Non-narrative cinema uses visual rhythm and montage structure rather than story to create meaning

City symphony films (Ruttmann’s Berlin 1927, Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera 1929) and French avant-garde filmmakers (Léger, Duchamp, Man Ray) showed that film could be structured like music — through rhythm, repetition, and abstraction — without dialogue, actors, or a conventional plot. Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi trilogy is a more recent example. Makela argues these works are the direct ancestors of live cinema performance: they use the same grammar (rhythm, movement, colour, visual tension) that a live cinema performer deploys. This is the conceptual bridge between cinema history and live performance practice.

Examples

Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927): rhythmically edited street scenes with no narrative; Koyaanisqatsi (1983): images of civilisation and nature structured as musical movement to Philip Glass.

Assessment

Identify two non-narrative compositional techniques used in a city symphony film and describe how each could be applied in a live cinema performance.