If you belong to
those Berlin nostalgics who collect old postcards, if you are one of
those who have parsed Berlin-Symphony of the Great City,
studying every detail of the outdoor cafés of the Unter den Linden,
every car model going through the Potsdamer Platz, all the elegant
women cruising the sidewalks of the Kurfürstendamm, then I have good news for you :
there is yet another treasure of graphic documentation about Berlin
in the 1920s !
“The
city of millions”, is a partly documentary film made by Adolf
Trotz already in 1925, two years before Walther Ruttmann’s
“Symphony”. It plunges into the still peaceful Berlin of 19th
century and, besides documenting the bustling metropolis of the
1920s, it anticipates the city in the year 2000, with a pioneering
animation sequence. Here is the link:
Adolf
Trotz is a somewhat mysterious person. We know when and where he was
born (1895 in what today is Poland) but not when he died. The last
known about him dates from 1937, in Rome.
In addition to films
with a documentary background such as The City of Millions, he
produced feature films with legal and sexual enlightenment topics. At
the beginning of the sound film era he also directed Elisabeth of
Austria and Rasputin.
The rise to power of
the Nazis ended his filmmaking in the German Reich. His film The
way to Good Marriage was banned in 1936 because it
portrayed marriage as individual happiness, without saying anything
about "racial instinct, of species-conscious choice of spouse,
and of the blessing of child birth, an indispensable requirement for
any good marriage."
He moved to Spain
where he made a few films. But from 1937, there is no trace of him.
The script of the
film is by Willy Rath (1872-1940), a journalist and film-maker, and
by Emil Endres. I know nothing about Endres, except that he worked in
some more films during the 1930s, one of them along with Walther
Ruttmann.
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