Barry J. Spinello (b. January 17, 1941, Brooklyn, New York) is an American experimental filmmaker, animator, documentarian, and visual music pioneer whose work challenges and expands the language of cinema. He is best known for his innovative cameraless films of the late 1960s and early 1970s—hand-drawn on 16mm clear film leader—where image and soundtrack are created simultaneously through direct intervention on the film medium itself, without the use of camera or tape recorder. Spinello’s early artistic formation combined music, painting, and poetry, a multidisciplinary foundation that led him to explore film as a synesthetic art form. From 1967 to 1971, he produced seminal works such as Sonata for Pen, Brush & Ruler (1968)and Soundtrack (1969), in which he painted and inscribed sound and image directly onto the filmstrip. These films—some held in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection—reconceive cinema as an intimate space of tactile mark-making, visual rhythm, and sonic patterning.
