Scoring Ruttmann’s Berlin: Musical Meaning in Historical and Critical Contexts

Abstract

When I first became acquainted with Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 silent film Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, I was taken with its vitality and visual virtuosity. I was fascinated by its rhapsodic and poetic staging of a single day in Berlin from dawn to midnight. I found its muscular representation of trains and factory machinery, all in motion, exciting and its preservation of an historical moment compelling. I was intrigued by Carl Mayer’s motivating conception: a ‘city symphony’. This film takes Berlin as its focus, but embodies competing principles in its construction. Documentary footage is organized through the application of avant-garde techniques. To create the source footage, Ruttmann shot on location for an entire year, capturing the spaces and activities of Berlin as a photographic archive.3 Each scene of the pulsating life of the city was collected and tagged as an entry in what Michael Cowen describes as database. Ruttmann then built the film without characters or more than a simple framework — a ‘day-in-the-city’. Instead, the film was constructed using the logic of the Querschnittfilm (cross-section film). Like cross-sectional illustration in medicine, botany or geology that exposed the internal and the external through simplified visual representation, this film dissected and recorded mass culture. In capturing quotidian life, the film sought to do more than simply document.