Berlin, Symphony of a Great City

1. Berlin, Symphony of a Great City Sheri Lin Vivian Liao Claire Yang

2. 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/

3. 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.

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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/103-0903717-2431025?n=130&tagActionCode=internetmoviedat

9. 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

10. http://ruavista.com/berlin.htm

11. II • As the clock shows 8 a.m., business begins its day, filing cabinets open, hands lift telephones- we 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

12. http://ruavista.com/berlin.htm

13. 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

14. http://ruavista.com/berlin.htm

15. 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

16. http://ruavista.com/berlin.htm

17. 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

18. http://ruavista.com/berlin.htm

19. 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)

20. 2. things don’t fit in… • marriage and death (a hearse) • the woman committing suicide (roller coaster, dancing)

21. 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

22. 4. City is an organism • Operators • Products are used by people → men and machines are interdependent

23. 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

24. 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

25. Review II- Uncanny SpacesP28-P29 • According to Samuel Weber, the perception of lack- that is, the wound of castration understood as a general sign of human imperfection- causes 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 film-that 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

26. 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

27. 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

28. City’s anthropomorphization←→Instrumentalization of people http://ruavista.com/berlin.htm

29. 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

30. Query Why does the film juxtapose contrasting things together? • when people have lunch • entertainment • Jewelry and beggar

31. Group Members

32. 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/103-0903717-2431025?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