Color Rhythms: Abstract Animation from the Center for Visual Music

A journey through decades of pre-digital abstract animation and visual music, featuring many restored films from the Center for Visual Music (CVM), a California film archive that preserves and exhibits historical experimental animation. From their extensive collection, we’ll see a 35mm print of Oskar Fischinger’s classic Allegretto (1936-43), his Composition in Blue (1935)—digitized from his own original nitrate print—and a new 4K restoration of Tarantella (1940) by Mary Ellen Bute, a pioneer of electronic imagery. Curated by CVM’s director Cindy Keefer, the program also includes preserved films by Jordan Belson and Jules Engel, Austrian Baerbel Neubauer’s hand-drawn Algorithmen, and direct animation creating both image and sound by Barry Spinello. Total running time approximately 60 minutes.