Viking Eggeling
- 1924Symphonie Diagonale
A Swedish painter who spent years drawing music on long paper scrolls, finished one seven-minute film of growing lines, and died sixteen days after its premiere.
Eggeling was orphaned young and left Sweden for Germany at sixteen. He studied art history in Milan while working as a bookkeeper, taught art at a school in Zuoz in Switzerland, and lived in Paris from 1911 to 1915, where he knew Amedeo Modigliani, Hans Arp and Léopold Survage.
In Zurich in 1918 he joined the Dada circle, and Tristan Tzara introduced him to Hans Richter. The two moved to Germany in 1919 and worked side by side on picture rolls, long scrolls of drawn forms that change step by step like a score. A first test of his Horizontal-Vertical Orchestra, filmed at Ufa in 1921, lasted less than thirty seconds, and that film is lost.
With Erna Niemeyer, later known as Ré Soupault, he finished Symphonie Diagonale in 1924 and showed it privately that November. Its public premiere came at the Der absolute Film matinee in Berlin on 3 May 1925, while he lay in hospital. He died of blood poisoning on 19 May 1925.
Films
Where to start with Viking Eggeling, in the order they were made. Runtimes are approximate.
