Having studied architecture and painting, Walter Ruttmann (1887–1941) worked as a graphic designer and made abstract films, including his Opus series, in the early 1920s before creating Berlin. Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt, which is unquestionably the most famous city symphony, providing the movement with its nickname and engendering the production of many similar films in the years to follow. In 1926, a year after Adolf Trotz had completed Die Stadt der Millionen: Ein Lebensbild Berlins, which is considered the first German feature-length city portrait, and at the same time that Alberto Cavalcanti was working on Rien que les heures in Paris, Ruttmann started his project of a film symphony about Berlin. The story goes that scriptwriter Carl Mayer (1894–1944), who had worked on films such as Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919), Die Strasse (Karl Grune, 1923), and Der letzte Mann (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1924), conceived the idea of a city symphony while standing in front of the Ufa Palast am Zoo one night, surrounded by hectic traffic, bustling city life, neon lights blinking in the streets, and trains ratting in the distance. Later, he withdrew from the project as his conception apparently differed from Ruttmann’s ideas. Together with producer/cinematographer Karl Freund (1890–1969), famous for his camera work for Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927), Der letzte Mann (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1924), and Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (Paul Wegener, 1920), Ruttmann collected footage from all over Berlin for more than a year, which he arranged in a card catalogue system and eventually put into a rhythmic and dynamic montage based on musical structures. Using associative and symbolic editing, multiple exposures, animated shots, and other experimental techniques as well as the deliberate avoidance of intertitles, Ruttmann presents the city of Berlin as the protagonist of the film. In addition, he also evokes the visual experience of the modern city in its fragmented and dynamic nature.
Consisting of five acts comparable to the movements of a musical symphony, Berlin presents a cross-section of everyday life in the city from early in the morning till late at night. A prototype for numerous other films, Berlin contains a panoply of city symphony motifs, including the arrival by train into the city, deserted streets in the wee hours, morning routines like commuting, the opening of shops, and street cleaning, labor in factories, offices, and construction sites, a lunch break, a policeman managing hectic motorized traffic, shop windows and mannequins, the contrast between poor and rich, a rain shower in the afternoon, and the entertainment industry at night. Being composed almost completely of documentary material, partly shot with hidden cameras and highly sensitive film stock that cameraman Reimar Kuntze developed specifically for the interior shots and nocturnal scenes, Berlin also includes a number of staged scenes, most notably, the suicide of a young woman jumping from a bridge.
Austrian composer Edmund Meisel (1894–1930), who was also known for his music for Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), composed a score for a 75-piece orchestra for Berlin, which premiered on 23 September 1927 at the Tauentzien-Palast, where it was accompanied by a historical program entitled “Kintopp vor 20 Jahren” (Cinema 20 Years Ago), which consisted of films from 1905–10. A quota production for Fox Europe, the film became a national and international success and was screened widely in commercial cinemas, unlike many other city symphonies which only saw limited release in ciné-clubs, film societies, and other specialized venues. Despite its success, the film also received some sharp criticism, including the famous complaints by Siegfried Kracauer, Paul Rotha, John Grierson, and others about its surface approach and a formalism that refuses any social insights and critical standpoint. However, these authors also underlined and valued the importance of Ruttmann’s film in relation to the New Objectivity movement, the documentary form, the cross-section film, and, of course, the city film.
Eva Hielscher
further reading
Bollerey, Franziska, “Annotationen zu ‘Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt’,” Eselsohren 2, 1+2 (2014): 41–69.
Cowan, Michael, Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity: Avant-Garde—Advertising—Modernity (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014).
Goergen, Jeanpaul (ed.), Walter Ruttmann: Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1989).
Kolaja, Jiri and Foster, Arnold W., “ ‘Berlin, the Symphony of a City’ as a Theme of Visual Rhythm,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 23, 3 (1965): 353–8.
Kracauer, Siegfried, “Montage,” in Siegfried Kracauer (ed.), From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), 181–9.
Prümm, Karl, “Symphonie contra Rhythmus: Wiedersprüche und Ambivalenzen in Walter Ruttmanns Berlin-Film,” in Klaus Kreimeier, Antje Ehmann, and Jeanpaul Goergen (eds.), Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland: Band 2: Weimarer Republik. 1918–1933 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005), 411–34.
Schweinitz, Jörg, “Maschinen, Rhythmen und Texturen: ‘Berlin—Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt‘ von Walter Ruttmann: Die filmische Imagination einer Metropole,” in Ute Schneider und Martina Stercken (eds.), Urbanität: Formen der Inszenierung in Texten, Karten, Bildern (Köln: Böhlau, 2016), 157–70.
Uricchio, William Charles, Ruttmann’s “Berlin” and the City Film to 1930 (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York: New York University, 1982).
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