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VAULTS: Symphony of great cities

Berlin, Moscow star in documentary films

By Gary Arnold (Contact) | Sunday, August 24, 2008

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During the late 1920s, a semi-documentary genre called "the city symphony" flourished in a number of places, Berlin conspicuously included. It was the title character in a famous example directed by Walther Ruttmann, "Berlin: Symphony of a Great City," first shown in September 1927 and preserved in a somewhat spare DVD edition available from Image Entertainment.

The genre was intended to be pictorially evocative rather than factually informative. The format of "Berlin" proved serviceable time and again: an impressionistic mosaic of city locales and social life, commencing in the morning with the arrival of a train bound for Berlin and concluding after dark with a survey of the city's nightlife, now beloved in cultural legend for being notoriously uninhibited and unsavory.

Mr. Ruttmann pretends to keep time more accurately than other observers by inserting clock faces at various points of his continuity, divided into five acts. The movie was enhanced by a musical score but not narration or intertitles. The images were meant to tell a succession of representative stories about the way city streets and buildings and factories look; the way residents and the work force awaken, commute and plunge into their jobs; the way these activities subside for the lunch hour and then resume; and finally the way recreation predominates after work hours, from participation in sports to attendance at movies, vaudeville theaters, nightclubs and saloons.

It's a safe assumption that legions of amateur cameramen have been inspired to record the look of their surroundings over the past century. That treasure trove of imagery helps preserve the reality of many places that time has effaced. The Berlin that attracted Mr. Ruttmann's camera crew is largely a lost city now, due to political calamity as well as ordinary growth and decay. Politics has left the movie with unforeseen aspects of the haunted and poignant.

Similar, if somewhat less ambitious, tone poems about Paris and Amsterdam coincided with the appearance of "Berlin." The impulse remains very much alive in contemporary filmmakers, even when the "city symphony" element is subordinated to conventional narrative purposes. For example, Woody Allen's "Manhattan" was an acknowledged valentine to the location itself. Michael Mann's cutthroat crime thriller "Collateral" was much easier to like as a pictorial immersion in Los Angeles after dark.

It's believed that "Berlin" was directly influenced by a Russian "city symphony" of 1926, Mikhail Kaufman's "Moscow." Video editions seem to be nonexistent in this country, but the same filmmaker was conspicuously involved - as principal photographer and title character in a movie that followed "Berlin" and contrived to surpass it in numerous stylistic and human-interest respects.

Also distributed by Image Entertainment, this creative landmark of the late silent period is "Man With the Movie Camera," a 1929 production conceived and supervised by Mikhail Kaufman's slightly older brother Denis, who had assumed the name Dziga Vertov several years earlier. The alias is a Ukrainian-Russian hybrid that can be paraphrased as "spinning top."

There were three Kaufman brothers who left a formidable impact on the movies. The youngest, Boris, eventually became an esteemed American cinematographer - Elia Kazan's cameraman for "On the Waterfront" and "Baby Doll" and then Sidney Lumet's cameraman from "12 Angry Men" through "Bye Bye Braverman."

A medical researcher and literary jack-of-all-trades in his youth, Dziga Vertov became an instrument of Soviet artistic policy soon after the October Revolution. He emerged as a prolific drafter of manifestos and contriver of newsreel-propaganda shorts in the succeeding decade. His loyalty to Leninist doctrine was interwoven with a prodigiously playful sense of movie imagery and its potentialities. "The Man With the Movie Camera" became an exuberant summation of his theory and practice.

Shot in Moscow, Kiev and Odessa, the movie was retitled "Moscow Today" in U.S. release. It mirrors certain aspects of "Berlin" - the directors seem to have been exchanging pretexts and gambits at this point in their careers - but Dziga Vertov sweeps you up in richer, ultimately jubilant waves of observation and pictorial association.