Symphony and Synecdoche: Walking in the Cinematic City

The cinema is a tangible space, bound up in the geography of the city. However, when thinking about cinema, consideration is rarely given to its position as a concrete part of the city's structure. Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927) locates the cinema within three structures: the symphonic structure of the film; the geographical structure of the city; and the structure of everyday life in Berlin. This entry is an attempt to discuss the cinema’s location within these structures and to suggest an apparent repercussion of its placement.

As we arrive in Berlin, it becomes clear that the city is built of a complex system of structures, communicative (telephone cables), functional (sewerage systems), and so on. These structures form the logic of the city, or, for Michael de Certeau (1988), they are the manifestation of the city’s strategies. These strategies are what give order to the city; these power cables, train tracks, and street signs are the score of the yet-to-be performed Great Berlin Symphony.

Soon after our arrival to the city, the orchestra take the stage, and the streets of Berlin begin to teem with pedestrians: the Berlin Symphony commences with the percussion of the pavement. Now, if Berlin is a city built of strategies, its people’s means of living with and in these strategies is what de Certeau describes as tactical. Such tactics wield the power to manipulate

spatial organisations, no matter how panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign to them (it can take place only within them) nor in conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from them. It creates shadows and ambiguities within them. It inserts its multitudinous references and citations into them, (p. 101).

With this in mind, we witness a mass of pedestrians walking in synchrony and harmony from the train station to their office or factory (with the exception of several improvising performers). For de Certeau, this constitutes a “wandering of the semantic” which causes some parts of the city disappear while exaggerating others (p. 102). In other words, the loudest notes are sounded when all of the orchestra – factory-workers, shop-keepers, and children – play at once.

In the fifth movement, the Berlin Symphony shifts from work to play – from alla marcia to scherzando – and, fittingly, the focus of the film shifts to the entertainment precinct which is where we find the cinema. What takes places in this movement is tactical: the Berliners are living in and with the strategies of Berlin the best way they know how, that is, by having fun. However, this tactical destination, by virtue of being situated within a strategically designated part of the city, is heavily influenced by strategy (i.e. entertainment districts exist to draw people in). As a result of this, the location imparts a unique significance to cinema: the cinema is emphasised both geographically and socially, both strategically and tactically.

To what effect does this significance come? As the cinema is where tactics willingly converge with strategy, it is rendered complicit with what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer designate “the culture industry” (1947). Under the rule of such, cinema

is sought after as an escape from the mechanised work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanisation has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process itself, (p. 1229).

So, the tedium of work depicted in movements two, three, and four is only escaped from by approximation to it in the fifth. In essence, the fifth act, despite its change in key, simply modulates to its relative major (that which is consequential to its minor); and after this performance, the orchestra will return to playing in minor again, for day after day after day.

Yet most significantly, this placement takes impact on the role of cinema itself: by strategising the tactics of cinema, whatever movies are shown can be nothing but mass entertainment. Chaplin’s iconic feet and cane – metonymous for The Tramp’s struggle to survive in the industrialised world – are just another marketable variation. In cinematic Berlin, “even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system,” (p. 1223) and this iron system is what sustains and regulates the tempo of the Great Berlin Symphony.

Works Cited:

Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (1947). In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Leitch, Vincent B. Et al., 1220-40. New York; London: Norton, 2001.

de Certeau, Michael. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkley: University of California Press, 1988.