Introduction

In the last chapter, I argued that abstract design was never simply an aesthetic phenomenon, but also the object of psychophysiological research, much of it carried out within the new science of advertising psychology. The participation in advertising on the part of Ruttmann and other filmmakers could hardly be written off as a compromise of aesthetic principles; it was, rather, a logical extension and application of their own experiments in abstract film design, which were carried out within a horizon of application. In a broader sense, we saw that Ruttmann understood reduction and abstraction as a potential answer to a problem of perception in modernity. Drawing on the convention of the scientific “curve,” he saw the aesthetics of abstraction as a means of training perception to operate within the new technological and mass-mediated public spheres of the early 20th century, spheres defined above all by acceleration and the increasing accumulation of mental and visual “data.”

One could easily carry this analysis of “perception training” over to the film that sealed Ruttmann's international fame in 1920s and since, his magnum opus BERLIN. DIE SINFONIE DER GROSSSTADT (BERLIN. THE SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY, 1927), in which Ruttmann used montage to depict the teeming life of the metropolis from morning until nightfall. As has often been pointed out, Ruttmann's first full-length film, despite replacing animation with photographic images, retained a schematic “musical” quality in its imitation of the symphonic form, its division into five “acts” of varying intensities, and its calibration of visual montage with the musical score by Edmund Meisel. Upon the film's premiere, critic Herbert Jhering spoke of Ruttmann's “Bildmusik” (image music) in BERLIN, and Béla Balázs would invoke the term “optische Musik” (optical music) to describe BERLIN in his book Der Geist des Films (The Spirit of Film, 1930). Subsequent scholars have largely followed in the same path. Such a musical quality, moreover, would appear to have informed Ruttmann's very planning of the film. As Goergen notes, rather than basing the film on a linear script, Ruttmann employed a kind of card catalogue for the individual scenes; each card included not only a description of the scene's content, but also, as one writer for the journal Filmkurier described it in an article from September 1926, “a precise graphic curve representing the scene's tempo and movement.

Introduction

Of all the domains of “sponsored film” recently rediscovered, product advertising has received perhaps the least amount of attention in English-language scholarship. And yet, the sphere is rife with possibilities for the kinds of archival investigations suggested by Elsaesser: investigations into commissioning companies and contexts, into distribution and forms of screening, and not least of all into the theories and discourses of consumerism that informed both the production and circulation of these films. Moreover, product advertising is a particularly relevant field for anyone wishing to comprehend avant-garde film culture of the 1920s. Nearly all of the major proponents of avant-garde film in interwar Germany – including Ruttmann, Reiniger, Seeber, Richter and Fischinger – collaborated with advertising producers such as Julius Pinschewer. Most, if not all, of this work employs the signature forms we have come to associate with experimental cinema, from abstract animation (Ruttmann, Fischinger) to silhouettes (Reiniger) to montage (Ruttmann, Seeber, Richter), which these artists placed in the service of advertisements for products as diverse as chocolates, tires, alcohol, flowers, cigarettes, skincare products, perfumes and illustrated magazines. Nor would it be correct to describe this use of experimental aesthetics for advertising as “secondary” or derivative; as Ingrid Westbrock long ago argued, advertising film provided a consistent forum for experimentation in the 1920s and many of the major innovations in experimental film (in color, sound and montage) were actually first tried out in advertising films.

Only recently has much of this work become available for researchers outside of archives, and only a handful of publications have devoted extended attention to its role within the avant-garde film culture of the interwar period. No doubt, this dearth of research is in part the result of tacit assumptions, in avant-garde history, that such advertising commissions represented a “compromise” of artistic integrity or simply a means of financing the artists’ more “serious” projects in visual music. But if we approach these films outside of such assumptions, a different picture begins to emerge, one suggesting – as Jacques Rancière has argued in a different context – that modernist formalism and advertising design in fact shared some fundamental goals and principles.

