crew
- Walter Ruttmann
- Director
- editor rating
-
4.5
- user rating
- genres
- sub-genres
- category
- Documentary
- directed by
- countries
- Germany
- released
- 1927
- run time
- 70 min.
(1927)
4.5
Tom Wiener
Poised between the devastating years immediately following World War I and the beginning of the Third Reich, Berlin appears here to be a thriving, bustling metropolis with few problems. There is one shot of man picking up a discarded cigarette from the street, another of a woman and boy picking through a trash heap, but that's the extent of any suggestions of poverty or need in this film. Director Walter Ruttmann is out to celebrate the varieties of urban experience and architecture by combining sound (music only) with image, but the film is abstract, more of an artistic experiment than a historical document. Ruttmann concentrates more on the generic aspects of Berlin that could exist nearly anywhere: wires, bridge girders, crowds of people (at one point interspersed with a shot of a herd of cattle). Individual faces and human interaction are almost non-existent, and the film suggests that Berlin's citizens are cogs in the giant machine that is a modern industrial city. This is a film about the possibilities of film more than about the specifics of Berlin, although, for example, lunchtime shots of restaurant patrons wolfing down sausages and sauerkraut do offer some identifying marks. It's also mostly a film about exteriors and street scenes rather than intimate interiors that wouldn't fit the grand accompanying music. Ruttmann has been correctly lauded for his rhythmic editing, but for an abstract film that celebrates inanimate objects as well as movement, it's hard to top Dziga Vertov's The Man With a Movie Camera, released two years after this film.
cast-crew for Berlin: Symphony of a Great City on AllMovie
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927)
