“Walter Ruttmann, a painter, produced a number of highly original and completely abstract films between 1922 and 1925 in which the camera was used merely as an animation device. He recollected that ever since he began to work in cinema he dreamed of using live material, to create ‘a symphonic film with the thousandfold energies that make up the life of a great city.' By chance he met Karl Freund, the cinematographer of The Last Laugh and Variety, who had the same idea. They collaborated with the writer Carl Mayer, one of the most visually oriented of scenarists, and to whom much of the power of The Last Laugh was due, in making a motion picture of life in Berlin from dawn awakening, the bustle and hustle of the start of the work day, relaxation at lunchtime intermission, the homeward trek at the end of the work day, dinner, nighttime entertainment, and then again the dawn. Made without actors, the film somewhat resembles the Kino-Eye theories of Dziga Vertov, but with this difference: in the Russian films we are always aware of the camera--it is the protagonist, it is our own roving eye. In the German film the camera is objective, omniscient, everywhere, it seems. We see action from a multitude of viewpoints. The several cameras were disguised or hidden, in the way that years later was to be called ‘candid'. In the barroom scenes the camera was in the next room, its lens pointed through a hole in the wall. Ruttmann recollected that the most difficult parts of the film to photograph were the scenes of the city asleep. ‘It is much easier,' he wrote, ‘to work with movement than to give an impression of absolute repose and deathlike calm.' He added that the chief photographer, Reimar Kuntze, hypersensitized the raw film so that they did not need to use artificial light for the night scenes--a technical tour-de-force in cinematography at the time.
“Although documentary in its insistence upon recording actuality, Berlin has no social message. Its purpose, as indicated by its subtitle, is lyric, and its charm lies in its smooth-flowing compression into an hour or so of the mood, light and atmosphere of a particular environment, and the character, look and activities of some of those who live within it.” Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.