Rennsymphonie

Of the three films that avant-garde director Hans Richter released in 1928, this is the least of them. Indeed, there appears to be little "avant-garde" about it. 'Race Symphony (1928)' belongs to a different style of film-making, most popular popular in the 1920s, known loosely as "City Symphonies." Documentaries such as 'Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927)' and 'The Man With a Movie Camera (1929)' celebrated the working-class mechanics of society, often shunning intertitles and instead using diverse optical effects – such as double-exposures, dissolves, split-screen and slow-motion – to communicate story and mood. Richter's entry runs just seven minutes, and documents a typical day at the German races, where sophisticated people turn up in droves to place a bet, watch the horses and celebrate a well-deserved win. Despite the excellent workmanship of the short – and, make no mistake, Richter is a phenomenal editor – the problem here lies in the subject matter, which is largely uninteresting.

Here in Australia, the Melbourne Cup is frequently described as "The Race that Stops the Nation." I've never bothered with it, and I've honestly never understood the appeal of horse-racing. Nevertheless, Richter does his best to convince me otherwise, using the film medium to emphasise how this sport brings people together like no other. In a particularly memorable piece of editing, Richter captures the final seconds of the horse race, highlighting the tension and then euphoria of the onlooking race-goers, a crucial moment when hundreds of people behave as one. Other than this impressive sequence, we're not left with anything of any real note; the documentary format leaves little room for creativity, and the director does the best he can with the material. Fans of horse-racing, City Symphonies and Richter will find 'Race Symphony' to be worthwhile viewing, but you've already seen better achievements in each of those three categories.

By 1928, Hans Richter was by no means past experimentation with the filmic medium; on the contrary, he was only beginning to discover how he could blur the lines between film and painting while using motion pictures to a greater effect than his artwork prior to that. A lot of the time, his work was purely abstract and used that abstraction to convey a main point, but "Race Symphony" is proof he also was interested in creating an abstraction out of pure documentary footage with no other apparent intent. Unlike "Everyday" and "Two Pence Magic", this film does not present itself with any obvious commentary involved, nor any other exterior purpose that might seem to enhance the meaning with the work: it is purely experimental, and one does not need to analyze it further to see it any different.

In this five minute film, Richter simply takes his documentation of a horse race and edits it in unique ways to create a unique variation on the work much in the style of most of his other movies made in the late 1920's. The usual frantic cutting, closeup shots, and superimpositions are all present within the film, which provide a fresh look at something that would be much less exciting within a documentary film. It's not an especially outstanding short by any means, but serves as a decent example of Richter's experimentation as he grew more and more familiar with the medium's potential in art.