“FRIEDE” Moon Rocket & Oskar Fischinger

Frau Im Mond (Woman In The Moon), directed by Fritz Lang in 1929 is simlpy amazing. Not only because it was one of the first sci-fi-rocket movies, because the rocket and those great special effects were designed by Oskar Fischinger and Hermann Oberth. If you want to build your own 1:144 scale replica paper model of the “Friede” moon rocket then click here.

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. He was cinema’s Kandinsky, an animator who, beginning in the 1920’s in Germany, created exquisite “visual music” using geometric patterns and shapes choreographed tightly to classical music and jazz. (John Canemaker, New York Times)

Oskar Fischinger’s own films are coming out on DVD - first volume just released by Center for Visual Music.