One would be hard pressed to think of a figure as ambivalent for Weimar film studies as Walter Ruttmann. On the one hand, Ruttmann figures in countless articles, book chapters and course syllabi as a major innovator of experimental film and a key representative of Weimar modernism. His abstract OPUS films (OPUS I-IV, 1921-1925), which held pride of place in the famous film screening of “absolute film” in Berlin in 1925, have been celebrated by critics from the 1920s to the present as pioneering works in avant-garde form and milestones in the history of animation. Similarly, Ruttmann's urban portrait BERLIN. DIE SINFONIE DER GROSSSTADT (BERLIN. SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY, 1927) – the film that secured his international fame in the 1920s – has long counted as a defining work of early documentary, a towering statement on Weimar modernity and the quintessential representation of urban modernism in the interwar period. Ruttmann's experimental style has influenced subsequent filmmakers from Oskar Fischinger to Len Lye and beyond, and his city film has spawned numerous imitations and “remakes,” both then and now. Indeed, Ruttmann's importance as a pioneer in experimental moving image art is only growing in our current digital media climate as scholars search for origins and precursors to the proliferation of experimental, non-narrative forms. But there is also another side to Ruttmann as the “one who stayed.” Unlike many of his contemporaries such as Hans Richter and Fritz Lang, Ruttmann went on, after the seizure of power by the National Socialists, to make some eighteen films for the new regime – and nineteen “fascist” films if one counts his Italian film ACCIAIO (STEEL, 1933) – between 1933 and 1941. Although once largely ignored and still unavailable for viewing outside of archives, this segment of Ruttmann's filmmaking career has garnered increasing interest since the 1980s, particularly in Germany, where scholars have devoted extensive attention to Ruttmann's post-1933 work for German steel companies, Nazi ministries, weapons manufacturers and other agencies.

The ambivalence surrounding Ruttmann's career – and its difficult fit within traditional narratives of the avant-garde – might help to explain the relative dearth of attention to these commissioned films in English-language scholarship, which has focused almost entirely on the OPUS films and the BERLIN documentary.