Leaving Home: Film, Migration, and the Urban Experience

Abstract

Like many others, Karsten Witte arrived in Berlin from elsewhere. As a consummately urban person, he liked mobility and was fond of transience and impermanence. Not surprisingly, he had a lifelong passion for motion pictures, as film, so aptly, used to be called. The following essay, which is dedicated to his memory, seeks to explore the nexus between spatial displacement, urban modernity, and the nature of film. I want to argue that Walther Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Big City [Berlin. Die Sinfonie der GroJ3stadt, 1927] constructs a text that makes this nexus readable. A semi-documentary of an ordinary day in Berlin, Ruttmann's film constitutes an image of the big city which identifies the urban experience as an experience of dislocation that is both traumatic and exhilarating.

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