The Formal Absolute in the Visual Music Film

The universal language of absolute music not only provided the ideal paradigm for the visual music film, but the late-nineteenth-century formalist debate in music over absolute and programme music also established a theoretical precedent for the public discourse on visual music after 1900. The visual music makers were inspired by the rhetoric and metaphor of music. Drawing on the Romantic ideal of absolute music as the supreme universal language, the visual music filmmakers initially looked at the paradigm of absolute music to give a structure to their work and subsequently for spiritual expression. Two distinct categories of the absolute emerged, the formal absolutism of Hanslick and the spiritual absolutism of Romantic author and critic E. T. A. Hoffmann. According to William Moritz, the term absolute was first appropriated from music and applied to the visual music films of Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling and Walter Ruttmann by critics in the 1920s. 91 For the purposes of this book I wish to extend this analogy further by incorporating the categories of the formal absolute and spiritual absolute as developed by musical theorists. Thus, I will draw on these two categories as a theoretical framework with which to explore the visual music film. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.