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Berlin, Symphony
of a Great City (cont.) Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927) is a black-and-white silent film made in Weimar Germany (a term that refers to the period beginning in August 1919 with the founding of Germany’s first democracy and ending in 1933 with the election of Adolf Hitler as Germany’s Chancellor). It was created by the experimental filmmaker and artist, Walter Ruttmann. The film aims to present spectators with a cross-section view of a single day in the life of Berlin in the mid-twenties. Starting at dawn and ending at midnight, the day is divided into five Acts – one part more than the traditional four movements of a symphony, yet still consonant with the way in which many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century symphonies broke with musical tradition. The initial footage was shot for the most part by three cameramen working in a "documentary" mode, often with hidden cameras. Shot over the course of a year, it was then condensed through the editing process into a 62-minute-long film, representing a single day. The city was generally viewed both in Europe and the US as the epitome of modern life – the space that embodied and delivered all that was most modern about “modernity.” In the nineteen twenties there was still a heightened awareness of the forces and phenomena ascribed to modernity and modernization . There was also a very strong sense in the interwar period that time was moving faster than it ever had before, and that, consequently, the changes arising from modernization – which manifested themselves in the home, at work, in politics, culture, social/demographic sphere – were happening more quickly and more visibly than they ever had. The city, as the most modern landscape, emerges at this time in the West as a space and force that had a deeply transformative influence/impact on human beings living within her boundaries. Furthermore this transformation was perceived to occur at the psychic level. So, while city life manifested itself in all kinds of ways that were visible on the surface (which to a large extent we still recognize) – such as dress codes, profuse and ever-changing fashions, display windows, new technologies; mass cultural forms – movies, radios, cabaret, sports; and traffic – these things were understood by and large as both inducing and reflecting deeper structural changes in the very psychic make-up of urban dwellers. People were critiquing and representing the city as a landscape which both destabilized and radically reshaped one’s very identity, core sense of self, and relationship to the surrounding world. By 1927, Berlin, itself, was widely perceived as the paragon of urban living – viewed in fact by many Europeans as Europe’s most American city (which is to say the most modern of all European cities). As one can imagine, opinions about the quality of life in Berlin varied widely: Some found it to be a tremendously exciting and innovative environment. Berlin was a place that embodied the dawn of a modern technological age, and where limitless experimentation in all walks of life was possible – in art, technology, social identity, fashion, cultural norms. To others it seemed chaotic, alienating, and completely dehumanizing; such critics saw Berlin as the pinnacle of decadence rather than of progress, a place that encouraged the decline of traditional morals and, in the eyes of the most extreme critics, of civilization, itself. Several themes are prominent in the film: Crisis and Control: Berlin, Symphony of A City was made approximately seven years after the end of the First World War. During this period, Germans had experienced a traumatic defeat, harsh and humiliating reparations imposed by the Allies as part of the Versailles Treaty, the abrupt dissolution of a powerful monarchy, an attempted revolution and its brutal suppression by the combined forces of the Social Democrats and the military... What had been Europe’s most powerful economy was severely damaged: There were massive material shortages compounded by rampant inflation that had started during the war and escalated to a devastating peak in 1923, causing many middle- and working-class people to lose their life savings. Germans also witnessed the establishment of Germany’s first democracy, which was in fact one of the most progressive democracies in Europe, though also extremely fragile for many reasons (which are unfortunately beyond the scope of this talk). Mechanization and rationalization: City life in the film is permeated with machinery and rationalized processes that regulate both human work and leisure. Machines serve the inhabitants of the city – by producing goods, carrying people and things, and providing entertainment and lighting. The film displays mechanization as something quite beautiful and even exhilarating that at times even take on human qualities – like the sweating engine in Act I. On the other hand machines control, even determine human activity with their onerous and unbending regularity. Montage: In the late 1900's and early 1920's, cultural discussions in Europe portrayed an overwhelming sense that modern life had become so complex, dense, and stimulating that it was not possible to explain or even describe it in any easy or straightforward manner. In Germany after the WWI, this sense of complexity and instability became particularly heightened for the reasons mentioned earlier in this talk. Within this climate there emerged in circles of art and literature a tremendous suspicion toward linear narratives – stories that purported to have clear beginnings, middles, and ends, to present well developed characters, and clear, comprehensible visions of the lives they described. This kind of storytelling was thought to be deceptively easy, dangerously illusionistic. Montage, with its non-linear character, seemed an appropriate means to convey this new reality. Crowds, time: Within the stream of fluctuating images and threaded motifs are many juxtapositions of discrete shots not continuous in space and time, but made continuous in the film strip – this is done in order to make interpretive comments about city life – not just to document appearances. This technique of juxtaposing discrete, non-continuous shots is called montage, a French word that means “putting together.” It refers to the work of editing – intercutting scenes into yards/hours of footage, taking out selected pieces – and re-joining them together to create a new continuous film strip which conveys new and interpretive meanings through juxtaposition. The cinema seemed to represent and intensify what was most characteristic of the city: continuous mobility, rootlessness, nervousness, loss of concentration, and the resulting relativity and meaninglessness of traditional values. It is important to remember that cinema was in this period still relatively new – in its third decade or so. Feature-length films were even newer. There was in general during this period an energetic, charged, and abundant discussion about various aspects of the cinema: Was it an art, or was it simply mass culture? Did it have any critical, or intellectual potential or was it