MMCA FILM AND VIDEO
2015.2.7~2.28
BAUHAUS AND ABSTRACT FILMS
FILMS : Bauhaus and Abstract Short Films
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Werner Graeff
COMPOSITION Ⅰ/1922
COMPOSITION Ⅱ/1922
Kurt Schwerdtfeger
Reflective Plays of Coloured Light
Heinrich Brocksieper
Surfaces Perpelleristic
Duck
Seamstress
Kurt Kranz
Twenty Pictures from the Life of a Composition
Black: White/White: Black
The Heroic Arrow
Leporello - Draft for a Colour Film
Variations on A Geometric Theme
Hans Richter
Rhythm 21
Rhythm 23
Viking Eggeling
Diagonal Symphony
INTRODUCTION
Film, for teachers and students at the Bauhaus, was an important facet of Gropius’s educational concept, which focused on teaching a “science of seeing”. Art and technology were to forge a new unity and film, the technological medium par excellence, was an indispensable part of this. Although Laszlo Moholy-Nagy failed in his attempts to establish a “Versuchsstelle fur Filmkunst” (Experimental Centre for Cinematic Art) at the Bauhaus, its teachers and students nevertheless produced a respectable body of work in film. While most of these date from the Bauhaus’s period of activity, a few were not realised by the artists them-selves until after World War II, building on their earlier film scripts.
The programmatic goal of the Bauhaus, as advocated by Moholy-Nagy, gives film an important role. Artistic specialisation was to be superseded by multimedia work. Photography and film were essential to this polyvalent approach and could count on occupying a pivotal position in the teaching concept. Moholy-Nagy also focused on the artistic appropriation of the actual film equipment, which was to assist him in shaping his technical perception of the present. His attention thereby centred on the rendering of a new reality, where technical equipment and an engineered “seeing” played an important role. The subjects readily filmed by Moholy-Nagy and his contemporaries, such as the iron girders of bridges, glass buildings and new maerials in general, occupied a space in this reality and shaped the living environment. Art had to respond to this, so as not to lose its initiative.
The Bauhaus’s works in film may be grouped according to three key aspects: architectural documentaries, socio-critical reports and abstract media art. These include film by the Bauhaus Masters (Walter Gropius, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy), Bauhaus students (Heinrich Brocksieper, Werner Graeff, Kurt Kranz, Kurt Schwerdtfeger) and filmmakers closely associated with the Bauhaus (Han Richter, Viking Eggeling).
A recent accusation levelled at Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus is that their avant-garde films did not fulfil their self-imposed objective of manufacturing products for the mainstream culture. As with its industrial furniture, the Bauhaus strove to overcome the artistic ivory tower, aiming to apply art to the manufacture of practical, utilitarian products. In the fields of industrial design and modern architecture, this approach was largely successful.
However, in the field of film, there are also distinctions to be made. The films about architecture associated with the Bauhaus, above all Richard Paulick and Walter Gropius’s Wie wohnenwir gesund und wirtschaftlich? (How Do We Live Healthily and Economically?) (GER 1926-1928) aimed first and foremost to promote modern, rational building, the modern building materials of steel, concrete and glass and the new method of construction with prefabricated structural components. They used the medium of film chiefly as a means of reaching the masses, or at least a greater audience.
The socio-critical reports by Ella Bergmann-Michel and Moholy-Nagy were also explicitly designed for a mass audience and were to make inroads into mainstream culture. After all, the
representation of social conditions through the medium of film is also practical, a utilitarian art for the mainstream culture. The film and video movements of the 1970s took up this precise point, putting their operational films at the disposal of the social and the reform movements. However, the Bauhaus’s films never shared the ignorance of formal issues which prevailed in the 1970s. They were defined by the instructive linking of social reportage and formalised images, and it is this which ensures the continued impact of this type of Bauhaus film.
By virtue of the abstract media art experiments in film alone, one may accept, at least in part, the failure of the utopia of the “artist in industry”. However, these films never claimed to be films for the masses. They explored fragments of problems, investigated the visual manifestations of modern design with light and spatial design. They therefore belong more to the tradition which Dziga Vertov defended with the following words: “We felt that we had an obligation not just to make films for wide consumption but, from time to time, films that beget films as well.”
