Abstract cinema, defined as “absolute” cinema in the 1920s by critic and theorist, Rudolf Kurtz, was initially an island of modest size, a direct expression of the historical Avant-garde. In fact, it was created by painters, members of the avant-garde, using rudimentary handicraft, techniques, and language that refuted the reproduction of the natural world, instead, focusing on light and form in the dimension of time, impossible to represent in static visual arts. And it was at the beginning of the 1920s, that visual artists like Léger and Picabia in France and Eggeling, Richter, Ruttmann and Fischinger in Germany, began to realise their abstract films.

German Abstract Cinema (“absolute”) was not only opposed to the canon of cinematographic narration, “lyric will,” and “realistic-naturalistic camouflage,” but abandoned definitively all psychological comprehension, opting decidedly for pure optical rhythms involving elementary shapes, mostly geometrical (significant examples: Rhytmus 21 and 23 by Richter from 1921-23, Opus II-III-IV by Ruttmann from 1922-25, Diagonal Sinfonie by Eggeling from 1923, Wax Experiments, Spiralen and Formspiel by Fischinger, 1921-27). This cinema discovered its semantic effectiveness in the synthesis of the forces of attraction and repulsion, in the relationship of contrasts and analogies, in the creativity of a rhythmic game of signs. For Richter, abstract cinema is a pure art form, superior, and requires a thoughtful spectator who must learn to see the beauty of an image and its relation with other images without worrying about intellectual or literary meanings. This requires and out-and-out re-education of the eye and spirit to learn to negate the myriad of conventions so deeply ingrained by literature and theatre.

Oskar Fischinger developed many of the themes and styles implied by Ruttmann’s Opus Films. Both afford an interesting consideration of the relationship of musical concepts to the time structure of abstract film. But in Fischinger’s films we can find, as new element, an evident interest in eastern mysticism and western hermetic thought, an interest that Fischinger shared with Kandinsky and Mondrian. His films will exert afterwards, in the fifties and in the sixties, a strong influence particularly on three important american film-makers of West Coast (Jordan Belson, James Whitney and Harry Smith) all deeply mystical themselves.

However, abstract cinema was officially born in Italy, thanks to two brothers from Ravenna, Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra, both futurists. The two artists made four short experiments in abstract cinema between 1910 and 1913, the result of their visual research. (These films were lost in 1944 during a bombardment of Milan). Their experiments precede by two years a project (not realized) by the french painter Léopold Survage (born in Russia) for a cinematographic-chromatic symphony. Corra and Ginna proceeded previously to seek for an analogy between the harmony of colours and the harmony of music and composed a few colour sonatas with their “light-organ”. Afterwards they turned their thoughts to cinema and developed the notion of film as form of visual music. Ever after this notion and all the problems of film’s temporal composition continue to have a considerable place in the formal concepts of the experimental film. From 1938-39, Luigi Veronesi, a photographer and graphic artist from Milan, an original follower of the Bauhaus, picked up where the brothers left off with a series of hand-painted films, the first visual artist in Italy to seek a widening of his own artistic universe through the medium of film(a bombardment in Milan in 1943 destroyed almost all these experiments.) Speaking about abstract cinema would be absurd without mentioning the contribution of Italian Futurism to the birth of almost all cinematographic avant-gardes. This contribution has long been underrated by critics in France and, above all, in Italy. Probably, its ideological apparatus and its political positions have hurt the good name of Italian Futurism, most particularly as expressed by Marinetti (his nationalism and interventionism during the war and beyond, and in 1919, his adherence to Mussolini’s “Fasci di Combattimento”).

1916 was an important year for the cinematographic avant-garde and therefore for abstract cinema: in February of that year, The Manifesto of Futurist Cinematography was published and distributed internationally with other manifestoes dedicated to the aesthetic of machines, which generated important consequences and provoked multiple echoes, particularly in France, Russia, Germany, Belgium and The United States. The Manifest of 1916 theorizes a cinema that is “painting, architecture, sculpture, liberated words, a music of colours, lines and shapes, job-lots of objects and chaoticized reality,” a cinema abandoning reality and realism, distancing itself from photography and gracefulness, launching itself into a complete freedom of multi-expressivity.

The film-makers of the 20s (Ruttmann, Eggeling, Richter, Vertov, Duchamp, Léger) account for the majority of research and creation within this cinema in response to the 1916 provocation of the futurists. With Vita Futurista, a collective film made by futurist artists in Cascine, outside of Florence, in 1916(now lost) cinema clamorously became a direct and immediate vision of how to behave - the film-performance of the futurists, “teetering on the line of demarcation between art and life.” This research would be resumed, above all, in the U.S.A. by the film-makers of the New American Cinema culminating in the famous sequences of Scenes from the Life by Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas, true images of how an artist lives.

