The redis­cov­ery of Berlin began thir­ty years ago this Novem­ber, with the demo­li­tion of the wall that had long divid­ed the city’s west­ern and east­ern halves. Specif­i­cal­ly, the Berlin Wall had stood since 1961, mean­ing the younger gen­er­a­tion of West and East Berlin­ers had no mem­o­ry of their city’s being whole. In anoth­er sense, the same could be said of their par­ents’ gen­er­a­tion, who saw near­ly a third of Berlin destroyed in the Sec­ond World War. Only the most ven­er­a­ble Berlin­ers would have remem­bered the social and indus­tri­al gold­en age the undi­vid­ed city enjoyed back in the 1920s — an age exhil­a­rat­ing­ly pre­sent­ed in the film Berlin: Sym­pho­ny of a Metrop­o­lis.

An ear­ly exam­ple of the silent-era “city sym­phonies” that showed off the cap­i­tals of the world on film (sev­er­al of which you can watch here on Open Cul­ture), Berlin takes the view­er along streets and water­ways, through parks, onto trains and ele­va­tors, on roller coast­ers, and into fac­to­ries, build­ing sites, cabarets, and skies. Shot over a year and com­pressed into less than an hour, this avant-garde doc­u­men­tary cap­tures the expe­ri­ence of Berlin in the 1920s — or rather it cap­tures, in that might­i­ly indus­tri­al age, expe­ri­ence at the inter­sec­tion of human and machine. Direc­tor Walther Ruttmann “charts the move­ments of crowds of chil­dren, work­ers, swim­mers, row­ers, and so on,” writes Pop­mat­ters’ Chad­wick Jenk­ins, “but only occa­sion­al­ly focus­es on a per­son as an indi­vid­ual. More­over, many of the most strik­ing scenes in the film avoid the intru­sion of peo­ple alto­geth­er, con­cen­trat­ing instead on the oper­a­tion of mechan­i­cal devices.”

Absent explana­to­ry nar­ra­tion or title cards, the film invites a vari­ety of read­ings. Chad­wick sees it as “the defam­a­to­ry dehu­man­iza­tion of the human, the dero­ga­tion of human auton­o­my and domin­ion over a world of indif­fer­ent mat­ter, a reduc­tion of the divine spark in humankind to the sta­tus of anoth­er mere thing.” This same qual­i­ty drove away one of Ruttman­n’s key col­lab­o­ra­tors on Berlin, the writer Carl May­er. Ruttmann, for his part, described his own moti­va­tion as “the idea of mak­ing some­thing out of life, of cre­at­ing a sym­phon­ic film out of the mil­lions of ener­gies that com­prise the life of a big city.”

A pri­ma­ry inter­est in move­ment itself is per­haps to be expect­ed from a film­mak­er who had pre­vi­ous­ly dis­tin­guished him­self as an abstract ani­ma­tor. (What his lat­er work as an assis­tant to Leni Riefen­stahl on Tri­umph of the Will indi­cates is anoth­er mat­ter.) But if Berlin: Sym­pho­ny of a Metrop­o­lis “dehu­man­izes,” writes Jenk­ins, it does so as a delib­er­ate artis­tic strat­e­gy to show that “the city is more than its var­i­ous com­po­nents, includ­ing its human com­po­nents,” and to “pro­vide an insight into the emer­gent qual­i­ties that make a city what it is, beyond being a mere com­pos­ite of the ele­ments with­in its geo­graph­i­cal bound­aries,” how­ev­er those bound­aries get drawn and redrawn over time.

Berlin: Sym­pho­ny of a Metrop­o­lis will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Samuel Beck­ett Walk the Streets of Berlin Like a Boss, 1969

See Berlin Before and After World War II in Star­tling Col­or Video

Dra­mat­ic Col­or Footage Shows a Bombed-Out Berlin a Month After Germany’s WWII Defeat (1945)

Berlin Street Scenes Beau­ti­ful­ly Caught on Film (1900–1914)

Watch 1920s “City Sym­phonies” Star­ring the Great Cities of the World: From New York to Berlin to São Paulo

The First Avant Garde Ani­ma­tion: Watch Wal­ter Ruttmann’s Licht­spiel Opus 1 (1921)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

When it came out in 1927, Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis showed audi­ences the kind of whol­ly invent­ed real­i­ty, hith­er­to beyond imag­i­na­tion, that could be real­ized in motion pic­tures. Its vision of a soci­ety bisect­ed into colos­sal sky­scrap­ers and under­ground war­rens, an indus­tri­al Art Deco dystopia, con­tin­ues to influ­ence film­mak­ers today. This despite — or per­haps because of — the sim­ple sto­ry it tells, in which Fred­er, the scion of the city of Metrop­o­lis, rebels against his father after fol­low­ing Maria, a good-heart­ed maid­en from the under­class, into the infer­nal low­er depths.

