Optics to auteur: the fortune, and the retirement into "après-garde" film

pivotal · UNDATED (B.S., pre-film career)

• When: UNDATED — after his public-sector optics career (Federal interval "G. Ford–early G. Bush") and an early retirement; n024 brackets "the twelve years of Incandenza's directorial activity," and the exclusive devotion fills "the last five years of his life," up to his death in YTSDB (2004)
• What: The oeuvre's origin. Trained under his father to tennis and then, via O.N.R.-financed doctorate, to applied optics, JOI became the top applied-geometrical-optics man in O.N.R./S.A.C./A.E.C.; his development of gamma-refractive indices for lithium-anodized lenses and panels is "one of the big half-dozen discoveries that made possible cold annular fusion." That acumen translated after retirement into a patented fortune (rearview mirrors, light-sensitive eyewear, holographic greeting cartridges, film-equipment) and finally, in the "optative retirement" of founding E.T.A., into "'après-garde' experimental- and conceptual-film work too far either ahead of or behind its time." He liquidated assets, ceded E.T.A. to Tavis, and devoted his "unimpaired hours" to documentaries, "technically recondite art films," and "mordantly obscure and obsessive dramatic cartridges." The optics-to-auteur pivot is the whole thread's premise — a lens-maker who turned lenses on the human. Orin's family gloss states it plainly: "he came at entertainment more from an interest in lenses and light" (n145). See the JOI timeline (the biography).