Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity: Avant-Garde, Advertising, Modernity by Michael Cowan (review)

In Rüdiger Suchsland's 2014 documentary From Caligari to Hitler: German Cinema in the Age of the Masses, film historian Thomas Elsaesser asserts that "Walter Ruttmann is one of the most important directors or personalities of Weimar cinema who are yet to be discovered." Michael Cowan's exciting new study Walter Ruttman and the Cinema of Multiplicity counters that claim: Ruttmann is definitely important but hardly unknown. Cowan's book is actually not even the first on Ruttmann—it builds on pioneering work by Leonardo Quaresima in Italy (1994) and Jeanpaul Goergen in Germany (1989)—but it is by far the most sophisticated and differentiated, filling a lacuna that strikes us as baffling, because Ruttmann is far from an unknown director. With his series of experimental abstract shorts, Opus I through Opus IV (1922–1925), he became a highly respected member of the Weimar avant-garde, and his 1926 semidocumentary montage Berlin. Die Sinfonie einer Grossstadt is a milestone in international nonfiction cinema, one that inspired numerous imitations and sequels (among them Thomas Schadt's 2002 Berlin Symphony). Yet what has complicated the picture is that unlike other modernists such as Fritz Lang, Hans Richter, Hanns Eisler, or Walter Gropius, Ruttmann did not go into exile but continued to work in Germany after 1933, making a total of eighteen films for the NSDAP.

Existing scholarship has thus often revolved around the question of how someone with Ruttmann's artistic credentials could possibly strike such a deal with the devil. Some scholars have justified Ruttmann's post-1933 films as a form of compromise: yes, the director acquiesced in ideological demands, but he continued making modernist films that stood out against the rest of what the German film industry produced at the time. Others have seen his "Nazi Sachlichkeit" as a continuation of a reactionary modernism already in play in his films in the 1920s. As Michael Cowan points out, what these different evaluations share is a view of Ruttmann as an autonomous auteur hoping to create a form of art that considers abstraction or formalism an achievement in itself. Cowan shows, though, that on closer inspection such a view cannot be upheld. Building on the work of Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, he points to the fact that the majority of Ruttmann's films were sponsored films: they were commissioned by private and state agencies (shipping and film companies, product manufacturers, public service groups, professional associations, government offices, etc.) and thus served a specific purpose, be it commercial, entrepreneurial, educational, or pedagogical. Moreover, sponsored films were the rule, not the exception. They also played an important part in the careers of Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Joris Ivens and René Clair. As a result, Cowan's approach situates Ruttmann in a very different nexus than do previous studies, seeking to "trade in a traditional aesthetic and auteur-centered accounts for meticulous investigation into context: commissioning bodies, occasions for particular commissions, intended audience, purposes and so forth" (13). Cowan insists that we should not consider Ruttmann's sponsored films to be the bread-and-butter jobs that made the more artistic ones possible. Such a division between high and low art misses the point that "Ruttmann's aesthetic experimentation occurred not despite the financial, practical and ideological conditions under which he made his films but rather in tandem with those very conditions; [his] aesthetics were compatible with commissioned work" (14, emphasis added).

Cowan's monograph follows a chronological outline. The first chapter, cleverly titled "Absolute Advertising," situates the early Opus films within larger debates about advertising design and psychology. Drawing on a rich sampling of 1920s advertising posters and films, Cowan shows how the borders between abstract forms and concrete, recognizable objects or products are indeed fluid; these are complementary, rather than contradictory, realms of representation. Indeed, it was the commercial designers who early on recognized that Ruttmann's abstractions were highly relevant...