The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity between the Wars ed. by Steven Jacobs, Eva Hielscher, and Anthony Kinik (review)

Throughout the histories of both documentary film and experimental art film, the city symphony has been something of a curiosity—often mentioned, yet seldom treated, as a form worthy of in-depth analysis. This non-narrative, silent film form in which the city serves as protagonist, and not simply a backdrop, has for too long remained an under-theorized structure. When it is mentioned, discussion of the city symphony is usually confined to two or three films, most particularly its two great exemplars: the Weimar classic Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Walter Ruttmann, 1927), from which the city symphony derives its name, and the Soviet masterwork Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929). And, while there have been a few notable attempts to categorize some of the other experimental "city" films, to date there has never been a full scholarly accounting of the more than eighty different non-narrative films created between 1920 and 1940 by both professional and amateur filmmakers across four continents. With the publication of The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity between the Wars, editors Steven Jacobs, Eva Hielscher, and Anthony Kinik have created an invaluable contribution to the understanding of this compelling form of international film modernism.

One of the aims of the book is to represent the transnational forms of collaboration and cross-border dialogue. In a range of essays and filmography annotations, the editors expand our understanding of who made city symphonies and why. Providing sustained and rigorous attention to this previously neglected chapter, The City Symphony Phenomenon rectifies a long-standing lacuna in cinema history, bringing harmony and purpose to a category of filmmaking that has previously seemed too unruly to fit into a single frame.

The book is divided into three sections. The opening introductory essay provides a comprehensive historical overview of the city symphony, arguing for understanding it as a genre in its own right while tracking the origins of its form. Laying bare the genre's structural components, the editors disentangle a number of historical inaccuracies that have accreted over time, such as the oft-repeated description of the city symphony film as a European form, despite the central importance of the first city symphony film Manhatta (Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, 1921), a collaboration between two American photographers. In defining city symphony as a non-story film form, structured to be analogous to music rather than literature or drama, and in which the city serves as protagonist and emblem of modernity, the editors make a persuasive case for the claim that city symphony should be considered as a film genre in its own right. Exploring the boundary conditions and potential instability of this claim, Jacobs, Hielscher, and Kinik make an important contribution to the understanding of genre theory as well.

The second section of the book is a carefully curated collection of sixteen essays, each of which focuses on a specific film or suite of films. Many of the essays provide insights into the biographies of the filmmakers while contextualizing little-known films by comparing them with their more familiar city symphony cousins in order to expand the idea of what a city symphony is, who made them, and for what reasons. For example, Michael Cowan contrasts Ruttmann's later short city film Düsseldorf (1935), made in support of the Nazi government, with the earlier and more seemingly neutral Berlin. Malcom Turvey analyzes the relationship between Vertov's Movie Camera and its precursor Moscow (1926) by Vertov's brother, the cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman and his collaborator Ilya Kopalin. Steven Jacobs tackles the lively exchange between the small group of Belgian filmmakers and a suite of internationally renowned documentarists from neighbouring countries the Netherlands, France, Germany, and beyond. Filmmakers discussed include Joris Ivens, Jean Vigo, Boris Kaufman, and Hans Richter, and links are made between...