Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity: Avant-Garde Film - Advertising - Modernity (Film Culture in Transition)

Winner of the Willy Haas award for best book on German cinema, finalist for the Kraszna-Krausz award in the category of Moving Image, honourable mention in the best book award of the British Association of Film and Television Studies Scholars.
By any account, Walter Ruttmann is a towering figure in the history of avant-garde cinema, a pioneer of both abstract experimental film and documentary. But Ruttmann was also the creator of numerous advertising films, industrial films, medical films and--after 1933--Nazi propaganda. In this award-winning study, Michael Cowan reconsiders Ruttmann's work as a whole. In the process, the book reframes our understanding of early experimental film by uncovering the links between abstraction, montage and scientific modes of governmentality that were crucial to mass modernity in both its democratic and fascist variants.