Symphony of a Metropolis
In Ruttman’s Berlin, the viewer observed the city from the ground level, rather than from the bird's eye. The spectator chases stories from the streets along with the characters they are affiliated with. Walter Ruttman’s Symphonie einer Großstadt grounds Berlin as a piece of music. The city is depicted as a place that people use and contribute to. The trains, buses, and cars come and go; the silver is ready in the shop to be purchased; the roads are paved and wide. These objects function under the sole premise that people will be using them. Similar to a musical score and dormant instruments, a city is lifeless unless people are there breathing into them.
There are the different tones of the Ruttman’s symphony, and the mood of the city is equated to the mood of the music. The early morning shots are more relaxed and dreamy, replete with slow tempo, quiet dynamics, and consonant melodies. Many scenes are much more vivacious, once the day gets underway. The more industrial scenes are full of trumpets and heavy strings, the dynamics are crescendo increasingly, and the tempo is breakneck.
Ultimately the piece must be rehearsed, and each time it’s going to sound slightly differently. The conductor must make choices, and in a city, I think the best continuance of the idea of the city as a symphony is that time is the conductor. Time inevitably decides who does what at which point and with whom. One scene that comes to mind is the beginning of the Ruttman film when the milk bottles are being made by the machines. There is a delicate flute section with smooth legato phrasings as the gears are moving seamlessly in their circular motions (14 minutes). As time rolls on, all is going according to plan. Each day is a new rehearsal.
Interestingly, it seems that the “mood” of the city may be translated much more as music than it can be translated into legible written stories. As de Certeau asserts, the paths in the city intertwine as “unrecognized poems” that “elude legibility.” Though a musical score is, by definition, legible, each rehearsal of a song takes on its own mood and allows for variations on a theme. Perhaps de Certeau would argue that the symphony of the city has a score with a bad calligraphy, and certain aspects of it remain unclear and up to the conductor to choose. Perhaps there is a spot where it’s foggy whether the composer says, “adagio,” or “allegro,” or the p’s can be mistaken for f’s.
Yet while a musical score is premeditated, there’s no argument that the symphony of a city is much less of a distinguished form. It’s essential to fill in the blanks of stories we may have access to. To go back to the silver in the shop example, it’s necessary to finish some storylines without all information. There are the texts that each person contributes, but we can’t fully make out what the texts are. Is the silver in the shop being sold often? For a lot of money? To whom? Here is the part where the symphony of the city gets to be out of reach. The “texts” that each person contributes may be illegible, like de Certeau said, but taken together with their counterparts may contribute to a broader, more comprehensible whole.