Visual Music

Absolut Panushka, Jan-Apr 1997.

Visual Music

While Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger experimented with animation, other artists in Germany also toyed with the idea of an abstract film. The Swedish painter Viking Eggeling, who had been a part of the Swiss Dada movement during the war years, began painting sequential images on long scrolls in hopes that they could be transferred to an animated film, and wrote theoretical texts about this "Horizontal Vertical Orchestra," as he called it. Hans Richter, also a Dada veteran, followed suit with similar scroll drawings. In 1921, he and Eggeling took their drawings to the UFA Studios and paid to have them filmed. But the results only lasted a few seconds and did not really give a good illusion of movement or transformation because the individual drawings were too different -- more like a storyboard than finished animation. Eggeling, very disappointed, went back to work on creating many more scroll drawings. Richter, however, entitled his little film fragment Film is Rhythm, and showed it quite a bit, once to a French critic, who took his glasses off to clean them just before the film began and put them back on only to realize that the film was already over.

A number of Bauhaus students and faculty also tried to produce a visual music: Werner Graeff and Kurt Kranz with film (though they only painted storyboard sequences, without being able to film them at that time), and Kurt Schwerdtfeger and Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack with a specially built projection instrument, Reflectorial Color Play, composed of numerous layers of panels which were moved by hand to create projections of geometric shapes in various colors according to a written score.

Two other Bauhaus students, Erna Niemeyer and LoreLuedesdorf, became friends with Eggeling and Ruttmann respectively and worked on their films. By 1923 Eggeling, who was very poor and undernourished, had finished the scroll score for a film Diagonal Symphony. Niemeyer took on the task of duplicating each of his drawings by cutting out the figures from tin foil, so that she could make them appear and disappear by cutting away pieces and filming the animation either backwards or forwards. This animation process took more than a year, but the results of Niemeyer's careful, smooth work are spectacular, giving a sensuous, musical attack and decay to Eggeling's intricate geometric forms, which Eggeling had planned in solo, duet and orchestral complexity on a parallel to auditory music.

Ruttmann edited the film, and showed it 5 November 1924 at an informal private premiere, after which Eggeling took a short trip to Paris to show the film to his friends there. He returned so ill he had to be hospitalized. The public premiere took place 3 May 1925 at the UFA Theater on Kurfurstendamm in Berlin, as part of "The Absolute Film," a program which contained a "Color Sonatina" performed with Hirschfeld-Mack's instrument, Richter's 30-second Film is Rhythm, Ruttmann's Opus II, III, and IV, and two French live-action experimental films, Ballet Mecanique and Entr'acte. Eggeling was not present; he died of septic angina two weeks later.

Erna Niemeyer married Hans Richter in 1927 and made several films for him (including ones he later called Rhythm 21 and Rhythm 23 as if they had been made earlier). After they were divorced in 1929, Richter made no further animation. In 1936 Niemeyer married the French Surrealist Philippe Soupault and lived until her death under the name Ré Soupault.

Moritz, William. "History of Experimental Animation." Website. Absolut Panushka, curated by Christine Panushka. (Jan-Apr 1997).