pure, mind-numbing entertainment? What were its psychological effects upon individuals and crowds? What was the effect of social mixing – classes and sexes – in darkened theaters? The affinity between urban experience and film (its technology and the experience of watching films): The symbiosis between urban experience (including train travel) and the experience of watching cinema – both induce in people similar mental states – is embedded in this film. In other words, not only does the film represent images of the city, sequentially and in juxtaposition, but urban experience is built into the very way the film was made. The film calls attention repeatedly to this symbiotic relationship between cinema and the city. One of the most specific segments showing this relationship is the opening arrival scene. The arrival functions as a mini prelude, which introduces the viewer to a visual synopsis of the film’s central themes. The frame of the opening shot is filled with a plane of rippling water. The camera starts moving more rapidly. The speed of the flowing gradually accelerates. In a rapid dissolve cut the shot of the water is first overlaid, then replaced by a shot of two hand-made (painted or collaged) surfaces of thin black and white horizontal bands, laid one on top of the other. They move up and down the screen, creating an effect that mimes the rippling undulations, transparency, and depth of the watery surface. Seconds later a large white circle and rectangle appear and are made to move up and down through the bands in accelerating half circular motions. Then, several white bands separate from the frame and arc downward from opposing upper corners. They are echoed by a rapid cut to a photographic shot of two train signals slicing down the screen, signaling the entrance of the train, which we then see hurtling towards us into Berlin. In these first seconds of the introduction Ruttmann makes a statement about two thematic relationships: 1. He tells us about the status of film – what film/his film is: it is both a photographic register of the physical world – documentary as such, but also a construct, an artifice. He does this in no uncertain terms by reproducing filmed forms with hand-made abstracted ones. He is also making connections between train travel, film watching, and film viewing – linking them both through tempo, technological construction and disorientation: The white bars, which mimic the water, are transformed into two arcing bands, which rhyme with the train signals, but which also invoke the clapboard on a movie set that marks the beginning of a new take. In a few seconds Ruttmann establishes a visual connection between train travel into the city (two icons of industrialization) and the cinema – another technological icon of modernity. As the segment progresses, so does Ruttmann continue to underscore the relationship between film (making and viewing) and train travel: he positions the camera inside the train, identifying the vision of the passenger with that of the spectator – both have to contend with the effect of moving images: change, disorientation, instability of the visual world, and even erasure when the speed of the technology gets too high. Notice how he takes the viewer/passenger through varying degrees of visual clarity, which all depend upon technological speed. Berlin, city of migrants and
immigrants: Another argument, first made by
Anton Kaes, Professor of German and Film at UC Berkeley,
takes us back to the passenger on the train at the beginning
of the film, who disembarks and through whose eyes we
experience a day in Berlin.* He cites the critique of
Siegfried Kracauer:
Karacuaer’s insistence that montage is only meaningful when used to make an incisive political statement about city life makes an assumption – that the makers and viewers have spent time in the city, and have the kind of lived experience that makes interpretation possible. But there were in Berlin at this time vast numbers of inhabitants, primarily migrants and immigrants, who were too new to the city to have acquired this kind of experience. Finally, insofar as this film constantly draws attention to the historical bond between cinema, urbanization, and modernity, Kaes points out, that film, too, has a structural affinity to the itinerant mode of the migrant. It easily transgresses national borders and confounds traditional coordinates of space and time; its very constitution mirrors an unsettled and unstable state of existence that has become the signature of our age. Film’s materiality is elusive and intangible. Film is innately nomadic. Time: It took three cinematographers over a year to photograph the film. Most of it was shot using movie cameras concealed in vans and suitcases to get “realistic”/candid effects. (A special jazz score with a seventy-five-piece orchestra was commissioned for the film, and the film was edited to accompany the music. Unfortunately the score has been lost.). This year’s footage was compressed into 62 minutes. This is compression of time holds true for most, if not all, films – but in this film the compression of time that editing involves relates to its commentary on life in the modern city. The film calls attention to the fact and controlling impact of regulated and synchronized time in modern Western life. For instance, each of the five segments begins with a view of a clock that marks the time of day during which the filmed events occur. The clocks function as an orienting device which punctuate a stream of assaultive impressions with the grounding force of knowing what time it is.
*Anton Kaes, "Leaving Home: Film, Migration,
and the Urban Experience,"New German Critique, No. 74 (Spring-Summer
1998).
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Vol. 8 Issue 1 Winter 2008 |
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During
the mid-twenties in Europe people were intensely interested
in urban spaces and their effects on city dwellers. This
was a long-standing interest that dated back at least to
the beginning of nineteenth century and persisted in this
post-war period in ways that were specific to it. One can
find this concern with urban space in numerous texts of
the time – sociology,
psychology, engineering, medicine, general cultural criticism,
and daily newspapers. It manifested itself in the visual
arts, as well, including in films of all kinds – narrative,
science fiction, documentary (e.g., Fritz Lang’s Metropolis,
Charlie Chaplin’s Modern
Times, Taxi Tangle (an American film set
in New York), Ernst Lubitsch’s The Last Laugh.)
What distinguishes Berlin, Symphony of a City from
these films is that the city it represents does not
serve as a backdrop or even a setting for a story about
people whose lives we follow. The story concerns
the City, herself, which constitutes both the film’s
subject and main actor.
Given how the film blurs the boundaries between
people and inanimate things, it is appropriate
to anthropomorphose the City into an actor.
Motion: The film spends a lot of time
showing things and people in motion. It opens with this
theme – with the train hurtling into Berlin – and continues
to show us vehicles speeding; people walking, playing
sports, and dancing; and animals trotting.