Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Fantasia
1940 · Samuel Armstrong · Fantasia on Sightlines
It starts in the dark. Musicians of the Philadelphia Orchestra stand in silhouette, lit in hard colored light like figures on a stage, and Leopold Stokowski raises his hands for Bach's Toccata and Fugue. Then the camera goes in among the players, and the players dissolve. What remains are bows, waveforms, cloud-shapes and shafts of light. There's no room and no orchestra any more, just the music and the forms it seems to give off.
That dissolve is the whole of Fantasia in small. The film keeps asking what a picture looks like when the music comes first.
Normally a film is shot and the music is fitted to it afterward. Here the order was reversed, and it was reversed on purpose. Stokowski's performance was recorded and fixed. Then it was broken down bar by bar on bar sheets, frame by frame, and every drawing was timed to it with click tracks. The cuts fall on events in the score, a new entry or a change of key, and not on dramatic beats. Even the overall shape of the film is borrowed from music: a concert program that moves from abstraction to comedy to apocalypse, with an intermission in the middle.
This is where Deleuze earns his place. In his books on cinema, a film's images are shots of things moving, and those movements show a larger whole that is always changing. He calls that changing whole the Open. Most films let us infer it from the story, the world the characters move through. Fantasia has no story to infer it from. It hands the Open to the orchestra instead. The music is the whole, and every image is a slice cut out of it. Seen that way, the film's oddest quality makes sense. Each movement can be a completely different world (a dewdrop meadow, a sorcerer's tower, a burning mountain), and none of them feels arbitrary, because what holds them together sits outside every frame and runs underneath all of them.
Animation has a special claim here, and Deleuze saw it. He argued that cinema doesn't capture posed, decisive moments the way a painting or a ballet tableau does. It records any-instant-whatever: ordinary instants taken at equal intervals, with none more important than the next. Cartoons belong fully to cinema for this reason, since a drawn figure doesn't exist as a pose but only as the continuous movement that traces it. Fantasia pushes this as far as it goes. A click track doesn't favor climaxes. It ticks evenly, and the animators had to fill every tick.
The Toccata is where the film tries the most. Oskar Fischinger had already made Komposition in Blau (1935), in which geometric solids move in rhythmic counterpoint to a classical score, and he was hired onto this sequence. He left as his forms were "progressively figured", turned back into recognizable things. That small studio fight is a fight over a Deleuzian idea. Deleuze calls it the power-quality: a color, a light or a rhythm shown for its own sake, before it attaches to any object or person. The Toccata reaches for that and then pulls back, a little at a time, toward bows and clouds. You can watch the studio deciding how much abstraction an audience will take.
After that the film keeps changing how it looks, and color does much of the work. The Nutcracker is soaked in saturated seasonal washes. Night on Bald Mountain drains almost to monochrome. Its lineage runs back to Alexeieff and Parker's pinscreen Une nuit sur le mont Chauve (1933), which set the same Mussorgsky piece in shades of light and shadow rather than line. Deleuze would call that inheritance expressionism, a world built from a gradient between light and dark in which things seem charged with a life that isn't quite organic. The dye-transfer pigment control behind those flames goes back to Flowers and Trees (1932). Here color is no longer decoration. It soaks up the mood of the whole movement, which is what Deleuze means by the colour-image.
Then there's Mickey. The Sorcerer's Apprentice is the one movement that tells a plain story: an apprentice acts, the act gets away from him, and his master puts it right. Its staging hangs on a single vertical line of authority. It's a small, neat action-image, situation then act then new situation, and it's where the project began, as a single deluxe short. Disney didn't shrink the project when costs rose. He made it bigger, until the story became one movement among eight. That's the film's most telling act of self-knowledge. The story got a seat in the concert, and only one.
The most moving shot comes in Ave Maria. The camera makes one long forward move through a forest of Gothic arches, built on the multiplane camera first tried out in The Old Mill (1937). Painted layers slide past each other at different speeds and produce real depth. For Deleuze, a moving shot is the moment the image tells us the whole has changed, and this shot is nearly that and nothing more. Nobody acts in it. The world simply opens in front of us.
The sound has its own history. With Fantasound, William Garity and John Hawkins, working with RCA, used about thirty microphones, separate optical tracks and a control track to move sound around the screen. To do it they invented the pan pot, which is now on every mixing desk in the world. Fewer than a dozen theaters were ever equipped. RKO cut the film to about eighty minutes with mono sound, the war shut off Europe, and the ambition wasn't attempted again at Disney for decades. Even so, the ideas came back through Cinerama and CinemaScope's magnetic tracks, and every multichannel format since descends from that experiment.
The film has no single author either. Samuel Armstrong directed two movements. Its real authors are Disney as impresario and Stokowski as the voice that unifies it. That suits the film. Its true protagonist was never a character. It was the score.
So here's a way to watch it again. Stop waiting for things to happen and listen for where the cuts fall. Notice how often a shape changes just as the music turns. Watch the Toccata as an argument still going on, over whether forms should stay pure or become things. And when the arches open in Ave Maria, ask yourself what that camera is moving toward. The film doesn't say. The music already knows.
Concepts in play
- the Open — With no continuous story, the pre-recorded score acts as the changing whole that every movement is cut from; each of the eight visual worlds is a slice of the music
- any-instant-whatever — Animation timed with click tracks to bar sheets broken down frame by frame: even sampling of movement with no privileged pose
- qualité-puissance — The non-objective Toccata and Fugue (bows, waveforms, cloud-forms, light-shafts with no represented space), descended from Fischinger's Komposition in Blau; Fischinger left as the forms were progressively figured
- expressionism — Night on Bald Mountain's near-monochrome palette, in the line of Alexeieff and Parker's chiaroscuro pinscreen version of the same Mussorgsky piece
- affective colour — Dye-transfer printing exploited for the deep saturation of the Nutcracker's seasonal washes and the drained flame palette of Bald Mountain
- action-image-large-form — The Sorcerer's Apprentice, the only movement with a plain story: Mickey's act gets out of control and the Sorcerer restores order, staged on a single vertical axis of authority
- the mobile section (plan) — The Ave Maria's single sustained forward multiplane move through a forest of Gothic arches, a change in the whole expressed through pure camera movement