Between 1922 and 1927 Oskar Fischinger, the pioneer of Visual Music – abstract experimental films synchronized to music – lived and worked in Munich, where he followed Walter Ruttmann to collaborate with him. Despite financial difficulties, Fischinger managed to make the Munich years 1925-1927 among his most adventurous and artistically successful for his own filmmaking. He continued to experiment with different technical means for producing imagery, including cut-outs, drawings, rotating moiré patterns, and layering combinations of images through optical superimpositions. The Hungarian composer Alexander Laszlo had been fascinated with the possibility of extending his own compositions into the realm of visual music. He contacted Fischinger in 1925 to prepare about 20 minutes of film material that could be integrated, along with painted slides, into the amorphous colored lights projected by his color organ. During 1926, Laszlo toured Germany giving “Farblichtmusik” concerts, but he reviews tended to criticize the quality of the music while praising the filmic effects. Fischinger, too, was unsatisfied with Laszlos music and prepared his own multiple-projections shows using three side-by-side images cast with three projectors. As Ruttmann had, Fischinger used all three systems for colorizing- tinting, toning and hand-coloring – to give a variety of color effects.

One of these multiple-projectors pieces has survived, with the title R-1. Ein Formspiel. R-1 constitute one of Fischinger’s most brilliant achievements. Its primary imagery consists of serial rearrangements of an alignment of staffs, a row of closely-parallel vertical bars, each of which can move up or down freely, thus creating patterns of motion -undulating waves, diagonal inclines, solos for individual staffs with their own eccentric rhythm, etc. – across the scene.