Berlin,
Symphony of a Great City
Sheri Lin
Vivian Liao
Claire Yang
Introduction
• IMDB User Rating: 8.4/10
• A guess at the meaning of the subtitle
“Symphony”
– Although we see real people and situations, the
brilliant editing constantly keeps the film abstract: the
situation and the people in a shot are not important.
What’s important is the juxtaposition to other shots: is
the composition varied enough? Thus we see a filmic
composition (in stead of a musical one) and the
subtitle Symphony is just.
http://imdb.com/title/tt0017668/
•
Documentary?
Genre: Documentary
– Argument scene. Considering one of the camera angles
(probably from a 2nd floor window), the argument must have
been staged at the exact spot where this camera could catch it,
and the crowd's reaction, from above, which hardly suggests a
serendipitous event.
– The drowning lady. How could he make an extreme close-up
with a hidden camera in such a brilliant angle? (By the way: if
she really tried to commit suicide, was Freund himself not only
one of the gaping bystanders without doing anything to save
her?)
http://imdb.com/title/tt0017668/
• John Grierson
– created nothing
– violated the first principles of documentary by showing nothing of
importance but images.
What’s it about?
• It is not a film about the life of Berliners, it
is Berlin seen as a living mechanism.
http://imdb.com/title/tt0017668/
• It marked a turning point in the filmic
representation of the city in its
“transposition of observation, in the
transition from the documentation of an
object to the documentation of an
experience.”
RUTTMANN’S BERLIN: FILMING IN A “HOLLOW SPACE”?
By Martin Gaughan
Critics
• Berlin is criticized on grounds of such replication and
fascination, for being lured by the appearance of Berlin’s
modernity, unconcerned with its more complex workings, for
presenting an unmotivated series of images, simply mirroring
the city.
• 3 categories of critical reception of Berlin:
– Praise its articulation of the real.
– Reject its inability to deal with immediate social issues.
– Siegfried Kracauer, specializing in theories of photography
and film and developing as a historical materialist rather
than a political Marxist, was more questioning of
Ruttmann’s aesthetic claims than most and somewhat
distanced from the immediate concerns of the Socialist or
Communist Party responses.
RUTTMANN’S BERLIN: FILMING IN A “HOLLOW SPACE”?
By Martin Gaughan
Director-Walter Ruttmann
• Had trained as a painter and had made purely abstract films since
1921.
• Insists on the consistent realization of the musical-rhythmic
demands of his montage practice. Immediacy of effect would be
achieved through concealed filming- Berlin’s citizens and their
behavior would be taken unawares.
• Retains the desire to construct from living material, to create a film
symphony from the million-fold actual energies of the great city
organism.
• Objective: brings the audience the pitch which allows them to
experience the city of Berlin.
• Hopes that he had allowed his audience to experience the city,
and had enabled a heightened awareness of the “tense, gripping
qualities of everyday life.”
RUTTMANN’S BERLIN: FILMING IN A “HOLLOW SPACE”?
By Martin Gaughan
Background－1920s Berlin
• The movie was made in 1927, during the period of Weimar
Republic.
• Weimar Republic: The period of German history from 1919 to
1933
• A sophisticated, innovative culture developed that was
centered around Berlin and included architecture and design
(Bauhaus), literature (Döblin), film (Lang, Metropolis)
painting(Grosz), and fashion. Berlin was the centerpiece of
European culture from about 1923-1932. It caught on fully
once the hyper-inflation and other economic problems of the
very early 1920s were brought under control by the newly
elected government.
• The heyday of Berlin began in the mid-1920s. It became the
largest industrial city of the continent. Berlin was the cultural
and intellectual center of Europe. Besides, night life was
blooming in 1920s Berlin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920s_Berlin
Plot
•
The title says it all: this is a visual symphony in five movements celebrating the
Berlin of 1927: the people, the place, the everyday details of life on the streets.
