A New Art: The Visual Music of Film

Abstract

This is a 1921 newspaper review of a screening of Walther Ruttmann’s Lichtspiel Opus I, widely recognized today as the first abstract animation to be publicly screened. Here, Diebold, who had been calling for such films since 1916, takes the opportunity to confirm his prior hypothesis in relation to Ruttmann’s film and to speculate about the future of such work.

KEYWORDS:

• Bernhard Diebold
• Walther Ruttmann
• Max Butting
• Lichtspiel Opus I (1921)
• abstract animation
• absolute film
• visual music

Notes

1. That we recognize Ruttmann’s Lichtspiel Opus I as the first abstract animation to be publicly screened depends upon certain historiographic criteria pertaining—principally--to technology on one hand, and the avant-garde project on the other. By adopting a viewpoint that includes proto-cinematography, as we do in this issue, we can immediately recognize the appearance of abstract animation at a much earlier date without, in any way, seeking to eclipse the specific contribution made by Ruttmann in 1921. (See my Editorial for this issue, “Starting, Stopping and Synthesizing Cinematographic Art,” for further discussion on this matter.) Joshua Yumibe has recently broached this matter with great sensitivity and insight. Yumibe draws attention to the work of C. Francis Jenkins, who was screening abstract hand-painted films in a “vernacular” setting before 1898. See: Joshua Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012).

2. Bernhard Diebold, “Expressionismus und Kino,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung und schweizerisches Handelsblatt Part I: 14/9, no. 1453 (1916), Part II: 15/9, no. 1459 (1916) and Part III: 16/9, no. 1466 (1916).

1. Editor’s note: Sumurun is a 1920 film directed by Ernst Lubitsch. It is interesting to note that it was Lubitsch (by then working in Hollywood) who arranged for Oskar Fischinger—the key figure of Diebold’s 1932 radio lecture (translated in the next essay in this issue)—to be offered employment in America in 1936.

2. Translator and editor’s note: Here, by evoking flimsy, “kitsch” film-sets through a list of their derivative components, Diebold may well be taking a swipe at Sumurun.

3. Editor’s note: Jeanpaul Goergen points out that the relationship between the film and the live music at the Berlin premiere involved some alternation. See Jeanpaul Goergen, “Oskar Fischinger in Germany, 1900 to 1936,” in Cindy Keefer and Jaap Guldemond (eds.), Oskar Fischinger (1900–1967): Experiments in Cinematic Abstraction (Amsterdam and Los Angeles: EYE Filmmuseum and Center for Visual Music, 2013), 43.