INTRODUCTION

Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927), directed by German avant-garde film pioneer Walther Ruttmann (1887–1941), presents a typical day in Berlin from dawn until midnight. Despite the title, the film was released at the end of the silent era; it creates its own music through the pace and rhythm of the editing. From its first release the film would have been accompanied by a live accompaniment. For The Long Weekend, the film was brought right up to date with the live performance of DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid.

Why should we watch a film like Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, almost 80 years after it was made? I like to think of it as an historical document made of fragments, a touchstone for the multi-media world we inhabit today. Basically, it's an insight into the patterns of life and living in a major metropolis – Berlin in the late 1920s – but it's also a testimony of how urban life ebbs and flows in the patterns held together by cinema and editing techniques.

Walther Ruttmann made history with his 1927 masterwork opus, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, by creating a film that looked at the city from almost every angle the camera could conceive. I tend to think that in our era of ubiquitous media – of surveillance, video podcasts, and on-line streaming media – we've finally caught up to his vision. Basically Berlin: Symphony of a Great City is one of my favorite examples of urban ‘realism’. It looks at the city of Berlin at the height of the Weimar Republic, a golden era on the edge of a deep, dark time, and asks: is this the way we live now? For my remix and rescore, I was inspired as much by the original film as by current developments – from the ubiquitous placement of cameras that are always online, showing us cities from around the world, to the way people document their personal creativity through digital media's inheritance from the worlds of cinema and theatre. Antonin Artaud famously wrote that the theater would become a kind of ‘double’ of the world, a place where reality would be subsumed by projections of itself. Ruttmann made Artaud’s vision become reality. Ruttmann originally studied architecture and painting, and even worked as a graphic designer. His design background is evident in his search for form as he juxtaposes scenes from the everyday world in a collage that portrays a city from dawn until midnight. At heart, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City is a film that feels like a 24-hour vision of a metropolis that is uneasy with its first portrait.

Fritz Lang, whose film Metropolis (1927) set the tone for our vision of the future – sleek, gleaming skyscrapers, Americanised urban landscapes where everything and everyone works efficiently – is the counterpoint for Ruttmann’s song of a city. Berlin was released in 1927 as well, and it created a different vision of a present-tense metropolis. The ‘Symphony’ rides a different rhythm than the Metropolis – one is ‘fact,’ the other is ‘fiction.’ But they both present conflicting visions of the present and the future of German cinema, and anticipate later experimental films like Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1983) or Orson Welles’s F for Fake (1974). The blur between what’s presented and what’s collaged, is what makes the film so appealing.

Ruttmann's film career began in the early 1920s with the production of his hand-coloured first abstract short films, Opus I (1921) and Opus II (1923). Both films anticipate the idea of cinematic collage, and how we can think of the urban landscape as a dense, highly contested realm of public and private visions of urban space. My remix looks at these issues from the viewpoint of a contemporary digital media landscape where software has blurred the distinctions between art, life, and the everyday realm of living in a media saturated landscape. Where Ruttmann made his film as a response to cinema, digital media guides the same impulse today. Most major cities have cameras of famous intersections that are permanently online, and of course Google Maps updates the same kind of vision—but on a global scale. Ruttman's films were experiments with new forms of film expression, and my remix pays homage to how DJ culture – urban music – evolved as the soundtrack to a new way of looking at the city

The dialogue between film and music for Ruttmann – and first and foremost in Symphony of a City – is a synthesis. It is essentially a ‘visual’ orchestral work in five movements celebrating the Berlin of 1927: the people, the place, the everyday details of life on the streets. Ruttmann's style of cinema is similar to his Russian contemporary, Dziga Vertov. By mixing documentary, abstract, and expressionist modes for a non-narrative style that captured the life of his fellow citizens, he wanted to capture all aspects of a city at the beginning of the age of cinema. But where Vertov mixed his observations with examples of the communist dream in action, Ruttman re-creates documentary as, in his own words, ‘a melody of pictures’.

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City starts with an uneasy tension between context and content: the film's framework is governed by time: it portrays the life of the metropolis from morning until midnight. In the beginning, you feel the atmosphere of the city in the form of its slow pace as dawn transforms darkness into light; a long-distance rush-hour train moves through the suburbs, its path making you aware of the proximity of the city as it moves rapidly towards its destination. The camera shots of the journey, motion filmed with what was, at the time, an amazing array of intuitive technical skills, symbolises urban density without getting caught up with the obvious issues rushing towards the metropolis. The final station, the dawn of light at the terminal: Berlin! The camera's progress continues and gradually the city awakens.

The camera, for Ruttman, is a kind of notepad. He wanted to make a landscape of poetry derived from the way the camera broke the landscape's continuity into a thousand shards of memory. The film progresses, evolves, and transcends time, from dawn to dusk. Berlin: Symphony of a Great City presents an eternal present, where time passes as a camera's clockwork mechanism.

— Paul D Miller

Part of UBS Openings: The Long Weekend - Futurist Friday

See Collection Display: States of Flux

  Music & Performance