This article is based on my PhD dissertation Rewinding the City Symphony: Historiography, Visual Motifs and Structural Patterns of Interwar City Symphony Films (Ghent University, 2018) and reflects on the methodology applied for the analysis of visual material. In this regard, what follows can be considered as a research report – with a special focus on the methods chosen and put into practice to study and analyze city symphonies, making use of digital humanities tools in a film studies research. Particularly, the digital film/video annotation software ELAN, the Cinemetrics method, a bar chart representation of shot lengths, and the grid visualizations of multiple film frames created as image montages with ImageJ play a role in this case study.

City symphonies are experimental-documentary city films of the 1920s and 1930s that take the modern metropolis as their protagonist and present it in its multiple facets and kaleidoscopic nature. Often described as cross-section or montage films (e.g. Kracauer, 1947; Weihsmann, 1997; Koeck and Roberts, 2010), they combine a great number of visual urban motifs and themes with a highly complex editing structure. The most famous examples are Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin. Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt (Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, 1927) and Dziga Vertov’s Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929). To this day, these films exert a considerable influence on filmmaking and the cinematic language in general. Recent city films such as London Symphony (Alex Barrett, 2017), Symphony of Now (Johannes Schaff, 2018), or Mark Cousins’s I am Belfast (2015) and Stockholm My Love (2017) are just the most obvious indications for this impact and popularity.

However, despite the ongoing (or reviving) influence on the production of urban films and the canonical status of Ruttmann and Vertov’s films, the city symphony has remained a somewhat downplayed and neglected phenomenon in film history. While, on the one hand, in fact, it is considered as a crucial part of canonical film history today and as a basis for the fast-growing scholarship on city films in general (see e.g. Bordwell and Thompson, 2019; Nowell-Smith, 1997; Koeck and Roberts, 2010; Mazierska and Rascaroli, 2003), on the other hand, it has never really been more than “a colorful footnote to film history” [Kinik 2008, 16]. Indeed, besides the handful of well-known titles, which include also Manhatta (Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, 1921) and Rien que les Heures (Nothing But Time, Alberto Cavalcanti, 1926), there have been more than eighty films made around the globe in the interwar period.[1] Many of these films fell into oblivion and have received little or no scholarly attention at all. Hence, the city symphony phenomenon was much more complex, widespread and diverse than generally assumed and acknowledged in film historiography. Moreover, even the canonical examples have never systematically and structurally been analyzed in detail in a comparative way. While there have been studies on individual titles, publications putting the city symphony in context of the broader field of the city film, and a few attempts mentioning and discussing a group of films together and highlighting some features (rough descriptions and short characterizations), a comprehensive analysis concerning shared visual and structural qualities and the central characteristics of the city symphony has never been made.[2] The result is the lack of a sophisticated and clear definition of the city symphony, based on both the canonical films and the greater city symphony corpus, that is still missing after decades of film studies. This blind spot is striking since it does not concern obscure films from the edge of film history, but a vast international phenomenon and films that were highly celebrated at their time and – once more – whose popularity and influence are recognizable to this very day.

What constitutes the city symphony looking at shared elements of the canon films Berlin, Man with a Movie Camera, Rien que les Heures and Manhatta as well as the bigger corpus? What are the visual motifs, formal and structural features of the city symphony? My research sets in at this point, addressing the conspicuous absence of an analysis of city symphony characteristics, as it delves deeper into the phenomenon by examining the films themselves.

With their highly complex structure, dense imagery and themes as well as their experimental techniques and striking editing patterns, city symphonies are a perfect fit for a computational film analysis, which in segmentations and annotations allows to structurally, precisely and in detail identify individual elements (such as motifs), break down the complexity of these films into separate component parts, and makes it possible to see how different aspects are linked to each other. Moreover, city symphonies do not only share the fractured nature and overwhelming, chaotic impressions with the modern city[3] – their very subject matter – they also relate to the database logic of the computer. According to Manovich (2001), the database as a cultural form introduced the “correlate” to the linearity and cause-and-effect trajectory of the logic of the narrative and a new way of structuring our experiences, presenting the world as a list of items and refusing to order this list. Every item possesses the same significance as any other. In addition, Manovich explicitly describes Man with a Movie Camera as “perhaps the most important example of a database imagination in modern media art,” which anticipated the database logic of digital media in presenting an almost “linear printout [...] of a database” and “a catalog of subjects that one could expect to find in a city of the 1920s,” supplemented with “the most amazing catalog of film techniques.” [Manovich 2001, 241][4] Similarly (and following Manovich’s ideas), Cowan integrates Ruttmann’s Berlin and the city symphony form in general in the same tradition of the database logic as it emphasizes “paradigmatic over syntagmatic relations, presenting the world as an inventory of possible choices rather than a causal chain of narrative events” [Cowan 2014, 60]. Moreover, apart from their form underlining and embracing the database logic,[5] both Man with a Movie Camera and Berlin were based on actual databases documenting city life. Vertov, as we can see in his film, arranged his film reels on shelves according to keywords, such as “city traffic,” “factory,” “machines,” and “market,” while Ruttmann used a card catalogue system for organizing his footage (see Figure 1 and Figure 2). In this regard, a computational study of city symphonies also comprises a self-reflexive moment as it shares its database logic with its very subject of research and aims to build a catalogue or database of city symphony features itself by looking at individual component parts of the films as equal items.

