#Walter Ruttmann

[nofatclips]

Live version of After the Storm by MacGray - Video by Félix Panis featuring scenes from:

Der Sieger by Walter Ruttmann (1921)

Australia's Luxury Train - Pathé (1962)

Formations - Chevrolet Motor Company (1936)

Above the Horizon - American Meteorological Society (1967)

Small Town or City Viewed From Train [CLN-36-C-23-B]

Convective clouds by John Friedman (1971)

Look to Lockheed for Leadership - Lockheed Martin (1940)

Mechanical principles by Ralph Steiner (1930)

Los Angeles-area railroad [PET0981_R-3_LA] (1946)

Rail by Geoffrey Jones - (1968)

The Big City by Charles Guggenheim (1950)

The Shock of the New by Hughes Robert (1980)

The Image of the City by Eames Ray (1973)

View from space - McGraw-Hill Book Co (1969)

Visual meditation: Driving in Western Kansas by Laura Gilchrist (2018)

Wheels of progress by John A. McGee (1950)

Eisenbahn by Lutz Mommartz (1967)

Ballet mècanique by Fernand Léger (1924)

Take it easy by Jam Handy (1936)

Earth in motion - Erpi Picture Consultants (1936)

[rrrauschen]

Walter Ruttmann, {1921} Lichtspiel: Opus I

[davidhudson]

Walter Ruttmann, December 28, 1887 – July 15, 1941.

[rwpohl]

*

[spectaculardistractions]

To Marie-Laure and Charles de Noailles Beverly Hills, 7 February 1931 Very dear friends, Firstly, I thank you kindly for the photo you sent of Marie-Laure and little Laure. They both look lovely and I was delighted to see them. I am so very far away that a letter or a memento from friends like you helps to fill some lonely hours with happiness. Thanks to the press cuttings I’ve received from you and Argus, I am up to date with the press campaign and reviews of the film. Your name would have been left completely out of it had it not been for Le Figaro and those spiteful comments in Aux Écoutes in particular. That magazine has taken cowardice to the point of publishing anonymous articles. If I were in Paris, I would track down that vile anonymous myself. That apart, I’ve also received some long and positive reviews. Painlevé sent me one in Dutch and Argus sent others in English, Russian and German. I’ve made an album I’ll show you when I have a chance. I quite agree with you though that for now the film is a lost cause in France. I am sure that the passing of time will correct this. In some of the cuttings (in particular an excessively ignorant article by Charensol, and in Aux Écoutes) I read that Cocteau’s film is also considered dangerous. So it seems that if we want to make films that stay within the boundaries set by the legal system, the censors, tradition and general loathing for poetry, etc., we are limited to Ruttmanesque films or charming American comedies. That is: to abstain from making films altogether. That is what is happening to me here. It is so difficult to explain, but you can’t imagine what it means to make a film over here, especially at Metro-Goldwyn. Even Eisenstein, who didn’t come up with any excessively revolutionary projects, was forced to leave after ten months without producing anything. There is nothing more predictable, outdated, banal and honest than the films made over here. For what it’s worth, they have a level of technical perfection that Europeans attempt to imitate in vain. For my part, I just observe and in no way intervene in production. Which is not to say they are not friendly, because they do pay me and do not expect anything in return. I followed your instructions not to sell the film to anyone else. Where England was concerned it was too late and by the time my telegram arrived, the deal had already been done. The arrangements with Strasbourg, Brussels and Spain though were all cancelled. On my instructions, Vicens went to the laboratory and collected the complete film negative. He wrote to say he had taken it to your home, correctly stored in two large boxes. The copy that was not seized is securely stored and will not be released without your permission. We are now going to demand the other two copies from the police: I hope they will return them. My friends on the rue Gay-Lussac are just waiting for Mauclaire’s cheque before sending you the accounts. I think they wrote to you about this a few weeks ago. As the film was banned though, I imagine there won’t be much money. GM Film have sent invoices I’ve already paid, the receipts for these are in the file you have in Paris. I’ve told them I will bring them over to show them when I get back. As for Tobis, I think he has made a copy of the damaged negative in his laboratory. I am sorry you can’t come to Hollywood. I will see you back in France then, as I don’t plan to stay in America much longer. I would love to tell you about all my adventures and misadventures since our last meeting. Best wishes to Auric if he is still with you. I’m envious. To you and Laure and Nathalie, all my friendship and fond regards, Luis PS I am sending an envelope with the cuttings you asked me to return. Thank you.

Jo Evans & Breixo Viejo, Luis Buñuel: A Life in Letters

[originalharmonysalad]

Roaring 20s Babylon Berlin: 1927 Colour Film w/sound

Time travel to the real Babylon Berlin of the roaring 20s. AI colorized 1927 film, restored w/ sound at 4K 60fps. Glamorous 1920s flappers, fashion and Berlin cabaret club dancers.

This is an AI restored edit from Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis 1927 by Walter Ruttmann

AI Upscaled and Colorized by Glamourdaze. Sound design by Glamourdaze.

