Tönende Handschrift II

Rudolf Pfenninger

Rudolf Pfenniger’s five-part documentary film series “Tönende Handschrift” (Sounding Handwriting) 1932 broke the dominance of the visual by introducing music. With his “short films for drawn sound” the Munich-born cartoonist created an approach which transferred resonance oscillations to long paper strips, traced them in ink, and transferred them to optical sound film. Individual tones as well as whole melody segments were recorded on these paper strips. It was thus possible to produce “tones from out of nowhere”, as the project description back then proudly claimed.

Program