“The city itself is a central character,” is a common statement from all sorts of filmmakers, extolling how vital setting is in telling just about any story. When the city is the only central character, however, you’ve crossed over into a very specific genre: the city symphony. Originated with Paul Strand’s experimental look at New York in 1922’s ‘Manhatta,’ city symphony films eschew traditional narrative structure, inviting audiences to step inside and explore their subjects with a uniquely cinematic eye.
Nearly a century after city symphonies were further defined by epochal works like Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 ‘Berlin: Symphony of a Great City’ and Dziga Vertov’s 1929 ‘Man with a Movie Camera,’ city symphonies were carried into the 21st century with 2017’s ‘London Symphony,’ available on blu-ray from Flicker Alley. Today, we’re thrilled to share a conversation with the film’s director, Alex Barrett, who looks back on how his timeless love letter to his home came to be.
Q: How did you experience your first symphony film?
Barrett: I kind of had an interest in silent cinema, generally, since a fairly young age. That was kind of started by my dad. I started going as a teenager to the regular local cinema every week. My dad was like, “OK. If you’re going to be interested in film seriously, let’s see some films.” He started taking me to the BFI. He took me to Taxi Driver, Seven Samurai, Seventh Seal. I’m like a 13 or 14 year old kid at this point. He also took me to [The Cabinet of Dr.] Caligari and Nosferatu, which were really my intro to silent cinema. Having seen those at the BFI, I was then sort of interested in silent cinema generally. I remember seeing Battleship Potemkin. I don’t remember where I saw it, but it was at a fairly young age, maybe just on a DVD from Eureka. You know, their Masters of Cinema. Back in the early days of DVD, they did kind of a range of [Sergei] Eisenstein stuff. But I had seen Potemkin and it had ignited my interest in Russian cinema, or Soviet cinema I should say. That led me to [Dziga] Vertov and Man with a Movie Camera. It was when I was at Uni that I started seeing Man with a Movie Camera and Berlin. I think we were shown Manhatta as part of my course and we were also shown Regen or Rain, the Joris Ivens film about Amsterdam in the rain. It really all grew from there. I discovered these films through Eisenstein, initially. I became a big fan of [Vsevolod] Pudovkin. I still am a massive Pudovkin fan. The Flicker Alley set is amazing. It was lovely to be able to own all of those on really beautiful looking discs. That’s really where it started.
Q: How well do you feel you have to know a city like London before taking on a project like this?
Barrett: That’s a very interesting question. So, me and Rahim, who was one of the key collaborators on the film, Rahim Moledina. We’re both narrative Londoners. Londoners, born and bred. We obviously know the city fairly well, or at least certain parts of it, because we grew up there. But in a sense, when you approach a film like London Symphony, you almost want to approach it with fresh eyes. A lot of the style and the techniques that we were using was looking at kind of de-familiarization and drawing on Russian deconstructionist photography, trying to make the old seem new again. Actually, as soon as I started working on the project, I started seeing the city with new eyes, like I had never before. We ended up with a team of cinematographers on the project. There were about five us who did the bulk of the shoot, but in total there were 15 of us, I think. Some of us were people like myself, who had been in London our entire lives, and some were very new to the city and had only been there a year or two. That was kind of interesting, to have that mix of viewpoints in terms of peoples relationships with the city. It’s a hard question to answer, but it’s a really interesting one. I guess, in some ways, you need to know it really well, or at least do the research. You need to find those nooks and crannies and the side of the city that maybe someone who hasn’t been there very long wouldn’t know. But then, at the same time, you want to come to it as if you’d never been here before and see it fresh. You need to somehow be somehow in the middle
Q: Do you shoot footage first and construct the narrative with what you find, or is there a detailed script prior to production?