In the role of Maria was a then-unknown 18-year-old actress named Brigitte Helm. “For all the steam and spe­cial effects,” writes Robert McG. Thomas Jr. in Helm’s New York Times obit­u­ary, “for many who have seen the movie in its var­i­ous incar­na­tions, includ­ing a tint­ed ver­sion and one accom­pa­nied by music, the most com­pelling lin­ger­ing image is nei­ther the tow­ers above nor the hell­ish fac­to­ries below. It is the star­tling trans­for­ma­tion of Ms. Helm from an ide­al­is­tic young woman into a bare­ly clad crea­ture per­form­ing a las­civ­i­ous dance in a broth­el.”

Halfway through the film, Maria gets kid­napped by the vil­lain­ous inven­tor Rot­wang and cloned as a robot. It is this robot, not the real Maria, who takes the stage in the scene in ques­tion, prac­ti­cal­ly nude by the stan­dards of silent-era cin­e­ma. Lang used the sequence to push not just the bounds of pro­pri­ety, but the aes­thet­ic capa­bil­i­ties of his art form: view­ers would nev­er have seen any­thing like the frame-fill­ing field of eye­balls into which the slaver­ing crowd of tuxe­doed men dis­solve. Here we have a medi­um demon­strat­ing deci­sive­ly and pow­er­ful­ly what sets it apart from all oth­ers, in just one of the scenes restored only recent­ly to its orig­i­nal form.

When Thomas allud­ed to the many extant cuts of Metrop­o­lis in his 1996 obit­u­ary for Helm, the now-defin­i­tive ver­sion of the pic­ture that made her a star still lay in the future. 2010’s The Com­plete Metrop­o­lis includes mate­r­i­al redis­cov­ered just two years before, on a 16-mil­lime­ter reduc­tion neg­a­tive stored at Buenos Aires’ Museo del Cine and long for­got­ten there­after. Now, just as Lang intend­ed us to, we can behold his cin­e­mat­ic vision of rulers employ­ing the high­est tech­nol­o­gy to keep even the elite mes­mer­ized by tit­il­lat­ing spec­ta­cles — a fan­tas­ti­cal sce­nario that has noth­ing at all to do, of course, with the future as it actu­al­ly turned out.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Metrop­o­lis: Watch a Restored Ver­sion of Fritz Lang’s Mas­ter­piece (1927)

Read the Orig­i­nal 32-Page Pro­gram for Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis (1927)

Fritz Lang Invents the Video Phone in Metrop­o­lis (1927)

H.G. Wells Pans Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis in a 1927 Movie Review: It’s “the Sil­li­est Film”

10 Great Ger­man Expres­sion­ist Films: From Nos­fer­atu to The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari

Watch After the Ball, the 1897 “Adult” Film by Pio­neer­ing Direc­tor Georges Méliès (Almost NSFW)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Every city needs its ide­al observ­er. More­over, a city needs an ide­al observ­er for each of its eras, and ide­al­ly each of its eras will have an ide­al observ­er in each major medi­um. Boom­ing with indus­try in the mid-19th cen­tu­ry and dai­ly absorb­ing more of what must have seemed like the entire world, New York fair­ly demand­ed the cel­e­bra­to­ry poet­ic capac­i­ty of Walt Whit­man. In time, Whit­man’s 1860 poem “Man­na­hat­ta” would inspire two visu­al artists to cap­ture the city in anoth­er time, and through a brand new medi­um. Begun in 1920 as a col­lab­o­ra­tion by pho­tog­ra­ph­er-painter Charles Sheel­er and pho­tog­ra­ph­er Paul Strand, Man­hat­ta (note the slight­ly dif­fer­ent spelling) made cin­e­mat­ic his­to­ry as the first Amer­i­can avant-garde film.

