Non-narrative film
Non-narrative film, or abstract film, is an aesthetic of cinematic film that does not narrate, or relate "an event, whether real or imaginary". It is usually a form of art film or experimental film, not made for mass entertainment.
Narrative film is the dominant aesthetic, though non-narrative film is not fully distinct from that aesthetic. While the non-narrative film avoids "certain traits" of the narrative film, it "still retains a number of narrative characteristics". Narrative film also occasionally uses "visual materials that are not representational". Although many abstract films are clearly devoid of narrative elements, distinction between a narrative film and a non-narrative film can be rather vague and is often open for interpretation. Unconventional imagery, concepts and structuring can obscure the narrativity of a film.
Terms such as absolute film, cinéma pur, true cinema and integral cinema have been used for non-narrative films that aimed to create a purer experience of the distinctive qualities of film, like movement, rhythm, and changing visual compositions. More narrowly, "absolute film" was used for the works of a group of filmmakers in Germany in the 1920s, that consisted, at least initially, of animated films that were totally abstract. The French term cinéma pur was coined to describe the style of several filmmakers in France in the 1920s, whose work was non-narrative, but hardly ever non-figurative.
Much of surrealist cinema can be regarded as non-narrative films and partly overlaps with the dadaist cinéma pur movement.
Abstract film
Abstract film or absolute film is a subgenre of experimental film and a form of abstract art. Abstract films are non-narrative, contain no acting, and do not attempt to reference reality or concrete subjects. They rely on the unique qualities of motion, rhythm, light, and composition inherent in the technical medium of cinema to create emotional experiences.Many abstract films have been made with animation techniques. The distinction between animation and other techniques can be rather unclear in some films. For instance, moving objects could either be animated with stop motion techniques, recorded during their actual movement, or appear to move when being filmed against a neutral background with a moving camera.
History
Abstract animation before cinema
A number of devices can be regarded as early media for abstract animation or visual music, including color organs, chinese fireworks, the kaleidoscope, musical fountains, and special animated slides for the magic lantern.Some of the earliest animation designs for stroboscopic devices were abstract, including one Fantascope disc by inventor Joseph Plateau and many of Simon Stampfer's Stroboscopische Scheiben.
1910s: Earliest examples
Abstract film concepts were shaped by early 20th century art movements such as Cubism, Expressionism, Dadaism, Suprematism, Futurism, Precisionism, and possible others. These art movements were beginning to gain momentum in the 1910s.Italian Futurists Arnaldo Ginna and his brother Bruno Corra made hand-painted films between 1910 and 1912 that are now lost. In 1916 they published The Futurist Cinema manifesto together with Giacomo Balla, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Remo Chiti, and Emilio Settimelli. They proposed a cinema that "being essentially visual, must above all fulfill the evolution of painting, detach itself from reality, from photography, from the graceful and solemn. It must become antigraceful, deforming, impressionistic, synthetic, dynamic, free-wording." "The most varied elements will enter into the Futurist film as expressive means: from the slice of life to the streak of color, from the conventional line to words-in-freedom, from chromatic and plastic music to the music of objects. In other words it will be painting, architecture, sculpture, words-in-freedom, music of colors, lines, and forms, a jumble of objects and reality thrown together at random." Among the proposed methods were: "Cinematic musical researches", "Daily exercises in freeing ourselves from mere photographed logic" and "Linear, plastic, chromatic equivalences, etc., of men, women, events, thoughts, music, feelings, weights, smells, noises." About a month later the short film Vita Futurista was released, directed by Ginna in collaboration with Corra, Balla, and Marinetti. Only a few frames of the film remain and little else of any Futurist Cinema work seems to have been made or preserved.
Around 1911 Hans Lorenz Stoltenberg also experimented with direct animation, rhythmically piecing together tinted film in different colors. He published a leaflet about it and claimed that many people growing up with the hand-colored films of Georges Méliès and Ferdinand Zecca would try their hand on painting on film at that time.
In 1913 Léopold Survage created his Rythmes colorés: over 100 abstract ink wash / watercolor drawings that he wanted to turn into a film. Unable to raise the funds, the film was not realized and Survage only exhibited the pictures separately.