Director Walter Ruttman, an experimental filmmaker, approached cinema in
similar ways to his Russian contemporary Dziga Vertoz, mixing documentary,
abstract, and expressionist modes for a non-narrative style that captured the life
of his countrymen. But where Vertov mixed his observations with examples of the
communist dream in action, Ruttman re-creates documentary as, in his own
words, "a melody of pictures." Within the loose structure of a day in the life of the
city (with a prologue that travels from the country into the city on a barreling train),
the film takes us from dawn to dusk, observing the silent city as it awakens with a
bustle of activity, then the action builds and calms until the city settles back into
sleep. But the city is as much the architecture, the streets, and the machinery of
industry as it is people, and Ruttman weaves all these elements together to
create a portrait in montage, the poetic document of a great European city
captured in action. Held together by rhythm, movement, and theme, Ruttman
creates a documentary that is both involving and beautiful to behold. The original
score by Timothy Brock is lyrical and dramatically involving, complementing the
mood and movement marvelously. Also included is the avant-garde short , an
abstract study in animated shapes and movement.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/6305301697/ref=ase_internetmoviedat/103-09037172431025?n=130&tagActionCode=internetmoviedat
I
• An early morning express train rushes toward the city,
slowing down through its suburbs and arriving at the
Anhalter terminus. Then shots of empty streets, where a
clock shows 5 a.m. Some slight activity, night revelers
returning, a billboard sticker, then, at about 7 a.m., some
industrial workers setting off. The pace quickens, more
workers, the urban transport system and subways
becoming more crowded, visually carried by quick
cutting on movements to and from platforms, up and
down steps. Factory wheels begin to turn, close-ups of
machines and products but not workers.
RUTTMANN’S BERLIN: FILMING IN A “HOLLOW SPACE”?
By Martin Gaughan
http://ruavista.com/berlin.htm
II
• As the clock shows 8 a.m., business begins its
day, filing cabinets open, hands lift telephoneswe are introduced to the world of the white-collar
worker, a world visibly different from that of the
industrial workers seen earlier, in which the
presence of the New Woman, fashionably
dressed, is notable. Slightly later the
entrepreneurs and professionals set out from
their luxury flats or suburban villas.
RUTTMANN’S BERLIN: FILMING IN A “HOLLOW SPACE”?
By Martin Gaughan
http://ruavista.com/berlin.htm
III
• By mid-morning, Potsdamer Platz (which
in the 1920s and 30s, was the busiest and
one of the liveliest squares in Europe), the
energizing hub of Berlin’s distinctive tempo,
is in full flow. Street incidents multiply.
RUTTMANN’S BERLIN: FILMING IN A “HOLLOW SPACE”?
By Martin Gaughan
http://ruavista.com/berlin.htm
IV
• Past midday the city slows down, inhabitants eat
and rest. Then the tempo picks up again.
Production, including the printing of an evening
newspaper, starts up again. A woman commits
suicide. The end of the working day is signaled
by the reverse of its beginning: factory wheels
stop, files are closed, telephones unplugged.
Various sporting and leisure activities are
pursued.
RUTTMANN’S BERLIN: FILMING IN A “HOLLOW SPACE”?
By Martin Gaughan
http://ruavista.com/berlin.htm
V
• Darkness falls, the city is dramatically lit,
its prominent street illuminated. We enter
a cinema, see a stage show, sporting
events, a high class restaurant and a local
Kneipe. The day closes with a firework
display set against the silhouette of the
radio tower, a recently built landmark of
Berlin’s striking modernity.
RUTTMANN’S BERLIN: FILMING IN A “HOLLOW SPACE”?
By Martin Gaughan
http://ruavista.com/berlin.htm
Group Discussion
1. What are they celebrating?
 the entertainment of city life, i.e. cabaret,
sport
 the progressive technology, i.e. machinery,
the radio tower
 the education (civilization)
2. things don’t fit in…
• marriage and death (a hearse)
• the woman committing suicide (roller
coaster, dancing)
3. Humans, animals, and machinery could
get along with each other harmoniously.
• The pace of life
• Traffic
• Dancing steps are repeated as machines.
• mannequins, dummies
4. City is an organism
• Operators
• Products are used by people
→ men and machines are interdependent
Review I: Allan James Thomas
• Indeed, it seems that if there is a point being
made, it is that rich and poor are all the same in
their primal needs and desires. What it shows us
is not the contrast between the conditions of rich
and poor, but their basic similarity. For all of the
juxtapositions of rich and poor and their
respective lifestyles we find in Berlin, the
ultimate effect is not to oppose the two in a
dialectic of class struggle, but to suggest their
ultimate unity as differentiated parts unified by
their common membership of the same organic
whole, that is to say, Berlin itself.
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/00/5/berlin.html
• The problem is that the Berlin if offers us is a profoundly
historical one; by subsuming any conflict between its
opposing elements to their ultimate unity as part of the
whole, it suggests that ultimately there can be no change.
