Historically, the avant-garde had good reasons to engage with advertising. When avant-garde film emerged in the early 1920s, advertising psychology was still a new field, one that sought to harness the latest psychological research on suggestion and attention management to influence mass behavior through carefully planned advertising images. The avant-garde, too, was fascinated by the idea of provoking psychological responses in spectators through art. Hans Richter, for instance, in a 1924 text for the avant-garde periodical G: Zeitschrift für elementare Gestaltung (G: Journal for Elementary Construction), described his early abstract “Rhythmus” films, 1921–25, as works that could force viewers “to ‘feel’—to go along with the rhythm” on the screen, and as a recent study by Ana Hedberg Olenina explores in depth, Sergei Eisenstein was deeply fascinated by all the ways that film might trigger psychomotor reactions in spectators. These artists also frequently looked to laboratory science as a model for their own experimental activity. Lázsló Moholy-Nagy, for instance, understood his Bauhaus-based aesthetic explorations in form, color, and composition as laboratory work ripe for practical applications like advertising, and he specifically sought to create an “experimental laboratory for film art” at the Bauhaus (as he outlined in a programmatic article for the magazine Film-Kurier in 1926).
Little wonder, then, that so many early avant-garde filmmakers participated enthusiastically in advertising. Of course, advertising commissions could help pay the bills and assist experimental filmmakers in securing access to advanced equipment. But ad work also enabled these filmmakers to demonstrate the real-world applications of avant-gardist experimentation and received wider distribution than strictly experimental efforts. These opportunities were seized upon by the pioneering experimental animators of the Weimar Republic, including Walter Ruttmann, Lotte Reiniger, and Oskar Fischinger. Ruttmann, in collaboration with Bauhaus artist Lore Leudesdorff, made a series of product advertisements for the company Werbefilm GmbH that read like practical applications both of Bauhaus color theory and of Ruttmann’s own experimental work. In their film Das Wunder (The Miracle), 1922, to take one example, the familiar colorful round and paisley shapes from Ruttmann’s abstract “Opus”films, 1919–25 morph before our eyes into a set of arguing heads, which eventually come to embrace one another under the beneficent influence of Kantorowicz liqueur. Sometimes avant-garde filmmakers would cut multiple versions of the same film, one more experimental and the other framed as an advertisement, as Richter did for his film Die neue Wohnung (The New Apartment), 1930, commissioned by the Swiss Werkbund to tout the benefits of modern architecture and interior design for an exhibition of modern housing in Basel. In other instances, films could toggle between experimental and advertising modes simply by having a logo added or removed at the end. That pattern was established by Fischinger’s Kreise (Circles), 1933–34, in which a full ninety seconds of abstract circle play gives way at the end (in the advertising version) to a plug for the advertising agency Tolirag, reading: “Alle Kreise erfasst Tolirag” (Tolirag reaches all [consumer] circles). The pattern is also visible in films like Len Lye’s A Colour Box, 1935, for the British General Post Office, or Hra Bublinek (Play of Bubbles),1936, a soap advertisement by Karel Dodal, Irena Dodalová, and Hermína Týrlová obviously influenced by Fischinger.
