On Berlin

Berlin, November 9, 1980.

Image via NOWNESS

I'll be honest, this is the first thing that popped into my head when I started to think about thinking about writing this post on my initial reaction to Walther Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City - a line from the lyrics of Nelly Furtado's popular dance/pop/R&B song from 2006, 'Promiscuous', which, despite the considered subtlety of the lyrics, neatly sums up my initial reaction upon viewing the first highly constructed frames of Ruttmann's film:

I be [sic] the first to admit it,

I'm curious about you,

You seem so innocent.

You wanna get in my world,

Get lost in it,

Boy I'm tired of running let's walk for a minute.

And now, due to the infectious rhythm and verbal ping-pong of the song, it’s firmly planted in my head and I’ve no choice but to run with it from here on in.

Oblique pop cultural references aside, I was in fact at first entirely curious about the world in which we find ourselves lost through Ruttmann’s deployment of a highly modern, avant-garde aesthetic. However, I’ll admit that the noticeable lack of a soundtrack proved to be an unforeseeable challenge to my viewing and enjoyment of the film. The silence of the film, and the silence of the sparse auditorium in which it was screened, evoked an almost awkward reverence for the projected image with uncanny parallels able to be drawn with the original perception and reaction of early modern audiences to early screenings of the film, and of cinema in general.

I found it interesting, in subsequent discussions of the film, the number of ways in which people have responded to the absence and presence of sound, which has lead me to consider the importance of absence in regard to these silent films – a concern which has further extended into my consideration of texts in other subjects I’m undertaking, both film and novel alike.

I thought one concept that was raised, of auditory hallucinations, was particularly interesting; a notion which resonates with the film’s lack of a conventional plot, inviting the viewer to instead conjure narrative hallucinations and invest narratives of their own making into a film otherwise driven by an almost documentary sequence of images and events that provide an impression of daily life in a thoroughly modern city. The importance of absence is something that has been raised in another English course I'm undertaking - ENGL3605 Contemporary British Literature - with particular regard to the film discussed in this last week's seminar, an interesting, albeit bleak, film from the UK, Morvan Callar. Specifically, the first five or so minutes of the film are completely silent, void of both dialogue and music; the silence is only periodically permeated (and the scene entirely lit) by the monotonous drone of a set of Christmas tree lights. The complete absence of a guiding soundtrack provides an interesting point of departure for an audience, who are left unassisted and challenged in the viewing of the film. I found this to also be true of Berlin.  

The fracturing of the film’s structure, and the replacement of a discernable narrative, had an obvious and an interesting resonance with the nature of modern life and demonstrated a self-awareness or reflexivity of cinema as part of forward thrust of modernity that the film so explicitly documents. As above-mentioned, I often find the beginning of a film to be largely indicative of its overall mood, or at least one of the more interesting and important moments (if it doesn’t grab you then you know you’re in trouble) and I felt that Act One was exemplary of this. The abstracted and rhythmically overlain shapes emulating the constant rhythms of sunrise and sunset, superimposed with the shapes replicating the lowering of the level crossing at a train intersection, which then dissolved into that juxtaposition with the actual train evoked not only the history of cinema itself, but the symbol of the locomotive as an avatar of the forward thrust of modernity. Other filmic parallels were then further evoked between the repeated frames of the train tracks and film reels; the windows from which the footage was shot and the cinematic frame within which this highly constructed view of the world is contained. The relationship between the city and its inhabitants was explored through the use of rhythmic cutting and associative montage as devices to suggest that although the human figure may appear diminutive in scale to the modern metropolis with its grid-like anatomy of empty streets, factories and sewers, the poetic forms and interiors of infrastructure - the bones of the city - the two are undoubtedly linked at both the level of the smallest gesture (a flight between two men) and the grandest scheme of cinema.