Rhymus 21
Rhymus 21 is an experimental film created by Hans Richter. Upon research into Hans Richter’s background, I discovered that he was a German artist that claimed to create the first abstract film. He believed that an artist’s duty was to be active politically, and joined radical art movements as a result. This short work brought to mind many previous associations with stop motion animation and our discussion in class about creating narrative.
It seems likely that Richter used stop motion techniques in this movie, but being unfamiliar with film, I wonder if stop motion was even a concept in the early 20th century. Using film reels allowed people to physically edit their film, so was this post production? Or was it stop motion? Did that exist?
I can see how the projects that we have been doing tie into the assignments that we are given outside of class, and how those are connected to art in the outside world from the past and present. We were asked in our first project to identify principles of Gestalt in the world, and now that I know what Gestalt is and means, I have been seeing it in everywhere in art. This movie exhibits principles of closure, proximity, continuity etc… almost every principle is embodied in this film. The rectangles contract and expand and twist to create a story and a relationship where none should exist between simple black and white rectangles. This brings me to the concept that we are now going over in our folded book project.
Creating narrative is something we’ve already discussed in class, but I think that this film exhibits the concepts we talked about perfectly. The shapes that contract and move around each other create a story where they should be none. Because we recognize the tempo and cadences of films, however, we recognize the building climax of the film where the shapes are moving rapidly, after a build up over a prolonged period. Had we not discussed this in class, I would not have caught that.
Richter seems to have understood how to create a narrative in film using the relationship of the rectangles he created with the principles of Gestalt, and the rhythm of storytelling; Or perhaps he did not. This is an experimental film after all. However, it does seem that the experimental part of it was translating a narrative into film, and that he already had a grasp on these ideas.