In the early Twenties in Germany, as elsewhere, painters turned to film as a medium in which to explore their artistic language and expand their experiments with formal concerns. Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling had worked together on principles of movement and rhythm between different formal units in drawings and scrolls. “It became evident,” Richter said, “that these scrolls, as a whole, implied movement...and movement implied film” (quoted in Steve Dwoskin's “Film Is”). Walther Ruttman is best known here for his Berlin: Symphony of a City; he too was originally a painter, and his experimental films were shown in Germany, according to Steve Dwoskin, even before those of Richter. With the coming of sound to films, the painter Oskar Fischinger could explore his musically-based theories in animation form.
Others among these early filmmakers, though also originally painters, had more photographically based concerns. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's influence on avant-garde photography and cinematography is considerable, and his film, Lightplay: Black-White-Grey is a highlight of this retrospective. Werner Graeff designed only two abstract films, which were finally realized in the late '50s; both are included in the program.
Other rarities are Kurt Schwerdtfeger's colored lightplays, originally developed at the Bauhaus as a hand-operated light play projection, and an early experimental film by Guido Seeber, who went on to become an expert special effects cinematographer.
Opus II-IV (Walther Ruttmann, 1923/25, 10 mins)
Diagonal Symphony (Viking Eggeling, 1923/25, 5 mins)
Rhythm 21 (Hans Richter, 1921/24, 3 mins)
Rhythm 23 (Hans Richter, 1923/24, 3 mins)
Film Study (Hans Richter, 1926, 4 mins)
Ghosts Before Breakfast (Hans Richter, 1928, 7 mins)
Film Score I/22 and Film Score II/22 (Werner Graeff, 1922, 5 mins)
Reflectory Color Lightplays (Kurt Schwerdtfeger, 1921/23, 15 mins)
Lightplay: Black-White-Grey (Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 1930, 6 mins)
KIPHO (Guido Seeber, 1925, 4 mins)
Wax Experiments (Oskar Fischinger, 1921/27, 4 mins)
Studies No. 5 and 7 (Oskar Fischinger, 1929/30, 9 mins)