Barrett: Sort of a mixture of the two. So the way that we worked, is that Rahim, who is essentially the writer on the project, wrote a script that was born of discussions between the two of us and born of the thematic ideas that we wanted to explore in the film. So a lot of that came from those themes. When we started shooting, though, we didn’t really use the script. Before we got to the shooting stage, I took the script and I turned it into a location list. So we had a scene with a mosque, so I said, “Alright. I’m going to find all the mosques in London. I think there were originally two or three religious venues in the script. I said, “I want to look at all the different religions in London.” So we kind made a list of all the different religious venues and then we went out to film them. When we were out shooting, we were not thinking at all about the script. We were like, “OK. We’re going to respond to what’s there. We’re going to go with our eyes fresh. We’re going in with open minds and we’re going to just find what we’re going to find there.” Then, in the edit, before I got to far into the edit, I wrote an editing script that was kind of based on what I had seen on the shoot, what I had seen in the footage, and kind of thinking about what [James] McWilliam had done. That was all structured around the shape of the music. Our composer, at that point, had written the structure of the score and that was the underlying structure. So, I was then responding to the material and what we had found. So there were these preexisting ideas and, going back to the script, there was this section on religious structures in London. That was really a jumping off point for us to go, “Alright, we’re going to go film all of those venues and find what we find. Then we’ll figure it out in the edit.”
Q: How do you know when you’re striking that right balance of very interesting footage, but also honest and soulful, as far as a view of the city?
Barrett: We kind of officially never finished the shoot, which I guess is what you’re maybe asking. We had a list of over 400 locations on our location list. When we got to around 300 locations, I think was like, “OK. Now that we have this much footage, I’m going to start editing and then we’ll figure out what we still need.” So we did an edit and we had a cut of the film, but there were still a few key things missing. Then there were also things that we didn’t know were missing. We showed the film to a couple of people and one of the things that came out of that was the nightclub scene at the end. We had shown it to people whose reactions was, “Great, but where’s the culture in the evening?” That was a really good note, so we went out and filmed another 25 locations or so, and we worked that into the edit that we had. There was still another 80 locations that were planned and we just abandoned the shoot. We had enough that we had the film. If we hadn’t, we would have kept shooting.
Q: What was the process like as far scoring ‘London Symphony’? Did the visuals primarily influence the music, or vice versa?
Barrett: The original intention had been that it was going to be a very back and forth process where I would kind of like cut, there would be some music, I would re-cut to that music, and there would be some back and forth. Really, what happened in the end was that I got ahead of the composer, James McWilliam, in the edit, so he mostly wrote to picture in the end. What had happened is that, at a very early stage, he had written a structure for the music. He structure was very specific to the second. It would say, “Movement One is going to be 15 minutes. The first two minutes are going to be mid-tempo and then it’s going to get fast for 25 seconds and then it will be slow for two minutes.” It kind of, essentially, gave me these blocks of time. I could say, “OK, here’s the tempo. Here’s the mood.” I would go in and I would edit it to this structure to the second. Even when I didn’t have the music to cut to, I was cutting to, in a way, the rhythm, or the planned rhythm. The planned tempo. There are a couple of things where we would very specifically hit beats, visually. There are a couple of moments where I went back in and changed the edit so that it would better fit the music. It was a bit of a back and forth process, but not quite as much as we had originally planned.
Q: How has the reaction been from audiences?
Barrett: Yeah, it was a really diverse range of people. In a way, we managed to break out of the silent film niche, let’s say, and it wound up going much wider than that. I think a lot of the warmest comments we got were actually from ex-Londoners. People would come to me and say, “I left London 20 years ago or 30 years ago and I loved seeing this.” I don’t know if you’ve found this in the work you do, but we had a great response from the silent film community, but there were also a lot of people who were very purist about silent film. Anything after the ’20s — or ’30s for some of Japan — but anything after the 20s, we’re not going to touch. We kind of had a mixture of people who were like that and then other people who were kind of like, “We love that you’ve done something authentically silent.” So I guess it was a slightly mixed response. One thing that we did find that was interesting was that it appealed to an older audience than we were expecting. I remember that we sold off this theater in London and were excited because we thought that we were going to make some money. Then we found out that every seat had gone to an over 65 concession, so we hardly made anything.
Q: What have you been working on recently?
