ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the film Weltstrasse See, Welthafen Hamburg directed by Walter Ruttmann. A commissioned work for the Freihafen-Lagerhaus-Gesellschaft and the municipality of Hamburg, Weltstrasse See, Welthafen Hamburg is the third city film Ruttmann made after Berlin. Weltstrasse See, Welthafen Hamburg includes a loose narrative involving a photographer, which frames the visual trip through the harbor, highlighting its importance as a world port. Contemporaneous critics share these mixed opinions about the film that presents Hamburg as the biggest warehouse city of the world. William Uricchio states that with its sequencing of typical views and slow lateral panning shots, the film presents a remarkable return to the tradition of city films as they have been produced from 1895 up to the mid-1920s. While Erik Barnouw in his standard works on documentary film describes the Hamburg film together with the films on Dusseldorf and Stuttgart as later contributions by Ruttmann to the wave of city symphonies.