It also deliv­ered a kind over­ture for the “city sym­pho­ny,” a genre of film that would, over the rest of the decade, test the poten­tial of the motion pic­ture by using it to cap­ture the unprece­dent­ed dynamism of metrop­o­lis­es around the world. (You can see many more of them here at Open Cul­ture.)

Man­hat­ta is poet­ic in its use of imagery — Strand, after all, was the author of the icon­ic 1915 pho­to­graph Wall Street, New York — but as the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art says, “for all its art, Man­hat­ta is also doc­u­men­tary. It leads view­ers through a day in the life of Man­hat­tan, intro­duced by lines from one of Whitman’s many odes to his beloved home: ‘City of the world (for all races are here) / City of tall facades of mar­ble and iron, / Proud and pas­sion­ate city.’ ”

Whit­man’s words appear on inter­ti­tles through­out the film, pay­ing trib­ute to “the shov­el, the der­rick, the wall scaf­fold, the work of walls and ceil­ings” and “shapes of the bridges, vast frame­works, gird­ers, arch­es” between shots of New York Har­bor, the Stat­en Island Fer­ry ter­mi­nal, the Brook­lyn Bridge, and oth­er of the city’s mar­vels of infra­struc­ture and archi­tec­ture. (Above, thanks to Aeon, you can watch a dig­i­tal­ly-restored ver­sion of Man­hat­ta, with a new­ly com­mis­sioned score by com­pos­er William Pear­son.) The last of these 65 shots cap­tures a sun­set view from a sky­scraper,  a kind of build­ing that Whit­man, who died in 1892, would scarce­ly have imag­ined. But he sure­ly believed that this “mod­ern Baby­lon-on-the-Hud­son,” as Man­hat­ta bills it, would nev­er cease to grow fuller, taller, and might­i­er, tak­ing forms in the future unpre­dictable even by the ide­al observers of its past.

Man­hat­ta will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch 1920s “City Sym­phonies” Star­ring the Great Cities of the World: From New York to Berlin to São Paulo

A Trip Through New York City in 1911: Vin­tage Video of NYC Gets Col­orized & Revived with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Great New Archive Lets You Hear the Sounds of New York City Dur­ing the Roar­ing 20s

Vin­tage Films Revis­its Lit­er­ary Scene of 1920s New York, with Clips of Sin­clair Lewis, Willa Cather, H.L. Menck­en & Oth­er Icons

1905 Video Shows New York City Sub­way Trav­el­ing From 14th St. to 42nd Street

Eight Free Films by Dzi­ga Ver­tov, Cre­ator of Sovi­et Avant-Garde Doc­u­men­taries

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

“Pics or it didn’t hap­pen,” says the Inter­net, a phrase typ­i­cal­ly “used in jest,” writes Erin Ratelle at Space and Cul­ture, as “a counter to an out­ra­geous claim of events. How­ev­er, its root is pred­i­cat­ed on the notion that media is inte­gral to being or exis­tence,” that we must record every­thing. Such implic­it under­stand­ing was only in its infan­cy in 1918, when the influen­za out­break known as the Span­ish Flu began, which per­haps goes some way toward explain­ing why a viral pan­dem­ic that killed mil­lions around the world—far more than World War I—is so under­rep­re­sent­ed in the his­tor­i­cal record.

These days if a Utah coun­ty com­mis­sion meet­ing about masks for chil­dren gets thronged by unmasked pro­test­ers, we get almost-instant video at The Wash­ing­ton Post. Images fil­ter out through Twit­ter and Face­book, or move in the oth­er direc­tion, and mil­lions see them with­in hours. Dur­ing the 1918 flu pan­dem­ic, unmasked pro­test­ers against mask laws also abound­ed, but cov­er­age of their stunts took months to move from local papers to nation­al out­lets, who even­tu­al­ly cov­ered the San Fran­cis­co Anti-Mask League’s stri­dent refusals. The dev­as­tat­ing epi­dem­ic, how­ev­er, esti­mat­ed to have infect­ed one third of the world, was almost entire­ly absent from silent film at the time.

