How does the urban landscape incorporate representations of the world in modernist cinema?: Berlin, Symphony of a City and Man With the Movie Camera

Modernist cinema’s enduring preoccupation with how the urban landscape as an amorphous, microcosmic ‘screen of signs’(1) upon which representations of the world may be projected, explored and incorporated dates from the very inception of film when images of human figures caught unawares negotiating distinctly urban spaces featured prominently amongst the first reels of footage produced.(2) Indeed, the relationship between city and film was almost inevitable because, due to the aesthetics of visual stimulation and heritage of mechanisation the former shared with the latter, ‘modern culture was “cinematic” before the fact.’(3) Consequently, urban life as captured on film has profoundly shaped how human corporeality, behaviour and perception are visualised and mediated because, as Stephen Barber explains, ‘the city adroitly negotiates and enforces its own mass within the image, applying intricate pressure around the human forms which that image holds.’(4)
The ‘city symphony’ films of the early 20th Century epitomised by Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a City (Berlin) (1927) and Dziga Vertov’s Man With The Movie Camera (MMC) (1929) formed a continuance of this tradition in their attempts to not only refine the, by then, stock visual vocabulary employed to articulate a ‘day-in-the-life of ‘the city’ (i.e.: scale, movement, speed, crowds, traffic, labour, consumerism, etc) but also to recreate the ‘experience’ of urban space in cinematic form. Although both Ruttmann and Vertov were widely praised by contemporary audiences for their replication of the sensual aspects of city life through technical innovativeness and evocative visual dynamism, many critics felt that the films fell short of their documentary agendas by offering little more than beautiful yet content-free images'(5) and ‘mere formalistic jackstraws and unmotivated camera mischief’(6) respectively. Such criticism was, to a large extent, motivated by how this alleged form-over-substance approach left the urban landscape open to confronting representations of a world in which city, human, camera and machine are contentiously interrelated, as shall be demonstrated below.

The central source of contention in Berlin is the ambivalence with which Ruttmann treats the German capital’s inhabitants. For much of ‘Akt 1,’ people are conspicuously absent but for the city structures, dormant machinery and waste they have left behind, as perfectly captured by the solitary piece of paper shown dancing on the breeze across an eerily deserted, motionless street. The, by then, highly anticipated arrival of the train previously depicted speeding towards Berlin in the establishing sequence is ultimately anti-climactic because rather than the train-load of potential protagonists convention dictates will alight with one finds an endless sea of bodies and blurred feet rushing forth, preventing the camera from lingering for any longer than an instant on their roughly interchangeable faces. This eschewal of plot and disinterest in individual, subjective view-points continues throughout the film as various everyday human activities and interpersonal encounters are observed but only ever in a fleeting, distant and episodic fashion. In addition, while the camera may casually survey people entering private buildings, it resists following them inside, designating the private sphere unimportant. Consequently, one becomes increasingly aware of the various, usually imperceptible ways in which the urban landscape shapes the public behaviour displayed. Reflecting the post-war popularity of Taylorist scientific management and the assembly-line standardisation of Fordism in Europe, both natural time and the thematic progression of the mise-en-scène in Berlin are structured around work, making the inhabitants glimpsed appear to be merely functions defined by what they do rather than actual people.(7) Following the synchronised mass movement demanded from the Berliners to, at and from work, one would assume that implied in their reward of free-time would be a return to individual agency but leisure too is portrayed as entirely collective and ruled by mechanization, as epitomised by the way in which the legs of the chorus-line kick and fall echoing the rhythms of the aforementioned train. Similarly, shots of children performing routinized activities that mimic those of their adult counterparts, from walking to school to pushing toy prams, are juxtaposed as if to emphasise how the city completely pre-programs social behaviour.

