‘A Hymn to Movement’: The ‘City Symphony’ of the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract

The ‘city symphonies’ of my title refer primarily to a cluster of films made in the United States and Europe in the 1920s and the 1930s. The best known, and most frequently imitated, is Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1926). Other ‘city symphonies’ of this period include Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926), Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Joris Ivens’ Regen [Rain] (1929) and Jean Vigo’s A Propos de Nice (1930). The earliest of the city symphonies was Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1921). Manhatta appears to have had a significant influence on the European city symphonies and city films of the later 1920s, and also on less well known American avant-garde films, including Jay Leyda’s AB ronx Morning and Herman Weinberg’s City Symphony and Autumn Fire .C ity and cinema have been inextricably linked from the very first films onwards. The avant-garde city films of the 1920s show the influence of early urban panoramic films and city actualities. They are part of the complex history whereby film-makers in the 1920s sought to renew the medium–and to turn away from commercial and narrative cinema–by returning to cinema’s origins in the documenting of reality, but with the particular twist given by the perspectives and angles of modernism. The ‘city symphonies’ of Sheeler and Strand, Ruttmann, Cavalcanti and Vertov follow the course of a day in the life of the city. Like the one-day novels of the period, they open up the question of ‘modernist dailiness’; the preoccupation with everyday life is combined with the intimation that much greater spans of time and culture are condensed within the diurnal round. Space and time relations–and duration and the passing of time–are some of the central preoccupations of the films, frequently underlain by the perception that ‘plot’ and ‘story’ must be excluded for time and space to become apparent. Rien que les heures, for example, opens with