city of ghosts
by
Douglas Messerli
Karl
Freund, Carl Mayer, and Walter Ruttmann (writters), Walter Ruttmann (director) Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis) /
1927, USA 1928 / I attending the screening with Deborah Meadows at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, in connection with their show New Objectivity.
In
the tradition of “city symphony” films such as Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s
Manhatta (1921), Alberto Cavalcanti’s
Rien que les heures (1926), Dziga
Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929),
Adalberto Kemeny’s São Paulo, Sinfonia de
Metrópole (1929) and several other such works, Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis takes
us through a day of that great city in a series of unconnected events that
presumably emblematize life of the metropolis. Ruttmann’s work is particularly
interesting in that it reveals a Berlin that only a few years later, after
Hitler’s Germany became involved in World War II, would no longer exist, with
about 30% of the former city leveled by Allied bombings.
Indeed the film begins with what might
almost be described as one of its heroes, a train puffing across the
countryside as it speeds early in the morning into the Berlin station. The city
it portrays in the bleak gray dawn is a nearly desolate one, a city shuttered
and closed, its vast 19th century brick and stone edifices almost
suggesting that we have arrived in some fantastical outland, from which human
life has been obliterated. The ghost of the past is expressed through leaves
and paper blowing out of the corners into the empty streets. Berlin, in short, begins as a rather
grim affair.
Before long, however, a few gates are
opened, maids and nurses, sweeping up around their workspaces or going about
their way for early shopping, appear. More trains arrive, bringing with them
workers who exit en masse to find
their ways to what appear as derelict work houses (some appearing to be as
desolate as the now-abandoned factories in the badlands of the New Jersey
suburbs of New York).
Soon after, the metal covers over small
shops are pulled up, blinds are raised in apartment complexes, windows opened.
What begins as avenues filled with horse-drawn carts soon become vast
thoroughfares filled with another of Ruttmann’s unspoken heroes, streetcars.
Cars come out of unseen driveways and mix with the flow. Factories start up
their vast mechanical creations, producing light bulbs, sheets of metal, bottles
of milk, and piles of bread loaves.
Indeed, one of the film’s charms is the
kind of quaintness of its gestures, featuring stuffed animals and wound-up tin
and plastic creatures advertising various products and purveyor’s, while presenting
us with visages of vast signage the like of which today exists, perhaps, only
in New York’s Times Square. Trains puff in an out of town within inches of
apartment windows. Children play among horse manure and mud.
Predictably, the wail of a siren
signifies lunch, as thousands of adults pour from offices and homes, rushing to
street-side stands for the German favorite of Frankfurters and grilled sausages
or pushing into swanky restaurants where, again they dine on platters of
sausage or order up highly decorated dishes that soon after will, like the many
bedding-down animals Ruttmann interpolates between his city frames, put them to
sleep. Some children are seen dining on the slops.
The impatient tap of a dining customer’s
spoon against his coffee cup calls all back to work, as Ruttmann’s screen once
again goes into a literal whirl (one of his favorite devices being the spinning
wheel of the hypnotist). A montage of newspaper headlines reading “Mord”
(murder), “Börse (market), “Krise” (crisis), “Heirat” (marriage), and “Geld”
(money) punctuates this 4th act of the film, as the director hurries
his city into a literal storm, with the wind rising and leaves scurrying across
the suddenly-wet streets. Department store doors revolve before our faces and
we are taken on a roller coaster ride, as a woman clings to the edge of a
bridge before throwing her body into the river below it, a mass of people
gathering to speculate on the cause of her suicide.
For the final act of his visual symphony,
Ruttmann takes us into the dark night of wet streets which beautifully reflect
the massive neon signs of restaurants, night clubs, theaters, and other evening
pleasures. In and out we speed with Ruttmann’s
camera into
light and grand opera companies, bars, burlesque shows, and variety
presentations of jugglers and trapeze artists. For a second we enter a film
palace to observe the lower portion of a film image we immediately recognize as
Charlie Chaplin.
Dancers come together and part. Women
flirt, are picked up, and taken to grand hotels, the participants ignoring a
boy beggar. In some bars men stand about as if waiting for the arrival of
women, in other beer halls men and women sing, roulette wheels are spun, and,
finally, the whole screen goes into a spin ending with fireworks and the movie’s
close. Nowhere in Ruttmann’s Berlin are
the numerous gay and lesbian bars or the late-evening and night heterosexual or
homosexual prostitutes and boy pick-ups! Ruttmann’s Berlin may be a bit wild,
but it is never truly perverse—in part because it doesn’t really deal with the
real denizens of the metropolis it claims be revealing, presenting all figures,
rather, as types. Only his children have encounters, and those, as I’ve noted,
are often abrasive and foreboding. These were the children, after all, of
Hitler’s Jungen bund.
Although throughout this film there is
often a kind of exciting rhythm of image, movement, and gesture, on the whole,
Ruttmann’s 24-hour travelogue is not a very endearing one.
Los Angeles,
October 16, 2015
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