Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 avant-garde film, Berlin, Symphony for a Great City adheres to the dawn to dusk format as it narratates the urban landscape of Berlin. With the use of rhythmic and associative montage Ruttmann composes a symphony of movement out of images he selected from German life in the 1920’s. It is organized into five acts, which correspond to the five stages of the workday, however his vision is symphonic rather than episodic. In the reading Graf identifies “a total suppression of intertitles, narrative and plot elements” in order to achieve a “pure film form”. Whether or not he succeeds in this, the film is recognized as a marking the maturation of the city symphony genre. It is an important film both as a document of Berlin life in the 1920’s and as a demonstration of Ruttmann’s exceptional use of rhythm, cutting and montage to structure film. His architectural background is evident in his attention to the shape of objects throughout the cityscape. He also relies on rhythmic and associative montage to construct an exemplar of the city symphony aesthetic. The rhythmic visual regime of the city film emphasizes the city as a ‘complex spatial arrangement of buildings, traffic, streets and boulevards’[1].
Cinematic montage is used to replicate the frantic, discontinuous space and pace of the urban metropolis. The frequency of the cuts denotes the changing tempo throughout the day. Graf suggests that the “instrumentalization of cutting rhythm in Berlin functions as a device of both emotive and illustrative description”. In the factory sequence Rutmann lays emphasis on the efficiency of the machine and particularly the beauty of that efficiency. I think many people will instinctively compare this scene with that of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis which came out in the same year. Fritz Lang projects an idea of the city worker as an automaton, marching in synch into the mouth of the factory where they will be enslaved by the machine, and left physically vanquished. In contrast Ruttmann projects an image of a relatively jovial factory worker entering the factory. Topical groupings like this are used throughout the film, like the children going to school, the women performing domestic duties, and people eating. In this way Ruttmann treats the people as much as objects as he does the buildings, trams and trains.
Metropolis clock.
The factory sequence focuses primarily on the machines. I did however think the shot of the hand pushing the lever was interesting as it encapsulates the idea of the Berliner as part of a greater machine. In emphasizing the efficiency and beauty of the machine he purports the idea of a synthesis or rather a partnership between man and machine. This idea reoccurs throughout the film, most notably the opening scenes of the train entering the metropolis. It is ostensibly being driven by a man and is also carrying people. When it enters the terminus, the workers, like cogs in a machine, mechanically open the station doors. They co-exist and are part of a greater structure, the metropolis itself. Visually this is interesting however I did at first feel that Ruttmann’s city symphony is lacking in a critique or social commentary, particularly due to his “exclusively aesthetic concentration”[2]. Machines are not seen by Ruttman to have social utility, instead they exist as “fascinating, intricate, moving objects”[3]. This does however set Berlin apart from other documentaries of the time, which are produced with explicit social biases, and adds to its value as a historical document.
In Weimar cinema: an essential guide to classic films of the era Noah William Isenberg suggests that Berlin is essentially a record of the “1920s explosion of advertising and concomitant transformation of modernity into a society spectacle”[4]. He suggests that advertising operates on multiple levels, beginning with the shots of “signs painted on the walls of buildings and store fronts announcing new products”[5]. This is reemphasized in the fifth act. As night falls the metropolis becomes saturated with advertisements, Isenberg asserts that “texts, words and graphic inscriptions proliferate in the city, transforming the urban environment into a complex web of linguistic signifiers whose shared focus is the commodity”[6]. I think Isenberg is accurate in his assertion that Berlin functions as an advertisement of modernity. Ruttman’s impassiveness affords him a unique perspective in representing modernity and the urban landscape. The lunchtime sequence is illustrative of this perspective. There is no apparent differentiation between age, class, gender or even species. Lunchtime is a necessity for a baby, a businessman, a monkey, a camel, rich and poor alike. Rather than drawing attention to the disparity in living conditions, he uses associative montage to intimate how all organisms in the urban landscape are motivated by the same requirements and compulsions, to eat, to sleep, anger, sex etc.
Train entering terminus.
Isenberg sustains Graf’s assertion that in Berlin, the camera takes on the role of Baudelaire’s flâneur; "a person who walks the city in order to experience it"[7]. The shots taken from the train out onto the passing landscape position the viewer within the train, within the machine and by extension a cog in the metropolis. Like the flâneur however, we are a detached observer, both in the city and apart from it. The absence of dialogue, intertitles and the continuous cutting from shot to shot precludes the audience from engaging with individuals within the documentary. We see Berliners in constant motion yet we have no sense of them arriving at a destination. Ruttmann does not impress ideologies onto the audience and so we remain the removed. I would however argue that this detachment in portraying the metropolis demonstrates a form of rebellion. Like Baudelaire, Rutmann is asserting that traditional art was inadequate for the new dynamic complications of modern life. Social and economic changes brought by industrialization demanded that the artist immerse himself in the metropolis and become, in Baudelaire's phrase, "a botanist of the sidewalk"[8]. In doing so he articulates a critical attitude towards the “uniformity, speed, and anonymity of modern life in the city”[9].