[vibe-stash]

Metropolis (1927) Director: Fritz Lang Cinematography: Karl Freund, Günther Rittau, Walter Ruttmann Art Direction: Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, Karl Vollbrecht

[thomasmartinnutt]

Chance Encounters #010

https://www.mixcloud.com/thomasmartinnutt/chance-encounters-010/

Jeph Jerman, Kasja Lindgren, Lucio Capece & Werner Dafeldecker, Philip Jeck, DJ Shadow, Marina Herlop, Deep Listening Band, Lasse Marhaug & Paal Nilssen-Love, Walter Ruttmann, Dave Philips, Catherine Lamb, Ilhan Mimaroglu, Carlos Casas, Delphine Dora (feat. Gayle Brogan & Le fruit vert), Michael Pisaro-Liu, Bing & Ruth, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Clara de Asís & Mara Winter, Wendy Carlos, Zhu Wenbo, Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto, Vanessa Rossetto, Jan Bang & Erik Honore, Shakali, Jed Speare, Eric Glick Rieman, Leslie Dalaba & Stuart Dempster, Cheikh Tidiane Fall, Bobby Few & Jo Maka, Dick Higgins, Adela Mede (feat. Martyna Basta), Red Wine and Sugar, Prefuse 73, Unknown Recordist, Chamber 4, Alessandro Bosetti, William Hooker & Phill Niblock, Richard Bernas & Robert Wyatt

[byneddiedingo]

Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)

Cast: Alfred Abel, Gustav Fröhlich, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Fritz Rasp, Theodor Loos, Erwin Biswanger, Heinrich George, Brigitte Helm. Screenplay: Thea von Harbou, Fritz Lang. Cinematography: Karl Freund, Günther Rittau, Walter Ruttmann. Art direction: Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, Karl Vollbrecht. 

Metropolis strikes me as the most balletic movie ever made. I'm not referring just to Brigitte Helm's fabulous hoochie-coochie as the False Maria, which so thrills the goggling, slavering gentlemen of Metropolis, but to the fact that as one of the great silent films it brilliantly substitutes movement for the speech and song the medium denies it. In addition to Helm's terrific performance as both Marias, we also have Gustav Fröhlich's wildly over-the-top Freder, who flings himself frenziedly about the sets. We may find the performance laughable today, but it's best to watch the film with the understanding that subtlety just wouldn't work in Fritz Lang's fever-dream of a city. Certainly that's also true of the always emotive Rudolf Klein-Rogge, whose Rotwang is pretty much indistinguishable from his Dr. Mabuse. But even the stillest of the characters in the film -- Alfred Abel's Joh Frederson, Fritz Rasp's superbly creepy Thin Man -- are there to provide a sinister contrast to the hyperactivity going on around them.  And then there are the crowds, a corps de ballet if ever there was one, whether stiffly marching to and from their jobs, or celebrating the fall of the Heart Machine with a riotous ring-around-the-rosy. There are times when Lang's manipulation of crowds reminds me of Busby Berkeley's. Lang's choreographic approach to the film is essential to its success as a portrayal of the subsuming of the human into the mechanical. Is there a more brilliant depiction of the alienation of work than that of the man who must shift the hands around a gigantic clock face to keep up with randomly illuminated light bulbs? Metropolis is usually cited as a triumph of design, and it probably wouldn't have the hold over us that it does without the sets of Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, and Karl Vollbrecht, whose influence over our visions of the future seems indelible. Would we have the decor of the Star Wars movies or any of today's superhero epics without their work? There are those who would argue that the film is long on visual excitement but short on intellectual content -- the moral banality, that the Heart must mediate between the Head and the Hand, hardly seems to suffice as a justification for the film's Sturm und Drang -- which weakens its reputation as a masterpiece. But that seems to me to ask more of movies than they were ever designed to provide. So much in Metropolis reverberates with history -- from the French Revolution to the Bolsheviks to the Nazis -- that it's a film we can never get out of our heads, and probably shouldn't.

[adrenalinezetaax]

On Imageless Films

What remains of cinema when the visuals are removed?

A few years ago, Anthology Film Archives did a screening series of what it called “imageless films.” The program is spread across a century of cinema, including Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend from the thirties and Derek Jarman’s Blue from the eighties, as well as more recent films. Some of them admittedly aren’t very different from what most people would call “sound art,” but I think there’s an important difference: unlike, say, listening to a fiction podcast, the audience must sit in a dark theater for the entire duration of the work (as one would for a movie). If one wants to get philosophical about it, one could also say that the dark screen is the image of absence—and it’s that distinction that some of these works rely upon to make their point.

Expedition Content is a striking example of this principle. This film was made by Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati at the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, which has produced several acclaimed documentaries. It repurposes audio originally recorded in the sixties during an expedition to West Papua conducted by ethnographers as part of research on the Hubula people. By focusing the audience’s attention on the sonic dimension of their journey, the artists curtail the preconceptions that accompany visual depiction of the film’s subjects, what some scholars might even argue constitute a “colonial gaze.” Sometimes creative choices undermine this objective: A text that prefaces the film revealing that one of the researchers disappeared during the expedition biases our sympathies somewhat, lending it the feel of a highbrow Blair Witch Project sequel. Nevertheless, the overall effect is quite striking. Presenting the material in a cinematic format also resolves the practical matter of captioning dialogue in a foreign language, which constitute a significant portion of the film’s material.

