James Whitney

James Whitney was born in Pasadena, California, in 1921. He studied painting and spent time in England before World War II. In 1940, after returning home, he began collaborating with his older brother John on experimental films. While John moved further into technical and mathematical research, James turned toward psychology, alchemy, and Eastern philosophy, interests that would later define the direction of his independent work.

In the early 1940s the Whitneys produced some of the first abstract films made in the United States. Using an 8mm optical printer built by John, they made Twenty-Four Variations on an Original Theme and the series of Film Exercises between 1943 and 1944, which combined geometric imagery with electronic sounds scratched directly onto the filmstrip. The works were awarded a prize for sound at the 1949 Brussels Experimental Film Competition and demonstrated how principles drawn from music, like rhythm, variation, and counterpoint, could be translated into moving light and shape. After this period James pursued his own path, spending three years on Variations on a Circle, a 20-minute 8mm study of geometric motion, and later reducing his images to fields of dots. His eight-year effort on Yantra produced dense mandala-like sequences by painting through thousands of pinholes punched in cards, while Lapis, completed in 1966 with the aid of John’s motion-control computer, expanded this method into kaleidoscopic movement. In the 1970s he began an elemental cycle with Dwija, a solarized study of alchemical drawings, and Wu Ming, a seventeen-minute meditation on the dual nature of wave and particle. His practice remained defined by long durations of labor and a search for visual equivalents of psychological and spiritual transformation rather than narrative or representation.

Whitney’s films have been exhibited internationally and preserved in major archives. They have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Stedelijk, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with retrospectives in Toronto, Montreal, and Amsterdam. The Academy Film Archive holds a large collection of the Whitney family’s work, and the Center for Visual Music has restored Yantra and Lapis in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou. His films remain landmarks of abstract cinema, influencing handmade animators including Sara Petty and digital pioneers including Larry Cuba. Whitney passed away in 1982.