Matthius Holl's designs.

In the late 1940s, when Fischinger had lost the support of the Guggenheim Foundation, he also invented a color organ instrument that allowed one to play lights to any music very simply. His Lumigraph hides the lighting elements in a large frame, from which only a thin slit emits light. In a darkened room (with a black background) you can not see anything except when something moves into the thin "sheet" of light, so, by moving a finger-tip around in a circle in this light field, you can trace a colored circle (colored filters can be selected and changed by the performer). Any object can be used: a gloved hand, a drum-stick, a pot-lid (for a solid circle), a child's block (for a square), etc. Oskar performed certain compositions (such as Sibelius' "Valse Triste") publicly, at the Coronet Theater in Los Angeles, and at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1953, in connection with a one-man show of his abstract oil paintings (where Jordan Belson saw it, and was greatly impressed by the mysterious "presence" of its color).

Fischinger hoped, like Castel long before, that someone would manufacture Lumigraphs, and that they would become common household items, used by children for play and artistic training, by adults for recreation and party games. Although that has not yet occurred, Oskar's original Lumigraph does survive, in the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt, where it is played with some regularity, and it has been loaned to the Louvre in Paris and the Gemeente Museum in the Hague for performances by Oskar's widow Elfriede. Oskar's son Conrad also constructed two other Lumigraphs, one large one that was used on an Andy Williams television special, and a smaller one to use in Los Angeles performances. The Lumigraph also appeared in a 1964 science-fiction movie The Time Travelers, in which it is a "love machine" that allows people to vent their sexual urges in a harmless sensuality. Maybe there should be a Lumigraph in every home.

* See: Giannalberto Bendazzi, "The Italians Who Invented the Drawn-On-Film Technique," Animation Journal, Vol. 4, No. 2, Spring 1996, pp. 69-84

William Moritz teaches film and animation history at the California Institute of the Arts.