ABSTRACT
The city symphony recognizes the city as an emblem of modernity, and its modernist form represents an attempt on the part of the filmmakers to use the rapidly expanding language of cinema to capture what Laszlo Moholy-Nagy once called "the dynamic of the metropolis." In the early 1930s, the city symphony cycle continued to expand and it simultaneously also became increasingly professionalized and commercialized as several municipal authorities commissioned films in the style of Walter Ruttmann's Berlin. City symphonies, first and foremost, cherish crowds as a cinematic spectacle, a kinetic and phantasmagoric swarm of shapes and colors. Interwar city symphonies not only share common themes and motifs, they are also characterized by a similar syntax and structural organization. The chapter also presents an outline of the book. The book testifies the annotated filmography to the importance and the widespread proliferation of city symphonies in the interwar era.
