Berlin, Symphony of a City (Freund, Mayer & Ruttmann, 1927)

[hearthesilence]

Anthology is screening a 16mm print of this on Sunday, May 12, 8pm, with a live score:

Anthology gives Edmund Meisel (the original composer of BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN as well as BERLIN) the night off. Instead the visionary ‘city symphony’ Meisel co-created with Carl Mayer, Karl Freund, and Walter Ruttmann unspools alongside a live score commissioned by the Springville, NY Center for the Arts, and composed and performed by bass player, vocalist, and percussionist Sue Garner, drummer and percussionist Rick Brown, and guitar player and percussionist Bruce Bennett. Collectively the trio boasts recordings and performances with The Shams, Run On, The A-Bones, V-Effect, Angel Dean, Timber, Rattle, Fish And Roses, John Zorn, Guigou Chenevier, Andre Williams, and Hasil Adkins, for labels including Matador, Norton, Thrill Jockey, and Egon. The group hopes that the Manhattan debut performance of their score will musically tease out the similarities between the film’s bygone Weimar Berlin and the lost Lower East Side of the performers’ vanished youth.

Ruttmann and company’s seminal, groundbreaking film is a valentine to the ‘new’ Berlin of the late 1920s. Beginning at dawn and ending after midnight, it shows Berliners hard at work by day and possessed by the city’s thriving nightlife. Essentially a feature-length montage, the film was heavily influenced by Soviet documentary experiments like Dziga Vertov's KINO-PRAVDA and was itself very influential in fostering the ‘city symphony’ genre and other documentary hybrid styles to come. This rare screening is not to be missed!

[HerrSchreck]

That score description, despite the creds of the players, makes me a little leery. . . . I'm not going, but would be interested to hear whether or not these guys support the film, or treat the night like a gig, and draw attention away from the film towards themselves.

"The group hopes that the Manhattan debut performance of their score will musically tease out the similarities between the film’s bygone Weimar Berlin and the lost Lower East Side of the performers’ vanished youth."

Reserved Shudder.

Reserved, but a shudder nontheless.