William Moritz

William Moritz (May 6, 1941 – March 12, 2004), film historian, specialized in visual music and experimental animation. His principal published works concerned abstract filmmaker and painter Oskar Fischinger. He also wrote extensively on other visual music artists who worked with motion pictures, including James and John Whitney and Jordan Belson; Moritz also published on German cinema, Visual Music, color organs, experimental animation, avant-garde film and the California School of Color Music.

Moritz was born in Williams, Arizona and raised in California and Arizona. His father Edward Moritz, a German immigrant, influenced his son's interest in music and literature. In an interview with Cindy Keefer of the Center for Visual Music in Los Angeles, Moritz relateed the importance of his early experiences with animation:

Moritz received his Ph.D in comparative literature from the University of Southern California in 1968; though he took courses in Cinema Studies, his degrees were in comparative literature, possibly due to what one colleague speculates was the lack of "a credible Cinema Studies program until the 1980s." (Deneroff 2004)

Moritz developed his interest in the work of Oskar Fischinger while a student at USC in 1958. His early enthusiasm for Fischinger's work became the focus of his career: "I saw my first Fischinger film, and it popped all my buttons!" (Keefer 2003) Moritz's first critical work on Fischinger was published in Film Culture, in an issue devoted entirely to articles about Fischinger, in 1974. In 1969, Moritz had begun his decades-long study, aided by Fischinger's widow Elfriede, finally culminating in the major biographical work Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger (2004). (The title is an allusion to An Optical Poem, a short film made by Fischinger for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1937). Optical Poetry is regarded as a major study of Fischinger's life and work. It received a Willy Haas Award as best book publication at cinefest - International Festival of German Film Heritage 2004.

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