|
|
| Line 1: |
Line 1: |
| Viking Eggeling was an avant-garde artist and filmmaker connected to Dada, Constructivism and Abstract art and was one of the pioneers in absolute film and visual music. His 1924 film Symphonie diagonale [Diagonal Symphony] is one of the seminal abstract films in the history of experimental cinema.
| |
|
| |
|
| http://monoskop.org/Viking_Eggeling
| |
|
| |
| (...)
| |
| 'universal language'. harmonic essential rules on painting.
| |
| got into film and worked on abstract sequences
| |
|
| |
| 'Eggeling's major concern during this period was to find a medium for the metaphysical problems which obsessed him, to articulate his forms of "universelle Sprache" [universal language] in order that they should serve as 'communication signs'. He was to give expression to these speculations in many hundreds of studies, until he finally gave shape to his form language in the large scroll drawings, which in their turn were to serve as models (score) for his later film experiments. Eggeling executed these scrolls during his years in Switzerland and showed them to his colleagues Arp, Tzara, Janco, and Richter.[7]'
| |
|
| |
| He continued his experiments with "picture rolls". These scrolls were sequences of painted images on long rolls of paper that investigate the transformation of geometrical forms and could be up to 15 meters in length. As they were to be "read" from left to right, this soon evolved into cinematographic experimentation on film stock.
| |
|
| |
| "I spent two years, 1916–1918, groping for the principles of what made for rhythm in painting. [...] In 1918, Tristan Tzara brought me together with a Swedish painter from Ascona, who, as he told me, also experimented with similar problems. His name was Viking Eggeling. His drawings stunned me with their extraordinary logic and beauty, a new beauty. He used contrasting elements to dramatize two (or more) complexes of forms and used analogies in these same complexes to relate them again. In varying proportions, number, intensity, position, etc., new contrasts and new analogies were born in perfect order, until there grew a kind of ‘functioning’ between the different form units, which made you feel movement, rhythm, continuity... as clear as in Bach. That’s what I saw immediately!"
| |
|
| |
| Eggeling constructed an animation table, a simple box covered with a sheet of glass, and made himself a dark room in a space adjoining the studio.[18]
| |
|
| |
| During 1922 and 1923 Eggeling attempted several more animation tests with Horizontal-Vertikal-Messe, but they still seemed inadequate.
| |
|
| |
| Eggeling was evolving a theory based on his film experiments and his studies of form and colour. He called his theory Eidodynamik [visual dynamics], a name thought up for him by his close friend Charlotte Wolff[24]. Little is known about it, but the fundamental principle was the projection of coloured lights against the sky to bear the elements of form.[25] Fernand Léger was the film-maker who interested Eggeling most among the experimentalists of that day.[26]
| |
|
| |
| (...)
| |
