In Schall und Rauch, director Hans Fischerkoesen (1896-1973) makes use of live-action and animation to separate the story into reality and fantasy. First we see a woman’s hands playing piano, then cut to a man absorbed in his own pleasure, sitting in an armchair smoking and listening to music, while the film’s second half is devoted to recreating the man’s reverie, embodied by billowing smoke turning into ephemeral figures of female dancers, achieved by Fischerkoesen by carefully arranging white sand on black velour paper. (In his later advertisement Sichtbare Gedanken, 1933, Fischerkoesen repeated the same idea: while two refined men play chess, their cigarette smoke morphs into a male genie who indicates the best moves.)
Fischerkoesen depicts two types of female dancers in Schall und Rauch: a ballerina in a classical tutu, and a waltz dancer waving her flowing skirt, each a stereotype of femininity commonly related to beauty, lightness, and grace. Here the ballerinas are merely a visual spectacle, their bodies made of male fantasy and smoke.
Schall und Rauch marked the start of a large film advertising campaign by the cigarette company Muratti. Famous for producing luxury cigarettes drawing on orientalist imagery, Muratti aimed to give their brand a more popular appeal, transforming the old picturesque design to simplified red and blue blocks of colour and gold lettering. The ambitious campaign employed new pack designs, posters, and newspaper ads, as well as film commercials in colour and sound by leading artists such as Wolfgang Kaskeline and Oskar Fischinger. By transforming a realistic scene into an animation sequence, Fischerkoesen laid the groundwork for the campaign’s subsequent radical, abstract commercials.
Fischerkoesen produced commercials almost exclusively, often in collaboration with Julius Pinschewer and later Ufa, though before and during World War II he also made Kulturfilme, military educational films, and his only three animated short films. Historian William Moritz, in his seminal 1992 article on Fischerkoesen in Animation Journal, observed that the director demonstrated aesthetically that “men of principle may resist by subverting, with subtlety, the rules and prejudices of the tyrant”. After imprisonment by the Red Army, in 1948 Fischerkoesen fled to West Germany, where he again became a leading advertiser, producing around 30 commercials per year.  

Sebastian Köthe, Virginia Bonilla Durán