Introduction

In the last chapter, I argued that abstract design was never simply an aesthetic phenomenon, but also the object of psychophysiological research, much of it carried out within the new science of advertising psychology. The participation in advertising on the part of Ruttmann and other filmmakers could hardly be written off as a compromise of aesthetic principles; it was, rather, a logical extension and application of their own experiments in abstract film design, which were carried out within a horizon of application. In a broader sense, we saw that Ruttmann understood reduction and abstraction as a potential answer to a problem of perception in modernity. Drawing on the convention of the scientific “curve,” he saw the aesthetics of abstraction as a means of training perception to operate within the new technological and mass-mediated public spheres of the early 20th century, spheres defined above all by acceleration and the increasing accumulation of mental and visual “data.”

One could easily carry this analysis of “perception training” over to the film that sealed Ruttmann's international fame in 1920s and since, his magnum opus BERLIN. DIE SINFONIE DER GROSSSTADT (BERLIN. THE SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY, 1927), in which Ruttmann used montage to depict the teeming life of the metropolis from morning until nightfall. As has often been pointed out, Ruttmann's first full-length film, despite replacing animation with photographic images, retained a schematic “musical” quality in its imitation of the symphonic form, its division into five “acts” of varying intensities, and its calibration of visual montage with the musical score by Edmund Meisel. Upon the film's premiere, critic Herbert Jhering spoke of Ruttmann's “Bildmusik” (image music) in BERLIN, and Béla Balázs would invoke the term “optische Musik” (optical music) to describe BERLIN in his book Der Geist des Films (The Spirit of Film, 1930). Subsequent scholars have largely followed in the same path. Such a musical quality, moreover, would appear to have informed Ruttmann's very planning of the film. As Goergen notes, rather than basing the film on a linear script, Ruttmann employed a kind of card catalogue for the individual scenes; each card included not only a description of the scene's content, but also, as one writer for the journal Filmkurier described it in an article from September 1926, “a precise graphic curve representing the scene's tempo and movement.