City Symphonies Made in the 1920s (Each

¶ … city symphonies made in the 1920s (each films). Describe the films in specific way: scenes and music.

Film comparison: City symphonies of the 1920s

During the silent era of cinema, the scores used to accompany various films were used to enhance the experience of watching the production. Director Walther Ruttmann and photographer Otto Umbo's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) portrays the city of Berlin from dawn to dusk, beginning with a train pulling out of the station early in the morning to the nightlife that brings the day to a close. The film chronicles the rhythms of the city as they gradually build, grow more intense, and finally climax at night, just like the corresponding music itself. The film suggests that Berlin's natural rhythms are a symphony and the music strives to highlight this phenomenon. The images are lush, over-the-top, and Romantic, just like the music itself. "Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, by focusing on a temporal structure instead of a traditional character driven narrative, manages to turn the city itself into a character" (Karreau 2006).

Charles Sheeler and Paul Stand's Manhatta (1921) similarly attempts to encapsulate the city of New York in image and sound, similarly making the city a character by beginning the film early in the day, and concluding with the city 'going to sleep' late at night. However, rather than Romantic, this film has a very modernistic, positive and progressive texture to its visual language. It uses uplifting quotations from Walt Whitman, juxtaposed with pulsating music to suggest that New York City, with its skyscrapers, busy business people, and other facets of the urban landscape represent the greatness of the future of America.

However, Manhatta is rather cold and distanced -- it focuses less upon individual people and more upon the awesome power and scope of the metropolis. When people are photographed, they are seen from a great height, with little intimacy. The city seems more 'human' than the people that inhabit it. "About three quarters of Strand and Sheeler's shots in Manhatta could just be stills. It's less about the camera being motionless than about the subjects being motionless" and quite often the film is sustained only by the forward propulsion of the music ("Manhatta (1921), Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler," The Stop Button, 2011).

Bonney Powell's City Symphony Manhattan Medley (1931) was produced after the creation of sound but similarly relies upon music and images more than words to convey the awesome power of Manhattan. But while the focus in Manhatta is on the light shining on the buildings and the city 'awakening' as an entity in and of itself rather than a series of individuals, City Symphony Manhattan Medley contains many sections of humorous, quirky music and shows individuals in motion to create a sense of narrative. It suggests that New York is a city composed of many distinct individuals, not simply edifices of stone and massive hordes moving as one. Its vision of the city is more optimistic and less classically modernistic in nature -- at times it is almost as humorous as a Warner Brothers' cartoon or Our Gang short, with its joyful honking music, images of children playing in overalls, and whistling steamboats.