"The head is round so that thinking can change direction." With this sentence, Francis Picabia coined a time when the world was in ruins and a young artistic movement saw art shattered as well. So they thought everything anew, did everything differently, naturally also in the new medium of film. The absolute films of Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling and Walter Ruttmann, which detach themselves from the world of objects, Marcel Duchamp's attempts to combine poetry and film, the oniric visual language of Hans Richter in "Vormittagsspuk" and the overwhelming cascades of images in Fernand Léger's "Ballet mécanique" all have one thing in common, namely the irrepressible desire to make the new art rise like a Phoenix from the ashes.