Walter Ruttmann (28 December 1887 – 15 July 1941) was a German cinematographer and film director, an important German abstract experimental film maker, along with Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling and Oskar Fischinger. He is best known for directing the semi-documentary 'city symphony' silent film, with orchestral score by Edmund Meisel, in 1927, Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis. His audio montage Wochenende (Weekend) (1930) is considered a major contribution in the development of audio plays. Biography Ruttmann was born in Frankfurt am Main, the son of a wealthy mercantilist. He graduated "high school" in 1905, then began in 1907, architectural studies in Zürich, later, in 1909, painting in Munich (later in Marburg) where he befriended Paul Klee and Lyonel Feininger. Ruttmann was conscripted into the army in 1913, first serving in Darmstadt, and shortly after the outbreak of the World War I was he 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 had the financial means to work independently of the major German studios of the time. He founded Ruttmann-Film S.R.O. in Munich and patented an animation table, in June 1920. His first productions were the first fully animated German cartoons, and abstract animated films. Lichtspiel: Opus I, produced between 1919 and 1921, premiered on 27 April 1921 at the Berlin Marmorhaus, and released for German theatrical distribution in 1922, is the "oldest fully abstract motion picture known to survive, using only animated geometric forms, arranged and shown without reference to any representational imagery". Opus I and Opus II, were experiments with new forms of film expression, and the influence of these early abstract films can be seen in some of the early work of Oskar Fischinger. Ruttmann and his colleagues of the avant garde movement enriched the language of film as a medium with new formal techniques. In 1926 he worked with Julius Pinschewer on Der Aufsteig, an experimental film advertising the GeSoLei trade fair in Düsseldorf. In 1926, Ruttmann licensed a Wax Slicing machine from Oskar Fischinger to create special effects for The Adventures of Prince Achmed, an animated fairy tale film, for Lotte Reiniger, making the moving backgrounds and magic scenes. Ruttmann was a prominent exponent of both avant-garde art and music. His early abstractions played at the 1929 Baden-Baden Festival to international