A South American city symphony—yet with European roots, since its filmmakers were émigrés from Hungary—São Paulo: a Symphonia da Metrópole depicts the Brazilian metropolis as a young, vivid, modern, progressive city, underscoring that both the film and the city are not lagging behind their European counterparts. The film was released by the Brazilian branch of Paramount, their press releases describe it as depicting the “thundering rhythms of progress” of the “brain-city of Brazil.” São Paulo: a Symphonia da Metrópole is clearly inspired by Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927) and Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926). Especially in its first part, it quite literally follows European examples in its temporal structure and portrayal of the awakening of the city and the start of the workday, until its climax in urban acceleration just before noon, beautifully represented by a montage of “kaleidoscopic” shots, in which the screen is split into multiple parts, not unlike some of the emblematic shots in Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929). However, in contrast to Berlin and Man with a Movie Camera, Kemeny and Lustig use numerous intertitles, giving us information on the locales and institutions as well as on their history. In addition, unlike most other feature-length city symphonies that include an almost ritual arrival in the city by train or ferry, the filmmakers locate the spectator as a city dweller in urban São Paulo from the beginning. This is also emphasized in one of the first intertitles, in which they dedicate their city symphony to the inhabitants of the Brazilian metropolis.
Nevertheless, in the middle of the film, after the lunch break scenes with panoramic shots taken from a loudspeaker above the city, there is an arrival by train, which marks a sudden change in style. At this point, the film becomes a traditional tourist travelogue or an educational film on the making of snake and spider antitoxins in the Butantam Institute, a short documentary about the state prison and its unique prisoners’ rehabilitation program, and a historical short about the 1822 events surrounding Brazilian independence. After this touristic intervention, the film resumes its city-symphony form, with impressions of high-rise buildings, rhythms of factory work and machines in the industrial areas, concluding with a vision of the São Paulo of the future, resembling the futurist city of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927).
Kemeney (1901–69) and Lustig (1901–70), who began their careers at the Pathé laboratories in Budapest and at Ufa in Berlin before emigrating to Brazil in the mid-1920s, worked 14 months on their São Paulo film symphony. Besides their focus on the architecture and geography of the city and their attention to radio broadcasting, the press, trade, the city’s financial sector, the coffee business, and university faculties, the filmmakers also pay attention to social and economic inequality with a magical sequence in which a god-like hand hovers above the city panorama, giving a penny to the poor and piles of banknotes to the rich. With this highly ambivalent image, oscillating between a form of social criticism denouncing inequality and a reactionary acceptance of a divine order of things, Kemeny and Lustig at least suggest that not everybody benefited equally from São Paulo’s expansion.
Eva Hielscher
further reading
Dähne, Chris, Die Stadtsinfonien der 1920er Jahre: Architektur zwischen Film, Fotografie und Literatur (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013).
Machado Jr., Rubens, “Cinema alemão e sinfonias urbanas do entreguerras,” in Jorge de Almeida and Wolfgang Bader (eds.), Pensamento Alemão no Século XX, Vol. III: Grandes protagonistas e recepção das obras no Brasil (São Paulo: Cosac Naify and Goethe Institut, 2013), 23–48.
Meneguello, Cristina, “São Paulo, a Symphonia da Metropole 1929,” Eselsohren 2, 1+2 (2014): 183–98.
Michael, Joachim, “Stumme Symphonien der peripheren Moderne: ‘São Paulo, A Sinfonia da Metrópole,’ Regie: Adalberto Kemeny, Rudolf Rex Lustig,” in Heinz-Peter Preußer (ed.), Späte Stummfilme: Ästhetische Innovation im Kino 1924–1930 (Marburg: Schüren, 2017), 328–44.
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