city of
ghosts
by Douglas Messerli
Karl Freund, Carl Mayer, and Walter
Ruttmann (screenwriters), Walter Ruttmann (director) Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis) / 1927, USA 1928
In the tradition of “city symphony”
films such as Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1921), Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926), Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929),
Adalberto Kemeny’s São Paulo, Sinfonia de
Metrópole (1929), and several other such works, Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis takes
us through a day of that great city in a series of unconnected events that
presumably emblematize life of the metropolis.
Ruttmann’s work is particularly interesting in that it reveals a Berlin
that only a few years later, after Hitler’s Germany became involved in World
War II, would no longer exist, with about 30% of the former city leveled by
Allied bombings.
Yet Ruttmann’s work, unlike some of the others I named above, seems far
from truly revelatory. While, for example, Vertov’s Kiev, filmed a year later,
is a work literally heaving with human life and—because it is so clearly
centered on its director hefting his camera into the most unlikely of
situations—is a fairly comical work, Ruttmann’s city “celebration” seems a
pretty dour affair, with few truly human interactions.
The film begins with what might almost be described as one of its
heroes, a train puffing across the countryside as it speeds early in the
morning into the Berlin station. The city it portrays in the bleak gray dawn is
a nearly desolate one, a city shuttered and closed, its vast 19th century brick
and stone edifices almost suggesting that we have arrived in some fantastical
outland from which human life has been obliterated. The ghost of the past is
expressed through leaves and paper blowing out of the corners into the empty
streets. Berlin, in short, begins as
a rather grim affair.
Before long, however, a few gates are opened, maids and nurses sweeping
up around their workspaces or going about their way for early shopping appear.
More trains arrive, bringing with them workers who exit en masse to find their ways to what appear as derelict work houses
(some appearing to be as desolate as the now-abandoned factories in the
badlands of the New Jersey suburbs of New York).
The workers, who occasionally greet one another, for the most part walk
forward somewhat like walking ghosts, at one point the camera catching a mass
of workers rising up from the subway who remind one of the travelers of
“certain half-deserted streets” of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of Alfred
Prufrock.”
Soon after, the metal covers over small shops are pulled up, blinds are
raised in apartment complexes, windows opened. What begins as avenues filled
with horse-drawn carts soon become vast thoroughfares filled with another of
Ruttmann’s unspoken heroes, streetcars. Cars come out of unseen driveways and mix with the
flow. Factories start up their vast mechanical creations, producing light
bulbs, sheets of metal, bottles of milk, and piles of bread loaves.
Workers arrive at their offices, putting out their writing materials,
typewriters are uncovered and women, mostly, go into a mad typing frenzy;
telephones are picked up and returned to their cradles—all actions that, as my
friend Deborah Meadows whisperingly reminded me, younger people today have
never experienced.
Indeed, one of the film’s charms is the kind of quaintness of its
gestures, featuring stuffed animals and wound-up tin and plastic creatures
advertising various products and purveyors, while presenting us with visages of
vast signage the like of which today exists, perhaps, only in New York’s Times
Square. Trains puff in an out of town within inches of apartment windows.
Children play among horse manure and mud.
Like the artists of the LACMA show “New Objectivity,” Ruttmann seems
particularly interested in children, often seen punching one another, bullying
other minors, and, in some cases, kicking at other children’s baby carriages
and toys. One small girl with a baby carriage is overwhelmed by the
impossibility of taking her small body and carriage up impossibly steep steps
wherein, we must presume, she resides. The numerous children of Berlin, in short, are seldom charming or
cute, but are represented more as mean-spirited small adults, a bit like Oskar
Matzerath in Grass’ post-war classic The
Tin Drum.
Predictably, the wail of a siren signifies lunch, as thousands of adults
pour from offices and homes, rushing to street-side stands for the German
favorite of Frankfurters and grilled sausages or pushing into swanky
restaurants where again they dine on platters of sausage or order up highly
decorated dishes that soon after will, like the many bedding-down animals
Ruttmann interpolates between his city frames, put them to sleep. Some children
are seen dining on the slops.
The impatient tap of a dining customer’s spoon against his coffee cup
calls all back to work, as Ruttmann’s screen once again goes into a literal
whirl (one of his favorite devices being the spinning wheel of the hypnotist).
A montage of newspaper headlines reading “Mord” (murder), “Börse (market),
“Krise” (crisis), “Heirat” (marriage), and “Geld” (money) punctuates this 4th
act of the film, as the director hurries his city into a literal storm, with
the wind rising and leaves scurrying across the suddenly-wet streets.
Department store doors revolve before our faces and we are taken on a roller
coaster ride, as a woman clings to the edge of a bridge before throwing her
body into the river below it, a mass of people gathering to speculate on the
cause of her suicide.
Masses of children play in a lake and soon participate in skating
exhibitions, hockey games, and other athletic contests. A few couples gather
upon benches to smooch before night falls.
For the final act of his visual symphony, Ruttmann takes us into the
dark night of wet streets which beautifully reflect the massive neon signs of
restaurants, night clubs, theaters, and other evening pleasures. In and out we
speed with Ruttmann’s camera into light and grand opera companies, bars,
burlesque shows, and variety of presentations of jugglers and trapeze artists.
For a second we enter a film palace to observe the lower portion of a film
image we immediately recognize as Charlie Chaplin.
Dancers come together and part. Women flirt, are picked up, and taken to
grand hotels, the participants ignoring a boy beggar. In some bars men stand
about as if waiting for the arrival of women, in other beer halls men and women
sing, roulette wheels are spun, and, finally, the whole screen goes into a spin
ending with fireworks and the movie’s close. Nowhere in Ruttmann’s Berlin are the numerous gay and lesbian
bars or the late-evening and night heterosexual or homosexual prostitutes and
boy pick-ups! Ruttmann’s Berlin may be a bit wild, but it is never truly
perverse—in part because it doesn’t really deal with the real denizens of the
metropolis it claims be revealing, presenting all figures, rather, as types.
Only his children have encounters, and those, as I’ve noted, are often abrasive
and foreboding. These were the children, after all, of Hitler’s Jungen bund.
Although throughout this film there is often a kind of exciting rhythm
of image, movement, and gesture, on the whole, Ruttmann’s 24-hour travelogue is
not a very endearing one.
Los Angeles, October 16, 2015
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2015).
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