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‘Early Abstractions’ features a selection of films by some of the pioneering figures in abstract cinema. Including works by filmmakers such as Walter Ruttmann, Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Léger, these films showcase some of the earliest hand-painted and live action experiments with movement, shape and form on screen.

Please note: Patrons, especially those sensitive to flickering and strobe light sources, are advised that some of these films contain flashing light effects.

Symphonie Diaganale (Diagonal Symphony) 1921

Introduced to one another by the avant-garde poet and performance artist Tristan Tzara in Zürich, 1918, the artists Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling enjoyed an intense creative collaboration that spawned some of the earliest works of abstract cinema. As Richter recalls of the pair’s creative practice ‘The contrast between us, which was that between method and spontaneity, only served to strengthen our mutual attraction...for three years we marched side by side, although we fought on separate fronts.

A rhythmic panoply of art-deco inspired graphics assemble and dissolve in front of the camera lens in Viking Eggeling’s Diagonal Symphony. Made a year before the artist-filmmaker’s untimely death, the film was described by the multidisciplinary artist, architect, and sculptor Frederick John Kiesler as ‘the best abstract film yet conceived’ and ‘an experiment to discover the basic principles of the organization of time intervals in the film medium

8 minutes | All Ages

Rhythmus 21 (Rhythm 21) 1921

Introduced to one another by the avant-garde poet and performance artist Tristan Tzara in Zürich, 1918, the artists Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling enjoyed an intense creative collaboration that spawned some of the earliest works of abstract cinema. As Richter recalls of the pair’s creative practice ‘The contrast between us, which was that between method and spontaneity, only served to strengthen our mutual attraction...for three years we marched side by side, although we fought on separate fronts.

A kinetic, abstract composition that tracks the movements of a series of minimalist rectangular forms reminiscent of De Stijl, Richter’s first film, one of the earliest of its kind, re-imagines the cinema screen as a painter’s canvas, a planar surface in which purely plastic forms emerge and recede, replicate, and divide.

4 minutes | All Ages

Lichtspiel: Opus 1 1921

Ruttman’s ground-breaking and surprisingly tactile early experimental work captures a playful, colouristic dance of hand-painted abstract and geometric forms which pulse and bloom on screen, an organic counterpoint to the filmmaker’s later meditations on Berlin’s rapidly modernising built environment of his city symphonies.

12 minutes | All Ages

Studies Nr 5-8 1931

Oskar Fischinger is often cited as the Godfather of visual music and experimental cinema; he created some of the first music videos - setting rhythmic editing and animation to represent the tones of a musical score. Fischinger's Studies series was made after the animator broke his leg on the set of a Fritz Lang film and in his recuperation started sketching with charcoal on paper. These black and white sketches became the basis of 17 remarkable animation studies. Numbers 5 - 8 are collected here - nature-inspired curves and geometric shapes adorn the screen in graceful response to jazz and classical soundtracks. Most notably, Study No. 8 utilises The Sorcerer's Apprentice by French composer Paul Dukas, which, nine years later in 1940 famously scored Walt Disney's visual-music inspired film Fantastia.

16 minutes | All Ages

Le Retour à la Raison (Return to Reason) 1923

Commissioned by Tristan Tzara's for screening at the Soirée du Coeur à barb, the last Dada manifestation in Paris, Man Ray’s Le Retour A La Raison is a powerful artefact of the movement’s anti-establishment sensibilities. The film features anarchic sequences of everyday objects printed to 16mm celluloid film through Ray’s cameraless technique of the ‘Rayograph’ rhythmically juxtaposed with abstracted nocturnal scenes and the sculptural nudity of Alice Prin (Kiki de Montparnasse).

Ages 12+ | Contains nudity

3 minutes | Ages 12+

Ballet Mécanique 1924

Considered a masterpiece of early experimental cinema, Léger’s rhythmic and chaotic rumination on post-war anxiety and increasing industrial automation features oblique vignettes of industrial machinery juxtaposed with human figures and cut-up animation, mimicking the discordant rhythms of modern life. Rooted in Dadaism, and in many ways a distillation of the artist’s ‘mechanical period’, the work was also the product of a fruitful creative collaboration with many notable contemporaries of the period, including the filmmaker Dudley Murphy, the musical composer George Anthell, and the artist and fellow filmmaker Man Ray.

11 minutes | Ages 12+

Entr'acte 1924

'Entr'acte does not believe in very much, in the pleasure of life perhaps; it believes in the pleasure of inventing, it respects nothing except the desire to burst out laughing.' – Francis Picabia

Paris, 1924: two men (Francis Picabia and Erik Satie) on a rooftop delight in firing a sentient cannon; a ballet dancer (Inger Frïis) appears to dance upon the very camera lens itself; ghostly boxing gloves spar over city squares; a toy sailboat takes a cosmic flight; a hunter (Jean Börlin) takes aim at a magical egg; a funeral crowd pursues a runaway hearse, to magical ends.

Absurdity abounds in Rene Clair’s wildly inventive Dadaist comedy, written by Francis Picabia and set to an original score by the composer Erik Satie. Featuring an impressive ensemble cast of Dada luminaries, including Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Jean Börlin, Georges Auric, and the filmmaker, writer, and composer themselves, Entr’acte is an unforgettable work whose sheer joy and beauty is equalled only by its formal wit and inventiveness.

22 minutes | All Ages