Berlin: Symphony of a Great City vs. Man with a Movie Camera

Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film, Man with a Movie Camera seems to closely follow on from Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, made two years before. Stylistically, visually and aesthetically the two films share much common ground. Generally speaking, they are also quite similar in a thematic sense; both offer the viewer a tour through a newly industrialised cityscape that is in constant movement. Both films offer us cities that are thriving, living organisms; cities that are being propelled towards an unknown yet electrified future. However, although made around the same time, and employing many of the same filmic techniques, Vertov and Ruttman offer very different readings of the condition of man in the modern world, and also of what the great machines of the industrial age signify for man’s future in years to come.

Watching Berlin, one gets the sense that Ruttman is clearly trying to avoid any political alignments or commentary in his work. True, there are fleeting shots of beggars and paupers, but these quickly blend into the scenery. We are shown a sequence of people eating at lunchtime in the city; people eat in restaurants and cafes, at home, next to street vendors and so on. Inter-cut with this are shots of animals eating in the zoo, and briefly, a shot of a starving woman and two children. Ruttman edits this in a way that you are not able to focus on the starving woman and her children for long enough to get a sense of their poverty. Almost as soon as the image registers, it is gone, replaced by people with ample sustenance. Further, Ruttman clearly made the decision to keep Berlin a predominantly aesthetic experience. The audience is positioned so that they are able to marvel at the magnificence of the modern city, its inhabitants and its machinery. As the viewer is posited to watch the film in this particular way, any emotional interaction with the images on screen are thus subdued, and dulled to a point that they become negligible, if not entirely irrelevant.

Throughout Berlin we are shown people going to work, at work and coming home from work. However, there is never a sense of the hardship of their labour. In fact, the film seems to focus on all other aspects of city life; people walk the streets, drive cars, eat, and generally are seen to enjoy themselves. Ruttman’s film shows the population as living a life that is considerably more leisurely than it is laborious – the exact opposite of Vertov’s film. In Man with a Movie Camera we are shown people constantly at work, and the films goes to painstaking detail to show the chaotic nature of modern life in scenes of telephone operators crossing wire over wire, of cigarettes being counted and packaged, of butter wrappers being made over and over again. Even the movies - a recreational activity - is named the "proletariat cinema"! For Vertov, modern life is work, for Ruttman it's everything surrounding it.