Center for Visual Music is a nonprofit film archive dedicated to visual music, experimental animation and avant-garde media. CVM is commited to preservation, curation, education, scholarship, and dissemination of the film, performances and other media of this tradition, together with related historical documentation and other material.

Jordan Belson is one of the greatest artists of visual music. Belson creates lush vibrant experiences of exquisite color and dynamic abstract phenomena evoking sacred celestial experiences.

Center for Visual Music presents the first in a series of DVD releases: Oskar Fischinger: Ten Films. This long-awaited DVD contains ten of Fischinger's classic Visual Music films plus many Special Features.

Jordan Belson: Films Sacred and Profane
Saturday, March 26th, 19:30h
LACMA - Bing Theatre
5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90036
Presented in association with Center for Visual Music

Born in Chicago and raised in the Bay Area, Jordan Belson trained as a painter before turning his attention to film-making after discovering the abstract films of Oskar Fischinger, Norman McLaren and Hans Richter. Since 1947, Belson has explored consciousness, transcendence, and light in a visionary body of work that has been called "cosmic cinema": brimming with vibrant color, mandalas, liquid forms and mesmerizing rhythms.

In 1957-59, Belson collaborated with sound artist Henry Jacobs on the Vortex Concerts, early multimedia events that combined new electronic music with Belson’s visual effects projected on the 65-foot dome of the California Academy of Science’s Morrison Planetarium. The program at LACMA features rarely screened films including Caravan (1952), Séance (1959), Cycles (1974, made with Stephen Beck), a new preservation print of Chakra (1972), and Belson's latest film, Epilogue (2005), funded by the NASA Art Program and commissioned by the Hirshhorn Museum (produced on video). The program also includes Allures, Light, Music of the Spheres and Samadhi. Program introduced by Cindy Keefer, curator and archivist, CVM.

For more about Jordan Belson (biographies by Moritz and Keefer, bibliography, filmography, Vortex resources, new articles, etc.), or the Belson DVD, please visit the official Belson Research site at: www.centerforvisualmusic.org/Belson

Jordan Belson: Films Sacred and Profane
Thursday, October 14, 2010, 19h
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Phyllis Wattis Theater
151 3rd Street, San Francisco, California, USA

Presented by Center for Visual Music. Introduced by Cindy Keefer, archivist and curator, Center for Visual Music.

Since 1947, Bay Area artist Jordan Belson has explored consciousness, transcendence, and light in an extraordinary body of abstract films that has been called "cosmic cinema." This program features rarely screened films including Caravan (1952), a new preservation print of Chakra (1972), and the Bay Area premiere of Epilogue (2005), a distillation of 60 years of visionary images synchronized to a symphonic tone poem by Rachmaninoff.

$5 general; free for SFMOMA members or with museum admission (requires a free ticket, which can be picked up in the Haas Atrium).

For more about Jordan Belson, please visit his Research Pages at www.centerforvisualmusic.org/Belson

A Fischinger Celebration - Benefit Art Exhibition and Reception
Tuesday, September 23rd, 19h
Goethe Institut Los Angeles
5750 Wilshire Blvd. #100, Los Angeles, CA

Benefit Art Exhibition and Reception. Celebrating Elfriede Fischinger on her 100th Birthday.

Hosted by Center for Visual Music in association with Goethe Institut and The Fischinger Trust.

Join us for a celebration of the life of Elfriede Fischinger (1910-1999), widow of the avant-garde filmmaker and painter Oskar Fischinger. This special evening features an Art Exhibition of selected photographs, artifacts and Paintings by Oskar Fischinger, a Reception, and Home Movies and Videos of Elfriede. Highlights include Oskar’s first Stereo Painting (1949), The Lumigraph film (1970) by Elfriede, and unshot animation drawings by Oskar. Proceeds from the evening, which includes a silent auction, will benefit the Fischinger preservation, conservation and digitization work underway at Center for Visual Music, a nonprofit 501(c) 3 archive dedicated to preserving and promoting the Fischinger films and legacy.

Tickets available through www.cvm.eventbrite.com or through Center for Visual Music. MAP and other details also at www.cvm.eventbrite.com

Info soon on the silent auction items.

Can't attend? Please consider making a donation of the ticket price ($40) to the Fischinger preservation and digitization project. Your donation is tax deductible; Center for Visual Music is a 501(c)3 nonprofit. You can donate online here, or contact CVM for additional methods: www.centerforvisualmusic.org/Fischinger/FundingNeeds.htm

Images from Oil paintings by Oskar Fischinger, to be exhibited at the Fischinger Celebration. Images (c) Fischinger Trust

Nonobjective Films, 1920s-1950s
A program of artists supported by Hilla Rebay
Friday Nov 6, 2pm, and again on Nov 20, in New York

An accompanying program to the Guggenheim's KANDINSKY exhibition.
Organized by the Center for Visual Music

In the 1940s, curator and founding director Hilla Rebay planned to establish a film center at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, which later became the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, to collect and promote nonobjective films. She awarded grants to artists and presented programs of short experimental films. With the help of Oskar Fischinger, an elaborate film center was planned to include studios and planetarium-style projection capability. Although unrealized, Rebay's support enabled many filmmakers to continue their work in abstract film. This program presents short films by filmmakers whose work was screened and/or supported by Rebay, including Jordan Belson, Mary Ellen Bute, Charles Dockum, Oskar Fischinger, Norman McLaren, Hans Richter, Harry Smith, among others. Having experimented with nonobjectivity, many of these artists were familiar with the work of Vasily Kandinsky, one of its most famous practitioners, having seen his paintings at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting.

14:00 16mm films
- Symphonie Diagonale, Viking Eggeling, 1921-24
- Film Studie, Hans Richter, 1926
- Tarantella, Mary Ellen Bute, 1940
- Film no. 7, Harry Smith, c.1952
- Mobilcolor Performance at the Guggenheim Museum, Charles Dockum, 1952
- Séance, Jordan Belson, 1959

14:30 35mm films
- Studie no. 7, Oskar Fischinger, 1931
- Loops, Norman McLaren, 1940
- Allegretto, Oskar Fischinger, 1936-1943
- Radio Dynamics, Oskar Fischinger, 1942

New Media Theater, free with Museum admission  (we're told you can access this via the gallery with Kandinsky's works on paper)

Nov 6 and 20, then 2 December dates; program also screens in January at the upcoming Kandinsky symposium.

Almost all are new prints; the Fischingers and Dockum are new prints from CVM's recent preservation projects. CVM also thanks Cecile Starr and Robert Haller.

The Center for Visual Music has received a prestigious Avant-Garde Masters Grant for the preservation of 3 reels of Oskar Fischinger’s original 35mm nitrate film experiments from his 'Raumlichtkunst' multiple projector performances of the 1920s. Funded by The Film Foundation and managed by The National Film Preservation Foundation, the program encourages archives to save works significant to the development of the avant-garde in America. The Film Foundation is a nonprofit organization established in 1990 by Martin Scorsese, dedicated to protecting and preserving motion picture history. Joining Scorsese on the board are: Woody Allen, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Francis Ford Coppola, Clint Eastwood, Curtis Hanson, Peter Jackson, Ang Lee, George Lucas, Alexander Payne, Robert Redford, and Steven Spielberg.