Recently completed my paper “A Filmic Map of Moscow: Traveling through Mikhail Kaufman’s City Symphony Moscow” for Yuri Tsivian’s excellent course “Dziga Vertov and His Time: Left-Wing Art, Avant-Garde Filmmaking, Radical Politics.”

Recently completely my paper “Towards a Synaesthetic Transparency: Janet Cardiff’s Her Long Black Hair as a Walk Between Acousticd, Temporal and Ontological Spaces” 

This paper was written for Eve Blau’s fantastic course “Transparency.”

Listen to two excerpts from the walk audio:

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Just returned from incredible Marfa, Texas and have now completed my final paper on ABCDF: Graphic Dictionary of Mexico City for Giuliana’s Bruno Proseminar on Film and Visual Studies theory. You can download the paper here.

One of the papers I’m working right now for Peter Gordon’s “Weimar Intellectuals” seminar is about Walter Ruttmann’s amazing 1930 sound collage WEEKEND. Take a listen below. Special thanks to Jonathan Mitchell for introducing me to this piece. And I’ve also included the first draft of my text.

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Research Précis

Walter Ruttmann’s WEEKEND:
Sound, Space and the Multiple Senses of an Urban Documentary Imaginary

Subject Background

On June 6th, 1930 a radically new form of radio was broadcast over the Berlin airwaves. An 11′ 20″ long collage of raw sounds greeted listeners accustomed to hearing news reports, occasional classical musical programs and, only very recently, literary works written specifically for radio performance, the nascent genre known as Hörspiel (”radio drama”). This startling work was WEEKEND, an audio documentary created by Walter Ruttmann, an avant-garde artist best known for his experimental filmmaking, most famously, his 1927 production BERLIN — Sinfonie einer Großstadt.

WEEKEND marks a milestone in the history of media arts as a first significant experiment in montage-based radio. The piece consists of six “movements,” transpiring from Saturday afternoon at the factory through a night out, a “pastoral” Sunday, and finally the city returning to work on Monday. Ruttmann gathered his sounds by driving around Berlin in a van with a hidden microphone, stopping at locations such as train stations, factories, and busy streets to record the uninhibited, rhythm of the city. For Ruttmann’s Hörspiel, the city of Berlin itself was the main actor, avoiding any traditional theatrical performers like other literary Hörspiele of the time. Ruttmann’s limited time recording in the studio was used to capture a few notes of classical instruments such as the violin and piano, but also to record the “playing” of non-traditional instruments such as a saw and hammer. Ruttmann recorded all of the material onto Tri-Ergon sound film, the Berlin company that pioneered the synthesis of sound and image technology in Europe. To understand the significance of editing and montage in Ruttmann’s work, one need only look at the amount of film processed from the beginning to the final product. After recording, Ruttmann had amassed 2000 meters of film. And the final piece was only 250 meters long, stitched together from 240 individual segments.

The first minute of WEEKEND, part of the “Jazz of Work” section, gives a strong impression of the overall work. Ruttmann opens with a growing sequence of gongs, spliced together at metric intervals, eventually growing in a crescendo into a quick instance of intensity with the sound of a factory machine, followed immediately by the repeated cuttings of a saw and a hammer, both also operating at the same rhythm and meter. Then, a church bell sounds, and the machine returns, for a more extended sequence, pulsating at a higher level. The act of detailed editing is now very clear: quick cuts to a few beats of the hammer and then back to the machine, a few cuts of the saw and then back to the whir of the machine. Another, different bell sounds. We hear a car start. A sequence of high-pitched notes on the violin. A single key of the piano. Then, a man’s voice, muffled like on a telephone. “Hallo Fraülein.” Quick cut to the clicking coins of an opening cash register. “Bitte Döhnhof zwoundvierzig vier null.” Cut back to the cash register. The conversation, is then broken, we hear a child’s voice and then the thumping engine of a car driving. The spoken fragments are treated first as independent sonic elements, and secondarily as narrative tools. Altogether, the first minute of WEEKEND is a whirlwind of acoustic experiences, together giving a highly visceral sense of the modern industrial city, the texture of its inhabitants voices, and its web of transportation and communication networks.