As a result, the humans depicted in Berlin come to resemble, depth-wise, the moving mannequins that feature in the various shop-fronts depicted both prior and following the appearance of actual people, though, as Siegfried Kraucauer observes, ‘[i]t is not as if these dummies were humanised; rather, human beings are forced into the sphere of the inanimate. They seem molecules in a stream of matter.’(8) In contrast, Berlin itself appears at once human and machine-like, aided by the sense of unreality and universality that Ruttmann’s avoidance of a comprehensive, all-encompassing aerial shot of the city creates.(9) Appropriating the common 18th and 19th Century literary trope of descriptively anthropomorphising the city, Ruttmann depicts a series of windows, shutters, roller-doors and curtains opening often autonomously just as humans and networks of transportation begin to simultaneously appear in the streets, prompting one to associate the former with the eyes of a waking organic entity and the latter with a pulsating circulatory system. Extending the body analogy, attentive close-ups revealing vital fluid or sweat-like condensation suggest that the tirelessly whirring and thumping, seemingly unsupervised machines portrayed are at once vital organs and themselves bodies effortlessly engaged in a complex, rhythmic dance. Conversely, Ruttmann himself described the city in Berlin as being akin to ‘a complicated machine that only works if the various parts, even the smallest, interact with the highest precision.’(10) Indeed, both machines and the, as already demonstrated, machine-like humans alike are shown to spring into action as if in response to the pushing of a lever shown in an immediately preceding close-up. Similarly, a shot depicting a street-light’s normally hidden wires being exposed for maintenance as traffic rushes past in the background dissolves into a series of overlaid close-ups of intricate wires and switches, pointing to the intricate, interconnected web of mechanisation that underlies even the city’s most unassuming façades. Thus, Ruttmann’s urban landscape appears profoundly cyborg-like.(11)


Figure 1. Raoul Hausmann, Elasticum (1920). Collage and gouache. 31 x 37 cm.

Though the term ‘cyborg’ is somewhat anachronistic in that it did not exist as a word in Weimar Germany when Berlin was made, the era’s fascination with techno-organic synthesis was real, embodying in equal measures both a fearful response to the destruction of the unprecedented, full-scale mechanized conflict of the first World War and the projection of the utopian hopes and fantasies of Weimar cultural modernists for their fledgling, inherently unstable republic.(12) German Dadaists created photomontages of human-machine hybrids that challenged the perceived threat of authoritarianism (Figure 1.), whilst proponents of the Neue Sachlichkeit (‘New Objectivity’) movement that had gained increasing momentum during the 1920’s created close-up portraits of machine parts, seemingly revelling in their surfaces.(13) More generally, Berlin formed the centre of discourses on the positive and negative aspects of urban modernity because it was the more recently and thus more obviously marked by industrialisation and modernisation than any other European capital, having only been established as the German capital in 1871.(14) Indeed, as Anton Kaes argues, the film can be read as an allegory of the dislocation of the millions that migrated to Berlin in the first two decades of the 20th Century because the camera follows the arrival of a train, then conveys a sense of dislocation in the flurry of urban images it captures that is at once traumatic and exhilarating, and, finally, remains in the city at the film’s conclusion.(15) Many at the time, such as Oswald Spengler, viewed the city as ‘the symbol of soullessness’ for the way in which its abstract rationality seemingly denies authentic human experience, cultural roots and morality,(16) whilst others celebrated the city’s ambivalence, as captured in Walter Benjamin’s flâneur who actively strolls the city streets of modernity whilst maintaining a critical, highly aware yet blasé and detached attitude towards it all.(17)

Berlin can be read as confirming and refuting both sides of this debate due to the flâneur-like depiction of potential sources of social tension which are instantaneously reincorporated and neutralised. When one of liberal Berlin’s many working ‘Neue Fraus’ (‘new women’) is shown catching a man’s gaze through the a department store window, any hint of prostitution or female sexual assertiveness is suppressed by the brief but telling shots that follow of a bride happily being led from a car by her father and the genital-less groin of a prepubescent mannequin. The differences in the quality of the food consumed and leisure pursued by the upper and lower classes are freely displayed but the images inter-cut between both of a lion devouring a hunk of meat and an elephant resting suggest equivalence. Lastly, while the wild-eyed woman’s obviously staged suicide amidst inter-cut images of plummeting rollercoasters and trains racing menacingly towards the screen may attract a crowd, so too does the fashion show depicted immediately after, suggesting that it was just another forgettable aspect of urban life.(18)

The key to understanding the motivation behind the calculated levelling of difference and conflict in Berlin and it’s portrayal of a cyborg-city lies in the opening and closing sequences. The film begins with a close-up of an unidentified gently running body of water, evoking a sense of primordial, timeless flow and natural beauty. Rather than continuing in this vein of bucolic rural imagery to indict the city one expects, given the film’s title, to eventually see, a series of moving, interconnected abstract lines and circles begin to overlay the natural phenomena, complimenting the water’s ebb whilst also foreshadowing the wheels, wires and tracks of the train about to burst forth into the frame from the left.(19) By setting up the arrival of the train, which epitomises industrialisation and modernity, in this way, Ruttmann seems to visually reconcile the inherent conflict between nature and the mechanized urban landscape by, as Carsten Strathausen asserts, ‘fusing the linear time of technological progress with the cyclical time of nature’ and thus cast the city as a ‘second nature’ for humanity.(20) This also explains why Berlin is portrayed as cyborgian and also the film’s de-emphasis of human individuality in favour of a symphony of bodies all of which must contribute to the greater whole; a sentiment best captured by the film’s final moments where, despite their absence, people are implicitly present as part of the humanised city-machine that is being celebrated by the fireworks display as the beacon of light emitted from the radio tower unites cityscape and sky through illumination.(21)

