This paper aims at analyzing the concept of “synaesthesia” – a simultaneous mix of sensations normally experienced separately – as a phenomenon at the roots of the genealogy of abstract cinema. It approaches this body of animated abstract images from its origins in Germany after World War I, to the rise of National Socialism and the escape to the United States of some of the key members of the German school (Walter Ruttmann, Oskar Fischinger), to computer art in the 1960s and beyond. The aim is to present the role of the cinematic abstract culture in the historical and political context that saw the birth of both the European avant-gardes and mass commercial culture in the US. One of the main goals is to show how the works of abstract cinema, realized between the 1920s and ‘40s, were at the origins of the experiments with electronic animation during the ‘60s (carried out, among others, by John and James Whitney), and of the studies in computer art and synthetic sound developed in the Bell Telephone Laboratories in the early ‘70s.
