Walter Ruttman's 1927 Film Classic "Berlin: Symphony of a Great City" with Live Organ Score Comes to UCLA Live's Royce Hall Nov. 29

The evening begins with an all-German concert on Royce Hall's magnificent pipe organ.

LOS ANGELES-UCLA Live presents German director Walter Ruttman's 1927 silent film masterpiece "Berlin: Die Sinfonie einer Großstadt" ("Berlin: Symphony of a Great City"), an ode to the "new" Berlin of the late 1920s, featuring an improvised score on Royce Hall's grand pipe organ by award-winning German organist Christoph Bull.

Part of the Goethe-Institut 40th anniversary celebration of Los Angeles' sister city partnership with Berlin, this UCLA Live exclusive evening begins with an all-German organ concert featuring works by Nicolaus Bruhns, Johann Sebastian Bach, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Johannes Brahms, N.J. Schneider and Christoph Bull.

The performance takes place at 8 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 29 at UCLA Live at Royce Hall on the UCLA campus. The program runs approximately two hours, starting with the concert (40 mins.), followed by an intermission and the film (65 mins.). For tickets visit www.UCLALive.org, call 310-825-2101 or contact Ticketmaster.

Filmed less than 20 years before the Nazi occupation, Ruttman's influential silent documentary "Berlin: Die Sinfonie einer Großstadt" is an invaluable photographic record of life in Weimar Berlin. A timeless demonstration of the cinema's ability to enthrall on a purely visceral level, the film offers a kaleidoscopic view of a single day in the life of the bustling metropolis. Carl Mayer ("The Last Laugh"), influenced by the naturalistic Kammerspiel movement, envisioned "a melody of pictures" sprung from daily reality instead of the stylized artificiality of the studio-bound expressionist film.

Following Mayer's rough outline, photographer Karl Freund deployed a team of cameramen to explore the avenues, alleyways and factories of Berlin and secure hidden-camera glimpses of the people and machinery that provide the city with its constant motion. Ruttman edited the scenes so that the images change in time with the music, like movements of a symphony. It may not seem like anything extraordinary now, but for his time it was revolutionary-think Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass's 1982 epic "Koyaanisqatsi," but made 60 years earlier. His later "World Melodies" expanded on the synthesis of the visual and the musical with scenes taken from all over the world.

Ruttman's animated and live-action films radically departed from the traditional narratives of contemporaries such as Charlie Chaplin and Max Fleischer. His roots lay in architecture and painting; the geometric animations of his very early filmmaking days have the collagist angularity of Constructivist posters. The short, "Lichtspiel Opus 1" (1921), was one of the first films to treat animation as high art and Ruttman might well be the grandfather of "Claymation." "Berlin: Symphony of a Great City," which utilizes the "Kino-Eye" or "Cinematic-Eye" technique of Dziga Vertov, is his best-known film.

If Ruttman had not been killed while making a newsreel on the frontlines of World War II, the history of film might have turned out differently. In the late '30s he delved deeper into documentary filmmaking, and then eventually moved towards propaganda. During Hitler's rise to power, he worked with Leni Riefenstahl in the editing of the infamous Nazi film of the Berlin Olympics, "Olympiad" (1936). Whether or not Ruttman would have suffered the same lapse in reputation that Riefenstahl did after the war will never be known since he died three years later.

UCLA university organist and organ professor Christoph Bull hails from Mannheim, Germany, and received a 2007 ASCAPlus Award for concert programming. In 2004, Dr. Bull was a featured recitalist and workshop presenter at the National Convention of the American Guild of Organists. Since then, he has performed at Los Angeles' Walt Disney Concert Hall as a solo performer and with the L.A. Master Chorale, in addition to his work with the Grammy Award-winning Southwest Chamber Music, Bootsy Collins and George Clinton of Parliament Funkadelic.

"The score I improvise at the performance will be unique," explains Dr. Bull. "It will be influenced by the atmosphere of the event and the audience's reactions to the movie. Part of the improvisation consists of exploring different sonorities on the pipe organ. To me, the industrial awakening portrayed in "Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt" lends itself to incorporating rhythmically repetitive musical cells, influenced by Minimalism and Trance."

Supported by the Ahmanson Foundation Endowment for Organ Programming. Special thanks to UCLA Live's promotional partner Goethe-Institut Los Angeles.

UCLA Live is an internationally acclaimed producer and presenter of music, dance, theater and spoken word, bringing hundreds of outstanding and provocative artists to Los Angeles each year.