It is not surprising that Ruttmann, a pioneer of montage in film, instigated this innovation in the sphere of sound. To understand WEEKEND, one must also understand Ruttmann’s earlier urban documentary, BERLIN. In BERLIN, Ruttmann had already illustrated the potential for applying montage techniques towards the representation of urban life. For over a year, Ruttmann traveled around the city in a van with a concealed camera, much as he would do with the microphone for WEEKEND. He then took this mountain of material, and through extensive editing, produced the final work that portrays the diverse life of the city from dawn until night. The film progresses from its opening shots of trains arriving into the metropolis before the city has fully awaken to final images of fireworks culminating a celebratory evening. Throughout, Ruttmann deploys sophisticated montage techniques, creating juxtapositions and transitions along conceptual and formal lines. Albeit a symphony, BERLIN was a silent film. But Ruttmann’s the subtitle sinfonie hints at his larger interest in sound and musicality.

Research Context

Scholarship on Ruttmann’s work is slim, especially in English, but even in his native German. It is likely Ruttmann has not received the same attention as his avant-garde colleagues, because of his later affiliations with the NAZIs. Ruttmann remained in Germany after Hitler’s rise to power and joined the NS propaganda machine, directing industry films and working as an assistant on Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. In the work that has been done on Ruttmann, not surprisingly, the main focus of scholarship has been on this issue of politics and centered on Ruttmann’s filmic output, especially BERLIN. Kracauer’s damning critique of BERLIN at the time, also surely contributed to marginalizing Ruttmann.

Following its broadcast, there was critical response to WEEKEND from various Weimar intellectuals. Writing in the Film-Kurier journal at the time, critic Lotte H. Eisner described Ruttmann’s project as “photographing space through sound.” Hans Richter, fellow filmmaker and DADA artist, called it “a symphony of sound…woven into a poem.” Also, reknowned film editor Paul Falkenberg wrote a short essay for Film Culture applauding Ruttmann’s sound editing innovations.

There has been very little academic scholarship written about WEEKEND. There a few paragraphs and quick oblique references in some books of German literary criticism on the Neües Horspiel of the 1960s, where the authors name WEEKEND to establish the historical context of the genre. The most extensive treatment of WEEKEND is a section in Antje Vowinckel’s Collagen im Hörspiel, in which she critically historicizes the work over seven pages. Vowinckel also includes a very helpful diagram that maps the progression of sounds through the piece. Vowinckel’s argument revolves around Ruttmann’s treatment of space and time. She details how Ruttmann’s subtle use of volume and distance from the microphone spatializes such sounds as doors opening and closing, trains leaving the station, and the progression of cars in traffic, successfully placing the listener into the aural-spatial context of the city itself. In terms of time, her main argument highlights how Ruttmann plays with chronology. The piece’s name and overall structure is, of course, a progression of time over three days. However, Vowinckel argues, this is a fragmented whole, a composite collage of many montaged fragments.

“Blindness” and a Urban Documentary Imaginary

My aim is to further develop the discussion of WEEKEND in the context of urban representation. While groundbreaking on many fronts, I am most interested in Ruttmann’s attempt to represent the urban experience in a purely sonic form. For as Fran Tonkiss writes, “The modern city, for all that there is to see, is not only spectacular: it is sonic.” It is precisely this interplay between the visual and the aural in the context of urban space and its representation through montage that makes Ruttmann’s work so compelling.

In interviews and his own writings, Ruttmann repeatedly called WEEKEND a “blind film,” a highly adept and evocative title. In his groundbreaking 1936 study of radio, Rudolf Arnheim located the medium’s unique artistic possibilities in its “blindness.” He argued against mainstream theory at the time that advocated for radio to create images in the minds of its listeners. He saw this perspective as based in seeing radio as somehow “sensorially defective” in comparison with film. Instead, Arnheim believed radio was most powerful when it leveraged its uniquely non-visual character, its “blindness,” creating its own aural world rather than striving foremost to convey visual pictures. What distinguishes WEEKEND is precisely its power to immerse listeners in the auditory landscape of the city, foregrounding the aural qualities of phenomena often represented visually.

