Take a look at Viking Eggeling's "Symphonie Diagonale"

(For a authentic experience, play this with music turned down)

Today, Viking Eggeling’s animated film Symphonie Diagonale (1924) may look no more impressive than a screen saver, but during the 1920’s, this seven minute animation was artistically a pioneering development in cinema. The claim of Symphonie Diagonale as “the first” abstract film originates from Eggeling’s collaborator Hans Richter (1888-76), but this claim is not true. As early as 1921, Walter Ruttman’s abstract film Opus I was premiered with a synchronous musical score and even earlier in 1910, futurist painters Arnoldo Ginna and Bruno Corra were developing the first abstract films. Eggeling’s legacy is his attempt to visually present an “esthetically timed” visual discourse based on the basic elements of drawing. Eggeling’s film is a unique record of repetitious metamorphoses of lines and shapes, one step removed from reality, created by rigorous planning and concentration as if creating a musical score. His only surviving film profoundly influenced abstract animators such as Oskar Fischinger (1910-67), Len Lye (1901-80) and Norman McLaren (1914-87). It is worthwhile to consider how Eggeling came to create this unique visual experiment, a film that encouraged future animators to create new visual worlds.

Viking Eggeling (1880-25) spent his childhood in Lundt, Sweden, where his father ran a sheet music store called The Eggeling Music Shop. At the age of seventeen Eggeling moved to Paris to further his ongoing study of art, first working as a bookkeeper and later moving to Switzerland to be an art teacher at the Lyceum in Zuoz, Switzerland. Teaching his students how to draw from nature led him into a deep analysis on the elements of drawing itself. Fellow artist Hans Arp (1887-66) recalled that Eggeling “was searching for the rules of a plastic counterpoint, composing and drawing its first elements. He tormented himself almost to death.”

By 1918 Eggeling had developed “a complete theory and functioning system” on the use of the basic elements of form. Richter writes:

His approach, methodical to the degree of being scientific, led him to the analytical study of the behavior of elements of form under different conditions. He tried to discover which “expressions” a form would and could take under the various influences of “opposites”: little against big, light against dark, one against many, top against bottom, and so forth. By connecting (“equilibrating”) the strongest contrasts of the most varied order intimately with their opposites through similarities which he termed “analogies,” he could control an unlimited multiplicity of relationships. Contrasting elements were used to dramatize two or more complexes of forms; “analogies” were used within the same complexes of forms to relate them again.

Eggeling found that the “elements of forms” (such as line and shape) could be developed and transformed like musical themes and phrases by incorporating contrasts and repetition. Photographer László Moholy-Nagy confirmed that Eggeling’s experiments leaned heavily on musical frames of reference, such as time signatures, tempo, and traditional musical forms like the symphony. In 1919, Eggeling and Richter abandoned easel painting to work out their visual experiments in Zurich, Switzerland.

Inspired by the story scrolls of ancient Egypt and China, Eggeling and Richter found that scrolls could also be used to document the transformation of an abstraction. Hans Arp remembers, “On great rolls of paper [Eggeling] had set down a sort of hieratic writing with the help of figures of rare proportion and beauty. These figures grew, subdivided, multiplied, moved, intertwined from one group to another, vanished and partly reappeared, organized themselves into an impressive construction with plantlike forms. He called this work a ‘Symphony’".

However, it didn’t take long for the scroll experiment to come to an end. The desire for actual movement within the design took precedence, and the new media of film offered the solution.

Eggeling’s first film, Horizontal-Vertical Orchestra (now lost), was made in 1921 and shown to a private audience of friends in 1921 and 1923. He was not satisfied and developed his next film Symphonie Diagonale in 1923, showing it privately the next year, and showing it in 1925 just days before his death. Symphonie Diagonale was originally designed to coincide with a music soundtrack (a few years before “talking” pictures came into existence). Apparently, the original soundtrack was either never recorded or destroyed. Today, his film can be viewed on the YouTube website, but beware that new music has been added and is not original to the film. When viewing the film on YouTube, it is best to turn the sound completely off in order to view the film in its purist form. Without sound, it is amazing to discover how “musically” developed it remains visually.

In the film, Eggeling presents his animated “elements of form” within the context of movement and time. The design elements are made of lines, modified into various patterns throughout the film. The unfolding of various abstract patterns appears over a black landscape or background, which focus our attention on the visual discourse appearing in the foreground. The foreground abstractions change with a sense of concentration and nuance, much like the unfolding of a melody. The timing, or “tempo”, is felt though the appearing and disappearance of abstract forms at various durations and intervals in space. As the animation proceeds, there is the feeling of an unfolding structure revealing a grand design, carefully considered so as not to give everything away at the beginning. Graphic details, such as the descending diagonal lines and line-based arcs, serve to magnify the grand design in the making, and keep the visual journey interesting. There is a feeling of completeness after the finish, a gestalt, or unified whole that transcends the details.

Upon first viewing Symphonie Diagonale, it is even difficult to perceive a beginning or an end. There is no story, no personality, but only a constant shifting of pattern upon pattern inside an undefined space, like the universe itself. According to Moholy-Nagy, Eggeling was “the first to discover the all-prevailing, revolutionary importance of an esthetic of time in film”. By building his animation from a musical foundation, Eggeling prepared the future for animators to come.

T. Winkels

Source: http://toddwinkels.blogspot.com/2010/08/take-look-at-viking-eggelings-symphonie.html