Cinematic Collecting: The Continuous Discontinuity of the Still Frame in Oskar Fischinger’s Walking from Munich to Berlin

Abstract

The contingent instant that Walter Benjamin, among others, claims photography uniquely makes palpable has no place in film. Cinema relies on the impermanence of such elusive moments to generate continuity and presence. This article shows how Oskar Fischinger’s 1927 experimental short Walking from Munich to Berlin combines photography and film in a way that stages the incompatibility of these technologies, while also forging a new visual language – a radical form of animation – with which to overcome it. The article both examines Fischinger’s work as a singular contribution to animation and the avant-garde of the Weimar era and beyond, unraveling its philosophical implications for theories of collecting, film, photography, and animation.