Berlin - The symphony of the big city

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Movie
Original title Berlin - The symphony of the big city
Berlin The symphony of the big city Logo 001.svg
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1927
length 64 minutes
Rod
Director Walther Ruttmann
script Karl Freund ,
Carl Mayer ,
Walther Ruttmann
music Edmund Meisel
camera Robert Baberske ,
Reimar Kuntze ,
Karl Freund ,
László Schäffer
cut Walther Ruttmann

Berlin - The Symphony of the Big City is a German experimental documentary by Walther Ruttmann , which premiered in Berlin in September 1927 .

content

The film begins with a train journey: an express train pulled by a steam locomotive drives through meadows, arbor and residential areas into the city, thus separating the surrounding area from the city. The train arrives at the Anhalter Bahnhof near the city center. After panning over the roofs of Berlin, the film shows the streets of the city, repeatedly interrupted by the view of the clock tower of the Berlin City Hall . Slowly the empty streets fill up with people on their way to work. Work begins everywhere. The rhythm of the city and of the film is getting faster and faster, and faster and faster, too, are the glare from the streets in the factories and offices. When the bell hits 12 o'clock, the speed collapses. After lunch break and food intake, however, it begins to accelerate again in the afternoon. Only in the evening do relaxation and calm return: Ruttmann also shows leisure activities by the water and in the park and in the evening in the city's entertainment establishments. Images of fireworks and finally the circling light of the newly built Berlin radio tower in the night sky complete Ruttmann's work.

background

The documentary film describes a day in the big city of Berlin , which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still gives an insight into living and working conditions at that time.

Ruttmann conceived his film as a documentary work of art that is supposed to depict the city of Berlin as a living organism. In the slow awakening of the city, in the hectic pace of the day and in the slower fading in the evening, he saw an analogy to a symphony and underlined this in the cut. Unusual for the time, Ruttmann used numerous short cuts to make the liveliness and hectic pace of the city more vivid. As one of the first symphonic films, Berlin - The Symphony of the Big City made use of the technical possibility developed in the late 1920s to cut films precisely and in many small cuts and then to glue them again. In this way it was possible to react to the possibilities of a varied film music with cinematic means - and vice versa.

The film "was approved by the censors in June 1927 with a length of 1,466 meters and premiered in Berlin on September 23, 1927." The film was first shown on German television on November 14, 1969 at 9:15 pm on ZDF .

criticism

Siegfried Kracauer criticized the film's superficiality and the social blindness that goes with it: “While in the great Russian films, for example, columns, houses, and squares are unheard ofly clarified in their human significance, here are scraps of which no one can guess why available."

music

By Edmund Meisel's original music for the silent film only a piano version is received.

In the 1970s, the American film musician Arthur Kleiner first recorded a version of Meisel's original for two pianos and percussion as a temporary arrangement.

The composer Günther Becker wrote out such a version in 1982, the 5th act of which was revised again by Emil Gerhardt . The piece was performed in this form in Los Angeles, London, Brussels and Florence, among others.

The French composer Pierre Henry has distinguished himself in his monumental electroacoustic work La Ville. The town. Metropolis Paris - Berlin (1984/1985) explicitly referred to the film by Ruttmann.

In 1987 Mark-Andreas Schlingensiepen wrote a large orchestral score after Meisel on behalf of the Berliner Festspiele, which was performed in the Berlin Waldbühne with the RIAS youth orchestra and has since been published by the Ries & Erler music publisher. Schlingensiepen then published another version for 16 instrumentalists, which was also played by the Klangforum Wien under his direction.

The version by Mark-Andreas Schlingensiepen was followed by further arrangements for different smaller line-ups by Emil Gerhard and Günther Becker, Helmut Imig and Hans Brandner. They were also published by the Ries & Erler music publisher.

In 1993 Timothy Brock set new music with the Olympia Chamber Orchestra Berlin - The Symphony of the Big City . (This version is based on the 1996 DVD edition.)

On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the premiere, ZDF and ARTE commissioned Bernd Thewes to re- orchestrate the original music in 2007 . Thewes' version sounds more illustrative and pathetic than Brock's. It was premiered together with the restored version of the film on September 24, 2007 in the Friedrichstadtpalast by the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Frank Strobel .

The Belgian band We Stood Like Kings released the post-rock soundtrack “Berlin 1927” in 2012 , which they performed live for Ruttmann's film.

In May 2016 a new composition by the composer Tobias PM Schneid was presented at the International Documentary Film Festival Munich .

Restored version

The film was restored "in 2007 in the Federal Archive Filmarchiv with financial support from ZDF in cooperation with ARTE".

The restored version “is based on a nitro duplicate negative from the holdings of the former Reich Film Archive. This material was supplemented with elements of a copy that the Federal Archives acquired from the Library of Congress in 1980. The film is now 1,446 meters long. ”The running time is about 64 minutes.

The broadcast on ARTE on December 1, 2007 was followed by three experimental short animated films by Ruttmann, which were reconstructed in the same year in the Munich Film Museum: Ruttmann opus II 1921 with music by Ludger Brümmer (2007), Ruttmann opus III 1924 in a shortened version with Music by Hanns Eisler (1927) and Ruttmann opus IV 1925 with music by Sven-Ingo Koch (2007). Ruttmann used motifs from these films as transitions in the symphony .

successor

In 1950, a film with a similar name, The Symphony of a Cosmopolitan City , came out with recordings from 1941. In 2002, as a reminiscence and as a continuation, Thomas Schadt's film Berlin: Symphony of a Big City came to the cinemas, which, also as a black and white film with background music, shows another day in the city of Berlin, only 75 years later. The film shows the fractures and wounds that Berlin suffered as a result of the war and the years that followed, both socially and in the cityscape. In contrast to the optimistic mood of the 1920s and the pulse of technology, long scenes and slow pans dominate here.

See also

literature

  • Ilona Brennicke, Joe Hembus : Classics of the German silent film. 1910-1930 (= Goldmann Magnum. 10212). Goldmann, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-442-10212-X .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b c opening credits of the restored version, broadcast on December 1, 2007 by ARTE.
  2. ^ Filmdienst.de and other broadcasts . In: Der Spiegel . No. 46 , 1969 ( online ).
  3. We can do it. In: Frankfurter Zeitung. 72nd year, no. 856, November 17, 1927, ZDB -ID 1063736-9 , filmportal.de (reprinted in: Siegfried Kracauer: Werke. Volume 6: Small writings on film. Part 1: 1921–1927. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-518-58336-0 , pp. 411-413).