The other day I was browsing through the Eye Filmmuseum online archive and I found a flicker film that I didn’t know. Flicker films are films that use rapid changes between contrasting frames. I’m a bit obsessed with flicker films and I’ve read a lot about them. The funny thing is that many authors talk about Arnulf Rainer (1960) by Peter Kubeka as the first flicker film, but browsing through archives I’ve already found at least 3 older ones.
It’s not so important who was the first person who did this or that, but it’s important to remember that history is always written from a subjective and limited perspective, so we can always find something new.
The flicker film that I discovered last week is in fact the older one that I know of, it was made in 1932 by Willem Bon. It’s title, Is er overeenkomst tusschen klank, rhythme en kleurafwisseling? means Is there a correspondence between sound, rhythm and colour variation?.
I haven’t found much information about the film or its director, but the Eye Filmmuseum has a short text about it:
“I have now asked myself the question: is there any agreement between colour variation and sound rhythm, i.e. is sound rhythm (musical rhythm) reinforced by synchronous colour variation? To keep the experiment as pure as possible, I first started with a short film, from which I omitted any form of movement. I only filmed flashes of colour, synchronously shot to a fragment from the very rhythmic ‘Bolero’ by Ravel.”
Willem Bon
Bon was inspired by the films that Walter Ruttmann made in the 20s. Ruttmann never made a flicker film—at least as far as I know—but his abstract animations, like the ones by Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger, etc., were very influential for many experimental filmmakers.
Willem Bon was a Dutch filmmaker and biochemist. He worked in a film by Joris Ivens in 1929 and from 1930 he was part of the Studio Joris Ivens, a film company founded by Ivens in which a lot of young filmmakers worked. There, Bon experimented with sound editing, among other things.
Is er overeenkomst tusschen klank, rhythme en kleurafwisseling? is a silent film, but it was shot, as Bon explains in his quote, to a fragment of music. Even if it’s silent, it’s a musical film. Bon made other experiments related to rapid changes in colour and form, such as Kleur- en vormafwisseling op 'Choo-choo' jazz (1932), also silent, but edited to a jazz track.
Flickering from Amsterdam to Tochigi
Three years later, another flicker film was made, this time quite far from The Netherlands, in Japan. The film was An Expression (1935) by Shigeji Ogino. You can watch it here.
Ogino was a Japanese filmmaker who made some abstract films, but also home movies, travelogues… He was not a professional filmmaker, but between 1929 and 1976 he shot more than 400 films in 8mm, 9.5mm, and 16mm. He’s not very well-known but some of his films were shown at some European festivals in the 30s.
An Expression is a silent abstract film, such as the ones by Bon, but in this case, there’s a narrative. The film tells the story of a meeting between a man from the city and a woman from the country, represented by a triangle and a circle. Ogino shot the film in black and white using alternating red and green filters. One frame is red and the next is green (complementary colours).
Neither Bon nor Ogino were trying to create psychedelic effects. Bon was interested in synchronisation and Ogino in the juxtaposition of binary elements, but rapid colour changes between frames generate entoptic phenomena—images whose source is the eyes themselves. In a sense, they were both pioneers of expanded cinema, pioneers that hardly anyone remembers.
As deep and fundamental as a heartbeat
The third flicker film that I know previous to the most well-known examples from the 60s is Color Sequence (1943) by Dwinell Grant.
Grant was a visual artist and art teacher who also worked for industrial film companies. In the 30s and 40s, he made several experimental films. He was a non-objective painter and that led him to make some non-objective experiments with movement. I love what he said about non-objectivism:
“…is a part of the earth itself. In creating it we do not say something about something else, but rather we produce a rhythm which is a part of nature’s rhythm and just as deep and fundamental as a heartbeat, a thunderstorm, the sequence of day and night or the growth of a girl into womanhood.… Nature is not something to be commented on, it is something to be.”
Dwinell Grant
These words could be a way to describe flicker films. Flicker films aren’t about explaining anything, they’re about feeling something.
The strange thing about Color Sequence is that in 1943 abstract painting and non-objectivism were quite mainstream, but people were not used to seeing it in movement and even Grant himself thought the film was a bit disturbing.
From what I’ve read, this was the only one of these three flicker films that was screened for an audience, and it was considered to be so weird and unsettling that it wasn’t shown again until the 1970s, when these “trance” films were more usual.
If you’re interested in flicker films and what I call “sense-destructive cinema” I wrote a more general, and longer, article last year.
As always, if you have something to say you can find me here and on Twitter. I would love to know if you know about some obscure flicker film!
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