Weekend

Sound collage: Walter Ruttmann
Reconstruction of the cinema theatre performance

Wochende is a pioneering work from the early days of radio, commissioned in 1928 by Berlin Radio Hour. On June 3th, 1930 a radically new form of radio was broadcast over the Berlin airwaves - an acoustic picture of a Berlin weekend urban landscape through a collage of raw sounds, words and music fragments. Ruttmann deliberately sought possibilities for producing an audio-film for radio: Wochende is a study in sound-montage... In Wochende sound was an end itself... Everything audible in the world becomes material... Tones and sounds should exist in their own right" - he wrote in 1929, prefiguring Pierre Schaeffer, Edgar Varèse, John Cage and the other giants of the musical avant-garde. He recorded all of the material on the soundtrack of an optical sound film using the so-called Tri-Ergon process (the Berlin company that pioneered the synthesis of sound and image technology in Europe). Wochende indicates a turning point in the history of media arts as a first significant experiment in montage-based radio. Twenty years later this editing technique will be improved, to form the basis of concrete music. Wochende can be also regarded as the first imageless film or purely acoustical film because it was originally intended as an acoustic collage to be heard whilst watching black film leader.