Place: Berlin. Span: one day in the life of the city circa 1927 captured by the camera. We enter by train.
One way to watch this, the most obvious I guess, is as a historic document, a snapshot of life as it was once. The old world just barely impregnated with faint traces of an archaic modernity; street cars, neon signs, busy streets, things we have now but were then just beginning to greet people. So with this mindset, as a museum piece that depicts an old version of our world.
This is fine, but I urge you to engage it differently if you can.
What if instead of merely observing exhibits from behind a glass panel, we get out from the museum into actual life? Instead of settling in for this as a historic - meaning dead, embalmed, academic - glimpse, we invigorate it with life that we know, with sunlight, texture, sound, breath that was then as real as it is now? How would it be in absolute stillness to feel present in the middle of a modern life?
This is how the film was intended after all, it's plainly revealed this way. Not a fossil for generations of curious tourists from the future, but a celebration of life 'now', modern, busy life out the window.
So no longer an old world that faintly reminds us of our own, but a new world, exciting, alluring, mysterious, alive with myriad possibilities. New things everywhere, novel pathways to travel, environments to experience. What I mean is, try to see the city as though you just got off the train and were visiting for the first time. It ends with the camera spinning around a flashing neon sign cut to match with fireworks erupting in the night sky.
I urge you to inhabit this, settle for nothing less. Let its neon flowers blossom in you.