Mary Hallock-Greenewalt used templates and aerosol sprays to create repeating geometrical patterns on hand-painted films. These extant films were probably made around 1916 for her Sarabet color organ, for which she filed 11 patents between 1919 and 1926. The films were not projected, but one viewer at a time could look down into the machine at the film itself. The Sarabet was first publicly demonstrated at John Wanamaker's New York department store in 1922.
1920s: The absolute film movement
Some of the earliest abstract motion pictures known to survive are those produced by a group of artists working in Germany in the early 1920s: Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, and Oskar Fischinger.Absolute film pioneers sought to create short length and breathtaking films with different approaches to abstraction-in-motion: as an analogue to music, or as the creation of an absolute language of form, a desire common to early abstract art. Ruttmann wrote of his film work as "painting in time". Absolute filmmakers used rudimentary handicraft, techniques, and language in their short motion pictures that refuted the reproduction of the natural world, instead, focusing on light and form in the dimension of time, impossible to represent in static visual arts.
Image:Diagonal-Symphonie.jpg|thumb|right|Four frames from "Diagonal-Symphonie"
Viking Eggeling came from a family of musicians and analysed the elements of painting by reducing it into his "Generalbass der Malerei", a catalogue of typological elements, from which he would create new "orchestrations". In 1918 Viking Eggeling had been engaging in Dada activities in Zürich and befriended Hans Richter. According to Richter, absolute film originated in the scroll sketches that Viking Eggeling made in 1917–1918. On paper rolls up to 15 meters long, Eggeling would draw sketches of variations of small graphic designs, in such a way that a viewer could follow the changes in the designs when looking at the scroll from beginning to end. For a few years Eggeling and Richter worked together, each on their own projects based on these ides, and created thousands of rhythmic series of simple shapes. In 1920 they started working on film versions of their work.
Walter Ruttmann, trained as a musician and painter, gave up painting to devote himself to film. He made his earliest films by painting frames on glass in combination with cutouts and elaborate tinting and hand-coloring. His Lichtspiel: Opus I was first screened in March 1921 in Frankfurt.
Hans Richter finished his first film Rhythmus 21 in 1921, but kept changing elements until he first presented the work on 7 July 1923 in Paris at the dadaist Soirée du coeur à barbe program in Théâtre Michel. It was an abstract animation of rectangular shapes, partly inspired by his connections with De Stijl. Founder Theo van Doesburg had visited Richter and Eggeling in December 1920 and reported on their film works in his magazine De Stijl in May and July 1921. Rhytmus 23 and the colourful Rhythmus 25 followed similar principles, with noticeable suprematist influence of Kasimir Malevich's work. Rhythmus 25 is considered lost.
Eggeling debuted his Horizontal-vertikalorchester in 1923. The film is now considered lost. In November 1924 Eggeling was able to present his new finished film Symphonie diagonale in a private screening.
On 3 May 1925 the Sunday matinee program Der absolute Film took place in the UFA-Palast theater at the Kurfurstendamm in Berlin. Its 900 seats soon sold out and the program was repeated a week later. Eggeling's Symphonie diagonale, Richter's Rhythmus 21 and Rhythmus 23, Walter Ruttmann's Opus II, Opus III and Opus IV were all shown publicly for the first time in Germany, along with the two French dadaist cinéma pur films Ballet Mécanique and René Clair's Entr'acte, and Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack's performance with a type of color organ. Eggeling happened to die a few days later.
Oskar Fischinger met Walter Ruttmann at rehearsals for screenings of Opus I with live music in Frankfurt. In 1921 he started experimenting with abstract animation in wax and clay and with colored liquids. He used such early material in 1926 in multiple-projection performances for Alexander Laszlo's Colorlightmusic concerts. That same year he released his first abstract animations and would continue with a few dozens of short films over the years.
The Nazis censorship against so-called "degenerate art" prevented the German abstract animation movement from developing after 1933. The last abstract motion picture screened in the Third Reich was Hans Fischinger's Tanz der Farben in 1939. The film was reviewed by the Film Review Office and by Georg Anschütz for the Film-Kurier. The director Herbert Seggelke was working on the abstract motion picture Strich-Punkt-Ballett in 1943, but could not finish the film during the war.