Some documentaries not only age like wine, but actual passage of time makes them more valuable than in time when they are made. They provide window into distant past, that would be sometimes unreachable and unfathomable through other media. Few documentaries serve this purpose as well as Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, 1927 silent film directed by Walter Ruttman.
The film tries to capture a day in life of the German capital through various scenes depicting its inhabitants engaging in their everyday activities. It is divided in five acts. First act begins with train arriving from countryside to Berlin’s central station and then shows empty streets in early morning that slowly begin to fill with people. Second act shows how factories, offices and shops begin to work. Third act shows intense activity on the streets, including parades, political protests and even a physical altercation. Fourth act begins with the lunch break and continues with people leaving work and begin to relax. Fifth act is dedicated to Berlin’s night life that includes restaurants, clubs, theatres and cinemas.
Ruttman was one of the most distinguished representatives of experimental and avant guard cinema in Weimar Germany. Berlin was his first feature and opportunity to apply the concept of a film in which a city, rather than individual, is a protagonist. Ruttman achieves that by treating Berliners as cogs in huge magnificent machine but displays both wonderful and terrifying aspects of early 20th Century civilisation and technology. Ruttman does so by very clever editing, using material that he was shooting on Berlin streets and various other location for almost a year. He strives for authenticity and doesn’t shy away from some potentially problematic images. There is a glimpse of social commentary that could be described as leftist – shots of workers entering factory are intercut with shots of cattle being brought to slaughter while the shots of upper class Berliners enjoying expensive meals in restaurants are intercut with the poor on the streets.
Berlin was greeted well by critics which were, at the time, enthusiastic about avant guard cinema. Although not the first film to apply similar concept, it launched a specific documentary subgenre known as “city symphony”. Reputation of Ruttman’s film, however, suffered in subsequent years. The first reason was Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Camera made two years later, which used similar concept, although in a more extreme and playful manner, with wider variety of experimental filming techniques. Another was Ruttman’s subsequent career in Nazi Germany where he, despite being distrusted by regime over his Weimar-era pacifism, continued to work and even assisted Leni Riefenstahl with her controversial documentary Triumph of the Will.
Ruttman died in 1941, while Nazi regime was still in control, and didn’t live to see circumstances that would make his work valuable. Today Berlin is less interesting to cinephiles and film scholars and more to historians, because its footage represents precious time capsule of technology, fashion, socioeconomic conditions, customs and popular culture of Weimar Germany. More importantly, it features Anhalter Banhof station and Hotel Excelsior, two of city’s landmarks that were destroyed during Second World War. Because of that, Ruttman’s film served as valuable template for future film makers trying to recreate the era, with television series Babylon Berlin being one of the more recent examples.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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