Rythmes de la ville - Människor i stad

With Mãnniskor i stad, an impressionist study of Stockholm, Sucksdorff sides with the large group of film makers that made a so called city symphony in their career. A genre that seems to be immortal since Ruttmann's Berlin, Sinfonie einer Grossstadt. Although this is Sucksdorff's first documentary with nature not being the central theme, Människor i Stad is clearly a work by this film maker: a highly personal film, lacking dialogue, in which the image on the one hand and the specially composed music on the other act as full partners. The personal aspect comes to the fore, for example, in the choice of perspective and in the use of close-ups. Several times, Sucksdorff shows us Stockholm through the experiences of a small boy. The sound and the music have a suggestive power of imagination that often anticipates the future events. Like other city symphonies showed before, its strenght lies for a major part in the editing, in the film maker's ingenuity to make, either thematically or purely visually, a 'composition' out of the different scenes and episodes. Sucksdorff succeeds in doing this.