Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity

An early practitioner of experimental film, Walter Ruttmann made his well-known 'Berlin: Symphony of a Great City' in 1927 and later worked as an assistant to director Leni Riefenstahl during the production of 'Triumph of the Will.' Tracing Ruttmann's career from the 1920s through the 1940s against the backdrop of a changing Germany, this book details the ideological and aesthetic shifts between the filmmaker's animation, montage works, and later propaganda films. In the process, it draws our attention to previously neglected bodies of film material and calls for a new focus on the institutional and financial contexts in which films are commissioned and distributed.