Elfriede Fischinger died quietly in her sleep at her home on Thursday, May
13, 1999. She was born September 17, 1910, in Gelnhausen near Frankfurt,
Germany. She attended the prestigious College of Design in Offenbach, and
in 1931 one of her abstract textile designs won a prize and was published
in a magazine as well as exhibited in Berlin, where she met her future
husband, animator and painter Oskar Fischinger. They were married in 1933
and she worked on many of his subsequent films. In 1936 they emigrated to
Hollywood where Oskar worked briefly for Paramount, MGM, and Disney. During
the 1940s, Elfriede supported their family of five children as a fashion
designer for Mascot Studios, Susie's Sweaters, and Andrea of Beverly Hills.
After the death of her husband in 1966, she traveled widely lecturing with
Oskar's paintings and films at such venues as the Montreal Expo of 1967,
the 1976 Ottawa Animation Festival, and the Venice Biennale, 1982. She
received a gold medal from the President of Italy and Lifetime Achievement
Awards from the Royal Academy of the Netherlands, the International
Animation Society, ASIFA, and Women in Film. She was a juror for the
Montpelier Film Festival and the American Film Institute. She published
half a dozen articles in magazines and art exhibition catalogs, and
appeared in several television documentaries including the CBS Camera Three
profile of Oskar Fischinger, the British ABSTRACT CINEMA, and the German
LONGING FOR COLOR, about the development of various film color processes in
the 1930s. She received a grant from the National Endowment for the
Humanities which allowed her and her daughter Barbara to restore an
unfinished film of Oskar's from the 1940s. She is survived by two sons and
two daughters as well as several grandchildren and great grandchildren.
Burial will be next to her husband in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City.