“Lichtspiel Opus II” complexifies the title of its predecessor. In the sobriety of a new palette the pace quickens and the right angles of the squares and rectangles appear to threaten the organic curves of the rounded forms. From the various colliding forms is distilled their origin – the dot – the first theme for study in “Lichtspiel Opus II”. Once again based on the ideas of the constructionist movement “Lichtspiel Opus II” is emphatically material and asserts the idea of art as construction, investigating the basic elements of figurative grammar and eulogising the constructive gesture. Patterns reform on a dark background, the source material for an image at a constant point of mutation. The formal simplicity of the new works evokes industrial expansion, where precision technical drawings are an indispensable basis for each new construction. An essential name in avant-garde cinema, Ruttmann also left a legacy in music. With Piscator, he worked on “Melody of the World” (1929) but became celebrated for “Berlin: Symphony of a Great City” (1927), the urban symphony he dedicated to Germany. Although constructivism decisively influenced German architecture and urbanism, principally the contributions of the Bauhaus School (financed by the Weimar Republic), with the rise of Nazism the vanguardist principles of the Gropius school were rejected as anti-German. It is in this context that, after the inventiveness of his abstractions, Ruttmann retreated from free expression and ceded to the pressure of Goebbels, whose vision of art for the Third Reich was that it must be intelligible to the German people, aesthetically conservative and focus on a heroic portrayal Nazi Germany. (SDM)