In 1929, Wilfried Basse (1899–1946) made a film about a day on the market on the Wittenbergplatz in Berlin—from the construction of the market stalls early in the morning, to their dismantling and cleaning of the streets in the afternoon (a motif often used as part of morning rituals in other city symphonies). Basse combines images of commodities, market vendors, and customers with people passing by and traffic and bustling city life in the background. A title card at the beginning explains that the big city does not only consist of speed and traffic, but that idyllic small-town life survives even in the core of the metropolis. In fact, an establishing shot introduces the position of the Wittenbergplatz in the city center—with the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church visible in the background. Subsequently, a panning shot moves from the recognizable cruciform U-Bahn station Wittenbergplatz to the open space right behind the building: the position where the market stalls are about to be erected.
It was this sequence of the market’s construction in particular that received attention by various eminent critics. Rudolf Arnheim was the first to underscore the supernatural effect of the scene, in which Basse makes the market appear within a minute by using accelerated motion and by editing shots taken every 30 minutes. Arnheim later also claimed that he played a drunken man in Markt in Berlin, but there is no visual evidence of this. Béla Balázs described Basse’s film as a masterpiece, though contrary to Arnheim’s emphasis on the film’s pure and sober objectivity, he applauded the film for its unstaged reality. Siefgried Kracauer, finally, relates Markt in Berlin directly to Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927) as he described it as one of the two cross-section films made in the style of Berlin (Menschen am Sonntag being the other) that deserve greater interest.
Basse made two versions of his market film. The shorter, original version with the title Markt in Berlin premiered in November 1929 at the Capital Theater in Berlin as part of an avant-garde film program, which also included Joris Ivens’s De Brug (1928) and which aimed to be a contribution to the famous Film und Foto (FiFo) exhibition held in Stuttgart that year. This original version does not include intertitles, except for the title card mentioned above. In December 1929, Basse made a second, longer version entitled Wochenmarkt auf dem Wittenbergplatz, including 22 intertitles. Basse changed his film according to the Kulturfilm standards, so that the censors would accept it as an educational film and that it could benefit from tax deductions and be screened in regular theaters.
Eva Hielscher
further reading
Arnheim, Rudolf, Film as Art (London: Faber and Farber, 1958).
Balázs, Béla, “The Spirit of Film” (1930), in Erica Carter (ed.), Béla Balázs: Early Film Theroy: Visible Man and the Spirit of Film (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2010).
Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947).
Kreimeier, Klaus, “Der Schatzsucher: Wilfried Basses Erkundungen der ungestellten Wirklichkeit,” in Klaus Kreimeier, Antje Ehmann, and Jeanpaul Goergen (eds.), Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland: Band 2: Weimarer Republik: 1918–1933 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005), 435–62.
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