Berlin, Symphony of a Great City

Alexander Graf’s essay on city symphony films makes one central claim: that the main innovation in these films is not their use of montage, but instead it is their use of montage to explore the experience of the city that is innovative. His most extended reference point for this is the sociologist Georg Simmel and in particular the essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life”. I thought it would be interesting to think about what Graf takes from Simmel’s essay and how these ideas are apparent in Ruttmann’s Berlin.

Berlin begins not with crowds of people living in close proximity, but with an image of a rising sun, followed by a train travelling into the city from the countryside. Still, the opening of the film with the opening of a day is also an opening on the temporal and spatial order of capitalism. No living person is seen in the first five minutes of the film as the city “wakes up”, but the streets and buildings are not empty of meaning. They are the framework within which people and money will circulate, and they create the constraints and possibilities of life there. Shots of empty factories and sewers are juxtaposed with images of mannequins in a store window and advertising posters (there are many parallels to Vertov here, and many differences, but that comparison would be another post). Ruttmann’s emphasis here is also that of Simmel’s essay, which explores the way that money, as well as city spaces and temporal arrangements, order the experience of urban life.

Simmel argues that

The relationships and affairs of the typical metropolitan usually are so varied and complex that without the strictest punctuality in promises and services the whole structure would break down into an inextricable chaos. Above all, this necessity is brought about by the aggregation of so many people with such differentiated interests, who must integrate their relations and activities into a highly complex organism. If all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways, even if only by one hour, all economic life and communication of the city would be disrupted for a long time.

Ruttman’s representations of machines in Berlin parallel his representations of the residents of the city. Scattered throughout the film are shots of factories and machinery, sometimes showing their overall function but often limiting the view to a close-up shot of a turning wheel or another isolated mechanical process, without any indication of what exactly is being done. Similarly, when people appear in the city we see their activities but it is rarely suggested that we know their precise purpose. Still, as people begin to populate the city they are clearly organised by money and time, and by a class framework closely related to these influences. There is a distinction between the ordinary citizens of the city who ride trains and buses and the wealthy men who ride in chauffeured cars, as well as those who rise early or stay late to work and those who spend the day and the following night at leisure, on the street and in cafes, restaurants, and theatres. As Graf suggests, the editorial strategies here do offer comparison as well as juxtaposition. People of various distinct classes and professions go about their business, and as the day progresses during Act 3 Ruttmann focuses almost exclusively on the actual people in the city and not their surroundings.

A lot of writing on modernism stresses its changed relationships to time and space but Simmel’s version, unlike Graf’s, doesn’t prioritise time over space. Clocks and time organise the day in Berlin, as do the rigors of labouring life. But this is a structuring by space as well as time. Recurring motifs like the train and the swirling circle or spiral (of typewriter keys or the chaotic camera viewing the city from a rollercoaster ride) set out and distort time and space at once.

For Graf, the city symphonies are caught between “documentary” and an “unstable point of view” needed to document city life (89). They also mark a shift from documenting the city to documenting experience of the city (85). But experience is exactly what the filmic experiments of Berlin struggle to capture. People appear as functions—workers or school students or patrons—as cogs in the machine of city life, but these are only cryptic hints at what their life might be. These lives are in the gaps left by the editing process or what Graf calls “the interval” after Vertov. Ruttmann’s film is thus not just an image of the city but a theory of urban experience. This can be seen again in the swirling keys of the typewriter, as Act 2 comes to an end and the workday begins, causing individual activities to blur together for the viewer. Graf sees the city symphonies as stressing one of Simmel's main points--the fast-paced experience of city life that strips human beings of extended contact with others and gives rise, defensively, to urbane individualism. But to find this in Ruttmann's film he must stress internal references to a comparitively minor scene in which one woman commits suicide, centring it as a dramatic moment of individual refusal.