[VIDEO] Jannon Stein writes about the abstract films of painter Hans Richter who "[turned] his talents to film and produces one of the earliest abstract films, Rhythmus 21." Stein's post includes three of Richter's films and also quotes Richter's descriptions of his aims in film-making which could easily describe similar aims in painting:

"The film is a play of relationships of light.
The relationships of light have both qualitative and quantitative character: degree of brightness, proportions, etc., etc.
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The true means of construction is light-the intensity and quantity of light.
The task for the whole is to shape the nature of the light-in the sense of a comprehensive perceptibility. . . .
…
In its sequence of events (its screening), this film communicates very authentically the relationships of tension and contrast in the light. These relationships consist of light and dark, small and large, slow and fast, horizontal and vertical, etc., etc.

An attempt has been made to organize the film such that the individual parts stand in active tension to one another and to the whole, such that the whole remains intellectually [geistig] mobile within itself."