‘A Hymn to Movement’

Abstract

The ‘city symphonies’ of my title refer primarily to a cluster of films made in the US and Europe in the 1920s and into the 1930s. The best known, and most frequently imitated, is Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin : Symphony of a Great City of 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 of 1921, which appears to have had a significant influence on the European city symphonies and city films of the later 1920s, as well as on less well-known US avant-garde films, including Jay Leyda’s A Bronx Morning and Herman Weinberg’s City Symphony and Autumn Fire . City and cinema have, of course, 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, and 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.