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Oskar Fischinger: A Centennial Celebration
This year marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Oskar Fischinger (1900–1967), one of the most prolific and influential artists of the international avant-garde film movement. Fischinger’s abstract animations melded color and geometric graphic design into patterns of rhythmic movement to produce a visual representation of the feelings produced by music and poetry, and his work is considered a forerunner to a range of subsequent contemporary art movements. To commemorate Fischinger’s centennial year, The iotaCenter, a Los Angeles-based organization for the preservation and promotion of abstract film, has produced a three-part series of Fischinger’s work. With the current release of Fantasia 2000, the retrospective provides a timely opportunity to re-examine the important but uncredited work Fischinger created for the original 1940 production, which Disney considered "too abstract" to be used in the final film.