A member of the Workers Film and Photo League who also used the pseudonym Conrad O. Nelson, Conrad Friberg (1896–1989) made a silent city symphony about Chicago in 1934. Three years earlier, another semi-professional filmmaker, the German writer, traveler, and photographer Heinrich Hauser, had already made another city symphony about Chicago, the feature-length Weltstadt In Flegeljahren: Ein Bericht über Chicago. Both Hauser and Friberg focused on the situation of the working classes in the Depression era. However, whereas Hauser, like Ruttmann and others, presented the city as a space of simultaneity, Friberg introduced an alternative to the cross-section idea of the life of a city. By tracing the length of Halsted Street from south to north through the entire cityscape, his short film preserves the spatial structure of urban space, and literally cuts through the city. Indeed, Friberg announces his course in an opening intertitle that “This Film Presents a Cross Section of Chicago As Seen On Halsted Street.”
Tom Gunning has described Friberg’s film, as one of the most original urban documentaries produced before World War II, a neglected masterpiece that offers a unique approach to urban geography and an alternative to the city symphony concept. The street determines the structure of the film, a linear path determined by a progressive trajectory along the course of Halsted Street. Due to the length of the street, the film shows a variety of Chicago neighborhoods, which unfold successively on the screen; shop and restaurant signs mark the different ethnic districts, as the film also explores the city as a space of textual inscription. However, Friberg combines this specificity of location and the street-determined cross-section structure, which suggests a linear montage, with the associative and contrasting editing techniques typical of city symphonies.
Eva Hielscher
further reading
Gunning, Tom, “One-way Street: Urban Chronotopes in Ruttmann’s ‘Berlin: Symphony of a Great City’ and Conrad’s ‘Halsted Street’,” in Synne Bull and Marit Paasche (eds.), Urban Images: Unruly Desires in Film and Architecture (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011), 62–79.
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