Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis
Berlin - Symphony of a Great City is a German experimental documentary film by Walther Ruttmann, which premiered in September 1927 in Berlin.
Content
The film begins with a train ride: A drawn by a steam locomotive express travels through meadows, gazebos and residential areas into the city, and thus delimits the area surrounding the city. The train arrives near the city center in the Anhalt Station. After a turn over the rooftops of Berlin, the film shows the city streets, punctuated by the view of the clock tower of the Berlin City Hall. Slowly, the empty morning streets are filled with people on their way to work. Everywhere the work will be included. Faster and faster, the rhythm of the city and the film, and also the faster aperture of the streets in the factories and offices. With the 12 - clock chime the speed collapses. After lunch break and food intake but it begins to accelerate again in the afternoon. It was only towards the evening return relaxation and rest a slowly: Ruttman also shows recreational activities on the waterfront and in the park and in the evening in the Vergnügungsetablissements the city. Pictures of fireworks and finally the circle of light in the night sky, from the time just newly built Berlin Radio Tower, exit Ruttmann's work.
Background
The documentary film describes a day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and is still today a glimpse of the living and working conditions at that time.
Ruttmann conceived his film as a documentary work of art that is supposed to represent the city of Berlin as a living organism. In the slow awakening of the city in the hustle and bustle of the day and in the slower decay in the evening he saw an analogy to a symphony and underlined this in the movie section. For that time unusual, sat Ruttmann a number of short cuts to make the vibrancy and bustle of the city are plastic. As one of the first symphonic films took Berlin - Symphony of a Great City in the late 1920s developed technical possibility movies to cut precisely and in many small sections and stick again. In this way, it could respond to the opportunities of a diversified film music with cinematic means - and vice versa.
The Movie " was released in June 1927 with a length of 1,466 meters by the censors and premiered on September 23, 1927 in Berlin. "
Criticism
Siegfried Kracauer criticized the superficiality and the concomitant social blindness of the film: "While pillars, houses, places will be made clear outrageously sharp in their human meaning as in the great Russian films, here tatters strung together, none of whom can guess why they actually are available. "
Music
From Edmund Meisel's original music for the film only a piano version is obtained.
In the 1970s, initially the American film composer Arthur Kleiner had recorded a version of Meisel 's template for two pianos and percussion as a stopgap.
The composer Günther Becker wrote in 1982 of such a version, the fifth act was again revised by Emil Gerhardt. In this form the piece among others came to the performance in Los Angeles, London, Brussels and Florence.
The French composer Pierre Henry has in his monumental electro-acoustic work, La Ville. The city. Metropolis Paris - Berlin (1984/1985) explicitly based on the film of Ruttmann.
1987 wrote then Mark Andrew Schlingensiepen is a great orchestral score by Meisel, which received its premiere at the Berlin forest stage with the RIAS Youth Orchestra and is now published by Musikverlag Ries & Erler on behalf of the Berliner Festspiele. Then Schlingensiepen published another version for 16 instrumentalists, who has also played under his management, among others by the sound of Wien.
The version of Mark Andrew Schlingensiepen followed by other adaptations for different smaller forces of Emil Gerhard and Guenther Becker, Helmut Imig and Hans Brandner. They are also published in the Ries & Erler Musikverlag.
1993 Timothy Brock has with the Olympia Chamber Orchestra Berlin - a new soundtrack Symphony of a Great City. (This version is the DVD release based on the 1996. )
To mark the 80th anniversary of the premiere ZDF and ARTE have given 2007, a new orchestration of original music with Bernd Thewes in order. Thewes ' version sounds illustrative - more pathetic than that of Brock. It was premiered along with the restored version of the film on September 24, 2007 at the Friedrichstadt Palace from the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Frank Strobel.
Restored Version
The film has been restored " in 2007 in the Federal Film Archive with funding from the ZDF in cooperation with ARTE ".
The restored version " based on a nitro duplicate negative from stocks of the former Reich Film Archive. This material was supplemented by elements of a copy, which in 1980 acquired the Federal Archives of the Library of Congress. The film now has a length of 1,446 meters. " Running time of about 64 minutes.
On broadcast by ARTE on 1 December 2007, three experimental short animated films, Ruttmann were connected, which had been reconstructed in the same year in the Munich Film Museum: Ruttmann Opus II in 1921 with music by Ludger Brümmer (2007), Ruttmann Opus III 1924 abridged in a version with music by Hanns Eisler (1927) and Ruttmann opus IV 1925 with music by Sven -Ingo Koch ( 2007). Motives of these films had Ruttmann used as transitions in the symphony.
Successor
In 1950, a movie came out with a similar name, the symphony of a metropolis, with images from the year 1941. 2002 came as a reminder and as a continuation of Thomas Schadts film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City in the cinema, also as black-and-white film with musical accompaniment, another day of Berlin shows, only 75 years later. The film shows the fractures and wounds that Berlin has suffered as a result of the war and the following years, socially and in the cityscape. In contrast to the optimism of the 1920s and the pulse of the art here is dominated by long scenes and slow pans.