His own 34 films screened in one person shows at the Museums of Modern Art in Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm and Tokyo, and also at Pacific Film Archive, Anthology Film Archives, LA Institute of Contemporary Art, Academy of Fine Arts (The Hague), and San Francisco Art Institute. His most recent film, All My Lost Lovers, was made with an AFI Independent Filmmakers Grant.

In the 1970s, Moritz developed his theory on visual music. Photo © Harry Frazier.

Act I
Moritz began writing about animation in 1969. Also, in 1969, he began working with Oskar’s widow Elfriede to identify, organize, and make safety negatives from Oskar’s materials. Their decades of work are detailed in his soon to be published Fischinger biography. Moritz’s first major critical biographical work on Fischinger was published in Film Culture in 1974. This decade also began his prolific writing on visual music.

Part of his traveling presentation, “Towards a Visual Music,” was published in Cantrills Filmnotes in 1985, and this thorough history of visual music remains unsurpassed. The development of the tradition of “color organs” is traced in this presentation, culminating in its influence on contemporary abstract animation. Simplified, Moritz’s visual music theories (expressed in numerous essays) encompass “the desire to create a moving abstract image as fluid and harmonic as auditory music,” while incorporating Pythagoras and Aristotle’s ideas of the correspondence between the musical tone scale and the rainbow spectrum scale, also defined as “music of the spheres.”

A few of Moritz’ published articles include: “Visual Music and Film-as-an-Art in California Before 1950,” “United Productions of America, Reminiscing 30 Years Later,” “The Surrealistic World of Max Fleischer,” “Some Observations on Non-Objective and Non-Linear Animation,” “Resistance and Subversion in Animated Films of the Nazi Era: The Case of Hans Fischerkoesen,” “Jules Engel, Post-Modernist” and “Abstract Film and Color Music.” For the Absolut Panushka website in the 1990s he authored 200 pages of “The History of Experimental Animation.” He’s published other pieces on Fischinger, Fleischer, Jordan Belson, the Whitneys, Bruce Conner, Harry Smith, Hy Hirsh, Mary Ellen Bute, Pat O’Neill, Stan Vanderbeek and other artists. His bibliography of published work is eight pages long.

Act II
Moritz has done preservation work on many animated films, beginning with Fischinger, and continuing with films by Walther Ruttmann, Viking Eggeling, Hy Hirsh, Harry Smith and Sky David, among others. Recently he consulted with the Academy Film Archive on its restoration of the Fischinger films from the original nitrates. He curated many of these new prints for the KINETICA 2 Fischinger Centennial traveling exhibition organized by The iotaCenter.

He’s curated many other film shows starting from the 1970s, and most recently Iota’s KINETICA 4 program, the latest of its traveling film exhibitions (see www.kinetica.org/K4). Some of his notable programs include his 3D show, and a variety of visual music shows presented worldwide.

Throughout his career, Moritz amassed an impressive research collection including hundreds of books, journals, program notes, articles, photographs, films and videotapes.

In 1987, Moritz began teaching at CalArts where his courses today include “History of Experimental Animation,” “History of Animation” and “History of Experimental Film.” At USC, he’s an adjunct professor, co-teaching “The History of Animation” with professor Christine Panushka.