Abstract film is a subgenre of
experimental film. Its history often overlaps with the concerns and history of
visual music. Some of the earliest abstract motion pictures known to survive are those produced by a group of German artists working in the early 1920s, a movement referred to as
Absolute Film:
Walter Ruttmann,
Hans Richter,
Viking Eggeling and
Oskar Fischinger. These artists present different approaches to abstraction-in-motion: as an analogue to music, or as the creation of an
absolute language of form, a desire common to early
abstract art. Ruttmann wrote of his film work as 'painting in time.'