Given that the two films were released within two years of each other, it is hardly surprising that the same binary collapses that occur in Berlin between urban and human, human and machine, private and public, and so forth, may be traced in MMC. Human movement is equated, both physically and rhythmically, with that of machines, from the general frequent in-shot double exposure of humans and machines to the specific alternating close-ups of a woman’s hands and face as she diligently folds small boxes in a swift, always identical movement which are repeatedly cross-cut with close-ups of equal duration of a machine similarly sorting boxes. Similarly, Vertov roughly divides his film into two halves, the first of which is devoted to labour, the second to leisure, not only to reflect the working day’s strict organisation of time and human behaviour within the city but also again to allow semantic associations to be drawn between the two through visual rhymes stressing behavioural equivalence and conditioning.(22) For instance, the pale women at the beach coating themselves in mud and applying dark lipstick in the leisure half recall the fair and dark skinned 18th Century costumed shop-front mannequins featured in the work half. Also, the city once again appears anthropomorphised, in this case through the cutting back and forth between close-ups of a various parts of a woman’s sleeping body beginning to stir and shots of empty urban spaces and motionless mannequins and machines gradually coming to life, punctuated by the rapid juxtaposition of a speeding train with her legs finally springing out of bed.

However, there are also numerous subtly yet significant ways in which Vertov’s film differs from Ruttmann’s in terms of how the urban landscape in each incorporates representations of the world. Firstly, though both more or less capture a day-in-the-life of a city, MMC is not set in a particular city but freely and often imperceptibly shifts between footage of Moscow, Odessa and Kiev, suggesting that the urban landscape depicted is somewhat transitory and thus universal, at least on a Soviet level. Similarly, while the progression of the day from work to leisure is honoured and time is shown to naturally pass through the use of conventional time-lapse shots of clouds, Vertov nevertheless continually disrupts any sense of temporal continuity. The reverse-motion used to make it seem that pigeons taking off from a rooftop are instead landing, the sudden cut from the end of the working day signalled by a series of shots of men washing their faces, women combing their hair and an arched metal bridge silhouetted against an evening sky to a beach in broad daylight, and the clock pendulum seen swinging during the film’s final moments that unnaturally gathers momentum to the point where it becomes blurred are all examples of Vertov’s deliberately generated discord. The element that, for Kracauer, saved MMC from the same aforementioned criticisms he directed at Berlin was that Vertov’s detached, surface-oriented observations were still ‘permeated with communist ideas,’(23) as evident in the sequence where alcoholism is seemingly equated with fascism by cutting from a beer hall, to a stern portrait of Lenin overhanging a worker’s hall wherein people are pursuing more intellectually rigorous pastimes like chess and reading the newspaper, and finally to a woman in a shooting gallery who hits a target we are told is ‘Uncle Fascism.’ One final difference between Vertov and Ruttmann’s films is that while both devote lengthy amounts of screen time to machines operating anthropomorphically to suggest the physical kinship between human and machine, the former often displays machines in purely aesthetic terms. For instance, the constantly present trams which glide and weave unexpectedly and with miraculous coordination in and out of frame seem objects of beauty divorced from their banal purpose, particularly when they are shown harmoniously superimposed and multiplied towards the film’s end.(24) Thus, overall, Vertov is far more concerned than Ruttmann is with how the urban landscape he depicts is perceived, rather than the actual urban landscape itself.

