Abstract film is a subgenre of experimental film. Its history often overlaps with the concerns and history of visual music. The earliest abstract motion pictures known to survive are those produced by a group of German artists working in the early 1920s: Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter (artist), Viking Eggeling and Oskar Fischinger. These artists present two different approaches to abstraction-in-motion: as an analogue to music (Ruttmann, Fischinger) or as the creation of an absolute language of form, a desire common to early abstract art. The factual accuracy of this article is disputed. ... Visual Music is defined several ways. ... 1920 (MCMXX) was a leap year starting on Thursday (link will take you to calendar) // Events January January 3 - Babe Ruth is traded by the Boston Red Sox to the New York Yankees for $125,000, the largest sum ever paid for a player at that time. ... Walter Ruttmann (born December 28, 1887 in Frankfurt am Main; died July 15, 1941 in Berlin) was a German film director and along with Hans Richter the most important practitioner of experimental film. ... Hans Richter was a Dada artist, filmmaker and writer. ... Viking Eggeling, born October 21, 1880, died May 19, 1925, was a Swedish artist and filmmaker. ... Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967) was an abstract animator, filmmaker, and painter. ... Black square by Kazimir Malevich Abstract art is now generally understood to mean art that does not depict objects in the natural world, but instead uses shapes and colors in a non-representational or subjective way. ...

The history of abstract film is highly contested, with various groups of artists and their supporting critics/historians fighting over which artists to include and which to exclude from its development.

See also

• Experimental film
• Visual music
• Color organ

The factual accuracy of this article is disputed. ... Visual Music is defined several ways. ... The term color organ refers to a tradition of mechanical (18th century), then electromechanical devices built to represent sound or to accompany music, in a visual medium — by any number of means. ...

References

• Malcolm Le Grice, Abstract Film and Beyond. [MIT Press, 1981]
• William Moritz, Optical Poetry. [Indiana University Press, 2004]
• William Wees, Light Moving in Time. [University of California Press, 1992]