Berlin

One morning in 1927. A locomotive speeds across the German countryside. Where to? Berlin. Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis is a film by Walther Ruttmann, in which the director's camera follows, minute after minute, the ordinary day of a teeming metropolis. Here, the workers - hardly awake - take over the streets and public transports before reaching their factories or offices. There, schoolchildren head for their classrooms. There, hawkers rush in town in search of customers to collar. Lunch provides a salutary break from a buzzing economic activity. With nightfall, the parties and balls inside remind us that we are in the roaring twenties. People dance, fall in love, and drink before going home for a night of restful sleep. Based upon an unremitting space-time, Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis thus follows the pace of human activities during a whole day. After multiple viewings of the movie without its original soundtrack so as not to be influenced, the five musicians from Zenzile have dissected, studied, searched…and created. Cut into some fifteen sequences distributed over the five acts of the documentary, this new soundtrack perfectly fits the various rhythms of the German metropolis. The original dub of the band from Angers thus sometimes becomes airier and more serene. Just as the public transports, at the heart of the movie, the quintet passionately gives rhythm to this spectacle through relentless movements. Guitar arpeggios regularly give way to dynamic solos, while the bass, now groovy, now soothing, maintains a tremendously efficient rhythmical construction supported by metronomic drums. The post-rockian synthetic and atmospheric pads, the musical and visual ferment, evoke the modernity of interwar Berlin. Movie-concert as much as concert-movie, Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis set to music by Zenzile is also a unique show boasting an unsettling and undeniable coherence.