Blast from the Past— On Berlin: Symphony of a Great City
Note: This is the hundred-and-forty-third in a series of historical/critical essays examining the best in film from each year. Essentially, I am watching films from the beginning of cinematic history that interest me and/or hold some critical or cultural impact. My personal, living list of favorites is being created at Mubi, showcasing five films per year. All this being explained, what follows is an examination of my third favorite 1927 film, BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY, directed by Walter Ruttmann.
In the beginning, there were actualities. That was the basis of cinema; not narrative, not fiction, not fantasy, but the mundanities (or beauty) of everyday life. That was Louis Le Prince, that was the Lumière brothers, that was Thomas Edison, that was even Georges Méliès at the beginning. With the rise of the Kino-Eye, as described by Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov, the fusion of German New Objectivity into cinema, and the cinéma vérité documentary, a new subgenre of film also arose: the city symphony. Besides the crowning achievement of that aforementioned Vertov (although MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA [1929] may not even accurately be described as a city symphony film), BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY may be the greatest of those films.
BERLIN’s alternate translation/title, SYMPHONY OF A METROPOLIS, is indicative of the far cry it is from another key 1927 German work: METROPOLIS. That Expressionist mega-production is a phenomenal vision of an evolved city, using the latest techniques and a bold, new style to create another world. BERLIN, while still bold in its style, resides in the land of actuality, following the great city throughout the course of a day (although in reality it took a few years to produce the film). It represented a shift for its director, Walter Ruttmann, a man who started his filmic career making avant-garde animations, one of which opens up BERLIN. But part of the greatness of BERLIN is the story of its production, an innovative approach to naturalistic art that cannot be credited to Ruttmann alone. Some might say not at all.
There is a general consensus that the primary creative forces behind BERLIN are Carl Mayer, writer or co-writer of such masterpieces as THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1920), SUNRISE (1927), and THE LAST LAUGH (1924), Karl Freund, cinematographer of METROPOLIS (another connection), DRACULA (1931), and I LOVE LUCY (1951–57), and Ruttmann. Mayer and Freund may have come up with the initial premise. There is also a theory that Freund was actually the primary shooting force, working with and overseeing credited camera operators Robert Baberske, Reimar Kuntze, and László Schäffer. Freund was only credited as supervisor of photography, but the inventive nature of the film’s shoot and his own anecdotes imply a much more involved approach.
But this theory assigns to Ruttmann the role of editor, which to be clear is not an easy nor non-creative task, a truly formative one for a film of this kind, in fact. But Ruttmann’s own testimonials about shooting BERLIN would indicate he had more involvement in the “traditional” sense of a director. The stories of Ruttmann, who died long before Freund as a war photographer in 1941, might have been better checked for veracity in the post-war revival of silent film studies.
Ruttmann’s work as a war photographer was likely not wholly dispassionate. With the rise of the Nazis, so too did Ruttmann with them, working as an assistant director on Leni Riefenstahl’s TRIUMPH OF THE WILLS (1935). This has given some a somewhat dismissive or critical eye towards BERLIN, in hindsight. The film is not apolitical, nothing is, but rest assured: the film is not a fascist work, no matter what John Grierson, documentary producer (and term inventor) and film theorist, said. Not if Mayer and Freund, German Jews who emigrated to London and the United States, respectively, had anything to say about it.
But OK, why was BERLIN so brilliant and why was and is it a blast from the past? The answer lies in its simplicity. BERLIN was a callback to the actuality, redeeming the premise of cinema as described by fiction-hater Vertov. And now, it provides a beautiful look at 1920s Berlin, “the greatest cultural extravaganza that one could imagine,” as Bowie described the city in the ’70s. Its artistic merit was always present; it doesn’t come only from its status as a time capsule. As Alex Barrett, director of LONDON SYMPHONY (2017) and commentary provider on the beautiful Flicker Alley Blu-ray release of the film, puts it, perhaps the shots of contemporary city life did not hold as much excitement for its contemporary audience. But that was not all BERLIN had to offer. Rapidly cut with implications of the contradictions of modern city life, BERLIN reduces the human experience to a day and, in doing so, renders it simultaneously digestible and absolutely impossible to reckon with. Watching the film is an experience in acknowledging one’s own daily life, and that’s an enlightening experience. In what ways it’s enlightening, and how the tide of human history seems to flow up to now, is up to you.
