ABSTRACT
Weihsmann suggests that the early filmic depiction of cities in the 1920s resulted from a growing fascination with “metropolitan motifs, motion, and development” and from the assumption that the camera could capture visual evidence of a city. In “documentary style” city films filmmakers reproduced different “urban motifs,” while in “pictorial colportage” they mixed documentary footage and fiction shot on location (9). Karl Grune’s The Street (1923), Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924), G. W. Pabst’s Joyless Street (1925), Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), Robert and Curt Siodmak’s People on Sunday (1928), Joe May’s Asphalt (1929), and Lang’s M (1931) were all produced within one decade, and all take place in a city – most often Berlin, but not always – and thematize urbanity, especially the
period’s understanding of the dangers and pleasures of modern urban life: crime, anonymity, a loosening of morality, unemployment, and class struggle on the one hand, and movement, speed, entertainment, and liberated erotics on the other. These films foreground what David Frisby has identified as characteristics of modernity: “abstraction, circulation and movement and monumentality” (20). While some were fascinated by the cinematic possibilities of documentary realism, others were fascinated by the artificiality of the set. The latter is famously the case with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, but also with The Street, for example, which has a highly artificial set.
