While watching Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, I couldn’t help but feel I’d experienced something similar before. Looking up various online articles online (in an attempt to validate my experience of the film through the opinion of others) I noticed several articles comparisons between the film and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Which I thought was a wonderful comparison, considering the fragmentary nature of both works - fractured insights into the lived experience of the cities of Berlin and Dublin respectively. Consider this (quite random) sliver from Ulysses –
“He turned into Cumberland street and, going on some paces, halted in the lee of the station wall. No-one. Meade’s timberyard. Piled balks. Ruins and tenements. With careful read he passed over a hopscotch court with its forgotten pickeystone. Not a sinner. Near the timberyard a squatted child at marbles, alone, shooting the taw with a cunnythumb. A wise tabby, a blinking sphinx, watched from her warm sill… And once I played marbles when I went to that old dame’s school. She liked mignonette. Mrs Ellis’s. And Mr? ...” *
Leopold Bloom’s narration as he walks through the city is quite personal. Seeing the child playing marbles, he is reminded of his own childhood in these same streets. Yet there is also a strong sense that Bloom’s experiences reflect less about him, and more about the life of Dublin itself. Harry Levin compared Bloom’s mind to a film – a montage of shots edited “to emphasise the close-ups and fade-outs of flickering emotion, the angles of observation and the flashbacks of reminiscence” (Quoted in The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century English Literature). It is unsurprising that Joyce considered Walter Ruttman to create a film version of Ulysses. In Berlin, the city is likewise presented in a series of representations of individual experiences – one notable example is the brief flirtation between two strangers on the streets of Berlin. However, the repetition of patterns in the movement of individuals in the city space work together to present a unified holistic sense of ‘a day in the life of the city’. It is not a film about the lives of Berliners, but a film about the life of Berlin.
If Ulysses is the quintessential modernist novel – with its self-conscious internalisation of, and complete messing up of, the traditional storyline - then Berlin must surely be its filmic equivalent. For the city – particularly the city expressed as a collection of fragments as it is in these two works - is the ultimate experience of modernity. Berlin reads to me as the city exploring itself. In The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century English Literature, Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls quote Ezra Pound (1922) “The life of a village is a narrative… In the city the visual impressions succeed each other, overlap, overcross, they are cinematographic”. This is so appropriate in regards to Berlin: Symphony of a Great City – the constant overlap of images, each echoing the one before. One of my favourite series of images opens Act II, where a series of doors, gates and shutters, then books and desks fly open across the city, linking its inhabitants together as they open up to the working day. But the images don’t simply intersect, but cross over each other – a train motif throughout the film works to present this idea of intersecting paths. In particular I noticed a series of shots in the first act showing the connection and shifting of train tracks to divert a train’s path across the city. The city is a place of flows and dynamics: it reveals its tangled, intricate, self-aware 'thing-ness' through the collective experience of its inhabitants.
Berlin is more than simply a beautiful collection of images of the city (although I can’t deny its aesthetic appeal, particularly in the still images of the first act). It is an intensely modern exploration of the life of the city which explores the relationship between individual experience and the collective whole.
* (Didn’t intend quote to be quite so long, but Joyce isn’t exactly sparing with words – Ulysses being 800 pages – and it seems a dishonour to copy down any less than I have here. Sure hasn’t made Word’s grammar-check happy though)