The parts that make it up can come and go, but Berlin
will always be Berlin.
• It( the film) holds us at a distance, the better to
appreciate it's intricate beauty. If we see 'history' in the
film, viewing it seventy-three years later, it is because we
see in that intricate beauty the traces of the conflict to
come which will shatter the false whole, unravel the city,
and the state, altogether; the soldiers marching the
streets in those distinctive helmets which will march
across Europe, the Jews walking freely, the children who
in 15 years or so will be herding those same Jews into
the concentration camps. We can watch it, not as a
snapshot of what has been, but as an uncanny, ghostly
foreshadowing of what will be...
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/00/5/berlin.html
•
•
•
Review II- Uncanny Spaces
P28-P29
According to Samuel Weber, the perception of lack- that is, the wound
of castration understood as a general sign of human imperfectioncauses a fundamental denial, a defense mechanism spurring the
“desire to penetrate, discover and ultimately to conserve the integrity of
perception: perceiver and perceived, the wholeness of the body, the
power of vision”
What is lost in the city films is a sense of visual control over the images
on the screen.
If it is not “us” who is controlling these images, it must be somebody
else. Indeed, the film triumphantly announce the arrival of “l’homme
machine” as the inevitable product of modernity’s attempt to see and
reveal “everything.” If follows that the alleged “lack of lack” in the filmthat is, their preoccupation with the delirious pleasure of showing and
looking-can be conceptualized as part of the defense mechanism to
which Weber alludes. Both the exclusion of self-determining historical
agents shaping history and the preoccupation with total transparency
suggest the fundamental denial that causes the uncanny to erupt
elsewhere, at some “other” place in the form of another being. This
“other” is metropolis.
UNCANNY SPACES: THE CITY IN RUTTMANN AND VERTOV
By Carsten Strathausen
Review II- Uncanny Spaces P30
• Critics’ unease with a film which celebrates
rather than condemns the loss of an objective
insight into the essence of things.
• The fusion of man and machine clearly underlies
the montage rhythm of Berlin. The ultimate
purpose is to enable the urban masses to
recognize themselves on the screen not as
particular individuals, but as organic parts of a
larger entity called metropolis.
• EX. Cross-cutting of human parts and machine
parts.
UNCANNY SPACES: THE CITY IN RUTTMANN AND VERTOV
By Carsten Strathausen
Review II- Uncanny SpacesP32
• Anthropomorphization of the city
↓↑(cyborgian complex of city life)
• Instrumentalization of people
• While Ruttmann’s celebration of the mass
ornament effaces living people by transforming
them into machines, his film, in turn, endows the
train with a human face of its own as it emerges
out of its hangar and menacingly confronts the
camera.
• Examples.
UNCANNY SPACES: THE CITY IN RUTTMANN AND VERTOV
By Carsten Strathausen
City’s anthropomorphization
←→Instrumentalization of people
http://ruavista.com/berlin.htm
Review II- Uncanny SpacesP32-33
• naturalize technology- to reconcile the conflict between
nature and culture by merging cyclical and linear
movements, static and moving imagery.
• EX: the dramatic accentuation of open, off-screen space
through traffic and people speeding across the screen in
straight lines is contrasted with closed circular forms
such as those of rotating machine, roulette tables, and
fireworks as well as the repeated presentation of the
clock and the spiral.
• Berlin introduces the metropolis itself as a form of
second nature by fusing the linear time of technological
progress with the cyclical time of nature.
UNCANNY SPACES: THE CITY IN RUTTMANN AND VERTOV
By Carsten Strathausen
Query
Why does the film juxtapose contrasting
things together?
• when people have lunch
• entertainment
• Jewelry and beggar
Group Members
Vivian
Sheri
Claire
Hollow Space?
Uncanny Spaces
IMDB
Group discussion
and report
Review1
Uncanny Spaces
IMDB
Background
Group discussion
Hollow Space?
Uncanny Spaces
PowerPoint
IMDB
Group discussion
References
http://imdb.com/title/tt0017668/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920s_Berlin
http://ruavista.com/berlin.htm
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/00/5/berlin.html
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/6305301697/ref=ase_internetmoviedat/103-09037172431025?n=130&tagActionCode=internetmoviedat
UNCANNY SPACES: THE CITY IN RUTTMANN AND VERTOV By Carsten Strathausen
RUTTMANN’S BERLIN: FILMING IN A “HOLLOW SPACE”? By Martin Gaughan