Lon­don Symphony

The ​“sym­pho­ny” film is a form which harks back to cinema’s ear­li­est days. These con­vul­sive visu­al col­lages offered por­traits of cities or land­scapes, and often arrived with suit­ably dynam­ic orches­tral scores. Film­mak­er Alex Bar­rett has decid­ed to exhume this obscure mode for a new gen­er­a­tion. Cru­cial­ly, he has attempt­ed to recap­ture exact­ly what made these films great in the first place rather than soup­ing-up the tem­plate for mod­ern eyes.

Lon­don Sym­pho­ny attempts to emu­late the expe­ri­ence of watch­ing a movie from the silent era, and it works to achieve that aim by pre­sent­ing its images in crisp mono­chrome. The film is split into four seg­ments, each of which cov­ers a broad aspect of cul­tur­al life in the cap­i­tal. Ini­tial­ly, the edit­ing appears ran­dom, as if we’re watch­ing a pho­to slideshow of dis­mal cityscapes, but then a sub­tle through-line emerges. Bar­rett daisy-chains from one sub­ject to the next some­times through lit­er­al links (shots of paper rub­bish on the street con­nect to a news­pa­per print shop) but some­times just through the for­ma­tion of the visuals.

As with ear­ly clas­sics like Dzi­ga Vertov’s The Man With a Movie Cam­era or Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin: Sym­pho­ny of a Great City, Bar­rett sub­tly med­dles with the bound­ary between doc­u­men­tary and fic­tion. There’s an ele­ment of script­ed real­i­ty to a cou­ple of moments involv­ing peo­ple cap­tured read­ing on the Under­ground or relax­ing in a park. James McWilliam’s superb score tips a hat to the churn­ing, loop­ing likes of Michael Nyman and Philip Glass and lends the film a dri­ving sense of momentum.

There’s a chap­ter which focus­es on the more com­mer­cial aspect of the cap­i­tal which is less inter­est­ing, while sub­cul­ture, nightlife and diver­si­ty (London’s alter­na­tive scene) don’t get much of a look in. But, as it promis­es in an open­ing inter-title, this is very much a film with one eye on the past and the oth­er on the future.