Barrett: I love quite a broad range of cinema. I have a film just about to come out in the UK. We don’t have an American deal quite yet. It’s a documentary about Christopher Lee that I was editor on. That was a lot of fun. I’m doing a lot of work right now as a freelancer, and I’m always developing projects as a writer and director. I had a film that I did that was kind of a Bulgarian language mystery thriller that was kind of very art house. That came out last year. I like to run the spectrum from stuff like that to something more commercial, like this Christopher Lee documentary. That was a lot of fun and just had its world premiere at FrightFest [recently]. That was a very enjoyable project to work on.
Q: Tell me about some of your broader cinematic influences?
Barrett: I guess the answer to that has changed slightly over the years. I remember that when I was a teenager, I was going to cinema every week. Out of Sight by Steven Soderbergh, though. When I was younger and I didn’t have as much experience with cinema, that was just incredible. It was like, “Wow! He’s frozen the screen in the middle of the image!” I had never seen that before. I started later watching [Martin] Scorsese and [Francois] Truffaut and you go, “Ok, this is where is kind of stealing this stuff from. But that was revelatory for me, discovering his work. The Limey was a film he made that I go back to a lot. I think he’s really playing there with cinematic form and that is really interesting. Then, as I was getting older and my dad was taking me to all these films, I fell in love with [Ingmar] Bergman. I became a very big Bergman fan. That’s something that has influenced me a lot. I came to those influences kind of by accident. I saw The Passion of Joan of Arc. A friend of mine invited me. It was part of a Jean-Luc Godard retrospective at the BFI and my friend said, “Let’s go.” I fell in love with it. It became my favorite film of all time. Dreyer is probably the filmmaker that has most influenced my work and, obviously, kind of bridges the silent era and the sound era in a very interesting way. Then you also have people like Joe Swanberg. I don’t know if you’re familiar with his work, but he’s one of the Mumblecore directors. As a young filmmaker starting out, [it was inspiring] seeing these young guys starting out and just doing it with no money. It felt like they were doing something that was achievable and realistic. Something like London Symphony has that spirit behind it. Yeah, we’ve got no money, but we’ve got cameras. Let’s just go make something. That’s something that has been very influential in my work as well. It’s kind of a range of people. There are so many. Robert Bresson is a director that’s very important to me. The other big one that I haven’t mentioned is Richard Linklater, who I really fell in love with. I made a short film at Uni and a friend said, “I really hate your film and the reason I hate it is because it reminds me of Waking Life.” I thought, “Alright. I guess I have to see Waking Life, and that began a real love affair with Richard Linklater. On the one hand, there’s the American stuff — Soderbergh, Linklater, Swanberg — and then you have Bergman, Tarkovsky, Bresson and somewhere in the middle is me.
Q: The weight of history is something very present throughout ‘London Symphony,’ both stylistically and in terms of the history of London. How do you go about maintaining a balance with one foot in the present and another in the past?
Barrett: Its interesting. I re-watched London Symphony last night for the first time in seven years. I don’t normally like watching my own work, but I figured that I should remind myself of what I did. I was kind of struck by exactly what you’re saying, this idea of history. When we were making it, we certainly had this idea of old and new being side by side. That was one of the key themes, but somehow the whole history of the city is something that is much more apparent to me now than it was when we made it in a strange way. I guess because I love cinema and I love silent cinema and I love [Carl Theodor] Dreyer, my influences are just sort of always there. I don’t know if all my work is about history thematically, but it carries the influence of the history of cinema in a kind of postmodern way. I think that aspect is always there in my work.
Q: Was is now a dream project for you?
Barrett: There are so many. Like most filmmakers, I have a pile of unrealized projects. I have one that has been slightly overtaken by world events, which was a film about a British woman of Jewish descent who went back to Germany to connect with her Jewish roots. I was planning to use a lot of the London Symphony style stuff to graft it onto this narrative. That was a project that I thought was going to get going for awhile and never really did. It’s just sitting in drawer now. There’s also a period ghost story that I really wanted to make. But that’s how projects are. They come and they go and you can’t hold onto them too much.
‘London Symphony’ is now available on from Flicker Alley. You can watch the trailer in the player below and either purchase or rent the film.
