Rhythmus 21

I understand that Hans Richter's "Rhythmus 21" is an example of an absolute film, a genre that consists of shapes overlapping to music. This three-minute short is worth seeing as a historical reference as the start of Richter's Film Ist Rhythm series. It's nothing particularly special. The masterpieces from interwar Germany were "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari", "Nosferatu" and "Metropolis".

I wonder which direction the era's cinema would've taken had the Nazis not taken over.

Hans Richter's 'Rhythmus 21 (1921)' has modest enough aspirations, and I suppose it's fair to say that it fulfills them adequately. As far as "geometric shapes increasing and decreasing in size" cinema goes, this is a vaguely interesting short film that takes a simple concept and does simple things with it. Though ostensibly exploring rhythm through geometry, 'Rhythmus 21' is more interesting in terms of illusory three-dimensional depth, with each shape's status as a foreground or background object seemingly changing as its actual size changes. Though I can't recommend this avant-garde short as being especially inspiring or insightful, the aesthetically-pleasing visuals make for a worthwhile enough three minutes.

'Rhythmus 21' is also quite different from the three other works I've thus far seen from Hans Richter. 'Ghosts Before Breakfast (1928),' 'Inflation (1928)' and 'Race Symphony (1928)' were live-action short films that put the technique of Soviet montage to good use, and nobody can deny that Richter had a superb eye for editing. The abstract animation of this effort is not technically notable, but nonetheless signalled the arrival of a new wave of avant-garde film-making in the 1920s. Richter would soon be joined by the likes of Man Ray, Walter Ruttmann and Viking Eggeling {in fact, Ruttmann probably got there first with 'Opus I (1921)'}. I wonder what 'Rhythmus 23 (1923)' has in store for me!

A kind of perpetual monochromatic Mondrian-in-motion. Seen with Sue Harshe's appropriately stark modern score; although the inevitable question is posed of whether the meaning changes with the interpolation of seemingly unconnected audio. Given it's an abstraction, perhaps less so.

This 3-minute "Avant-Garde" short is perhaps the single most inconsequential of the lot. Originally named RHYTHMUS 21 and the seventh of its ilk I had watched in one afternoon (with another to follow, capped by a feature-length film in the same vein!), I jokingly began to refer to it as "Litmus Test"!!

What we get here, basically, is a succession of shapes (rectangles, to be exact), photographed in a way that they move about and 'through' the screen, their zooming in and out suggesting the depth of the frame. One can only surmise that the original intention was to experiment (literally, play around) with the medium…and, if anything (as with a number of these efforts, in fact), a lot depends on the soundtrack chosen to accompany the visuals. In the end, it is safe to assume that I spent more time writing about the movie than actually experiencing it!!

White boxes moving to the sides, like opening doors to a lift (or is it a black line which gets thicker, until it occupies the full frame?) opens this Dada short film, where the movements of white squares and white rectangles against a deep black background takes up two thirds of its brief run time. Then comes the final minute, when another white square enlarges to fill the frame completely, and black squares and various black geometrical shapes dance against a plain white square, all in complete silence, with absolutely no music score to accompany it.

Hypnotic, yet pointless, also meditative; it is calming to me to watch Richter's experimental work, and see the first time movement was even implied on film.