Germany, 1927
Directed by Walter Ruttmann
After starting a career as painter and then moving to filmmaking to create abstract films, Walter Ruttmann decides to shoot a new kind of film that would be a visual symphony composed with the energy of the millions of people who brings life to the German metropolis. “Berlin: the Symphony of a Metropolis” is a five-part feature taking the pulse of the city and its inhabitants from dawn to dusk whose impact owes a lot to montage.
The camera records a movement, say employees walking down streets to go to work; the image fades over another one showing a similar movement, say workers walking with their bicycles or horses trotting in an avenue or soldiers goose-stepping; and the same fade and imitation keep on going. An aspect of the city life smoothly segues into another and the initial movement echoes throughout a clever series of images, allowing the film to display a most comprehensive vision of Berlin.
The film looks like an astute and inspired daisy-chain of images giving the feeling of a deeper, harmonious and unified carrying the people and the place along. One mechanical motion gives way to another and one meeting of minds is followed by a common physical effort. To live in Berlin is to partake to an endless dynamics and to move on from one activity to another, from one sensation to another. Tellingly, the main leitmotif is shots of speeding vehicles: the film opens aboard a train bound to Berlin, with stunning images of the landscape fleeting on-screen; the montage is packed with every kind of vehicles available in the town, from old-fashioned horse-drawn carriages to taxis, from streetcars to limousines, from rows of bikes to queues of buses. Berlin is definitely cast as a place where mechanical motion is quite simply the soul of the city and where speed defines its modernity.
Inside this restless motion people are barely examined, apart from their own perfunctory professional gestures. Social differences are glanced over – this is not a critical take on the Weimar social order. Actually, when the film decides to linger on specific, pleasant, lively moments for people, it clearly strays from its rules. It purports to shoot whatever happens in the course of a single day; but the long series of edited pictures about sports and late-afternoon entertainment cannot but belong to other times in the life of Berlin, probably in the weekend, like sports competitions. The film vows to capture real events in real time; but at least in a couple of case, the scene sounds like a fiction (a woman and a man flirting as they pace along a big shop’s showcases, a woman committing suicide by jumping in a river and the commotion that follows, but also a quarrel between two passerby catching the public’s attention). People are part of the perpetual movement defining their town but the human adventure cannot fit in easily in the agenda.
Compositions are simple and effective and never really surprise with an odd angle. “Berlin: Die Symphonie der Großstadt – Berlin: the Symphony of a Metropolis” is mainly concerned with building an artful, smart and dynamic collection of images conveying obsessively movement which the director bluntly equates with these millions of energy comprising the life of the German capital; to have a fresh, human look at the metropolis is not really Ruttmann’s point. In retrospect, though, the film does elicit melancholy and foster memory; after all, it vividly captures places that have since vanished; the city hosted then activities which are no longer possible as the Nazi regime’s debacle caused the destruction of vast swathes of Berlin – and Germany.