Even more interesting than the correspondence between certain sounds and colors is the analogous reflections of the artistic tendencies of certain ‘epochs’ in the structure both of music and painting.
Sergei Eisenstein (1947, 94)
Sergei Eisenstein’s quest for a language of montage in photographic cinema is strikingly similar to Viking Eggeling’s quest for a dynamic language of visual symbols for painting, scroll and abstract animation. Both artists sought their answers in a formal relationship of the Horizontal–Vertical; both were concerned with singular units of time for projection (frame by frame timing); and both founded their respective theories of a visual language of time in musical counterpoint on form as content. Essentially, both artists were two of our first critical theorists in film. Eisenstein’s theories are the early roots of film criticism as a whole; and Eggeling’s theories, alongside experiments by Leopold Survage and Walter Ruttmann, exemplify our first critical roots in experimental animation as a fine art mode and aesthetic discipline.
Embedded in the historical and cultural Soviet Union of the 1930s, film as a cinematic recording of events opened the door for sociopolitical theory to eclipse Eisenstein’s quest for a cinematic language, effectively removing experimental film as a critical discipline in cinema history. Rescued by twentieth century experimental film critics (Lawder 1975), experimental film, ironically, was framed as an outgrowth of art history. Correspondingly, following Viking Eggeling’s premature death just days after his abstract animation film, Diagonal Symphony, was exhibited at the Absolute Film Show in Berlin in May 1925, experimental animation as a critical and aesthetic discipline and praxis was aborted in total.1 Art historians failed to grasp the mantle for the evolution of Eggeling’s seven to eight years of concentrated experimentation and research that shaped his “Theory and Counterpoint of Visual Elements”, so that high art culture served to annihilate the whole of experimental animation as a viable trajectory for a critical art history and mode of art. Subsequently subsumed into film history in the 1970s, experimental animation was regarded as single frame-by-frame experimental film (Dill 2006). This critical substation initially served to welcome experimental animation into the fold of a shared art history with experimental film. Doubly, it served to subvert, distract and marginalise experimental animation’s singular contributions to an aesthetic mode of fine art worthy of a singular canon of literature to equal its earliest art historical roots. Rectifying this predicament is our twenty-first century calling.
It would seem to me to be any scholar’s pleasure to write a foreword for any book in their field of study. Speaking as its author here, it has been a particular pleasure to receive the editors’ invitation and to have the opportunity to write a foreword for this book. I thank the editors, the publisher and the contributing authors of this anthology for doing their part to rectify the historical distractions and submersion of our field with this collection of critical scholarship in experimental animation and interviews with its artists. At its Latin root, to animate is to give life to … experimentation has long been understood in the sciences as a method for research and investigation … conclusively, Experimental Animation: From Analogue to Digital converses well with both topics.
—Janeann Dill, Doktor der Philosophie, MFA
Note
1 Although Eggeling died in 1925, there is evidence that Eisenstein saw Eggeling’s, Rutmann’s and Richter’s abstract films in 1929 when he played a part in a film by Hans Richter. If or how these films may have had an impact on Eisenstein is not clear. Moritz, William, “Restoring the Aesthetics of Early Abstract Films,” Research paper presented at Society for Animation Studies Conference, California Institute for the Arts, Los Angeles County, October 1991, 9.
References
Dill, Janeann. “Philosophy of Experimental Animation: Towards A Neo-Aesthetic Discipline,” Doktor der Philosophie Dissertation. Interview, P. Adams Sitney, Getty Scholar and Fellow, and Professor, Princeton University, USA, 2006.
Eisenstein, Sergei. The Film Sense, Edited and Translated by Jay Leyda. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1947, 94.
Lawder, Standish. “Eisenstein and Constructivism” in Sitney, P. Adams (Editor), The Essential Cinema: Essays on Films in the Collection of Anthology Film Archives, vol. 1, series 2. New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1975.