Bonus material: Among the events hosted by visiting lecturers during the Bauhaus’s Dessau period, there is film evidence of only five that dealt with film: On 10 June 1929, the pioneering Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov shows and discusses his film Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera, USSR 1928/29). On three evenings in June 1930, Hans Richter, under the motto “Der Gute Film” (The Good Film), shows his and Viking Eggeling’s abstract films and some of his picture scrolls. On 7 December 1931, Herr von Halem from Dusseldorf illustrates his lecture “Der Stahlskelettbau und seine Entwicklung im In- und Auslande” (The Steel Frame Building and its Development at Home and Abroad) with a 1928 two-part film on construction: Das Stahlrahmenhaus der Stahlbau GmbH Dusseldorf (Architekt Hans Spiegal) (The Steel Frame House of Stahlbau GmbH Dusseldorf (architect, Hans Spiegel) and Bau eines Stahlrahmenhauses auf der Ausstellung, Die technische Stadt, Dresden 1928 (Bauleitung: Architekt Felix Muller) (Construction of a Steel Frame House at the Exhibition, The Technical City, Dresden 1928 (construction manager: Felix Muller, architect)). For the DVD “Media Art”, we have selected from this body of works the “absolute” films of Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling.
KOMPOSITION Ⅰ/1922
(COMPOSITION Ⅰ/1922)
GER 1922/1977, 2’, silent, 16 mm [originally 35 mm], colour
Direction, camera, editing, production: Werner Graeff
There is evidence of a preoccupation with film at the early Bauhaus, which dates back to 1922. At this time, Werner Graeff, student of Theo van Doesburg, drafted plans for two abstract films, which he was unable to realise due to a lack of time and money: Komposition Ⅰ/1922, which works with coloured squares, and the black and white Komposition Ⅱ/1922 (Composition Ⅱ/1922). Both work with just a few, readily comprehensible elements. This reduction is typical of Graeff’s films. Graeff was first able to realise the black and white film in 1958/59 with his students at the Folkwang-Werkkunstschule in Essen on a homemade trick camera table. The colour film was first completed in 1977. Graeff’s idea for a colour film came about through his acquaintance with Hans Richter, who was introduced to him by Theo van Doesburg. Graeff recalls that in 1922, Richter already had plans to turn his painting “Fuge in Rot und Grun” (Fugue in Red and Green) into a hand-coloured film.
KOMPOSITION Ⅱ/1922
(COMPOSITION Ⅱ/1922)
GER 1922/1959, 2’, silent, 16 mm [originally 35 mm], b&w
Direction, camera, editing, production: Werner Graeff with Werner Hannapel
In 1922, Werner Graeff sketches outlines for two films, which were first realised after the war. His teacher, Doesburg, had also recruited Graeff for “De Stiji”, the journal he edited. From 1921 to 1923, this featured three articles by Hans Richter, which put forward the importance of the medium of film in the future work of visual artists. Also documented are Richter and Eggeling’s (to date unpublished) attempts to make abstract, objective films. Encouraged by this, in 1922 Graeff develops his own film projects and in 1923 publishes the outline for the black and white Komposition Ⅱ/1922 in the fifth edition of the journal “De Stiji”. By this time, he has met Richter in person and becomes his colleague and friend.
REFLEKTORISCHE FARBLICHTSPIELE
(REFLECTIVE PLAYS OF COLOURED LIGHT)
GER 1922 /1967, 24’ (excerpt of 17’), sound, 16 mm, colour
Concept and reconstruction: Kurt Schwerdtfeger
Direction, camera, production: Rudolf Judes
Kurt Schwerdtfeger’s Reflektorische Farbspiele consists of five stanzas: “Vegetative Form” (Vegetative form), “Bauhaus 1922”, “Streifen und Gitter” (Stripes and grids), “Rotes Quadrat” (Red square) and “Hommage a Schlemmer”. Schwerdtfeger was less interested in technical perfection than in lively improvisation. With constructivist elements, he devises a mesmerizing light show that fascinates with the crystalline purity of the colours and forms. In 1922, Schwerdtfeger launched a lantern festival with shadow theatre pieces at the Bauhaus, which was the root of all subsequent shadow theatre productions and light projections. After the war, the artist reconstructed his stanzas and re-staged them with his students at the Padagogische Hochschule Alfeld, a teacher training college. Reflektorische Farbspiel was filmed by Rudolf judes shortly after Schwerdtfeger’s death in 1966.
