Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis and Weimar Cinema

Introduction: Weimar Culture and Avant-Garde Film

The Weimar Republic represented a period of tumultuous upheaval for Germany — politically, economically, and culturally. Following World War I, the public was only beginning to come to terms with the emerging pathologies and conflicts of Modernity and industrialization. Avant-garde art offered a means of approaching these issues apart from, but not outside, both the prevailing political rhetoric of the past and the discourse provided by a new generation of political actors and agitators. Walter Ruttmann's 1927 film Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt in German) is one such piece of avant-garde art. It attempts to show, over the course of a day, the life of a contemporary city as it blends — sometimes forcefully — the new and old worlds of the early twentieth century.

Examining Ruttmann's film in detail offers important insights into Weimar-era cultural production, and particularly into how these cultural products vacillated between purely avant-garde aesthetic experimentation and the deployment of those experiments in the service of a particular political ideology. In particular, Ruttmann's editing of certain shots and scenes at times suggests a possibly socialist or Marxist message lurking just beneath the surface of the film, but this message is never completed. As such, one must consider the possibility that Ruttmann — or at least Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis — views its subject matter with some degree of ambivalence: excited by the aesthetic and technological possibilities offered by Modernity, but troubled by the seemingly inevitable mechanization and dehumanization it carries with it.

Before discussing Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis in detail, it is useful to provide some historical context regarding the Weimar Republic in general and the state of cinema in the Weimar Republic in particular. Even considering the Weimar Republic itself demonstrates some of the difficulties inherent in discussing and defining the ups and downs of political and artistic movements of the early twentieth century. As Detlev Peukert notes, one of "the problems that the Weimar Republic poses for historians [is that] even its temporal boundaries are open to dispute."

Historical Context of the Weimar Republic

One may view the start of the Weimar Republic as occurring either in 1918, with the decline of the Imperial monarchy, or in 1919, with the establishment of the Weimar Constitution. The particular choice informs one's interpretation of the subsequent years. This issue highlights the larger uncertainties facing Germany following World War I and helps to underscore how Weimar Germany was characterized by disagreement and tumult — a tumult that reveals itself in the frames of Ruttmann's film and its ambivalent political message.

As would be expected, the films of the Weimar era depicted the same political and psychological difficulties facing society, although not always directly. The effects of World War I on the German psyche have been well documented, along with the way these effects filtered into the cultural production of Germany. The most interesting aspect of Weimar-era cinema, however, is the way it attempts to balance opposing forces of depression, resentment, and despair with the sense of driving optimism that nevertheless presented itself through representations of Modernist technology and art. Anton Kaes argues that "the classical cinema of Weimar Germany is haunted by the memory of a war whose traumatic outcome was never officially recognized, let alone accepted," so that "unspoken and concealed, implied and latent, repressed and disavowed, the experience of trauma became Weimar's historical unconscious."

Scholarly Accounts of Weimar Cinema

Kaes looks to classic German films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, and Metropolis, arguing that "these films translate military aggression and defeat into the domestic tableaux of crime and horror," and in doing so transfer the national, public concerns of Germany to the level of personal, urban problems.

It is worth pointing out that while Kaes focuses on these dark, brooding films and considers them indicative of a traumatized German unconscious following World War I, his account of Weimar-era cinema differs from some of the most notable earlier considerations. Unlike Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner, Kaes does not argue that "the films produced during the Weimar period should be read as manifestations of a kind of collective unconscious, displaying a uniquely German preoccupation with authority and a desire for submission that foreshadows the willingness of Germans to submit to real-life dictator Adolf Hitler."

Instead, Kaes suggests that Weimar cinema did not represent an unconscious desire for authority, but rather the return of repressed traumas. Thus, the monsters of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, and Metropolis are not secret objects of longing but rather personifications of the violence already inflicted upon the population. While Kaes' account of Weimar-era cinema is convincing when one considers only the films he focuses on, it ultimately seems too restrictive an account of the variety of genres and styles exhibited by Weimar-era film.

Christian Rogowski recognizes that Weimar-era cinema exhibited more stylistic and narrative diversity than Kaes' doom and gloom, but in discussing what he considers "the many faces of Weimar cinema," he largely glosses over "documentary montage films" like Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis. Recognizing the relative critical no-man's land in which the film has found itself is crucial, because it further reveals the fluctuating cultural space of the Weimar era and the difficulty of pinpointing the film's artistic and political allegiances.

Early German abstract films gave rise to the notion of optische Musik (optical or visual music) — films that were "liberated from the yoke of narrative" and instead focused on expressing abstract visual movements with a kind of musical flow. Walter Ruttmann was responsible for a number of such films, and much of his work prior to Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis constituted this kind of "absolute cinema." Despite this, the film is not frequently considered to be part of the optische Musik phenomenon, because its relatively scant narrative content seems to deny the tendency toward full abstraction.

Political Imagery in Acts Three and Four

Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis is broken up into five acts and takes place over the course of a single day. In the context of this study, the most important scenes come in the third and fourth acts, when Ruttmann portrays political agitation in the streets and the wealth disparity of the city. The majority of act three takes place in a busy Berlin street, where the hustle and bustle of the crowd is contrasted with the crisp, tidy movements of the Reich President and his attendant guards. Where the surrounding shots feature cars and buses rushing past disorganized masses of people, the President walks down a set of sparsely populated steps, moving between lines of policemen standing at attention. This shot is immediately followed by scenes of protesters marching in unison carrying a flag, and later by someone standing above a crowd, shouting what one presumes are political ideas.

These shots achieve a number of interrelated effects. First, they present a clear visual disconnect between the political elite and the rest of the city. The President's shot is all order and decorum, while the rest of the act is filled with chaotic, seemingly overwhelming masses of people. This is crucial because it reveals how Ruttmann makes an implicit political statement through his particular aesthetic choices. While Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis contains more explicitly tonal montage sequences that juxtapose two conceptually related images — discussed below — this sequence features a more subtle use of montage that forces the viewer to note a distinction between the President and the public, even if this recognition occurs only on a subconscious, visually geometric level.

Ruttmann's particular political inclinations remain opaque in this sequence, but he does seem to argue that the political elite exist in a world apart from the public they are intended to represent and govern. This argument becomes clearer when one considers the following shots, which feature marching protesters and a shouting agitator in a crowd. These shots suggest that the true work of politics takes place not in the well-regimented halls of official power, but in the rowdy, constantly shifting space of the urban street. Ruttmann thus projects a simultaneous celebration of the political interest and agency of the public while suggesting the potential danger and uncontrollable power of the masses — all of which has arisen as a response to elite indifference.

The notion of elite indifference becomes even more explicit in act four, when the city stops for lunch. Wealthy people are shown eating in a fancy restaurant, and the film makes no effort to beautify this activity. A woman spoons more food onto her plate even as she continues chewing her last bite, a man eats straight from his knife, and a portly man is shown shoveling food into his mouth — right before the film cuts to a shot of a lion tearing meat from a bone. This particular montage is arguably the most overtly political in the film, because it equates the eating habits of the wealthy with the predatory nature of a lion.

The effect is heightened by subsequent shots: two clearly poor children comfort their downtrodden mother as she sits on some steps, just before a series of shots showing decadent, intricate dishes, including a stylized goose atop a platter of mussels and a massive plate of lobsters. The film then cuts to the kitchen, showing the considerable labor that goes into creating the food previously shown being devoured with all the grace and consideration of a lion tearing flesh from bone. Finally, the eating sequence ends by showing a barrel of discarded and rotting food in the kitchen, before moving on to two small children sifting through debris.