‘A Hymn to Movement’

Laura Marcus

doi:10.1017/CBO9781107045422.006

Chapter 5 - ‘A Hymn to Movement’

The ‘City Symphony’ of the 1920s and 1930s

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2014

Laura Marcus

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Laura Marcus: Affiliation:
University of Oxford

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The ‘city symphonies’ of my title refer primarily to a cluster of films made in the US and Europe in the 1920s and into the 1930s. The best known, and most frequently imitated, is Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City of 1926. Other ‘city symphonies’ of this period include Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926), Dziga-Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Joris Ivens’ Regen [‘Rain’] (1929) and Jean Vigo’s A Propos de Nice (1930). The earliest of the city symphonies was Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta of 1921, which appears to have had a significant influence on the European city symphonies and city films of the later 1920s, as well as on less well-known US avant-garde films, including Jay Leyda’s A Bronx Morning and Herman Weinberg’s City Symphony and Autumn Fire. City and cinema have, of course, been inextricably linked from the very first films onwards. The avant-garde city films of the 1920s show the influence of early urban panoramic films and city actualities, and they are part of the complex history whereby film-makers in the 1920s sought to renew the medium – and to turn away from commercial and narrative cinema – by returning to cinema’s origins in the documenting of reality, but with the particular twist given by the perspectives and angles of modernism.

Type: Chapter
Information: Dreams of Modernity
Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema
, pp. 89 - 109

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107045422.006 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2014

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Chapter 5 - ‘A Hymn to Movement’

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