Surprisingly loud for a film without sound

Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City is a portrait of Germany’s city, from ‘dawn ‘til dusk’, decades before it was divided into two, or characterised by the existence or the memory of a wall. The opening shots of the city, following the train sequence, display an empty shell of a city, of buildings and places that, although formative of a city’s history and identity, cannot be significant without the human interactions and events they shelter and shadow. Here, Berlin is a ghost city, perhaps Ruttman’s testimony to the effects of the First World War, but also a haunting prediction of the city’s fate during and after World War Two. Here, we see more than hear the silence, the length of the cuts underlining the slow movement, with Ruttman’s images of empty streets, closed blinds and solitary walks creating a sequence which mirrors a symphony’s ‘adagio’ after a fast paced, train packed ‘sonata’. The constant walking, sweeping, and everyday movement such as washing dishes and slicing food all work to create a rhythmic sequence interspersed with moments of tension and suspense, such as the fight and the suicide. We are familiar enough today with the sights and sounds to be able produce in our minds exactly what the sequence of shots would sound like, even if we have not heard these sounds directly, in real life. For instance, the sounds of prancing horse hooves and the taps and chimes of a typewriter are only familiar to me because I have so often heard them reproduced in various films. Therefore, I can assign each shot and every image a sound, or an absence of sound, which makes the viewing all the more exciting, for me at least, being forced to use your imagination in this way, without even music attempting to sway your emotions or control your impulses. The various shots are able to truly produce a soundless symphony, with every movement creating a rhythmic beat, even an elephant’s tail swishing back and forth mimicking the movement of a metronome. The lack of sound or music forces us to really focus on what the screen presents, the fractional seconds which would otherwise go unnoticed, and those “unconscious optics” which the camera seeks to reveal.[1] In this way, I can see how a film like this would appeal to people watching it at the time, whereas for people watching it today, it is not so much entertainment or even social commentary as it is historically and contextually significant. The film finally ends with a shot of a rotating searchlight, adhering with the ‘dawn ‘til dusk’ motif, but also reminiscent of how many movies begin today, with the logo for film production giant ‘Twentieth Century Fox’, established in the 1930s. The rush resembles a mad throng, which eventually leads to a fight, and even a suicide. Whereas Kracauer criticized the film for being devoid of social content[2], I think it adequately depicts the many facets of life for those of differing classes and occupations, and is certainly a portrait of Klaus Mann’s recollection of the era: “Within the city, millions of underfed, corrupt, sex-starved and pleasure-hungry men and women writhe and totter in a jazz-induced delirium. Dance had become a mania, an obsession, a cult...War cripples and profiteers, film-stars and prostitutes, former monarchs (with princely pensions) and retired schoolmasters (with no pension at all) – all twist and turn in gruesome euphoria”.[3] It is not difficult to see the blatant contrast that Ruttman makes between the wealthy and the poor, including a shot of a beggar woman followed by the retrieval of an expensive necklace from a shop window, effectively contrasting destitution with opulence. And although sex does not make an explicit appearance, it is still alluded to, through the lingerie bearing mannequins and also after the dance sequences, where men and women enter taxis, only for Ruttman to cut to a scene of a flashing neon sign reading ‘Hotel’. A shot of a woman’s skirts flying up with the wind is about as daring as it gets, this scene begging comparison to Marilyn Monroe’s iconic sequence in ‘The Seven Year Itch’ (1955). Furthermore, whereas Kracauer comments that the montage aesthetic gives rise to the mechanical processes of society, I’m with Walter Benjamin in saying that camera close-ups often capture the “hidden details of familiar objects”, and that the features of our urban landscape, our factories and offices, seem to have “locked us up hopelessly”.[4] If it was Ruttman’s intention to make this kind of a comment about urbanisation and industrialisation, he could not have been more accurate, and now, more than eighty years later, we are still struggling to come to terms with an increasingly modernised, fast- paced and noisy city.

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[1] Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Technology and culture, the film reader, ed. Andrew Utterson, (Routledge: London, 2005), p. 117

[2] Alexander Graf, ‘Paris – Berlin – Moscow: On the Montage Aesthetic of the City Symphony Films of the 1920s’, in Avant-Garde Film, eds. Alexander Graf and Dietrich Scheunemann, p. 87

[3] Michael Simmons, Berlin, the dispossessed city, (Hamish Hamilton: London, 1988), p. 65

[4] Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, p. 116