waves welled up and receded. And the impression of this amorphic spectacle was: the Creation. (Bernhard Diebold, April 2, 1921)
Context
In the early to mid-1920s several abstract films were made by artists who had arrived at abstraction in their painting and were eager to experiment with a medium that visualized movement and the passing of time. Lichtspiel Opus I, the film exhibited here, is among this small group of early, purely abstract films. It is the first of four Opus films made between 1919 and 1925 by the German painter Walter Ruttmann. It was followed by the Swedish painter Viking Eggeling's Symphonie Diagonale (1923), the German artist Hans Richter's series of Symphonie films (1921-25), and the many abstract films made by yet another German painter, Oskar Fischinger. The story of abstract art as it is generally told omits mention of these films even though they were very much part of the engagement with abstraction in the early decades of this century. This oversight, which the present exhibition means to redress, has kept a playful, visually arresting, and exploratory art from being known, studied, and enjoyed by the general public as much as by academics. The focus here is on the film more than its maker, to elucidate its technical aspects, and to suggest its participation in the contemporary concerns with abstraction, motion, and time, which intersected with the debate about "film as art."
How Opus I was made
Used as we are today to elaborate technologies surrounding us virtually everywhere, it is easy to overlook the considerable technological challenges that presented themselves to Walter Ruttmann's project in 1919 and its sophistication in the face of them. Ruttmann experimented with various strategies while seeking the collaboration of professionals and friends. In 1920 he applied for a patent for his "Tricktisch" (tricktable). This contraption had three movable transparent plates onto which he painted images with slow-drying paint to allow for easy adjustments in between takes. On the diagram, three lamps are designated by the letter a, while b is where the film camera is located in a fixed position. In between these two points are three glass plates c, d, and e. C is fixed and thus used for shapes which do not change position from frame to frame, d moves horizontally and is thereby used for shapes which move across the screen, and e moves vertically to make shapes advance or recede in space or go in and out of focus. In the patent application for the tricktable Ruttmann writes: "Through the combination of a change of shapes on, and lighting of, the picture plates, as well as through the changes which are attained by moving the plates, the most varied, unique, and evocative cinematographic pictures ... can be produced."
The tricktable ensured the even movement of various images in relation to one another. Although the contemporary literature is silent about the technique used to produce Opus I, it is very probable that Ruttmann employed the "Tricktisch" or a similar mechanism, judging from the smooth transitions observable in the film.
Opus I is essentially an animated film. It was shot with stop motion photography, that is, one frame at a time. Between takes, if the film was indeed created with the tricktable, Ruttmann would move some of the glass plates and adjust some of the shapes painted on them. It is interesting to note that his invention used all three dimensions in the production of animated films. Most of the other abstract films made at this time, with the exception of some of Oskar Fischinger's, were created two-dimensionally by moving cardboard, paper, or foil shapes on a flat, two- dimensional surface; effects of depth were achieved by varying the size of the forms.
Most films of the time, abstract and otherwise, were filmed in black and white. Opus I stands apart with its soft pink, blue, and yellow-orange tones. The technological problems of recording color on film were not solved until 1932, and then only partially. However, at least two other methods were employed earlier by some filmmakers and studios. The technique used for Opus I was hand-coloring the completed, processed film; another technique in use at the time was color-coating film before exposure. Virtually all of the contemporary reviews of Opus I mention that it is in color, and the color may have played a major role in how the film was received (see excerpt from a contemporary review at the back of the brochure).
Why combine abstraction and film?
There is no easy answer to this question. Most films made then as now are not abstract; they are representational and narrative, and most of the artists who made abstract films in the early 1920s began incorporating representational images into their films by 1925. In the abstract films of this period several debates intersected: the modern concern with abstraction, the desire to make a uniquely contemporaneous art, and the debate about film as art which was caught up with medium-specificity.
Purely abstract films of the 1920s were made by painters who had already begun to paint in an abstract manner, and their turn to film was largely an extension of this engagement with abstraction. After the devastating first world war, abstraction was seen by many to be the only viable, untainted artistic language. Some artists meant to create with their abstract art a world apart and removed from the world of atrocities and impurities, while others were confident that with their abstractions they would create a universally understandable language. Only abstraction was, in the eyes of many, a contemporary form of communication.
The painters who became abstract filmmakers, among others, identified as their era's most telling characteristic its rapid and continuous modernization and embrace of technology. Ruttmann, for instance, wrote about the modern condition and proposed that a new art must be found to help modern man cope with the changing face of life, with life's ever increasing tempo. The art form able to do that in Ruttmann's eyes was "painting with time" or abstract film. Film was seen by many as having the essential properties of motion, rhythm, and the articulation of time: properties which seemed to make it singularly suited for contemporaneous artistic expression since they seemed to parallel the defining characteristics of the era.
Not just any film, however, was seen to rise to the status of art. In order to be art, as Vasily Kandinsky and Kasimir Malevich, among others, argued, film had to abandon representation and turn to abstraction. In the eyes of many avant-garde artists and critics, films that told stories were mere and empty entertainment. Only films, which foregrounded the specific properties of the film medium could be considered art, and this was best achieved, it was argued, by excising representation and narration in favor of abstract shapes and ephemeral patterns.
Link to Sand Animation Movies, in YouTube
Link to Giant Steps Visualization by Michael Levy, in Flash format