In 1927 Oskar Fischinger set out from Munich to Berlin on foot, traveling like many Europeans did before private ownership of automobiles became common. Only this time he took his motion picture camera with him, using it like a still camera, taking still frames and the occasional short shot along the way. When projected, this becomes a dazzling montage of the German countryside and people with a constantly tumbling-forward perspective, preserving many scenes and locations later obliterated by the Second World War. While München-Berlin Wanderung was not the first film of its kind -- Frederick S. Armitage and A. E. Weed's Down the Hudson (1903) was likely that -- it is freewheeling, deliberately artistic and experimental in spirit, closer to the single-frame films made decades later by Kurt Kren than it is to anything else made in 1920s Europe.
Review of Walking from Munich to Berlin