Cin­e­ma of all kinds avoid­ed the sub­ject, writes Bry­ony Dixon at the British Film Insti­tute (BFI): “It’s aston­ish­ing to think how invis­i­ble the first pan­dem­ic in the time of cin­e­ma is from the film record. Apart from one infor­ma­tion­al film, which sur­vives in the BFI Nation­al Archive, the influen­za pan­dem­ic of 1918/1919 doesn’t appear in British film at all. There were no news­reel reports, and no fic­tion films were made that even men­tioned the three waves of the pan­dem­ic that struck the coun­try in the final year of the First World War and would kill 200,000 peo­ple” in the UK and 500 mil­lion world­wide.

This does not mean there are no films about plague and pesti­lence from the time. But the present seemed to have been too painful. Film­mak­ers looked back to Boc­cac­cio, one of whose Decameron sto­ries was adapt­ed for the screen. “It must cer­tain­ly have been eas­i­er,” Dixon writes, “for silent era audi­ences to con­tem­plate pan­dem­ic with­in the moral frame­work of the medieval peri­od.” Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death was adapt­ed by Fritz Lang in a screen­play for Otto Rippert’s 1919 The Plague in Flo­rence. F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nos­fer­atu is, arguably, about dis­ease, as is its source, Bram Stoker’s Drac­u­la. But fic­tion and doc­u­men­tary most­ly stayed mum about the dead­ly flu pan­dem­ic.

In 1918, the War had near­ly every Euro­pean nation (and the U.S. at that point) pre­oc­cu­pied. Gov­ern­ment con­trol over major media out­lets cen­sored cov­er­age of the dis­ease, osten­si­bly to avoid a pan­ic. The stag­ger­ing death tolls of war and infec­tion were over­whelm­ing. A polit­i­cal nar­ra­tive took shape to sug­gest a cul­prit, Spain, which was neu­tral dur­ing WWI, and the first coun­try to begin cov­er­ing the dis­ease in their press (hence the “Span­ish Flu,” which did not orig­i­nate in Spain). The one excep­tion to the black­out in the BFI archive is the short infor­ma­tion­al film at the top, Dr. Wise on Influen­za.

Pro­duced under the aus­pices of Sir Arthur New­sholme, the Chief Med­ical Offi­cer of the Local Gov­ern­ment Board (LGB), the film arrived a lit­tle too late to do much good after the sec­ond wave of infec­tions began in 1919, and it was not wide­ly dis­trib­uted. The short film pro­motes wear­ing masks, and it tells a very famil­iar sto­ry, as Dixon explains:

The ‘doc­tor’ uses the device of a fic­tion­al sto­ry in which a rather dim Mr Brown coughs and sneezes over col­leagues in the office and the street, before going on to infect 100 peo­ple at a the­atre (we see a rare ear­ly glimpse of the Empire Leices­ter Square, which was show­ing a musi­cal, The Lilac Domi­no).

It doesn’t end well for Mr Brown, and an on-screen title lists the grim totals of deaths in British cities, just as we’ve become used to see­ing today. Oth­er par­al­lels with the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion are spooky: the prime min­is­ter, Lloyd George, like Boris John­son, was hos­pi­talised for days with the virus, and an anx­ious nation was told it was ‘touch and go’ for a while.

His­to­ry has been rhyming all over the place late­ly, maybe the most poet­ic thing about the ugly times we’re liv­ing in. As much as we might have believed that the world, or our par­tic­u­lar cor­ner of it, had changed, we’re find­ing out how lit­tle progress we’ve actu­al­ly made. Iron­i­cal­ly, one of the most remark­able dif­fer­ences between the ear­ly 21st cen­tu­ry and every­thing that came before—the omnipres­ence of cam­eras and video—has accel­er­at­ed these real­iza­tions. We can now wit­ness, in ways no one pos­si­bly could have in 1919, just how much of the past we’re drag­ging along behind us.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Hap­pened When Amer­i­cans Had to Wear Masks Dur­ing the 1918 Flu Pan­dem­ic

The His­to­ry of the 1918 Flu Pan­dem­ic, “The Dead­liest Epi­dem­ic of All Time”: Three Free Lec­tures from The Great Cours­es

Japan­ese Health Man­u­al Cre­at­ed Dur­ing the 1918 Span­ish Flu Pan­dem­ic Offers Time­less Wis­dom: Stay Away from Oth­ers, Cov­er Your Mouth & Nose, and More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness