I will not deny that it probably took a lot of effort to make "Symphonie diagonale", but the outcome is still a boring watch. Do not be fooled by the french title or the Swedish director, but this is a German film. Eggeling lived in Germany at this point and died a year later. This is probably also the reason why he did not make any other films as he was fairly prolific in other areas of art. This is silent and black-and-white as it was usual for that era, but I must say this is not on par with what Richter and Ruttmann did at this point. And apart from that, it is far far away from the works of some of the finest silent film actors that came out around this time as well, even a couple years earlier. Animation was clearly nit at its best yet at this point, but it developed quickly. I do not recommend "Symphonie diagonale". Nothing memorable to see here.

It is curious, how much our minds are wired to try to make sense out of the images we see: are the moving, dancing, art deco figures in this film combs? Caricatures of wings? A logo? And the oddly hypnotic, abstract images which appear at one minute? what of them? Are the images and figures presented mean to compliment each other, or stand independently? Or meant to simulate movement? Viking Eggeling's Symphonie diagonale is interesting, nonstop art deco images, good to just sit and watch the repetitive patterns shapes, like a blinking neon sign, and zone out to, and well drawn also.The print I saw had either been well restored, or just held up immaculately, because the film had contrast between its deep blacks and pure whites, as opposed to medium range greys that a lot of old silent films have.

Those grotesque lines and numerous haphazard shapes really captivate you and you beseech your noggin to construe a meaning for patterns. You toil assiduously and eventually get lost in the never-ending meandering lines. Akin to Escher's painting of flight of incomprehensible and unfathomable stairs, the right angled figures and horizontal and vertical histograms in Viking's enigmatic video leave us in a profound flummox.'Symphonie Diagonale' is a quintessential example of abstraction in Modern art. Picasso, Cezanne did tangentially talk about abstraction but more or less remained stuck to the thought of depicting the main idea lucidly. But, Viking Eggeling on the other hand takes abstraction to an unprecedented and fascinating realm. The gist of this piece of work by Viking is to break free the modern paintings from the shackles of property of being static, i.e. to make the idea of depicting transition or fleeting movement in a painting (*series of photos) conceivable. The frames come one after another, thus creating a motion picture which facilitates delineation of author's chain of thoughts possible. It seems like the shapes appearing in a cyclical order symbolize the recurring nature of several things around us, the symmetrical stairs of our home, keys on a piano, day and night, seasons and so forth. To pinpoint and interpret the exact theme Viking had in his mind is a conundrum, maybe he thought more in terms of the video eliciting different response in viewer's mind and how can self-correlation of viewer gives a structure and rarefied boundaries to this work. The rhythm, with which the images appear, is not exactly in a fixed pattern or not exactly in a totally random pattern but it lends it a sense of meaning. The figures in shapes of cigarette smoke, an ear, a harp, entice the viewers to give some weight-age to them and conceptualize the whole video. As this piece of movie was silent originally thus the music's significance stands on very thin ice. Maybe, patterns and music are attempting to coherently complement each other. Music though is hypnotic and amusing; it hardly solves any purpose rather it just baffles the viewer. The repetitive patterns, strange appearance of the figures makes the video extremely loaded with information and very strenuous. You can't look at it for long duration and maybe this constraint makes it so beautiful and adds to a unique aesthetic sense to it. Though it's very hard to fully understand the underlying idea of the video, still the idea of strange forms coming again and again makes it impressive. In the end, I feel that Viking wanted us to appreciate the change and accentuate the fact that change is what keeps us interested in everyday life.

This animation could arguably be held as a consummate creation of modern art expression. Viking Eggeling's short was created as an experiment in design, time, and rhythm, not too far removed from Hans Ricther's Rhythmus 21, but several times better and more interesting. What particularly appeals about this film is that, despite the fact that the forms and shapes are entirely abstract, this film is still rather fascinating to watch. It sort of pre-dates trance cinema in that sense, and could possibly considered a forerunner of such things as even Maya Deren's work in the 50s.--PolarisDiB