Early twentieth-century film can be seen to engage with modernist avant-garde trends through the works of Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter, and Viking Eggeling. These artists were drawn to film as a product of new technology and a medium that was unencumbered by tradition. They rallied against the constraints of the more conventional practices of art such as painting and sculpture, issues of perspective and gravity which did not concern the filmmakers. Instead, they wished to explore dynamics of rhythm, harmony, dissonance in their own medium of film and therefore connected and engaged with a number of concerns and trends regarding painting, other avant-garde movements and were specifically interested in the dynamism of modern life and how to capture these ideas through film. These themes are evident in the films of Ruttmann such as Light-play Opus 1 from 1921, Richter’s Rhythmus 21 from 1921 and Rhythmus 23 from 1923 and Eggeling’s Symphony Diagonal from 1921.
Walter Ruttmann can be seen to engage with many modernist avant-garde trends through his film Light-play Opus 1 from 1921. Ruttmann had a desire to set his paintings, forms and colours in motion and was concerned with movement, recreating the sensation of dynamism and working with a medium that would allow for him to animate his images . Light-play Opus 1 is a clear representation of Ruttmann’s appeal to get away from the traditional use of a static, two-dimensional canvas and move into this new medium to convey a sense of motion and a focus on the temporal organisation of visual forms. This clear rejection of academic and traditional methods is, as Charles Harrison puts it, a trend very commonly associated with avant-garde movements as “the value of modernism is established in practice as a kind of intentional difference with respect to other current forms and styles and practices” . Another key avant-garde trend that Ruttmann is following here is the use of abstraction in motion and abstract forms that inhabit the film which reveals how Ruttmann rebelled against the narrative-driven, emotional and expressionistic films and the conventional techniques of that time. Expressed by Derek Hillard, “many early films presented not theatrical narratives, but technological innovations which emerge as motors of modernity” which, according to Michael Cowan, was “central to Ruttmann’s professional identity as an avant-garde filmmaker” . Very characteristic of the modern doctrine, Ruttmann believed that film had nothing to do with storytelling and instead took a formalist approach and focused on what was unique to film, which for him was movement over time, form and colour. He “reduced the contingent details of individual objects in movement to reveal the abstract lines of movement itself” , found harmony of form and new techniques of using colour and form . This has a clear connection to the avant-garde movements and their ideas to move away from the naturalistic and realism of traditional painting styles and methods. Ruttmann visibly portrays this in Light-play Opus 1 through the moving shapes and diverse forms that dissolve and reappear, creating tension between them, and the use of colour and music that create different rhythms and moods throughout the piece. His forms and surface are also clearly linked to painting which was not a conventional practice used in film. Another avant-garde trend that Ruttmann followed is also seen in the film when he uses no illusions of depth with no impression of objects moving through a three-dimensional space . As Charles Harrison describes, “modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did nothing else” and this “progressive flattening of the apparent pictorial surface and, by implication, of progressive loss of figurative form and content” , is evident in Light-play Opus 1. It is clearly apparent that Ruttmann’s Light-play Opus 1 followed many of the avant-garde trends and went against many of the traditional conventions of that time.
Hans Richter’s Rhythmus 21 from 1921 and Rhythmus 23 from 1923 exhibit many modernist avant-garde trends as well. Richter was involved in and was influenced by many avant-garde movements and groups all around Europe such as the Cubism, De Stijl and Dada movements. Malcolm Turvey explains how the “Rhythm films themselves conform to his definition of Dada” and that Richter “saw his films as Dadaist” . However, it was his involvement with the avant-garde Constructivism movement that most affected and influenced his later film works such as Rhythmus 21 and Rhythmus 23. As R. Bruce Elder states, one can “correctly identified the use of modern materials as a defining feature of Constructivism” in his film. In Rhythmus 21 and 23, Richter’s Constructivist interests are revealed in the use of rectangles, squares and lines of different shapes related to architecture as well as the flow of geometric shapes that shift across the surface of the screen in a movement that is stressed by an uneven rhythm. The more complicated forms and use of shades and overlapping in Rhythmus 23 are suggestive of depth and movement, compared to the use of restricted square shapes in Rhythmus 21 which make it difficult to understand spatial relationships on the screen. This also drawing attention the flat rectangular surface of the screen and complicating our illusion of space. Expressed by David Bartine, these elements portray how Richter challenges “the conventional thought about forms of harmony, order, and security as often displayed in the arts and in politics of that time” and how “Richter used the language of harmonic counterpoint to articulate some of his innovative resistance to the status quo” . This rejection against society’s traditions of that time conveys how “many of the most influential of modern art’s early supporters believed that it was precisely in its independence from social concerns and processes that the value of modernist art was to be found” . In Rhythmus 21 and 23, Richter found structural relationships between the abstract forms and a kinetic play of contrasts and proportions to reflect his desire to go beyond the expressionism of conventional, story-driven traditional films and instead exploited movement and combinations of forms that grow and break apart. Harrison clarifies how “it is normal to associate the modern in art with a breakdown of the traditional decorum in Western culture that previously connected the appearance of art to the appearance of the natural world” . Characterized by precision, architectonic forms and clear formal order, Richter simplified his composition so he could concentrate on the exploitation and arrangement of essential elements of cinema which again were movement, time and light which are evident in both his films.
Viking Eggeling is the final artist that engages with the modern avant-garde trends of the twentieth-century through his film Symphony Diagonal produced in 1921. Eggeling began as a painter and was influenced by the avant-garde Cubist movement as seen in his painting Composition from 1919. Elements from this can be seen in his film Symphony Diagonal in the flat geometric forms and intersecting planes as he analyses the movement of forms on the screen’s surface. He emphasised line using a series of contrasts between vertical and horizontal, light and dark, straight and curved, strong and weak, and disappearing and emerging in a systematic abstraction. These “sensations that are unique to film medium-sensations that could not be produced but through the film medium- is pure modernism” and conform to the developments of the avant-garde movements. This film was made around the same time as Hans Richter’s Rhythmus 21 and, as Maria Teresa Arfini explains, “Symphonie Diagonale is structured as a musical sonata-form” with a title that has musical associations but the film itself does not contain any sound and instead the musical composition is visually expressed. The geometric forms in the film move and change rhythmically, implying a parallel between abstract art and music. Together with Richter, Eggeling “shared a purpose to find a formal universally understandable language” or a vocabulary of visual imagery that was as complex and free as music. This was unlike anything that had been seen previously in film and went against many of the academic traditions and as Hans Richter himself puts it, “it is here that Eggeling’s approach to Modern Art has its origin” . This experimenting with abstraction, visual language, understanding of rhythm, time and imagery, and moving away from attempts of capturing reality was seen as a trend of the avant-garde movements as “artists of a modernist persuasion will tend to dissociate themselves and their practices from authorized manners of seeing and picturing the world” and exemplifies the new technological advances of the age.
From the unconventional title usage to the use of abstraction to exploit form in space, to the rejection of academic standards and traditional conventions, Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling engage in many of the modernist avant-garde trends of the twentieth-century. These artists were thinking about similar concerns and ideas that were relevant in mediums other than film, but these studies were translated into work that dealt with the media of film by introducing elements of time, movement, color and light.