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VIKING EGGELING’S DIAGONAL-SYMPHONIE AN ANALYSIS 445 V iking Eggeling’s first film, which likely was never exhibited publicly (and possibly was not finished), was Horizontal-vertikal Orchester (1923); it was organized, as the title suggests, along vertical and horizontal vectors.His next film was organized on diagonal vectors .1 P. Adam Sitney explained: In his film Symphonie Diagonale figures move along alternative diagonal lines crossing the screen from upper left to lower right and from upper right to lower left.At the same time they seem to move in depth from the surface of the screen to an imaginary receding point at its center, as Richter’s squares had, and back again. Finally, Eggeling’s shapes evolve in straight and elaborately curved lines while they pursue their diagonal and emerging-receding movements. The musicality of Symphonie Diagonale comes from its exhaustive use of reciprocal movements.An elaboration along one diagonal axis is mirrored … by its disunion at another end; a movement into the screen precedes one out of it.2 This description is wonderfully precise and careful (as Sitney’s writing always is). Nonetheless, I would question whether his description of Eggeling’s use of emerging–receding movement is entirely accurate. What is described simply as recession can be experienced in a more ambiguous manner: as much as a shrinking of a form on a two-dimensional surface as the recession of a form Appendix 446 APPENDIX through the third dimension. I shall sometimes use the terms “recession” and “recede,” and their contraries, but it should be understood that the language is an inaccurate shorthand, for phenomena that could perhaps be described as shrinking (or expanding) that suggest advancing or receding in depth, are not actually experienced as processive or recessive movements. Standish D. Lawder remarked that Eggeling’s Diagonal-Symphonie “must be regarded as much a demonstration of a theory of art as a work of art in itself .”3 The statement is easy to contest, and therefore must be contested. Even so, one must acknowledge that there is an analytical character to Eggeling’s work.A spectacularly focused effort—as dedicated and single-minded as Mondrian ’s in the period 1912 to 1919—led Eggeling to simplify natural forms to calligraphic notations. Having reached these basic, simple, highly schematized elements, he was able to combine these notations freely, to combine them and to vary them, showing them developing and then receding. Eggeling referred to the principle that preoccupied him while he worked on Diagonal-Symphonie as “Eidodynamik” (visual dynamism). This principle maintained that the basic element of cinema was projected light and that it was that element which should be the basis of a film’s form. In this regard the film that struck him as the truest was Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy ’s Ballet Mécanique. The importance of the light’s being projected was twofold: it lent light a particular quality; and it gave a temporal shape to changes in light. In unpublished notes from the period of Diagonal-Symphonie , Eggeling recorded the following: Film. Passage of time characterises the invention and creation of forms, an unbroken advance of the absolutely new. Sinking—rising … Theory of development : true and striking interpretation. Natural classification to gather the organisms together and to divide the groups into subordinate sections where similarities appear to be still greater and so on. The characters of a group always appear as a common theme which each subordinate section varies in its special way. Relation between the originator and what he creates: a relationship of ideal kinship. The logical, deductive relationship of the forms + chronological continuities of the species …The old geometry operated with static figures, the new explores the different variations of a function, which is to say, the continuity of the movement through which an image is produced.4 The idea of the different variation of a function no doubt refers to ideas from that branch of mathematics known as analysis, a key topic of which is that of continuous functions. Eggeling understood this field as the mathematics of motion: while artists previously had talked about basic geometrical elements— circles and triangles and squares—he thought in terms of motion paths, of a moving from point one to point two while b moves from point two to point three, whatever a and b are (a square, a circle, a rod, a cone, a shape with no [18.191.223.123] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 02:00...

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