Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis
| Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis | |
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| Directed by | Walter Ruttmann |
| Written by |
Karl Freund Carl Mayer Walter Ruttmann |
| Music by | Edmund Meisel |
| Cinematography |
Robert Baberske Reimar Kuntze László Schäffer Karl Freund |
| Edited by | Walter Ruttmann |
| Distributed by |
Fox Film Corporation (US) Fox Europa (Europe) |
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Release date
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Running time
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65 minutes |
| Country | Weimar Republic |
| Language | Silent film |
Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (German: Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt) is a 1927 German film directed by Walter Ruttmann, co-written by Carl Mayer and Karl Freund.
The film is an example of the city symphony film genre. A musical score for an orchestra to accompany the silent film was written by Edmund Meisel. As a "city symphony" film, it portrays the life of a city, mainly through visual impressions in a semi-documentary style, without the narrative content of more mainstream films, though the sequencing of events can imply a kind of loose theme or impression of the city's daily life.
Other noted examples of the genre include Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand's Manhatta (1921), Alberto Cavalcanti's Rien que les heures (1926), Andre Sauvage's Etudes sur Paris (1928), Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera (1929), Adalberto Kemeny's São Paulo, Sinfonia da Metrópole (1929) and Alexandr Hackenschmied's Bezúčelná procházka (1930).
This film represented a sort of break from Ruttmann's earlier "Absolute films" which were abstract. Some of Vertov's earlier films have been cited as influential on Ruttmann's approach to this film, and it seems the filmmakers mutually inspired one another, as there exist many parallels between this film and the later Man With a Movie Camera.
The film displays the filmmaker's knowledge of Soviet montage theory. Some socialist political sympathies, or identification with the underclass can be inferred from a few of the edits in the film, though critics have suggested that either Ruttmann avoided a strong position, or else he pursued his aesthetic interests to the extent that they diminished the potential for political content. Ruttmann's own description of the film suggests that his motives were predominantly aesthetic: "Since I began in the cinema, I had the idea of making something out of life, of creating a symphonic film out of the millions of energies that comprise the life of a big city."
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Wikipedia