Konkrete Geräusche und Musik der Maschinen

Alongside the Bauhaus, sound film also made its breakthrough: in the 1920s, numerous artists experimented with the new technology. The event presents found objects from the film and sound archives of the past century.

After an introduction to the early history of technical media in the 1920s by Thomas Tode and Martin Reinhart, short films and sound pieces will be performed at the ZKM Cube. These include the experimental sound plates by Edmund Meisel, which make sounds of the industrial age audible, among other things: machine noises, street noises or the »railway ride to the emergency brake«.

There will also be animations by Hanna Nordholt and Fritz Steingrobe, which were created as part of a film production by Thomas Tode and Martin Reinhart, and also Erwin Piscator's »Einfunktionierter Film im Theater« and »Moholy-Nagy kann deine Nase erklingen lassen«. In Hans Richter's first sound film »Alles dreht sich, alles bewegt sich«, the film artist produced a Dadaist soundtrack of the sounds of a fairground.

The original soundtrack of Sergei Eisenstein's »Panzerkreuzer Potemkin« contains the famous music of Edmund Meisel, which he had worked out with Eisenstein. The aggressive soundtrack sets the class struggle to music, with choral singing emphasizing the importance of the collective. »Weekend« by Walter Ruttmann is a film without pictures, which uses the invention of the sound film in a radical way, as it created a primarily auditory medium, a sound collage.

In the 2019 rediscovered film »Tönendes ABC« by Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy, he drew in his own words »with (...) profiles, sequences of letters, fingerprints, geometric signs on the sound film strip«, achieving »surprising sound results«. Also shown are film fragments by Soviet artists Yevgeny Sholpo and Nikolai Voinov.