On 3 May 1925, German and French avant-garde cinema converged in Berlin at the now-legendary matinee, “Der absolute Film.” The French contingent consisted of Léger and Murphy’s Ballet mécanique and René Clair’s Entr’acte; Germany was represented by these four films from Viking Eggeling and Walther Ruttmann. Rhythm, movement, compo­sition supersede storytelling, intensified here through non-figurative animation frequently described as “optical music.” Completed with the help of Ré Soupault, Symphonie diagonale brings to life the Swedish-born Eggeling’s abstract “cinemorphic” paintings, which he de­veloped alongside Hans Richter, whose own Film ist Rhythmus would appear the following week at the matinee’s re­peat performance. The dynamic figures in Ruttmann’s Opus II may have been familiar to contemporary spectators from the animated “falcon-dream” in Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924), and we would see the flickering lines of Opus IV again in the opening of Ruttmann’s Ber­lin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927). More recently, Ruttmann’s “painting with time” enlivens the closing credits of TV series Babylon Berlin (2017-), an honor that Ruttmann would likely not have eschewed, given his pioneering work with Julius Pinschewer in the use of film in advertising and his sustained preoccupation with the “psychophysical” power of rhythmic movement in film.

Joel Westerdale