Like previous studies on Ruttmann, this one has had to contend with the “Mephisto” question I evoked in the introduction: namely, how to explain Ruttmann's turn from Weimar modernism to propaganda films under National Socialism. Was Ruttmann's commissioned work after 1933 simply a cover for pursuing aesthetic modernism? Was there a “fascist aesthetic” always already present in his Weimar films? While one can never fully ignore this question, I have tried to reframe its terms by suggesting that we approach Ruttmann less as a disinterested artist than as an “expert,” who drew on other areas of expertise – motion studies, advertising design, statistics, traditions of scientific illustration, etc. – to fashion film as a “useful medium.” In the process, this book has also followed the work of Malte Hagener and others to suggest that we need to expand and complicate our understanding of the interwar avant-garde, its history, its politics and its aesthetics. Part of that expanded view involves recognizing that for a large segment of the avant-garde, experimentation implied (and often entailed) practical applications in advertising and other spheres – applications that subtended the very definition of the avant-garde as a project for the reintegration of “art and life.” Against this backdrop, one would do well to avoid seeing advertising or other commissioned work as a compromise of a purportedly “purist” or “absolute” – or inherently progressive – aesthetics of experimentation. As we have seen, the possibility for “applications” inhered in Ruttmann's experimental aesthetics from the beginning, just as they inhered in the experimental sciences on which he drew. For Ruttmann the nature of those applications played a secondary role to the effort to fashion the cinema as a means of expert intervention. They were, as he put it in his 1928 text “Die absolute Mode” (“The Absolute Fashion”), “a matter of indifference.”

Considering Ruttmann in this way, I believe, allows us to reformulate the questions of continuity and rupture posed above. On the one hand, Ruttmann was – as the title of this book suggests – concerned throughout his career with fashioning the cinema as a tool to manage multiplicity, and more specifically for the conceptualization and ordering of mass society. This might seem hardly surprising: as Grierson long ago recognized, Ruttmann's films were profoundly concerned with the mass nature of modern society and how to come to terms with it.