Walther Ruttmann's Silent Classic BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A CITY Opens MoMA's Silent Movie Week
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STILL: WALTHER RUTTMANN’S BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A CITY (1927). SOURCE: GARTENBERG MEDIA ENTERPRISES.
COVER ART FOR THE DVD RELEASE OF RUTTMANN’S FILM, DISTRIBUTED BY GME.
From July 30th to August 5th, The Museum of Modern Art will present its third annual Silent Movie Week. This year’s programming is comprised of seven recent silent film restorations screened over seven consecutive evenings. MoMA’s week-long celebration commences with the Museum’s digital restoration of Walther Ruttmann’s BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A CITY (1927), which will be shown with live musical accompaniment in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden.
GME distributes BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A CITY to North American universities as a DVD publication that also includes Ruttmann’s 1929 feature MELODY OF THE WORLD, and 12 short films by Ruttmann as bonus features. Also included in this release are a selection of Ruttmann’s paintings and drawings, lobby cards and original artwork for BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A CITY, and an 86-minute long radio feature from 1987 about Ruttmann’s life and career.
As delineated in MoMA’s program note for Ruttmann’s film:
Walter Ruttmann’s landmark city symphony transforms a day in the life of Weimar-era Berlin into a percussive visual poem. Beginning with the arrival of a morning train and concluding in nightfall, the film’s five-act structure follows the metropolis from dawn to dusk, capturing the pulsing energy of urban modernity through dazzling montage sequences. Cinematographer Karl Freund’s roving camera moves fluidly through factories, boulevards, cafés, and nightclubs, capturing the mechanical rhythms and social strata of a city in transformation. Neither strictly documentary nor avant-garde experiment, Ruttmann’s masterpiece synthesizes abstract formalism with documentary observation, creating a hypnotic portrait of industrial society that influenced generations of filmmakers from Dziga Vertov to Godfrey Reggio.
BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A CITY is one of numerous silent films that GME distributes on DVD, Blu-Ray, and digital formats to North American academic institutions. For a full list of international silent classics offered by GME, click here.
GME also distributes a number of city symphony films on various formats, which can be found here. To read more about GME President Jon Gartenberg’s 50-year dedication to researching and curating programs and exhibitions of city symphony films, click here.