What makes the work of this avant-garde group, enriched by the inventor of silhouette film Lotte Reiniger, theoretician Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and other less fruitful contemporaries of similar sensibility (Graeff, Pfenninger), contemporary is their attempt to use pictures in motion to show a clear visual rhythm and to reach the spirit and form of music as a non-referential art



Even though the films of German avant-garde filmmakers have been stored in museum archives for decades, their heritage has never been fully buried. That is the case also in this time of eclectic MTV esthetics of moving pictures. In any case, these films were not as easily forgotten, unlike some (even avant-garde) that did not use the universal and timeless language that masters of German abstract film, such as Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter, Oskar Fischinger and Walter Ruttman, invented in 1920s and 1930s. What makes the work of this avant-garde group, enriched by the inventor of silhouette film Lotte Reiniger, theoretician Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and other less fruitful contemporaries of similar sensibility (Graeff, Pfenninger), contemporary is their attempt to use pictures in motion to show a clear visual rhythm and to reach the spirit and form of music as a non-referential art. The final goal was an “absolute”, “clean” film free of representational, illusionist and narrative function. Naturally, such ideas did not appear out of a vacuum. They appeared and developed within a spiritual triangle that was formed after WW I by German, French and Russian avant-gardes circles to which some of the aforementioned filmmakers belonged to. In their works today we can identify different influences and traces: Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Constructivism, Expressionism, Supremacism, as well as other contemporary arts and the philosophy!
Many regard the finale of the film avant-garde to be the death of Viking Eggeling in 1925. He came from Sweden and declared himself as a Dadaist. At the end of 1910s (after initially collaborating with Hans Richter), he started to research the analogies between musical and visual forms. The result of his research was one of the most representative examples of “clean film”, Diagonalsinfonie (1923/24). Meanwhile, Richter questioned the visual dynamics, using the animation of squares and triangles which in the series Rhytmus (21, 23, 25; 1921-25) become “painting in time”. Walter Ruttmann was also interested in visual music and based his Lichtspiel Opus I-1V (1921-1925) on the choreography of curves and geometrical forms. Afterwards he created the master piece of (hybrid) avant-garde documentaries, Berlin. Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt (1927). Even until today Ruttmann’s friend Lotte Reiniger remained unsurpassed in her silhouette animation. Many later famous masters of experimental animation from Len Lye and Norman McLaren to the Whitney brothers thanked Oscar Fischinger, creator of the attractively rhythmic, musically accompanied “optical poems” and “visual symphonies”, who reached his career peak with Motion Painting (1948) at the time of the awakening of the “second” avant-garde in America. There is no doubt that the new generations from the digital era, inclined to clean (and musical) forms, experiments with graphic and kinetic potentials of pictures, will reach for the models inherited from Fischinger and his avant-garde contemporaries. (Diana Nenadić)