Movement, drama and the modern metropolis

We travelled the globe this week. From London’s entertainment hub Piccadilly Circus, with its faithful devotees – a congregation of traffic and bodies swelling and circulating under garish electric lights. To Berlin, another nodal point of modernity, another (albeit broader, wider) intersection. We entered Walter Ruttman’s Berlin (1927) as train-bound strangers, slowing up as we breached the fringe of the billboard-embellished city. We were here to see the site/sights, to consume the drama of the urban.

In the film’s opening sequence, there’s a chiaroscuro portrait of the coal-coloured face of the approaching train, framed by billowing white smoke like a curly-haired halo. From then on, smoke seeps through the cracks between the scenes and rises from the chimneys of the stout square factories and hovers in the background of the cityscape. It’s the residue of mechanical society; a motif. Billy Stevenson rightly calls the railway lines – along with the tram, its surrogate – the “syntax of the film”. The railway is the exemplar of the networks and systems that dizzily map the city. Berlin is a spider-web of railway lines, telephone wires, roads, alleyways.


Berlin: Symphony of a Great City is an ode to movement. The city is Ford’s production line writ large, a monument to mechanised industry. With one hand movement, the factories’ automata lurch into life. Fragile glass wares pile up in one factory, newspapers are spat out in another; a growing, overflowing stack. It’s frenzied, overwhelming, and poetic. Meanwhile, (production) lines of pedestrians snake through the city, tracking public spaces with constant cross-overs. Dwarfed by brick buildings and broad cobble streets, anonymous people scurry across the surface of the city and animate Ruttman’s deliberate, sober long takes and low angles. Sweeping and cleaning and opening doors and raising blinds and carrying parcels and crossing streets and riding bikes and walking, walking and more walking.


This human activity is parodied by the recurrent mannequins that stare blindly from shopfront windows. They inculcate and mock the ceaseless hustle and bustle of their surrounds, inanimate objects enacting mindless movement: the skirt adorning a rock-solid fashion mannequin floats oddly in a breeze, and the mechanised legs of a toy man on a bicycle turn feverishly while his frozen face grins away.

Human figures in Berlin are located upon inescapable trajectories detached from destinations, always moving and never arriving. Unstoppable bodies, and clumps of bodies, are often accelerated, making their movements choppy and frantic. There’s an air of absurdity to the sped-up eating and drinking of workers at their one o’clock lunch hour. Later, inter-cut images of children ice-skating, women dancing and men sweeping snow become a sort of disjointed dance. This is Ruttman heightening the lyrical, performative aspect of city life. The film’s momentum peaks with a visceral, chaotic, spiralling sequence that elucidates the transformation of urban life into spectacle. A rollercoaster ride plunges, a woman tries to jump from a bridge, a fire engine rushes through the city, and the skies gather to storm the city – while the newspaper industry churns out the daily headlines.


In his incessant parade of scenarios and scenes, his inexhaustible variety of images, Ruttman renders city life theatrical. Or, more accurately, cinematic. He offers up the mundane, transitory intricacies of urban activity as entertainment, insisting on the spectacle of the city street. The lighthouse with which Berlin ends is a metaphor explaining the film: Ruttman casts a sweeping spotlight across the modern city, a panoramic eye exacting from it fleeting, everyday dramas. Thus Siegfried Kracauer argues that cinema foregrounds the subjects we habitually overlook:

“Many objects remain unnoticed simply because it never occurs to us to look their way. Most people turn their backs on garbage cans, the dirt underfoot, the waste they leave behind. Films have no such inhibitions; on the contrary, what we ordinarily prefer to ignore remains attractive to them precisely because of this common neglect. Ruttman’s Berlin includes a wealth of sewer grates, gutters and streets lined with rubbish…”

Speaking of contemplating waste…Andrew O’Hagan published a fantastic feature in the London Review of Books a couple of years ago performing this exact rhetorical move: literally and figuratively laying out trash, making an inventory of debris. He draws us into a strange world peopled with Freegans and trash collectors, bringing the garbage dump, the landfill and the incinerator both to our attention and into the realm of the everyday. Perhaps it’s not only a cinematic function, then – investigative journalism can also bring the refuse of society, the overlooked ‘outside’ of perception into focus?