ABSTRACT
Having studied architecture and painting, Walter Ruttmann worked as a graphic designer and made abstract films, including his Opus series, in the early 1920s before creating Berlin. Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt, which is unquestionably the most famous city symphony, providing the movement with its nickname and engendering the production of many similar films in the years to follow. Being composed almost completely of documentary material, partly shot with hidden cameras and highly sensitive film stock that cameraman Reimar Kuntze developed specifically for the interior shots and nocturnal scenes, Berlin also includes a number of staged scenes, most notably, the suicide of a young woman jumping from a bridge. Using associative and symbolic editing, multiple exposures, animated shots, and other experimental techniques as well as the deliberate avoidance of intertitles, Ruttmann presents the city of Berlin as the protagonist of the film.
