The City Symphony & Urban Landscape Essay Film workshop will introduce students to one of the earliest genres of international experimental filmmaking, first developed in the 1920s silent film era, in which collective life in the modern city is the subject and not simply the backdrop for filmmaking. In this course, we will study well-known city symphony films from the classical era, including Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), along with many other “amateur” and professional films about modern cities created throughout the 20th century, and many contemporary works that build on and expand from the approaches of this genre in order to explore ideas about industrialization, globalization, environmental sustainability, racialized oppression, gentrification and issues of queer identity. Highlighting the many political and social dimensions of city symphony and urban landscape essay filmmaking, we will use our study of the many different formal approaches to representing the city to inspire our own creative projects.

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