Essential Visual Music: Rare Classics

The UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Center for Visual Music (CVM) are presenting a program of rarely screened 16mm and 35mm films from the CVM collection, at The Billy Wilder Theatre at The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles on January 21, 2009. The program features a range of works, from experiments by German film pioneers to light show psychedelia, and highlights of new visual music and experimental animation. It includes little-seen films by Oskar Fischinger (pictured above), Jules Engel, Charles Dockum, and Mary Ellen Bute, among many others. From the website:

Several of the works in the show were designed to be used in performance contexts, light shows and other expanded forms of cinema, often with independent musical accompaniment, such as the 35mm ‘recreation’ film of Oskar Fischinger’s multiple-projector film performances from the mid-1920s. A number of the films were made in Southern California, including early experiments in computer graphics from UCLA in the 1960s and Cal Arts in the 1970s. Many of the prints in this show represent recent preservation work by CVM.

Admission to this event is FREE. The Billy Wilder Theatre is in the Hammer Museum, at 10899 Wilshire Blvd. in Westwood. Title list and film notes are at CVM’s website.