Berlin – Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt

A textbook classic to which the years have not been kind. The portrait of a city dawn-to-dusk may not have been a hackneyed project in 1927, but it would soon become so. The unsophisticated structure, the mundane content of the images, the exclusion of overt human or social significance were all presumably deliberate, the better to centre attention on the montage, which is indeed dynamic and possibly 'symphonic', for those able to concentrate on editing rhythms for any length of time. Today it's the hidden camera banalities that hold the real interest, while the turbulent cutting ironically becomes a hindrance to actually engaging with these fragments of long ago and far away. Reissued in the '30s with an added score by Edmund Meisel.