Symphonie diagonale

Viking Eggeling explored movement and time in his drawings and film in the early 20th century, when moving images were a new medium. When the war broke out, he emigrated to Switzerland, after living for many years in Paris. There, he joined the Dada group and the artists around Cabaret Voltaire. The non-figurative film Diagonal Symphony consists of simple animations of abstract shapes cut out of metal foil. By masking, rearranging, and double-exposing the shapes, Eggeling used them to build an entire system to explore the balance between order and disorder. This is Eggeling’s only completed film, and he died the following year. An earlier effort, Horizontal-Vertical Orchestra from 1923, was lost long ago.