Symphonie diagonale (1924)'s comments

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sienel

Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtBjFv46XLQ

13 years 10 months ago

moontopmountain

Reminds me of MC Escher...pretty amazing when you consider these sci-fi style images were made the same year as The Navigator or The Last Laugh

10 years 2 months ago

ClassicLady

Pretty. I suppose if I knew more about filmmaking I would be amazed.

10 years 6 months ago

tcfaria

This was truly amazing! I loved it.

11 years 1 month ago

Made in 1924 by Viking Eggeling, "Symphonie Diagonale" is the best abstract film yet conceived. It is an experiment to discover the basic principles of the organization of time intervals in the film medium. This version was restored by Gösta Werner in 1994 in collaboration with The Swedish Filminstitute. Music by Olga Neuwirth, 2006.

A tilted figure, consisting largely of right angles at the beginning, grows by accretion, with the addition of short straight lines and curves which sprout from the existing design. The figure vanishes and the process begins again with a new pattern, each cycle lasting one or two seconds. The complete figures are drawn in a vaguely Art Deco style and could be said to resemble any number of things, an ear, a harp, panpipes, a grand piano with trombones, and so on, only highly stylized. The _original_ tone is playful and hypnotic.

This short film is a visual rather than musical symphony. A cacophony of animated geometric figures appear in succession, much like a musical piece where idioms or themes emerge. All the figures have in common that they are oriented either approximately minus thirty degrees from the horizontal plane or approximately plus thirty degrees from the horizontal plane.
--> Cool, apparently Swede (as me) who died in Berlin 1925, less than 3 weeks after the premiere of Diagonalsymfonin.

But hey, to me 4/10.
And the version on YouTube is 8:35 min, not 5 min!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtBjFv46XLQ

8 years 11 months ago