That cinematic perception is the true subject of MMC is made clear by Vertov’s framing of the urban mise-en-scène with people in a cinema preparing to watch and then actually watching portions of what we have seen in between, which consequently implicates our gaze with theirs. Together, we form the class to which the ‘truly international language of cinema’ claims to experiment with shall be taught, free from ‘intertitles,’ ‘story’ and ‘theatre’ conventions. Vertov’s specific selection of the cinema and the city as his educative tools reflects his recognition of how the former can transform and even construct the latter, such as the newsreels which allowed Europeans to visualise for the first time the destruction being wrought upon cities miles from their own during World War I, and also how film was the medium responsible for teaching the sensory values of speed and intensity to those early moderns who had never experienced them firsthand. The lesson consists of essentially three parts. Firstly, Vertov employs many of his camera ‘tricks’ only so that he may demystify and lay bare their constructed-nature either moments before or after they occur. A rapid sequence of extreme close-ups of the bottoms of carriages, blurred rails and flailing limbs convinces us that the cameraman has lost his life heroically trying to film an oncoming train yet moments later we are shown the very much alive cameraman safely burying the camera beneath the tracks, exposing his death by editing. Similarly, a series of full-frame, static, portrait-like images of children is gradually inter-cut with shots of MMC’s chief-editor examining the stills as they appear on pieces of film via a moviola. Moments later, the children appear again but this time as part of the mise-en-scène from which they had been removed watching a magic show, thus completing a tour of the editing process. This points one to the second part of the lesson, namely the importance of memory. MMC demands from its audience a willingness to abandon preconceived notions of narrative and the misleading opacity of film images and push memory and perception to its limits. Meaning in most of the examples from the film given above is generated by one’s capacity to recall the numerous motifs and interpret what is depicted accordingly.

The final aspect of MMC’s lesson, which the two preceding ones lead up to, is, like in Berlin, acceptance of and an ability to identify with a cyborgian element, namely the human-machine gaze of the camera:

I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it.(27)

Fearful of the profound gap exposed between human and mechanically recorded perception by the cinema’s ability to render the normally invisible elements of the everyday visible, Vertov and his Kino-Eye movement had called for a ‘new man, free of unwieldiness and clumsiness’ who would possess the ‘precise movements of machines.’(28) This ‘kino-eye’ manifests itself in MMC in a number of ways. Firstly, despite the kinok’s determination to ‘temporarily exclude man as a subject for film’ until able to ‘control his movements,’(29) the cameraman appears to be the film’s protagonist and, given the fact that he is never seen without his camera, meant to be read as a cyborg-like figure. However, as Judith Mayne explains, the centrality of the cameraman is constantly called into question by the fact that he himself is being filmed, thus rendering it uncertain whether the footage we see without him in it is from his point-of-view or an unidentified third party.(30) Secondly, the ‘kino-eye’ is literally visualised by Vertov in his frequent superimposition of a human eye over the camera lens which, regardless of whether the shutter is open or closed, is still able to ‘see,’ making it this all-seeing cyborgian entity which we imagine capturing the birds-eye-view shots of the city and:

...grop[ing] its way through the chaos of visual events, letting itself be drawn or repelled by movement, probing, as it goes, the path of its own movement…distending time, dissecting movement, or, in contrary fashion, absorbing time within itself, swallowing years, thus schematizing processes of long duration inaccessible to the normal eye.(31)

However, this interpretation too unwittingly undermines itself when the camera is depicted dancing on screen to the delight of the film’s internal cinema audience because its fetishized staginess fails to do justice to the overall concept.(32) Lastly, as the discussion above has hopefully shown, the ‘kino-eye’ manifests itself in the nature of MMC itself which, as Joseph Schaub argues, infects the viewer like a ‘virus’ by prompting them to adopt it’s highly aware, pervasive, receptive characteristics.(33) This is memorably visualised when Vertov cuts back and forth between a woman’s eyes and horizontal window shutters opening and closing with increasingly frenzied momentum forcing we, the audience, to also blink and thus mimic the flicker of the camera shutter.

Modernist cinema produced a new, distinctly modern way of conceiving the urban landscape and the self’s relationship to it. In Berlin and MMC, we find urban landscapes open to the incorporation of confronting representations of a world in which the traditional conceptualisation of human as private, autonomous individual independent of the city he or she created and now inhabits has seemingly been supplanted by a vision of the human as not only merely another aspect of a collective, entirely public realm pre-determined by the city but also machine-like. While Ruttmann uses the cinema to reconcile these inherently intertwined binaries by depicting a cyborgian urban landscape capable on incorporating and neutralising the tensions produced, Vertov uses the cinema to reconfigure our natural perception of the urban landscape along the mechanised, cyborgian lines of the ‘kino-eye.’

References
(1) Jean Baudrillard, America (London; New York: Verso, 1988), p. 56.

(2) For instance, consider the work of Louis Le Prince, Max and Emil Skladanowsky and Auguste and Louis Lumière.

(3) Leo Charney & Vanessa R. Schwartz (eds.), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), p. 1.