At the beginning of the 1920s, a group of film-makers in France (Delluc, Epstein, Germaine Dulac) though not bound to Dadaism and holding divergent aesthetic ideals, did, however, agree on the refusal of the conventional theatricality, the dramatic narrative, the theatrical space of French cinema of the age. Gradually, they discovered that visual rhythm can become an alternative “structural principle” that transcends novelistic exposition. This brings us to “pure cinema” – insofar as it differs from other non-cinematographic, dramatic or documentary forms – that was theorized by Henry Chomette and, subsequently, to the “visual symphony” of which the theoretical writings of Germaine Dulac speak. These film-makers are larger responsible for expanding the borders of abstract cinema and, unlike the German “absolute” cinema of that time, the "pure cinema" used any and all natural, animated or inanimate elements to create a “visual symphony” triggering, as Chomette recalls, “a series of unknown visions.” They were defined by Sadoul and Langlois as “impressionists” - a definition widely contested today.

Yet, in the France of the 1920s, another abstract tendency, tied to the dadaist movement, remains of great importance. Entr’acte(1924) by Clair - Picabia, for example, the first integrally dadaist film, considered one of the masterpieces of avant-garde cinema, is certainly an abstract film: a series of “free images” based on rhythmic-figurative associations (a ballerina with a beard and moustache, a game of chess between Man Ray and Duchamp disturbed by a jet of water, a hearse crossing the city without a guide – first slowly and then at break-neck speed, etc.) Le Ballet Mécanique(1924) by Léger is also clearly an abstract film, defined cubist-dadaist because it places on a rhythmic-figurative plane the cubist experience, because of its liberation from plot, its iterance and its deformation and decomposition of images and objects that appear, one after another, without following any clear train of thought. There is no hint of a “visual symphony” à la Dulac presenting a particular theme, instead, all the subjects, heterogeneous to the point of impudence, are randomly associated in an “obsessively dadaist” way.

The dadaist cinematographic experience, in both France and Germany, anticipates that of the surrealists and largely paved the way of its advent. No clearly defined border exists between Dada and Surrealism, which share many common values and, often, the same artists can be found in their respective ranks. Filmstudie(1926), for example, by the dadaist Richter, was defined by the same as surrealist, as is the case with L’Étoile de Mer (1927) by the dadaist Man Ray because of the high degree of oneirism and eroticism transmitted by its author. Surrealist cinema, particularly that of Dulac-Artaud (La Coquille et le Clergyman, 1927,) that of Buñuel-Dalì (Un Chien Andalou, 1929 and L’Âge d’Or, 1930,) but also that of Cocteau (Le Sang d’un Poète, 1930) can be considered an ulterior widening of the scope of abstract cinema, for their obstinate will to visually render the dreams, the oneiric fantasies, and because of its frequent recourse to “spontaneous” symbolic forms as “incongruous associations” and the mix and frequent collision of images. The “mythical” cult movie, Le Sang d’un Poète, once analyzed by Freud, is, according to Cocteau, a “realistic documentary of unreal events where the style of the image is more important than the story and authorizes everyone to draw their own conclusions and interpret its symbols according to their own spirit.”

Speaking about La Coquille’s screenplay by Germaine Dulac, Artaud states, “I thought a screenplay could be written that wouldn’t account for the knowledge and logical consequentiality of facts, but would, above all, look for deep reason in the hidden birth and wanderings of feeling and thought, the active and veiled rushes of our so-called clear actions[...]”

The surrealist cinema, Le Sang d’un Poète in particular, deeply influenced independent American film-makers during the 1940s and 50s who had gathered around Maya Deren, considered the founder of the New American Cinema. These artists reacted violently to the narrative cinema, “expositive” and they set against it an “evocative” one able, so they sustained, to stimulate an conscious creative effort in the spectator.

Maya Deren, film-maker, theorist, organizer, anthropologist, Voodoo initiate, deepened the concept of poetry in film with her first work, the famous Meshes in the Afternoon of 1943. A poetry no longer limited to rhythm and assonance, but meant as a “vertical exploration” in contrast to drama working in a “horizontal level, from feeling to feeling". Poetry constructed and structured as the result of a brave vertical exploration, the only movement, according to Deren, capable of infusing images with meaning and making them intensely magical, allowing a receptive and willing spectator to go beyond what appeared on the screen , realizing another reality, the invisible worlds hidden from the rational mind. Meshes is also the first American trance film, according to the definition of P. Adams Sitney, known researcher and theorist of the New American Cinema, author of the fundamental text Visionary Film. In this type of cinema, there is a clear refusal by the camera of realism, naturalism, literary and theatrical dimension, which, instead, is utilized by the director  to imitate mental activity, impulses, hallucinations, and visions. “The trance film practically assumes the employment of fluid-linear space, in an oneiric state, for the use of a single protagonist – often the author himself – in the creation of a ritual towards readying a “chamber psychodrama”.

