Melodie der Welt

With a roar and a score of natural and composed sound, we take ship to see the world under the direction of Walter Ruttmann.

Here's the thing that, as a fancier of the Actualities Era (ca. 1894-1907) that I noticed. Ruttmann chose the clips for this compilation to give us some high lights, like waves crashing on the shores, furnaces, and lots of things that someone who has gone through the whole Lumiere catalogue would have noticed. It's as if he was reading Haeckel one day, noted that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" and said "We're going through the entire history of real-world movies in forty-five minutes, only we're going to add sound to them; Once that's done, we're all caught up to today, and cinema can only move forward."

Despite the way that phrase trips off your tongue if you're German, it turned out not to be the case. But they didn't know that in 1929, so we'll assume he meant it. And he does it very well, at a rising pace and a good score by Wolfgang Zeller. I'm sure if you're inclined that way, you could tie a bunch of the clips here to individual movies. Me, I'm not so inclined. After noting the resemblance in some telling cases, I'll conclude this was meant to be a movie that overwhelmed its audience visually; and while there may have been some fuddy-duddies who would go on about the Theater that showed programs of musical films in Berlin before the Great War -- I would have been one of those bores -- everyone would be eagerly anticipating the next sound film.

There is no fathoming our modern world for me outside the invention of the camera, this newfound ability to take up the world in terms of timeflow and shuffle it in reflection. It is the world standing on the precipice of modernity that silent cinema uncovers after all, looking a little damp and sunless from the centuries, but also a little startled and excited as it prepares to make the leap and finds all around it wondrous tools for that leap, automobiles, trains and cinemas.

It would have been a simple impulse for pioneer filmmakers in the early days, simple but no less exciting for that. All these things were waiting to be documented as if for a first time. It was so in that Leeds film about traffic some thirty years before and so it is here. Ships, streets, structures, activities from the bustle of the modern city to native dances, the film is a travelogue that celebrates the swirl of being able to now have views of all these things in the same space. Among them now are sounds; the film is offered as the first German sound film. They were making so called 'city symphonies' at around this time; the filmmaker behind this being responsible for one of the very best I know. We might as well call this a world symphony.

I wouldn't really urge you to go out of your way to watch this, other than perhaps as a cachet of images from the time when our gaze was beginning to go global. More interesting for me is to note that the impulse behind this type of film hasn't gone away. But it has undergone a shift. This mode continues in films like Koyannisqatsi, only the modern world is presented there in the cautionary light of having strayed too far and is contrasted with the sanctity of the natural order. The modern lunge is here celebrated with wide-eyed eagerness. It makes some sense why. People could not yet see the destructive effects on the environment and society. Still the eye is as rather dull as it would later be in Koyannisqatsi. Contrasts between old and new, far and close.

Because after all the camera is a marker of modernity in another sense as well. It's not simply that far and close could be shuffled now, past and present, it's that the whole unraveling of appearances - all this motion in every direction of perception - reveals a narrative eye with the ability to leap and surge itself, an eye that gives rise to world.

This is what more erudite filmmakers of the time, in Paris and Moscow, were busy exploring, the mechanisms that control that surge of the eye. It would be more interesting to pick up that thread if you haven't already. The vital distinction is between the camera as device that records and as soul that surges through to animate. Such efforts were running parallel to a good deal of modern thinking about how the world is put together; I'd like to imagine, somewhat wistfully, that an alert mind of the time would have been as stimulated by news from Solvay as by the dreamlike uncertainty of a film like Menilmontant.

THE STORY & GENRE -- This is an abstract cultural documentary from Walter Ruttmann (cinematographer for METROPOLIS and DIE NIBELUNGEN: SIEGFRIED 1924), which takes you on a whirl of images and clips. Not genre, even if found on some lists.

THE VERDICT -- I guess you can tell I like this quite a lot. It's fast-paced, and at 49 minutes (restored) it's not going to demand tolerance. However, you may want to do it in bits, and ponder what you've seen. That it's a German film will not enter into the equation since there is virtually no dialogue. Sound.

FREE ONLINE -- Yes.

'Melody of the World' is one of the very first German sound films. Although this film was produced more than a year after 'The Jazz Singer' (which isn't really the *first* talkie, but let it pass), 'Melody of the World' seems to be firmly convinced of its own importance as the *first* talking picture, or at any rate the first one seen and heard by German audiences.

We first hear the blast of a steam whistle as an ocean liner pulls out of Hamburg's harbour. A breathless narrator excitedly tells us that we're embarking on a voyage round the world, and we will be witnessing sights and sounds from many nations.

From here, the film is a melange of travelogue clips. People of diverse nationalities offer bland good-will messages directly to the camera; these are intercut with wildlife scenes from exotic climes. I suppose that the opportunity to see these things -- and, even more so, to *hear* them -- was exciting for cinema audiences in 1929.

Near the end of this film, we are treated to a rather static conversation between George Bernard Shaw and English film director Ivor Montague. Their discussion is self-conscious and stilted, with neither man displaying much screen presence. In dialogue that sounds suspiciously rehearsed, the two men agree that this wondrous new invention, the talking picture, will dissolve boundaries between nations and between people. I found this wishful thinking to be more than slightly ironic. In the days of *silent* film, movies were praised as a universal visual language that had no national barriers. It was only with the arrival of sound recording -- when each movie had to acquire its native tongue -- that films ceased to be universal.

Most of the photography in 'Melodie der Welt' is clumsy even by 1929 standards, but this is likely down to the unwieldy sound-recording equipment that was necessary at that time. More for its historical significance than for its entertainment value, I'll rate this movie 6 out of 10.