WEEKEND, however, should not be seen in exclusively aural terms. Like the lived experience of the city, Ruttmann creates a rich, multisensorial environment. W.J.T. Mitchell writes, “there are no visual media.” There is no such thing as “reified sensory labels such as ‘visual,’ ‘aural,’ and ‘tactile’,” but instead only “sensory ratios.” He argues that often multiple media are “nested” within each other, for example when a television program is treated as the subject of a film. WEEKEND demonstrates the effectiveness of such an approach to media analysis. In WEEKEND, the sound of the saw does not evoke an image of a saw. Instead, the sound functions independently, rhythmically, musically. The sound of a train, though, is more recognizable and is not spliced and repeated like an independent note. The rhythm of the train is the actual rhythm of the train, as it operates in the city. However, Ruttmann subverts a purely literal representation, by embedding the sound in the overall montage as another musical component. It is, in Mitchell’s term, thereby “nested.” The blindness of the medium remains foregrounded, while the visual is not entirely suppressed. It is this varied approach to documentary material, used both to evoke real urban phenomena and abstracted as musical sound, that draws the listener’s imagination into the multisensorial nature of urban space.

References

Arnheim, Rudolf. Rundfunk als Hörkunst. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1979.

Barnouw, Erik. Documentary. A History of Non-Fiction Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion. Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York: Verso, 2002.

Cory, Mark. “Soundplay: The Polyphonous Tradition of German Radio Art.” In Wireless Imagination. Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Edited by Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.

Dimendberg, Edward. Film noir and the spaces of modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Döhl, Reinhard. Das neue Hörspiel. Geschichte und Typologie des Hörspiels. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesselschaft, 1988.

Eisner, Lotte H. “Reichsrundfunk sendet akustische Filme.” In Film-Kurier, 6/15/1930. Re-printed in Walter Ruttmann. Eine Dokumentation. Edited by Jeanpaul Goergen. Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1989.

————. “Walter Ruttmann schneidet ein Filmhörspiel.” In Film-Kurier Nr. 33, 3/1/1930. Re-printed in Walter Ruttmann. Eine Dokumentation. Edited by Jeanpaul Goergen. Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1989.

————. “Ruttmanns photographisches Hörspiel.” In Film-Kurier Nr. 33, 3/1/1930. Re-printed in Walter Ruttmann. Eine Dokumentation. Edited by Jeanpaul Goergen. Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1989.

Falkenberg, Paul. “Tonmontage. A propos Walter Ruttmann.” In Walter Ruttmann. Eine Dokumentation. Edited by Jeanpaul Goergen. Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1989.

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“Jerzy Toeplitz im Gespräch mit Walter Ruttmann.” In Wiadomosci Literackie, 10. Jg., 1933, Nr. 28. Translated to German by Erik Steiner. Re-printed in Walter Ruttmann. Eine Dokumentation. Edited by Jeanpaul Goergen. Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1989.

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————. Noise, Water, Meat. A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.

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Richter, Hans. “Experiments with Celluloid.” The Penguin Film Review 9 (1949), p. 114.

Ruttmann, Walter. “Die ‘absolute’ Mode.” In Film-Kurier, Berlin, Nr. 30, Feb. 3, 1928. Re-printed in Walter Ruttmann. Eine Dokumentation. Edited by Jeanpaul Goergen. Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1989.

————. “Wie ich meinen BERLIN-Film drehte.” In Licht-Bild-Bühne, Berlin, Nr. 241, Oct. 8, 1927. Re-printed in Walter Ruttmann. Eine Dokumentation. Edited by Jeanpaul Goergen. Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1989.

————. “Berlin als Filmstar.” In Berliner Zeitung, Sept. 20, 1927. Re-printed in Walter Ruttmann. Eine Dokumentation. Edited by Jeanpaul Goergen. Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1989.

————. “Kunst und Kino.” 1917 letter in possession of Deutschen Filmmuseums Frankfurt/Main. Re-printed in Walter Ruttmann. Eine Dokumentation. Edited by Jeanpaul Goergen. Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1989.

Tonkiss, Fran. “Aural Postcards: Sound, Memory and the City.” In The auditory culture reader. Edited by Michael Bull and Les Back. Oxford: Berg, 2003.

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