Introduction

If the decision to surround Ruttmann with party loyalists for the making of Blut und Boden did stem from any suspicion of an eminent Weimar modernist, that suspicion was short-lived. Almost immediately after the completion of BLUT UND BODEN, Darré's Stabsamt des Reichsbauernführers rehired Ruttmann, this time as principal director, for a short cultural film entitled ALTGERMANISCHE BAUERNKULTUR (ANCIENT GERMANIC AGRARIAN CULTURE). Premiering on 14 April 1934 in a closed screening attended by Darré, Himmler and several other prominent figures from the Stabsamt des Reichsbauernführers and the Reichsnährstand, the film went on to play in the preliminary program (Vorprogramm) at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo before touring German theaters the same year. Employing several Weimar actors – most notably Fritz Rasp who had played in dozens of big-budget films, including a stint in Fritz Lang's Metropolis as the “Thin Man” – it told the story of a devoted member of the Hitler Youth (Claus) who defends the honor of the ancient Germanic people when a liberal professor (“Dr. Sandmann”) depicts them as savages and nomadic peoples without a sedentary culture. Among other things, the film was notable for its interactive format. In a variation on the “prize contest” format often used in advertising films, in which audiences were prompted to solve a riddle or engage in some other similar activity, Ruttmann had the student address the spectators directly at the end of the film, calling on them to contribute to the propaganda campaign by sending in letters to the Reichsbauernführer:

In contrast to traditional prize films – for example the Viennese film WO SIND DIE MILLIONEN? (WHERE ARE THE MILLIONS?, 1925), which was combined with a contest to win a bicycle – ALTGERMANISCHE BAUERNKULTUR did not invite its audience to win anything.

One would be hard pressed to think of a figure as ambivalent for Weimar film studies as Walter Ruttmann. On the one hand, Ruttmann figures in countless articles, book chapters and course syllabi as a major innovator of experimental film and a key representative of Weimar modernism. His abstract OPUS films (OPUS I-IV, 1921-1925), which held pride of place in the famous film screening of “absolute film” in Berlin in 1925, have been celebrated by critics from the 1920s to the present as pioneering works in avant-garde form and milestones in the history of animation. Similarly, Ruttmann's urban portrait BERLIN. DIE SINFONIE DER GROSSSTADT (BERLIN. SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY, 1927) – the film that secured his international fame in the 1920s – has long counted as a defining work of early documentary, a towering statement on Weimar modernity and the quintessential representation of urban modernism in the interwar period. Ruttmann's experimental style has influenced subsequent filmmakers from Oskar Fischinger to Len Lye and beyond, and his city film has spawned numerous imitations and “remakes,” both then and now. Indeed, Ruttmann's importance as a pioneer in experimental moving image art is only growing in our current digital media climate as scholars search for origins and precursors to the proliferation of experimental, non-narrative forms. But there is also another side to Ruttmann as the “one who stayed.” Unlike many of his contemporaries such as Hans Richter and Fritz Lang, Ruttmann went on, after the seizure of power by the National Socialists, to make some eighteen films for the new regime – and nineteen “fascist” films if one counts his Italian film ACCIAIO (STEEL, 1933) – between 1933 and 1941. Although once largely ignored and still unavailable for viewing outside of archives, this segment of Ruttmann's filmmaking career has garnered increasing interest since the 1980s, particularly in Germany, where scholars have devoted extensive attention to Ruttmann's post-1933 work for German steel companies, Nazi ministries, weapons manufacturers and other agencies.

The ambivalence surrounding Ruttmann's career – and its difficult fit within traditional narratives of the avant-garde – might help to explain the relative dearth of attention to these commissioned films in English-language scholarship, which has focused almost entirely on the OPUS films and the BERLIN documentary.