FLACHEN, PERPELLERISTISCH (SURFACES PERPELLERISTIC)
ENTE (DUCK)
NAHERIN (SEAMSTRESS)
GER approx. 1927-30, 6’, silent, 35 mm, b&w
Direction, camera, editing, production: Heinrich Brocksieper
Heinrich Brocksieper studied from 1919 at the newly founded Bauhaus in Weimar and attended Johannes ltten’s preliminary course and other classes. From 1927, he focused increasingly on photography and made a number of experimental films. Regrettably, most of these were destroyed in an air raid during the war. Just three films remain. Flachen, perpelleristisch (GER 1930, 3’) shows three rapidly turning trapeziums on a black background, the effect of which produces an afterimage on the retina. In the animation Ente (GER 1930, 1’), only fragments of which have been preserved, a dissolving white surface reveals a drawing of a bottle, which changes into a duck. Here, the focus seems to have been on the smooth mutation of the one object into the other. In Naherin (G 1930, 2’), a white pair of scissors, buttons, safety pins and thread appear on a black background. These are evidently filmed as a photogram, i.e., without a camera, whereby the objects are placed directly on celluloid and then exposed to light. The objects com together in groups and- according to Brocksieper-carry out battles, disintegrate and re-form.
ZWANZIG BILDER AUS DEM LEBEN EINER KOMPOSITION
(TWENTY PICTURES FROM THE LIFE OF A COMPOSITION)
GER 1927-28 /1972, 2’, 35 mm, colour
Direction, editing, production: Kurt Kranz
Animation: Robert Darroll
Kranz had already drawn up drafts for Zwanzig Bilder aus dem Leben einer Komposition as a 17-year old, before he began to study at the Bauhaus. The film arranges into a series a sequence of pictures of a colour composition in water colour and tempera, painted for a portrait format picture book. After attending a lecture by Moholy-Nagy in Bielefeld, the young lithographer Kurt Kranz applies to the Bauhaus and studies from 1930 to 1933 under Albers, Klee, Kandinsky, Schmidt and Peterhans. Kranz already drew series of drawings in his sketchbooks as a 15-year old, and this way of thinking in series consequently influences his creative output. During this period, he also drafts a number of ideas for films with abstract motifs. However, these are first realised after his retirement as professor of art in Hamburg, with the assistance of his student, Robert Darroll. In all of Kranz’s films, a simple process of cross fading links the watercolours ot drawings with one another. Although this realisation of the series of images in film seems rather simple and noncinematic, it nevertheless shows how the medium of film altered the horizons of painting in the 1920s.
SCHWARZ : WEISS / WEISS : SCHWARZ
(BLACK : WHITE / WHITE : BLACK)
GER 1928-29 /1972, 2’, silent, 35 mm, b&w
Direction, editing, production: Kurt Kranz
Animation: Robert Darroll
The drafts for Schwarz : Weiss / Weiss : Schwarz, which consists of 40 India ink drawings in portrait format, were drawn up by Kranz before he began to study at the Bauhaus. Schwarz : Weiss / Weiss : Schwarz is built up in stanzas and tells, according to Kranz, a proper story. “White circles push vertically into a black plane; their tracks create ‘bars’ of different widths. (…) Then, completely unexpectedly, black and white wedges appear and disturb the vertical order.
Subsequently, constellations of white circles commandeer the space. Suddenly, on page 14, the dominant white becomes the nucleus of black ‘points of inflection’. Between this and the next page, what filmmakers call the zoom is put to use.” (Werner Hofmann) The film wasn’t realised until 1972.
DER HEROISCHE PFEIL
(THE HEROIC ARROW)
GER 1930 /1972, 8’, silent, 35 mm, b&w
Direction, editing, production: Kurt Kranz
Animation: Robert Darroll
Der heroische Pfeil is the first project to be developed by Kranz as a film in landscape format, based on 60 sequential drawings in India ink on single pages. It may be seen as an ironic homage to the arrow motif ever-present in the Bauhaus posters. It is inspired among other things by Klee’s “Pedagogical sketchbook”. With the arrow as the “hero” which constantly strives for progress, this film has a distinctly anecdotal character and deals with overcoming, or asserting oneself against, all kinds of obstacles. When the “hero” passes through a field of “arrow hooks”, it is halved by a so-called “keen adversary”. Hyper-diminution and enlargement yield to a steady line, the soul of the arrow, which ultimately forms a circle as a symbol of infinity. The film was only realised in 1972.
