Berlin: Symphony of a Great City

(1927)

★ 7.5 IMDb · 130 votes

Genres: Documentary

Year: 1927

Runtime: 69 мин

Country: Germany

Director: Walter Ruttmann

Cast: Paul von Hindenburg

Plot

A day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still provides an insight into the living and working conditions at that time. Germany had just recovered a little from the worst consequences of the First World War, the great economic crisis was still a few years away and Hitler was not yet an issue at the time.

Preceding Dziga Vertov's Chelovek s kino-apparatom (1929), and before Adolf Hitler's rise to power, Walter Ruttmann's urban symphony of Berlin is a semi-documentary in five acts. Employing an enthralling visual rhythm, seamless jump-cuts, double-exposures, and a sense of perpetual motion, this non-narrative love-letter to the bustling German capital documents a single day in the life of Berlin, from sunrise until late at night, and everything in between. Against the backdrop of ceaseless movement, the camera swiftly follows the myriads of workers as they flock into towering factories, then, it moves from work to all sorts of entertainment, never shying away from sharp contrasts: the rich and the poor; humans and heavy machinery; beauty and ugliness.