AD HOC #91 FORM AND SPIRIT: NON-OBJECTIVE FILMMAKING
Schedule
Tue, 07 Apr, 2026 at 08:00 pm
UTC-04:00Location
Innis Town Hall | Toronto, ON
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AD HOC #91 FORM AND SPIRIT: NON-OBJECTIVE FILMMAKING
A program of artists’ films inspired by the Art Gallery of Ontaro’s Edna Taçon: Verve and Decorum exhibition.
Programmed by Jim Shedden, AGO Curator, Special Projects and Director, Publishing.
Co-presented by AD HOC and the Art Gallery of Ontario
Tuesday, April 7, 8pm
Innis Town Hall
Innis College, 2 Sussex Avenue
Free admission
“Music is the ultimate teacher.” Wassily Kandinsky
American-born, but raised in Canada, Edna Taçon (1905–1980) was a trained violinist who considered music and abstraction as similarly intuitive and creative pursuits and wrote about the “sublime summit” attainable by both. She exhibited her collages and paintings throughout the 1940s, splitting her time between Toronto and New York. In 1941, she received a Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Scholarship, which allowed her to work and exhibit in group shows at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (now the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum). Inspired by Wassily Kandinsky’s theories on abstraction and colour, her paintings and works on paper are characterized by floating compositions, flowing lines, and luminous forms rendered through a loose blending of colours. The AGO has subsequently acquired five of her works. The exhibition was curated by Renée van der Avoird, AGO Associate Curator of Canadian Art.
In film, an interest in non-objective, or “absolute film”, dates back to the early 1920s when artists like Hans Richter, Walter Ruttmann and Viking Eggeling saw that the inherent aesthetic properties of cinema had been hitherto passed over by filmmakers. Walter Ruttmann characterized those properties as “most closely related to those of painting and the dance. It uses the following means of expression: forms; surfaces; brightnesses and darknesses with their inherent moods; but above all the movement of these optical phenomena, the temporal development of one form out of the other.” Ruttmann absolutely rejected the idea that cinema had anything to do with storytelling and, while to this day film is primarily used as a narrative tool, there has been a steady line of filmmakers since Ruttmann’s time who have made an art of film based on its fundamental visual possibilities.
Like Taçon, it can be argued that Ruttmann and the other filmmakers in this program are aligned with Kandinsky’s spiritual understanding of art, that it is fundamentally intended to make the viewer’s soul vibrate, and to create a harmony among the vibrations. This idea is passed on from Kandinsky to Ruttmann, Richter and Eggeling and, from them. to Oskar Fischinger, and then Jordan Belson and the Whitney brothers. Belson used abstract forms to create a meditative experience, to guide the viewer to travel with their mind’s eye to deeper realms of human consciousness. James Whitney was influenced by everything from Jungian psychology to alchemy and Tao. One of his films shown here, Yantra, was produced entirely by hand over a five year period, by punching grid patterns of 5 in × 7 cards with a pin, James was able to paint through these pinholes onto other 5 in × 7 in cards, to create complex, dynamic images. His brother John Whitney Sr. was an early pioneer in computer graphics, and he explains his research and techniques on the soundtrack to Experiments in Motion Graphics. John Sr.’s sons all became filmmakers as well, and we are featuring John Whitney Jr.’s Terminal Self, which follows in the graphic tradition of the earlier films on this program.
Hans Richter, Rhythmus 21, 1921, b&w, silent, 3 min., 16mm
Walter Ruttmann, Lightplay: Opus I 1921, colour tinted, silent, 10 min., 16mm
Hans Richter, Rhythmus 23, 1923, b&w, silent, 3 min., 16mm
Walter Ruttmann, Opus II-IV, 1921-24, b&w, silent, 10 min. total, 16mm
Viking Eggeling, Diagonal Symphony, 1924, b&w, silent, 6.5 min., 16mm
Mary Ellen Bute, Tarantella, 1940, colour, sound, 5 min., 16mm transferred to digital
Oskar Fischinger, Motion-Painting No. 1, 1947, 11 min., colour, sound (J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto), 16mm transferred to digital
James Whitney, Yantra, 1957, colour, sound, 6.5 min, 16mm
Jordan Belson, Re:Entry, 1964, colour, sound 6 min., 16mm transferred to digital
John Whitney Sr., Experiments in Motion Graphics, 1968, colour, silent, 11 min., 16mm
John Whitney Jr., Terminal Self, 1971-72, colour, sound, 7 min., 16mm
Len Lye, Particles in Space, 1979, b&w, sound, 3.5 min., 16mm
TRT: 83 min.
Thanks to Sebastian di Trolio and the Art Gallery of Ontario for lending us some of the 16mm film prints in this program.
Thanks to Innis College and the University of Toronto Cinema Studies Institute for their ongoing support of this series.
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Where is it happening?
Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Ave, Toronto, ON M5S 1J5, CanadaEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
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