Berlin: die Sinfonie der Großstadt

Some time back I did a post on the silent film Man With a Movie Camera. Jacqueline Stewart followed it up on Silent Sunday Nights with a movie that has a similar theme, but actually came a few years before: Berlin, Symphony of a Great City. I eventually watched it and left this post in the unscheduled drafts, since at the time I wrote it it was still a bit too close to having watched Man With a Movie Camera and I had not too far in the past done posts on a couple of other German movies.

Berlin, Symphonie of a Great City is similar to Man With a Movie Camera, but not quite as stylized. The movie looks at the city of Berlin as it was during the time of filming in 1927. This is noteworthy because it's smack dab in the middle of Weimar Germany, before the Nazis took over and completely changed German film culture (Karl Freund, who did the cinematography, was one of many people in the German-langauge film industry who fled Nazi Germany). It's obviously also well before World War II, which led to the bombings which destroyed a whole lot of Germany, so the movie can be seen as a bit of a document or time capsule of Berlin as it was in 1927.

There's no real plot to this movie, and also no characters or dialogue. The movie more or less looks at Berlin as it might have been over the course of a day, except that of course the action was not filmed in one day. That is to say, the movie is structured in five acts, with the only title cards announcing the beginning and end of each act, starting in the morning and going through the night. So, the opening act begins with a train coming in to one of Berlin's railroad stations early in the morning, at a time when most of the city is still asleep, although the early birds are just beginning to wake up. The movie then goes on with the start of the workday, lunch, mid-afternoon, and a final act set after dark.

It's a bit tough to say how much of the action is spontaneous and how much of it might have been set up, although I have a feeling at least some of it was not scripted. The homeless people who are depicted in one scene seem fairly real to me. It's also always possible that the cameramen stood in one spot for a while and only filmed when something interesting was happening, or else knew what interesting things were going to happen (eg. the funeral procession) and make a point to film that.

Since the movie was filmed a few years before Man With a Movie Camera, it's unsurprising that it's not quite as technically radical as the Soviet film. That, and the fact that Dziga Vertov was much more open about his desire to be experimental than Walter Ruttmann who directed Berlin, Symphony of a Great City was. As a result, this one can look a bit old-fashioned at times.

However, Berlin, Symphony of a Great City is still quite good technically, while as a piece of cinematic history it's even better.