About

‘Geometric Visions’ highlights a range of films that experiment with mischievous exchanges between mathematical forms and geometric shapes. From chance encounters between circles, triangles, squares and dots, to dancing forms that mimic the distinct patternations of snowflakes and bird songs, this selection of films is an immersive visual spectacle of colour and shape on screen.

Please note: Patrons, especially those sensitive to flickering and strobe light sources, are advised that some of these films contain flashing light effects.

Kreise (Circles) 1933

Music is not limited to the world of sound. There exists a music of the visual world. Oskar Fischinger

A masterful example of Oskar Fischinger's work, Circles is a series of circular shapes and lines spiralling and swirling across the screen in time to classical music. The brightly coloured forms are luminous as they emerge from their dark background. Circles is one of the first colour films ever produced in Europe. Fischinger helped to develop the technology required to produce colour on 35mm film with Circles utilising this newly created 'Gasparcolor' film stock.

3 minutes | All Ages

Polka Graph (Seeing Sound) 1947

A continuation of Mary Ellen Bute’s Seeing Sound experiments in visual music utilising the Schillinger system – a precise mathematical theorem to synchronise music to visuals – Polka Graph embodies the energy of the filmmaker’s earlier abstract works. Playful and rhythmic, the work features vivid cell animation layered over graph pattern wherein concrete geometric and abstract forms dance and transform to the musical cadences of “Polka” from The Age of Gold by Shostakovich.

A pioneering figure in early experimental filmmaking, Bute was a trailblazer for recognition of women’s role in the medium, and her film has lost none of its vibrancy, flamboyance, and assurance.

4 minutes | All Ages

Komposition in Blau (Composition in Blue) 1935

An innovative figure in abstract animation, Oskar Fischinger worked within his native Germany as an animator/special effects artist, contributing special effects to Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon 1929, before relocating to Hollywood in 1936 where he assisted in several Paramount Studios productions.

Set to the orchestration of musical composer Carl Otto’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, Komposition in Blau is a vibrant and tactile work that showcases the artist’s love of abstract musical animation, stop motion, colour, and synchronisation.

4 minutes | All Ages

Color Cry 1952

'A new type of “direct” film, made by the ‘rayogram’ or ‘shadow cast’ process. Strips of film were exposed without the use of a camera. Patterns were created by placing stencils and coloured gels over the film. Lye synchronised this to a piece of blues music.' Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

Digital version produced with the assistance of Park Road Post Production and made available by Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

4 minutes | All Ages

Neige (It’s Snow) 1974

A serene and somewhat surreal animation that recalls Ontario’s vibrant seasonal contrasts, Neige (It’s Snow) is also a work from one of the veterans of the National Film Board of Canada’s animation department, animator Gayle Thomas, who produced a diverse body of work during her almost thirty year career with the department.

5 minutes | All Ages

Kaleidoscope 1935

Set to the propulsive Cuban-inspired rhythms, New Zealand-born artist/filmmaker Len Lye’s expressionistic advertisement for Churchman Cigarettes is awash in colourful abstract imagery hand-painted directly on film, and showcases the artist’s visual flair and inventiveness.

4 minutes | All Ages

Film of Circles, Squares, Triangles, Lines and Dots 1981

A painterly, rainbow profusion of the shapes mentioned in the title, Film of Circles, Squares, Triangles, Lines and Dots is the work of Ivor Cantrill, son of Australian experimental filmmakers Corinne and Arthur Cantrill. Ivor's hand-drawn animation is set to an engaging and chiming soundtrack by experimental composer Chris Knowles.

11 minutes | All Ages

Dawn Chorus 1988

The economy of bird language is by natural design. The use of silence and counterpoint are obvious aids to emphasis where every gramme of energy is called to account. The film uses minimal shapes to make visual virtue of the song birds' clues to communication. John Tappenden

Brightly coloured abstract forms flicker and pulse as though about to emerge or disappear completely in UK-based experimental filmmaker John Tappenden’s tactile and meditative Dawn Chorus, a minimalist celluloid study in pure design and naturalism.

5 minutes | All Ages

223 = Two Hundred and Twenty Three 1985

The moving image becomes a deconstruction site for memory and meaning in Dutch-born Australian experimental filmmaker/academic Dirk De Bruyn’s trancelike visual assault.

A densely layered work of abstract visual montage embedded in a soundtrack of industrial noise, and featuring still photography of the artist as a child alongside eclectic hand-drawn imagery, logotype, and printed text set directly onto film celluloid, the film is a fiercely independent work of no budget experimental cinema that recalls the late No Wave film movement.

6 minutes | All Ages

Without You 2008

Calm down/what happens/happens mostly/without you. Josef Albers

Training the camera lens on London’s industrial suburbia, UK-based Israeli filmmaker/video artist Tal Rosner’s angular visual ode to Josef Albers’ poem doubles as textural study of the modern built environment, an oblique view of the concatenating, colour-coded impulses of urbanisation.

5 minutes | All Ages