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Viking Eggeling was known as both a talented painter and an avant-garde filmmaker who since 1918 was closely associated with German artist Hans Richter. Eggeling was born in Lund, Sweden and went to Paris at age 17. He became a Dadaist in Switzerland a decade later. He and Richter were fascinated with the notion that paintings had rhythm and did many abstract experiments utilizing picture strips arranged in ways to explore the relationships between lines and space. While in Germany, he created assorted elaborately arranged scroll paintings. These scrolls seemed to naturally lead Eggeling and Richter to experiment with animation. Between 1921 and 1924, Eggeling worked steadily on the intricate drawings that would form his classic, highly influential abstract short Diagonal Symphony. Eggeling made two similar films, Parallel and Horizontal before he died of heart failure at age 45.