Gregory Markopoulos, another great film-maker of the New American Cinema, will support in the sixties a position near to the Deren’s concept of poetry in film: “Instead of being a physician of words, the New American Cinema Film-maker is a physician of images, the first of this kind... Images which unlike the commercial film images do not inhibit life, but rather translate the creative film spectator (a recently realized species) affected by these images to a loftier existence outside the visible, mundane world.”.

The New American Cinema is a vast and complex continent. Though it was born in the 40s its sweep reaches up to today. Stan Brakhage, for example, one its most famous and dedicated exponents, has kept on working independently with 16mm and, then, video, until his death in 2003. His cinema, initially realistic-oneiric, soon evolved into abstract cinema. In his marvellous symphonies of images, almost always mute, minimal elements are united as if they represent musical notes and their succession is regulated by relationships of frequency, rhythm and melody, precisely dealing with the world of music. His last works – painted and hand-scratched films – approach abstract expressionism. The flood of images and the spatial enigmas that it produces, evoke not only Pollock but also Kline and Rothko.

The New American Cinema, excluding certain tendencies, such as the so-called lyric cinema (Baille, for example and part of the works of Jonas Mekas,) the “grotesque”(Jacobs, Nelson and, particularly, the Kuchar Brothers) and the “new narration”(Shirley Clarke, Rogosin,) can be considered “abstract” without creating excessive theoretical problems, when lending this term an ampler and more complex meaning than that given to it in the 1920s. In particular the “expanded” cinema, those of the psychedelic, “cosmic,” underground animation, stroboscopic and structural cinema, have broadened the scope of abstract cinema, in a most creative way and transformed it from a “great island” into a true “continent.”

With Lapis, begun in 1963 and finished in 1966 - a 9 minute film – James Whitney realized one of the first computer-film, thanks to an analogical computer designed and built by his brother John. Actually, the four years of work in creating the film were mostly spent in drawing by hand a field of tiny dots, organized in hundreds of very fine concentring rings to generate slowly changing elaborate patterns (probably the most complex example of a mandala in cinema). Cybernetics helped Whitney go back centuries to the ancient practice of syncretism in its search for profound vision. (The term lapis – stone in Latin – alludes to the “philosopher’s stone” or to the transmutation medium in alchemy).

Permutations, by John Whitney, is, instead, an abstract film made using a digital computer: a dazzling show of serial images, organized with hypersensitive kinetic empathy. For the first time, a digital computer allowed an artist to create exceptionally refined abstract graphic forms. In 1969, Binary Bit Patterns, by John and Michael Whitney, the language elaborated by computer achieves the purity and abstraction of a musical composition: an extraordinary exploration of pulsating  geometrical configurations in continuous metamorphosis, a vision of those structures can be perceived with closed eyes(also Brakhage will work in this direction).

Other important exponents of the expanded cinema: Bartlett (Metanomen, 1964) and Jordan Belson that with his Cosmos(1970, 6 minutes) gave the name to an entire new strain of film, the cosmic cinema. Cosmos operates on numerous levels, but is in great measure a video film that directly enters the “galactic consciousness.” Abstract, poetic, hypnotic, this film tries to represent a vision of the cosmic sphere in its entirety, at the center of which, creative strength manifests itself - for the spectator it is an unbelievable kinetic journey to the center of the galaxy. As a yogi, Belson sought the transcendence of the self. “His personal cinema delineates the mechanics of transcendence in the rhetoric of abstractionism. He has turned to yogic and Buddhist texts for guidance or confirmation of his cinematic structures” (Sitney).

Harry Smith, the other great film-maker of West Coast, born into a family of occultists, developed a mystical bent and was intensely involved with magic, alchemy and kabala. In the spirit of the Great Work, he made his first abstract films by painting and dyeing directly on the film surface (No.1, No.2, No.3, and No.4, 1939-50). For P. Adams Sitney, Smith is an hermetic artist, “one who finds the purification, or the formal reduction, of his art coincident with his quest for a magical center that all arts, and all consciousnesses, share”. Actually Smith regarded his work in the historical tradition of magical illusionism (Robert Fludd and Athanasius Kircher) and even spoke of Giordano Bruno as the inventor of the cinema in an hilarious lecture at Yale in 1965.

