According to avant-garde film historian William Moritz, “Oskar Fischinger must count among the greatest artists of the twentieth century. His films and paintings achieved the status of cult icons, influencing a whole generation of younger artists, and providing anonymous models for the music videos and computer graphics of the last quarter of the century.” John Cage has said, “Fischinger's whimsical notions about sight and sound opened a new door for me," while Norman McLaren declared him “one of the great formative influences of my life.” His work was an influence on Walt Disney's Fantasia and an inspiration for many Disney films of the 1940s. Tonight's program of Fischinger's astounding visual music includes many new and preserved prints. “Decades before computer graphics, before music videos, even before Fantasia (the 1940 version), there were the abstract animated films of Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967), master of ‘absolute' or nonobjective filmmaking . . . who created exquisite ‘visual music' using geometric patterns and shapes choreographed tightly to classical music and jazz.”