Walther Ruttmann's Berlin, Symphony of a City

I found Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a City way confusing. Sure I was impressed by Ruttmann’s clever evocation of how the body and mind experience the rhythms of the city through both shot composition (for example, where the stationary camera shoots through the windows of a speeding tram through which pedestrians walking at a much slower pace are visible, juxtaposing mobile and immobile, slow and fast) and editing and repetition (for example, one can almost hear the sound of the train chugging along as it travels towards Berlin due to the repetitive sequence of quick, alternating, multiple angle shots of the tracks, the landscape passing through carriage windows and the wires overhead). But it troubled me that I couldn’t work out whether this visual ‘symphony’ was meant to portray a positive or negative characterisation of urban life.

On the one hand, you have a camera that exalts in the exhilarating scale of the city, frequently shooting upwards from a low angle or downwards from high above playing on or panning and travelling to embrace the horizontal. The ordinarily mundane opening of tram depot doors becomes a slow, dramatic, ceremonial unveiling shot from a variety of angles while the synchronized spinning and pounding of machines becomes an intricate techno-ballet of intimate close-ups that infinitely gather momentum and observe the mechanical participants anthropomorphically ‘perspire’ heroically in the name of progress. Having worked all day, Berliners both rich and working class are united in their reward of freedom to use every minute of free-time to enthusiastically indulge in the seemingly endless amusements the city has to offer, from every sport under the sun to shopping (a past time upon which the city’s existence undeniably relies) to meeting socially in bars, restaurants, parks, nightclubs, theatres and cinemas.

On the other hand, the individuals we meet are completely two-dimensional not only in terms of personality depth (understandable if the city is considered the sole protagonist) but also behaviourally. Ruled by the rigid structure of the working day, Berliners swarm drone-like to and from work in a mass synchronised movement made all the more disturbing by the fact that the film was put together out of a years-worth of hidden-camera footage that seemingly revealed no diversion from routine and also by the film’s juxtaposition of adults and children doing the same activities (going to work/school, pushing prams, getting/pretending to get married etc) to highlight how the city seems to socialise us into acting in certain collective ways within it. The danger this unnaturalness presents is exposed when two men get into a fight and the crowd, distracted from their preordained paths, surges forward unpredictably and almost violently to watch. The crowd is similarly distracted when, in perhaps the film’s only internal, psychological moment, a wild-eyed woman commits suicide by jumping off a bridge into the river below as if driven to do so by the city itself given the images cut into the sequence of being on a rollercoaster that is shortly after inter-cut with a shot of a train menacingly racing towards the screen, quick successive close-ups of previously reliable arrows that disorientingly change directions and a spinning, blurred merry-go-round-like shot of the city. Furthermore, though class extremes are evident in the presence of street beggars and rich, cigar-smoking aristocrats, Ruttmann ultimately seems to suggest that humans in a city, whether well-off or disadvantaged, are no better than animals in a zoo (for example, images depicting both ends of the class spectrum eating and resting are inter-cut with a lion ripping through a piece of meat and a elephant lying down respectively).

I found that Berlin’s incoherencies are forgivable and in fact significant if you interpret the film, with the benefit of the distance or hindsight, as very much a product of the distinct, inherently contradictory context in which it was conceived: Weimar Germany. In the wake of WWI, the new, unfamiliar socio-democratic form of governance that was imposed upon Germany by the victors along with the devastatingly harsh ‘war guilt’ reparations of the Versailles Treaty left the nation in a state of uncertainty, instability and alienation. Germany’s consequent need to redefine its collective identity lead to a boom in cultural production, particularly in silent cinema, suitably characterised by different, conflicting styles and tendencies all evident in Berlin, from expressionism (the suicide scene) to the Neue Sachlichkeit or ‘new objectivity’ (the documentary aims and techniques) to Dada (use of montage). Thus, Ruttmann’s underplaying of class conflict when in reality the later years of the Weimar Republic saw painfully high inflation and unemployment, his naturalisation of the city’s compulsory foreign military presence and his valorisation of an industrialised urban space that regulates human behaviour can be understood as attempts to present a united, stable German identity.