LEPORELLO - ENTWURF FUR EINEN FARBFILM
(LEPORELLO - DRAFT FOR A COLOUR FILM)
GER 1930-31 /1972, 5’, silent, 35 mm, colour
Direction, editing, production: Kurt Kranz
Animation: Robert Darroll
Leporello - Entwurf fur einen Farbfilm is more free and geometric in scope than the aforementioned films. It is based on 32 sequential drawings in watercolour, tempera and coloured ink on a 3.52-metre long Leporello. It shows red, violet and blue circles and snail-like forms, some bound as if by belting. “Shapes reminiscent of building plans divide themselves with increasing regularity. Bars of red and yellow light intersect and permeate one another. A vertical section of light washes away the grey planes, like the blade of a blind. A motif of bars appears. Two poles of light form and these organise the bars ‘magnetically’ around themselves. The accumulating light forms unite while the bars condense, first hatching and then cross-hatching. The expanding light form fills the scenes.” (Kerber)
The concept could only be realised in 1972.
VERIATIONEN UBER EIN GEOMETRISCHES THEMA
(VARIATIONS ON A GEOMETRIC THEME)
GER 1955/1972, 22’, silent, 35 mm, b&w
Direction, editing, production: Kurt Kranz
Animation: Robert Darroll
Variationen uber ein geometrisches Thema processes the controversial relationship between biological and geometric archetypes, between nature and art. Kranz defines variation chiefly through the intervention of the imagination: “In that moment, where imaginative changes are made, a variation, rather than a phase, comes into being.” This was first realised in film in 1972.
RHYTHMUS 21
(RHYTHM 21)
GER 1921 /1923, 4’, silent, 35 mm, b&w
Direction, editing, production: Hans Richter
Animation: Svend Noldan
In Rhythmus 21, Richter animated squares of paper of different dimensions directly under the camera-white, grey and black, at a controlled tempo and following a systematic rhythm. “The light and dark squares and rectangles of Richter’s first film have-in clear contrast with the design concept of Malewitsch and the De-Stiji group-no meaning. On the contrary, the film communicates the ratios of tensions and contrasts of the new material, light.” (Viola Kiefner)
Hans Richter studied painting in 1909 in Gary Melchers’s master class at the Kunsthochschule Weimar, which was in a sense the Bauhaus’s predecessor. In a letter to the Lord Mayor of Dessau in 1930, the Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer proudly announces the filmmaker Hans Richter’s appointment as a visiting lecturer at the Bauhaus. On three successive evenings in early summer 1930, Richter showed avant-garde films and his early picture scrolls. These surely included Rhythmus 21 (GER 1921/1923, 4’), Rhythmus 23 (GER 1923/1925, 4’) and the film Symphonie diagonal (Diagonal Symphony; GER 1921/1924, 3’) by his friend Viking Eggeling. When Kandinsky saw Eggeling’s film, he is said to have exclaimed, “He copied that from me!”
RHYTHMUS 23
(RHYTHM 23)
GER 1923 /25, 4’, silent, 35 mm, b&w
Direction, editing, production: Hans Richter
Animation: Svend Noldan
Rhythmus 23 was described as a play of lines against planes, although the first also appear as diagonals. “At the beginning of the film, two white squares move axisymetrically towards one another on a black background until they merge to form one large square. This process is then reversed. The large square separates into two squares, which become smaller. Each of these is confronted with a long, narrow rectangle, set at a slant. Symmetry plays an important role here and in the rest of the film. The same sequence with the juxtaposition of square and rectangle set at a slant appears as a negative at the end of the film. In the intervening period, the directions of the planes set at a slant are frequently varied.” (Werner Hofmann)
SYMPHONIE DIAGONALE
(DIAGONAL SYMPHONY)
GER 1921-1924/25, 7’, silent, 35 mm, b&w
Direction, editing, production, animation: Viking Eggeling
Drawings: Erna Niemeyer and others
From 1919 onwards, Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling have experimented with abstract elements on picture scrolls. After the first disappointing attempts, Richter and Eggeling discover that the individual picture scroll drawings cannot be converted into a moving sequence by means of a straightforward filming process. The Swede Viking Eggeling works from summer 1921 on Symphonie diagonale. He initially cuts the elements that are to be filmed from paper, then later out of thin metal sheet, and arranges these in a subtle musical pattern. A critic writes in 1924: “We now know that it is possible to make a film as a work of art. Eggeling grasps the principle of film: motion and light, abstracted from any simulation of nature and wholly independent; he has transferred the rhythm of the sequence of movements to simple forms; these relate to the motion picture in approximately the same way as a cubic painting relates to nature photography.” Eggeling is already dangerously ill by the time his film is finished. His life companion, the former Bauhaus student Erna Niemeyer, completes the sequences of drawings for Symphonie diagonale. The film is premiered on 3rd May 1925. Eggeling is not present and dies on 19th May 1925.
Text : STIFTUNG BAUHAUS DESSAU (BAUHAUS DESSAU FOUNDATION
Translation: MMCA Film and Video
