Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Les Productions Fox Europa, Deutsche Vereins-Film, 1927)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Sunday night, after the Grammy Awards, I flipped to the Turner Classic Movies channel wondering if there would be something interesting on the “Silent Sunday Showcase,” a program featuring silent movies every Sunday night at 9 p.m. Pacific time (which, ironically given the title, translates to midnight on Monday Eastern time). I got more than I bargained for: two movies I’d heard of for decades but had never actually seen, plus one I’d never even heard of before. The longest of the three – a five-reeler that counts under silent running speed as feature length (silent films were shot at 16 frames a second, though shortly before their end they sped up the cameras to 20; when sound came in, they sped up to 24 frames a second because the faster speed meant better recording quality) – and also the best was Walther Ruttmann’s 1927 film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. It’s somewhat arbitrarily divided into five “acts,” each representing one reel of the finished film, and other German films of the period – including Fritz Lang’s two-part Die Nibelungen, for which his writer and then-wife Thea von Harbou designated each reel as a “canto” (and yes, that was as pretentious as it sounds) – though it works here because each “act” takes place during a different time of day.

Ruttmann’s film begins with a series of horizontal lines that looked, my husband Charles said, like an old TV with the horizontal hold out of whack. These soon resolve themselves as electrical wires as seen from inside a train. The first act of Berlin: Symphony of a Great City depicts Berlin in the early morning hours as the city’s inhabitants are getting ready for work and the great stores and factories are just opening up for the day. Charles was particularly struck by a scene of cows being driven through the Berlin streets into a factory that turns out to be a dairy; used to the way modern dairies are run, in which the raw milk is extracted somewhere else and shipped to the site, he was struck by the idea that anyone would have staged a cattle drive through the streets of a major industrial city. I pointed out that two years earlier Buster Keaton had staged a cattle drive through Los Angeles in his 1925 film Go West, so the idea wasn’t exactly unknown to 1925 city dwellers (or filmmakers making movies about cities). The workers arrive for their jobs en masse and Ruttmann cuts between the workers and the cows so we get the point: modern factory life regiments the workforce so much it literally turns them into dumb animals.

The second act shows the factories being fired up, the stores being opened, and the people working in them. The third act shows lunchtime, with people thronging the local restaurants and taking streetcars to go there from work. In the fourth act Berlin’s businesses and factories are seen closing down, and in the fifth act we see the city’s night life, including what Berliners had for entertainment. Though we see him only from the ankles down, it’s clear from what we do see that the film the Berlin moviegoers we see watching is Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 classic The Gold Rush, and there are marquees showing ads for other films as well as the spectacular cabaret entertainments. Many of the cabaret scenes feature magicians or acrobats – obviously in a silent film Ruttmann couldn’t depict the outrageous songs and comedy sketches we see in cabaret-themed films like Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930) and Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1971) – and the film ends strikingly with a fireworks display.

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City is the sort of abstract movie filmmakers come up with every generation or so and think they’ve invented: I remember seeing films like this in the 1960’s and hearing them hailed as a new, totally different form of entertainment, and likewise I can remember the hype surrounding the 1982 film Koyannisqatsi made it seem like its director, Godfrey Reggio, had invented a new type of cinema. Ruttmann’s film, made decades earlier, was at times so similar I joked, “You might as well call it Berlinqatsi.” One of the fascinating things about Berlin: Symphony of a Great City was when it was made: between 1919 and 1933 Germany was ruled by the Weimar Republic, an attempt at democracy that actually worked pretty well when outside powers and outside circumstances allowed it to – it didn’t help that the French had demanded enormous reparation payments after World War I that virtually bankrupted the German economy, or that the crippling effect of the reparations, the stupid attempts of the German central bank to get out from under then by printing so much money so fast it sparked a hyper-inflation, and the sabotage of any efforts by the German government to negotiate their way out of the reparations burden by German Right-wingers in general and Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in particular (realizing that the worse the economy was the better they would do politically, Hitler and the Nazis went out of their way to wreck any attempt by the Weimar government to provide economic relief, not that different from the unanimous rejection of President Biden’s COVID-19 relief bill by the U.S. Republican Party) would ultimately topple the Republic and bring Hitler and the Nazis to power.

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City was produced during a relatively happy Indian summer for the German economy, after the currency reform of 1924 had ended the hyperinflation and before the 1929 U.S. stock market crash sparked a worldwide depression that had hit Germany particularly hard because they were depending on American investments and loans to have an economy at all. Many of the scenes in Ruttmann’s film – notably a sequence of three men walking together, at least two of whom are obviously Jews (you can tell from their dress and especially their beards) – are more heartbreaking now than they were to Ruttmann’s original audience because we know what fate is in store for these people and what they’re going to be up against in just a few more years. Given how abstract this movie is (even though it’s more than just a chain of spectacular images: the “day in the life” continuity gives the film more strength and . It alsodramatic power than most imagistic non-plotted films like this), it’s surprising that, unlike most of the most creative personnel in Weimar-era cinema – including the so-called “production supervisor” of Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, Karl Freund, whose presence here puts everyone in this movie one degree of separation from Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz – who had left Germany either before the Nazi takeover (F. W. Murnau, Paul Leni) or immediately after it (Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak), Ruttmann not only stayed in Germany after 1933 but made Nazi propaganda films with titles like Blut und Boden (“Blood and Soil,” a favorite Nazi slogan) until his death in Berlin at age 53 in 1941.