Ruttmann was born in
Frankfurt am Main, the son of a wealthy mercantilist. He graduated from high school in 1905 and began architectural studies in
Zürich in 1907. In 1909 Ruttmann began painting in
Munich, where he befriended
Paul Klee and
Lyonel Feininger, and he would later paint in
Marburg. Ruttmann was conscripted into the army in 1913, first serving in Darmstadt, and shortly after the outbreak of
World War I he was sent to the
Eastern Front, where he served as an artillery lieutenant and a gas defense officer. After spending 1917 in a hospital for
post traumatic stress disorder, he began making films. Ruttmann was a prominent exponent of both avant-garde art and music. His early abstractions played at the 1929 Baden-Baden Festival to international acclaim despite their being almost eight years old. Together with
Erwin Piscator, he worked on the film
Melody of the World (1929), though he is best remembered for
Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (
Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis, 1927).
Weekend (Wochenende), commissioned in 1928 by Berlin Radio Hour, and presented on 13 June 1930, is a pioneering work of
musique concrète, a montage of sound clips, recorded using film optical sound track from the
Tri-Ergon process. Ruttmann recorded the streets sounds of Berlin with a camera, but without images, this was before
magnetic tape.
Hans Richter called it “a symphony of sound, speech-fragments, and silence woven into a poem.” A pacifist, he traveled to Moscow in 1928 and 1929. During the Nazi period he was replaced by
Leni Riefenstahl as director of the documentary which eventually became
Triumph of the Will (1935), supposedly because Ruttmann's editing style was considered too "Marxist" and Soviet influenced. He died in
Berlin 15 July 1941 due to complications following an embolism. ==Culture and Media==