In 1926 Virginia Woolf expressed a certain suspicion that “the past could be unrolled, distances annihilated in the chaos of the streets”, this was represented through the new media of film.
City Symphonies are poetic, experimental documentaries that present a portrait of daily life within a city while also attempting to capture a part of the cities spirit. These documentaries belong almost entirely in one decade, the 1920 was where the genre of city symphonies was born. The silent films were split almost in two where they could either celebrate the splendor of a city or they could highlight the degradation within it. As the films had no plot or actors their structure and movement throughout are based on the music of orchestral symphonies as well as the hours of the day to move the film on, this was a new style of film that didn’t use the dynamics of narrative pacing like most of its predecessors.
City Symphonies typically use juxtaposition to create contrasts or pointed comparisons between images and scenes. Such as the director of ‘Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927)’ Walter Ruttmann cuts from a mannequin displaying lingerie in a shop window, to theatreland where chorus girls are preparing to go onstage in their alluring costumes. Though this technique was used in Soviet films for didactic reasons, Ruttmann’s vision was clear and his motivation was to simply capture art rather than politics. He said “I had the idea of making something out of life, of creating a symphonic film out the millions of energies that comprise the life of a big city”.
When watched today the symphonies offer an amazing snapshot the cities but also glimpses of what life was like in the time of which it was made. In early cinema this genre was depicted as both an externally experienced spectacle as well as an internal rhythm, thus creating a dual sense of anonymity and intimacy. Baudelaire described it as “a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life […] he is an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I’”.
City Symphonies are as invokable beautiful as they are due to the cameras equivocal ability to visualize the potential alienation of a city, but also its interdependency. The two main aspects that make a city symphony are, the historical importance and the playfulness of form, which make them so fresh and appealing even after 100 years. In a world which is widely dominated by commercial, fictional films it is important to keep the medium of cinema alive by creating films of this kind because, however we wish to define the genre of city symphonies, they offer us a vital, unobstructed and vivid records of time gone by.
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