[cinemacentury]

Friday, February 23, 2024

95. OPUS II (Walter Ruttmann, 1921) - Germany - Streaming - YouTube - 4 minutes. New film #89. Silent.

[o-the-mts]

90 Movies in 90 Days: Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927)

Every day until March 31, 2024 I will be watching and reviewing a movie that is 90 minutes or less. Title: Berlin: Symphony of a Great City Release Date: 23 September 1927 Director: Walter Ruttmann Production Company: Deutsche Vereinsfilm AG | Fox Europa Produktion Summary/Review: A day in the life of Berlin is illustrated in a montage of images to symphonic music.  There is an emphasis on…

[davidhudson]

Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großtadt (1927), directed by Walter Ruttmann (December 28, 1887 – July 15, 1941).

[iconauta]

Ballet Mécanique (19124) Fernand Léger

Ballet Mécanique ( Mechanical Ballet) is an avant-garde film made by the cubist painter Fernand Léger with the assistance of the American director Dudley Murphy . It is the best known example of cubist cinema and the only film work made by Lèger. Originally this film was intended to accompany the ballet by American composer George Antheil , but due to disagreements between the various authors, the film was presented without any musical accompaniment. Today, the ballet and the film would be considered two separate and independent works, although there have been numerous attempts to adapt Antheil's music to Léger and Murphy's Ballet Mécanique*.

The first public screening took place on September 24, 1924, in Vienna, but the best known remains the one in Berlin in May 1925, when Ballet Mécanique was presented at an evening entitled Der Absolut Film organized by the artists of the Novembergruppe in collaboration with the UFA . On the occasion other avant-garde films were screened in addition to Léger's work including Entr'Act by René Clair , Symphonie Diagonale by Viking Eggeling , Ryhmus 21 e Rythmus 23 di Hans Richter and Walter Ruttmann's Opus II, III, IV . All of these works shared the intent to absolve cinema from theatre and literature thus giving it a new form that went beyond only a narrative expression.

"The error of painting lies in the subject. The error of cinema, in the script. Freed from this dead weight, cinema can become a gigantic microscope on things never seen and heard," , said Fernand Léger about his work.

"Léger has completely freed the object from its rational, anecdotal, symbolic meaning, to build the film only on its plastic value, without any concern for its current meaning" declared instead Hans Richter crediting Léger with being the first to create a totally pure form of cinema.

The film consists of a swirl of kaleidoscopic images that mechanically reproduce human movements and inanimate objects. But it is only the images that move; the camera remains motionless without making any movement. No narrative binds the images held together only by the mechanical rhythm of the projection. To accentuate the sense of unreality, Léger colorized some versions of the film, while in others he preferred black and white; he never arrived at a final version of Ballet Mécanique .

Performers in the film include, in addition to the two authors, Kiki de Montparnasse , the smiling woman and Katherine Murphy: the girl on the swing (00:37). Charlie Chaplin also makes an appearance in the film in the form of a cubist puppet, the work of Léger himself, who is given the task of opening (00:27) and closing the ballet (15:55).

nda: over time numerous attempts have been made to adapt George Antheil's music to Léger's film; several of these versions are available online. We preferred to write a new soundtrack inspired by Léger's own statements:

"Nous insistons jusqu'à ce que l'oeil et l'esprit du spectateur ne l'acceptent plus. Nous épuisons sa valeur spectacle jusqu'au moment où il devient insupportable."

“We insist until the eye and mind of the spectator no longer accept it. We exhaust its spectacle value until it becomes unbearable.”

[differentflowergladiator]

Oskar Wilhelm Fischinger German- American abstract animator, film maker and painter. He is known for his unique visualisation of sound using computer graphics and animation, in which he plays with s pimple shapes and colours and moves them accordingly to the notes and pitch of the music (optical poem) He is known in the industry for his work on Fantasia, Woman in the moon. In his early life he got a diploma in engineering, which his technical abilities and mechanical shapes may stem from in his work. He was later introduced to Walter Rettmann a pioneer in abstract film. During this time Fichinger was experimenting with coloured liquids and three dimensional modelling materials, wax and clay.for this he used a wax slicing machine which synchronised a vertical slider with a movie camera. He wrote to ruttmann about this, who then used it to make backgrounds for Lottie ringers the adventures of Prince Ahmed. He collaborated with Louis Seel to make satirical cartoons. Which he then took this in handed knowledge of animation to become more experimental in his files making.

Secondary action

Gestures that support the main action to add more dimension to the character animation. A angrily waliking characters primary action would be the legs moving, but the secondary action is the arms, that would move in a very rhombus manner, with grinding teeth that would indicate to the audience that the character is angry. Or if a character moves with relaxed arms with a peaceful face, this would indicate calmness in the character The secondary action however should not dominate the primary action, for instance if a character is sad the hands shouldn’t cover the entire face, instead whipping away a tear would be a more subtle and lest domination action. Staging can also come into play on secondary actions, as to when the secondary action should come into play to give the audience time to digest how the character is feeling.