An optical poem

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35mm 1.33:1 color sound; production assistance John Cage; music Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 by Franz Liszt. A milestone in object animation, Fischinger manipulated hundreds of paper cutouts hung on invisible wires and shot a frame-at-a-time in close synchronization to Liszt's rhapsody. The dance of shapes resembles a voyage through an imaginary space where "the keen sensation of depth becomes a conceptual part of the action, with the circles that rotate around each other revealed as cosmic figures that could be either microscopic cells or stellar configurations (William Moritz)." Sadly this was the only Fischinger film commissioned and released by a major Hollywood studio.