Walter Ruttmann builds his film around a single day in Berlin, from empty streets at dawn to nightclubs and neon at midnight, with no actors, no plot, and no intertitles to explain anything. A train pulls into the city as the opening sequence, and from there the editing tracks factory machinery, streetcars, office workers, children walking to school, lunch crowds, and the stock exchange, cutting faster as the city's pace quickens through the middle of the day. Ruttmann shoots ordinary Berliners alongside the machinery of the city itself, treating gears, telephone switchboards, and marching feet as interchangeable rhythms in the same montage. The film is organized into five acts corresponding to phases of the day, a structure borrowed from symphonic music rather than storytelling. Nothing is narrated and nothing is staged as drama; the argument is made entirely through cutting rhythm and the accumulation of unremarkable moments. It is one of the defining examples of the 1920s city symphony genre, made a couple of years before the coming of synchronized sound ended this kind of pure-image filmmaking.