Introduction

In the last chapter, I argued that Ruttmann's cross-sectional montage functioned above all as a means of ordering the images of the world that proliferated in the visual media of the 1920s according to a “statistical” epistemology, one that suggested higher laws even as it acknowledged the particular and the idiosyncratic. As we saw, such a project, while lending itself to the immediate goal of an advertisement for world cruises, also resonated with broader questions of Weimar modernism and with a broader understanding of film as a medium existing at the border between contingency and order. But statistics was not only a conceptual or epistemological tool of mass modernity; like experimental psychology, it was also a mode of knowledge created and practiced within a horizon of applications. More specifically, it was bound up with what Foucault has famously called “governmentality,” the modern form of power that conceives of mass society as a “population” with its own laws and regularities (birth and death rates, rates of disease, economic activities, etc.). If statistics offered the central means of conceptualizing such biopolitical phenomena, it always operated within a horizon of applications meant to influence them: of private and public campaigns for increasing birth rates, curbing alcoholism, reducing disease and “degeneration,” enhancing public whealth and welfare, avoiding accidents, “directing the flow of population into certain regions or activities,” etc. As Ian Hacking puts it: “Statistics may think of itself as providing only information, but it is itself part of the technology of power in a modern state.” With the emergence of biopolitics, statistics became the key intermediary within a power relation no longer conceived of in terms of sovereign rights, but rather in terms of a population to be guided and influenced.

Given the horizon of applicability in which statistics operated, it should hardly come as a surprise that a filmmaker such as Ruttmann, whose filmic experiments drew upon such forms of expertise, would employ “statistical montage” to fashion film as a tool for biopolitical intervention. He did this, from the beginning of the 1930s on, through a number of sponsored “cultural films” (Kulturfilme), including FEIND IM BLUT (ENEMY IN THE BLOOD, 1931), BLUT UND BODEN. GRUNDLAGEN ZUM NEUEN REICH (BLOOD AND SOIL. FOUNDATIONS FOR THE NEW REICH, 1933), ABERGLAUBE (SUPERSTITION, 1940) and EIN FILM GEGEN DIE VOLKSKRANKHEIT KREBS (A FILM AGAINST THE EPIDEMIC OF CANCER, 1941).

Like previous studies on Ruttmann, this one has had to contend with the “Mephisto” question I evoked in the introduction: namely, how to explain Ruttmann's turn from Weimar modernism to propaganda films under National Socialism. Was Ruttmann's commissioned work after 1933 simply a cover for pursuing aesthetic modernism? Was there a “fascist aesthetic” always already present in his Weimar films? While one can never fully ignore this question, I have tried to reframe its terms by suggesting that we approach Ruttmann less as a disinterested artist than as an “expert,” who drew on other areas of expertise – motion studies, advertising design, statistics, traditions of scientific illustration, etc. – to fashion film as a “useful medium.” In the process, this book has also followed the work of Malte Hagener and others to suggest that we need to expand and complicate our understanding of the interwar avant-garde, its history, its politics and its aesthetics. Part of that expanded view involves recognizing that for a large segment of the avant-garde, experimentation implied (and often entailed) practical applications in advertising and other spheres – applications that subtended the very definition of the avant-garde as a project for the reintegration of “art and life.” Against this backdrop, one would do well to avoid seeing advertising or other commissioned work as a compromise of a purportedly “purist” or “absolute” – or inherently progressive – aesthetics of experimentation. As we have seen, the possibility for “applications” inhered in Ruttmann's experimental aesthetics from the beginning, just as they inhered in the experimental sciences on which he drew. For Ruttmann the nature of those applications played a secondary role to the effort to fashion the cinema as a means of expert intervention. They were, as he put it in his 1928 text “Die absolute Mode” (“The Absolute Fashion”), “a matter of indifference.”

Considering Ruttmann in this way, I believe, allows us to reformulate the questions of continuity and rupture posed above. On the one hand, Ruttmann was – as the title of this book suggests – concerned throughout his career with fashioning the cinema as a tool to manage multiplicity, and more specifically for the conceptualization and ordering of mass society. This might seem hardly surprising: as Grierson long ago recognized, Ruttmann's films were profoundly concerned with the mass nature of modern society and how to come to terms with it.