A commissioned work for the Freihafen-Lagerhaus-Gesellschaft and the municipality of Hamburg, Weltstrasse See, Welthafen Hamburg is the third city film Ruttmann (1887–1941) made after Berlin (1927). While Erik Barnouw in his standard work on documentary film describes the Hamburg film together with the films on Düsseldorf and Stuttgart as later contributions by Ruttmann to the wave of city symphonies, William Uricchio states that with its sequencing of typical views and slow lateral panning shots, the film presents a remarkable return to the tradition of city films as they have been produced from 1895 up to the mid-1920s. Contemporaneous critics share these mixed opinions about the film that presents Hamburg as the biggest warehouse city of the world. While a Hamburg newspaper in October 1938 praised the cinematography of cameraman Hans Bastanier and noticed that Ruttmann succeeded in composing “a real symphony” out of these images, Albert Schneider in Licht-Bild-Bühne criticized the film as being weaker than Ruttmann’s earlier films and that particularly the character of a photo reporter was embarrassing for such a “Kulturfilm.” Indeed, Weltstrasse See, Welthafen Hamburg includes a loose narrative involving a photographer, which frames the visual trip through the harbor, highlighting its importance as a world port.
Eva Hielscher and Michael Cowan
further reading
Barnouw, Erik, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (1974) (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1990), 73.
Goergen, Jeanpaul (ed.), Walther Ruttmann: Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1990).
Uricchio, William, “Ruttmann nach 1933,” in Jeanpaul Goergen (ed.), Walther Ruttmann: Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1990), 59–65.
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