Symphonie Diagonale by Viking Eggeling

(video by Roxanne Minnish)

Made in 1924. It was the only movie that remained after Viking Eggeling. He would die in 1925. A first movie of him, Horizontal-vertical Orchestra, is lost.
Try to watch it with and without sound: you'll realize the perfect equivalence between the structures used by the musical language and the structures used by the cinematic language.
Actually his movie is a cinematic ballet, which was fertile space for Eggeling to find the equivalence with the harmonic and contrapuntal structures. Hans Richter, Man Ray or Walter Ruttmann were on the same page, naturally, each one with his own differences. I think now at Maya Deren: her movies were looking for something different in dance: sublimated ritual. No wonder that one of her movies is named just that, Ritual in Transfigured Time; but all her movies are about myth, and ritual, and dance.
I found on MySpace a very interesting site devoted to the art of Viking Eggeling.





(Filmele Avangardei)