Slide one Walter Ruttmann, born in 1887 in Frankfurt, Germany, was an early practitioner of experimental film. He experimented with new forms of expression and techniques, which can be seen even in his first abstract films. Ruttmann is well known for his avant-garde art and music work, his early work being played at the 1929 Baden-Baden festival despite it being eight years old. He studied architecture and painting, working as a graphic designer before his film career took off in the 1920’s, he also had background as a cellist/violinist. Slide two His first abstract, LichtspielOpus 1, is an experiment with colours, rhythms and shapes. He writes that one has to “work with film as though using a paintbrush and paint”. Lichtspielinfact means “play of light” or “light show” but also used in Germany at the time to denote moving pictures. This is what is called an ‘absolute’ film- which is a movement that begun in Germany by a group of artists including Ruttmann. The movement meant that the artists created different approaches to abstraction-in-motion using a variety of techniques and language in their motion pictures focusing on light and form in the dimension of time. 3:13. It is believed that Lichtspiel Opus 1 was the first abstract animation ever shown to a general audience.The abstract shapes and forms within the film compliment the different musical styles and moods within the soundtrack. Three futher works were made under the Lichtspiel title, number 2 being banned in Munich in 1922 as it was thought of to be encouraging hypnotism. Slide three In 1927 came one of Ruttmann’s most famous works, Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis. The silent film shows us one day in Berlin, portraying the life of a city through visual aides using a semi-documentary style without a conventional narrative. So Berlin was a break from Ruttmann’s absolute films before, which were really abstract. The film suggests that Ruttmann had an interest in the soviet montage theory as the film consists of these same conventions- it’s an hour long altogether and a musical score was written by Edmund Meisel to accompany the film. This clip shows the town going about their daily chores and work. Slide four After berlin, Ruttmann sought opportunities for producing an audio-film for radio, he wrote in a manifesto in 1929 “everything audible in the world becomes material”. Weekend by Ruttmann is a work from the early days of radio commissioned in 1928. The radically innovative radio piece made from a collage of words, music fragments and sounds was presented on 13 june 1930 painting an acoustic picture of a Berlin weekend urban landscape.

Weekend is historic in media arts as it is the first significant experiment in montage-based radio. Ruttmann collected these sounds by driving around Berlin in his van with a hidden microphone, stopping at factories, busy streets and other locations to gather a rhythm of the city. To gain an understanding of the significance of editing and montage in his work, you only need to look at the amount of film used. Ruttmann used 2000 meters of film with the final piece only being 250 meters long- 240 individual segments stitched together.