By uses of tempo and rhythm, and by large-scale integration of single effects, [city symphonies] capture eye and impress mind in same way a military parade might do. But by their concentration on mass and movement, they tend to avoid larger creative job. What more attractive (for a man of visual taste) than to swing wheels and pistons about in ding-dong description of a machine, when he has little to say about man who tends it? And what more comfortable if, in one's heart, there is avoidance of issue of underpaid labor and meaningless production? For this reason I hold symphony tradition of for a danger and Berlin for most dangerous of all film models to follow.-John Grierson, First Principles of DocumentaryThe modern cities emerging from 1920s symphony films that so fascinated and frightened John Grierson resemble living clock- work. These films use fluid, rapid montage characteristic of avant-garde and popular films of late silent period-as well as classi- cal unities of time, place, and theme-to depict a typical day in life of a real or constructed European capital. At time of Grierson's writ- ing in early 1940s, the symphony tradition of cinema consisted of eight very different films, ranging from delicate impressions of a soggy Amsterdam afternoon in Joris Ivens's Regen (1929) to riotous class critique of seaside vulgarities in Jean Vigo's A propos de Nice (1930).1 However, as Grierson's final quoted sentence suggests, this diverse cin- ematic tradition is often summarized through Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1928). Emphasizing its na- ture and perhaps explaining why it has become representative critical example of its cycle, Berlin consists of what title cards identify as an overture and five acts. The overture alludes to city's prehistoric origins, and opening of first act depicts a predawn entry into city via rail. The subsequent four acts detail a typical morning, arrival at work, afternoon, and nightlife, respectively. Contemporary scholars of city symphony continue to define it with reference to Ruttmann's film, even as tra- dition itself has expanded beyond initial 1920s cycle of European avant-garde works to encompass midcentury New York cycle as well as contemporary global entries more closely aligned with an observational docu- mentary tradition.2As Grierson implies, Berlin 's symphonic qualities entail development of evolving themes and apparently divergent rhythms. These are collected and resolved through creation of a master structure, which is itself derived from impression of simultaneous, thematically connected phenomena occurring in different locations, resulting in a sense of omnipresence for viewer (Kracauer 64-65). This concatenation of daily activities produces city as a transparent, unified organism with a circadian cycle, thereby constructing it as a subject, as Grierson hints at when he speaks of quotidian activities as undertaken by city itself instead of by its inhabitants (105-06). However, production of city as a sub- ject simultaneously reduces citizenry to part of rhythmic machine city comes to resemble (Grierson 106). The legibility lent to usually overwhelming onslaught of technol- ogy, industry, and spectacle that compose quotidian reality of modern urban dweller produces a corresponding erasure of socio- economic order's alienating, exploitative quali- ties and its historical context.Grierson concludes that Berlin 's dangers derive from its claim to observe, select from, and interpret material of everyday existence while obscuring means by which this mate- rial is produced and organized; film pro- vides a compelling play of surfaces while for- bidding investigation into manner of their connection. Siegfried Kracauer expanded on Grierson's attack, arguing that film's con- centration on mass and movement not only forbade economic critique but also amounted to a proto-fascist aesthetic (180-83). …