Finally, city symphonies are a perfect case study for exploring the possibilities and applications of computational methods for film analysis as they allow for a variety of research questions, including the issue of film style (editing patterns, experimental techniques etc.), questions of content (motifs, themes), and specific aspects concerning the representation of people and the city.

Through the methodology described above, I could indeed identify an extensive catalogue of shared visual motifs and structural patterns of interwar city symphonies and their presentation of the modern city.[29]In fact, while, on the one hand, I could underpin certain aspects emphasized in scholarship and film historiography, on the other hand, I could also revise other elements and mark them as misreadings or (over‑)hasty conclusions. Moreover, I could also add new findings. The result is a much more nuanced, detailed and sophisticated picture of the phenomenon of city symphonies, of which this article includes just a small fraction.[30]

I would like to conclude this research report with a couple of reflecting remarks that exceed the city symphony focus and underline some benefits of digital tools like ELAN and Cinemetrics, that might have a relevance for the entire field of film and media studies.

The first one concerns budget and research frameworks. My project did not provide specific funding for the use of digital tools or a close collaboration with software developers or IT engineers, who might have come up with a different solution for my research endeavor. In fact, the use of digital tools was not part of the initial research plan of the umbrella project “City Symphonies: Urban Modernity, Film, and Avant Garde (1920-1940)”, funded by the Special Research Funds of Ghent University, but came later by my own initiative.[56] Therefore, the application of ELAN and the Cinemetrics approach in combination with excel sheets and ImageJ can be considered as a best practice for getting my analysis done within the available recourses and timeframe.[57] As I only used free and open-source software (compatible with most computer operating systems) as well as programs that were provided as part of the work package for researchers at Ghent University,[58] this approach should be widely accessible and might be interesting also for other scholars with little funding. Moreover, with their variable, flexible, and open form, the tools I used are applicable and customizable for a great variety of research questions.

The second remark is about research transparency and visual argumentation. ELAN allows for highly structured annotations, segmentations and systematic annotation protocols, which can be considered as externalizations of the observations that normally take place inside the scholar’s mind during close analysis [Melgar et al. 2017]. Moreover, they can easily be shared with other researchers, who load them, together with the corresponding video files, in their own ELAN version on their computer. In this way, the analysis process and research, including various steps, collected data, findings, and conclusions, become more transparent, retraceable, and shareable. Moreover, the ELAN software and interface as well as the Cinemetrics concept provide visualization methods that support statements, which, with traditional film analysis methods, are harder to underpin, generally only by written explanations. In fact, these data visualizations become visual arguments themselves. This is also true for the image montages made with ImageJ. The film or media scholar receives new powerful tools to illustrate, underline, and fortify findings and observations in a direct visual way.

The final comment concerns a significant benefit of using a tool such as ELAN in a manual way, which might also make us rethink the notion of digital analysis. From the methodology described in this article, the impression might arise that I have mainly reproduced manual film analysis practices in a digital environment: I noted shot changes and added descriptions about visual and filmic aspects to this shot-based protocol. While one could indeed question the advantage of ELAN applied this way, there is the very activity of doing ELAN – the very experience of segmenting and annotating – that leads to an in-depth knowledge of the film and a level of hands-on research and learning that neither a traditional film analysis nor a digital analysis with automatic shot detection alone can provide.[59] This is probably most obvious for editing techniques and montage patterns, as the “ELAN experience” can, to a certain degree, be considered as a recreation or reconstruction of the film editing process, starting in reverse from the end product of the final film. In fact, in its design, timeline approach, segmentation, and annotation possibilities, ELAN resembles digital film and video editing platforms, such as Final Cut Pro or Avid Media Composer.[60] In this regard, manually segmenting and annotating in ELAN on the level of shots imitates or retraces the editing process (in digital form) and, in so doing, provides an empirical way of analyzing a film in its structures and motifs. We can speak of a reverse-engineering scholarly experience. More precisely, it is an experience that – as a hands-on activity – includes both eyes and hands (or better: fingers), which results in a more intimate interaction with the material instead of just watching the film. Simply speaking, by using your eyes and fingers in tandem, you get to see things and observe connections and interrelations between various elements you would not be able to see otherwise – or might easily miss. In this article, I have discussed a couple of findings regarding city symphonies that surfaced this way, such as the construction of crowds out of individuals and small groups, the prominence of wet streets and stairs, the interweaving of natural elements with urban structures or the adroit horizontal and vertical city explorations. Moreover, to be clear, the fingers aspect does not only concern the reverse editing activity as detecting shot boundaries, but also the descriptive part of adding keywords and describing shots that contributes to the increased examination of the material and in-depth knowledge of the films. This hands-on angle of using digital tools is an underestimated aspect in digital humanities as digital is increasingly understood as automatic as opposed to manual. Large bodies of automatically acquired data became available and, as a result, the trend is distancing scholars from their material. However, as I have shown, especially the manual hands-on use of digital tools such as ELAN or Cinemetrics can be extremely beneficial in giving film and media scholars (and students!) an invaluable experience of more intimately interacting with their material. This might also lead to a rethinking of the idea what digital analysis is or can be. In the end, the manual fingers-eyes use of ELAN can be considered digital in two respects and, if you will so, in its purest way: It is digital because it produces numbers; it is also digital, etymologically, because you do it with your fingers.[61]