Initial Release Date: September 23rd, 1927

Also Known As: Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt

Position on list (at time of viewing): 811

This film is unique among the movies that have been included on this list so far. It’s a true documentary (in that it doesn’t participate in the staging so many other period documentaries admit) about life in Berlin in the mid-1920s, referred to as a ‘city-symphony.’ This was actually a subgenre of documentary film that flourished in the 20s and 30s, and this is the first example of it on the list (although far from the first one that was made). They tended towards abstraction, and were constructed more like a piece of music than a story (hence the name). This is an interesting entry on the list, and its abstraction may actually make it more accessible to the modern viewer in some ways.

The film has no plot to speak of, but does have a deliberate structure. Filmed over the course of an entire year, the editing process is used to make the film mirror the progress of a single day in Berlin, starting in the early morning and lasting late into the night. The film is divided into five acts (or movements) that cover early morning, the morning commute, busy street life, lunch break/heading home, and nightlife. The film uses a huge amount of montage in order to imply meaning in many scenes, sometimes with a little bit of politics blended in (workers entering a factory juxtaposed with cattle being driven into a corral, that kind of thing). For the most part, however, the film is abstract and impressionistic, attempting to capture the feel and sense of a city at work and at play. There’s a pretty big Russian influence here, and there’s pretty good historical evidence that Ruttmann and Dziga Vertov (much more on him at a later date) were big influences on each other. The director’s previous work had primarily been fully abstract art films, and he stated repeatedly that his primary goal with the movie was to achieve pure aesthetics.

Probably the most interesting thing about the movie, as noted in the headline above, is the way that it functions as a kind of time capsule. Everything in the movie is from a Berlin that was largely lost to World War 2. There are entire buildings and blocks captured in the movie that were leveled in the war and never actually reconstructed, at least not in the same format. The movie operates as a snapshot of one of the great cities of the world shortly before much of the city was lost forever to history. Because it tracks a ‘day in the life’ of the average citizen, it also serves as a fascinating representation of the trends, fashions, and processes of average people going about their lives in a way that can potentially be quite interesting to the modern viewer. If ‘slice of life’ film or television is something you enjoy, this movie may be a distinct pleasure for you for that reason alone. I particularly liked the last two acts of the film, which have a focus on recreation. Children are shown just playing and fooling around after school, and the nightlife scenes of Berlin after dark in the Roaring Twenties are exciting and kinetic. All this is to say that the movie remains pretty engaging despite not having a narrative to tie it all together.

I have no major reservations about recommending this film for viewing, but I would probably make a few qualifications to that. First, I’m not sure that the film really rewards repeated viewings. I’ve seen it twice, and I really didn’t get much more out of it the second time around. The primary reason that I rewatched the film was to see it with a different soundtrack, of which there have been many. These city-symphonies, because of their close ties with music, are frequently the subject of new or rerecorded music from contemporary music groups. I’ve seen the movie with its remastered original soundtrack by Edmund Meisel, and also with a new techno soundtrack by Berlin electronic duo Tronthaim. While this certainly presented some novelty, I’m not invested enough in the instrumental music scene to really have a full appreciation to what the different composers did with the movie, and I’m not sure that a new soundtrack is enough to justify going through it again for the casual moviegoer. There’s also a relatively narrow range of interest on this. The amateur historian or people-watcher will probably have a great time, but I’m not sure how large a demographic that is. Your time certainly wouldn’t be wasted watching it, but it’s definitely going to have limited appeal.

This film is rather difficult to score because I feel like it has a narrow but powerful appeal. For someone in the target audience, this could easily be a top-tier entry on the list, but I think that it would leave many modern viewers a little flat. Thinking of it as a visual art installation might help; it’s certainly more akin to a painting in motion than a traditional film. It also has the benefit of being only a little over an hour, so you certainly wouldn’t be wasting much time to decide for yourself if it’s your kind of thing or not. Unfortunately for this film, it will very shortly be entirely superseded by another city-symphony that achieves stratospheric status in all of film history, and I feel like that also works against Berlin‘s legacy here. Ruttmann’s masterpiece (for it certainly is the high point of his career) in many ways becomes merely a footnote or stepping stone on the way to the pinnacle of city-symphonies in a couple years’ time. While this leaves the movie somewhat out in the rain historically, I still think that few would be disappointed by at least a single time experiencing this interesting artifact of the 1920s.

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