Berlin - sinfonie der großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City)

Walter Ruttmann's Berlin film will soon be sixty years old. It remains the most beautiful and most important historical testimony on the German capital. Whenever experts are polled, Berlin ranks among the ten best documentary films, worldwide Edmund Meisel must be counted as the most interesting composer for silent films. His score for Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin first brought him international fame. His musical language was, for those times, rather daring: he loved dissonant tone clusters, jazz, the everyday noises invented by Bruitism, and motor-like rhythmic patterns.