Jud Yakult with his Us Down by the Riverside(1962, 3 minutes) gives us a visual realization of the USCO, a group that, inspired by McLuhan, worked melding different media into multiple channels: film, video, oscilloscope, live kinetic images and four-channel audio. Us Down by the Riverside is one of the most representative of psychedelic film that through “the sensorial experience” and the “sensory overload” tends to stimulate “psychedelic” effects in the viewer. A classic of the psychedelic tendency is, without a doubt, Peyote Queen by the film-maker Storm De Hirsch(1965, 8 minutes.) An attempt to visually render the wealth of kaleidoscope visions of peyote, the hallucinogenic cactus ritually used by the Indians of New Mexico. According to the film-maker, Peyote Queen is an “exploration in the colour of ritual, in the colour of thought, a journey in the depths of sensorial disorder, of the inner vision, where mysteries are represented in the theatre of the soul.”

In the environs of the American Underground – New American Cinema was so-called, “Underground,” because it was often projected underground in “cellars” or “basements” – its numerous proponents established an ambitious purpose: to transform deeply, through the intensification of feelings and emotions, the spectators’ conscience, at least of those open to the risk. As well, the “poetic” cinema of Maya Deren, from its outset, proposed similar purpose. The movement established itself as a seemingly “objective art” as suggested by one of the greatest mystagogues of the twentieth century, G.I. Gurdjieff. “In true art, nothing is accidental, everything,” affirms Gurdjieff, “can be calculated in advance. The artist knows and understands the language he wants to transmit and his work will always produce, with mathematical certainty, the same impression on men, obviously of the same level[...] A work of objective art,” he adds, “contrarily to the current art that is subjective and mechanical, is entirely similar to a scientific work, with the only difference that it addresses itself to the emotions of man and not to his mind. The “objective” artist doesn’t transmit his ideas directly but through determined feelings he arouses consciously and systematically, knowing what he’s doing and why he’s doing it.”

The extraordinary Corridor(1968-70, 20 minutes) by S.D. Lawder, with music by Terry Riley,  could be considered exemplary in this sense. It is the result of two years of work and experimentation with equipment created by Lawder. Corridor is a stupefying visual polyphony, a fusion of music and kinematic tension achieved through the progressively quickening stroboscopic fluctuation of images that can create a mental state generally achieved by meditation, more rarely with the use of certain drugs, or by the electrical stimulation of the brain, causing a radical change in cerebral function – a “regal” access to the alpha frequencies.

Nevertheless, not only the “expanded” branch of the New American Cinema intended to radically transform the spectator’s conscience. Kenneth Anger, for instance, another of the greatest exponents of the American Underground, whose original style, baroque, theatrical, follower of the englishman Aleister Crowley, occultist of the “left hand,” “frightful,” reviser of classical myths and contemporary pseudo-myths, stands, in a very clear way, on the symbolic-sumptuous-luciferian side, his purpose to poison and transform the conscience of the spectator, stimulating his “sensual imagination.”

In Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome(1954-60, 38’,) considered his masterpiece(his second title is Lord Shiva’s Dream, or L.S.D.,) Anger uses the neo-pagan rituals of Crowley in which the celebrants – a perturbing Anaïs Nin among them – assume the identities of Gods and Goddesses after having consumed powerful magic potions – in this film, participants really consumed L.S.D. – and begin a sort of pagan eucharist (the “banquet of the poisons”,) that is progressively poisoning at a narcotic - exotic - magic level, not lacking irony, which, then, culminates in a ritual orgy marked by increasing hallucinatory superimpositions of imagery, sumptuous and very colourful. According to the legend, various projections of the film in London in 1966 were organized by Anger who “experimented” with an audience under the influence of L.S.D.

From the 40s – 80s, New American Cinema explored the abstract continent far and wide and many experiments considered audacious at the time are now available to all, thanks to digital technology, with a small difference: what once took years, now takes minutes or hours at most. All of this in the finest tradition of the avant-garde. American independent film-makers, as forerunners, discovered new formulas, created original forms, perhaps too original for their times, often leaving the work incomplete to those, who later, first with video and, then, the digital artists of the new millennium, can go on to realize more meaningful abstract works. Actually, their works have already been widely used, re-worked, re-cycled and developed by the “great enemy,” Hollywood Cinema, and, above all, by cinema and video advertisement, video-clips and the digital industry itself.