Magical History Tour – City Symphonies

Walter Ruttman’s BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY (Germany 1927) is not just the singular portrait of a glittering mid-1920s metropolis, but also the linchpin of a series of documentaries from the 1920s and 30s which carry its name: the city symphonies, which employed rhythmic montage and associative sequences of images to capture the increasing dynamism, mechanization and modernity of cities and how it felt to live in them at the time. Rhythm, tempo, movement, abstraction and a lust for experimentation govern these cinematic approximations of Berlin, Nice, Moscow, New York, Paris and Rotterdam, which we will be showing in July. The series will also be supplemented by several, more recent films which either make explicit reference to the city symphony genre or are related to it.