(4) Stephen Barber, Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space (London: Reaktion, 2002), p. 20.

(5) John Grierson, 'First Principles of Documentary' in Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary Kevin Macdonald & Mark Cousins (eds.) (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 100.

(6) Sergei Eisenstein cited in Carsten Strathausen, ‘Uncanny Spaces: The City In Ruttmann and Vertov’ in Screening the City Mark Shiel & Tony Fitzmaurice (eds.) (London: Verso, 2003), p. 28.

(7) Anton, Kaes, ‘Leaving Home: Film, Migration and the Urban Experience’ New German Critique no. 74, 1998, p. 191.

(8) Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film Rev. and expanded ed., Leonardo Quaresima (ed.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 186.

(9) Wolfgang Natter, ‘The City as Cinematic Space: Modernism and Place in Berlin, Symphony of a City’ in Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle: A Geography of Film Stuart C. Aitken & Leo E. Zonn (eds.) (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), p. 218.

(10) Walter Ruttmann, ‘Wie ich meinen Berlin-Film dreht’ Lichtbild-Buhne 8 Oct 1927 cited in Kaes, ‘Leaving Home: Film, Migration and the Urban Experience,’ p. 190.

(11) Carsten Strathausen, ‘Uncanny Spaces: The City In Ruttmann and Vertov’ in Screening the City Mark Shiel & Tony Fitzmaurice (eds.) (London: Verso, 2003), p. 27.

(12) Matthew Biro, ‘The New Man as Cyborg: Figures of Technology in Weimar Visual Culture’ New German Critique, no. 62, 1994, p. 71.

(13) Martin Gaughan, ‘Ruttmann’s Berlin: Filming in a “Hollow Space”?’ in Screening the City Mark Shiel & Tony Fitzmaurice (eds.) (London: Verso, 2003), p. 41.

(14) Gaughan, ‘Ruttmann’s Berlin: Filming in a “Hollow Space”?,’ pp. 41-43.

(15) Kaes, ‘Leaving Home: Film, Migration and the Urban Experience,’ pp. 184-185.

(16) ‘The Soul of the City’ cited in Strathausen, ‘Uncanny Spaces: The City In Ruttmann and Vertov,’ p. 20.

(17) See The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999).

(18) Kaes, ‘Leaving Home: Film, Migration and the Urban Experience,’ p. 188.

(19) Natter, ‘The City as Cinematic Space: Modernism and Place in Berlin, Symphony of a City,' p. 216.

(20) ‘Uncanny Spaces: The City In Ruttmann and Vertov,’ pp. 32-33.

(21) Strathausen, ‘Uncanny Spaces: The City In Ruttmann and Vertov,’ p. 32.

(22) Anna Lawton, ‘Rhythmic Montage in the Films of Dziga Vertov: A Poetic Use of the Language of Cinema’ Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 13, 1978, p. 46.

(23) Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, p. 187.

(24) Malcolm Turvey, ‘Can the Camera See?: Mimesis in Man With a Movie Camera’ October vol. 89, 1999, pp. 43-44.

(25) Barber, Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space, pp. 16-17.

(26) Lawton, ‘Rhythmic Montage in the Films of Dziga Vertov: A Poetic Use of the Language of Cinema,’ p. 47.

(27) Dziga Vertov, "The Council of Three," in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, Annette Michelson (ed.), trans. Kevin O'Brien (London: Pluto Press, 1984), p. 17.

(28) Dziga Vertov, ‘We: Variant of a Manifesto’ in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov Annette Michelson (ed.), trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press, 1984), p. 8.

(29) Vertov, ‘We: Variant of a Manifesto,’ p. 7.

(30) Kino and The Woman Question: Feminism and Soviet Silent Film (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), p. 162.

(31) Dziga Vertov, "The Council of Three," p. 19.

(32) Strathausen, ‘Uncanny Spaces: The City In Ruttmann and Vertov,’ p. 32.

(33) ‘Presenting the Cyborg's Futurist Past: An Analysis of Dziga Vertov's Kino-Eye’ The Cyberpunk Project [Online] Accessed 22 October 2007.
http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/cyborg_futurist_past.html

Bibliography

Barber, Stephen, Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space (London: Reaktion, 2002).

Baudrillard, Jean, America (London; New York: Verso, 1988).

Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999).

Biro, Matthew, ‘The New Man as Cyborg: Figures of Technology in Weimar Visual Culture’ New German Critique, no. 62, 1994, pp. 71-110.

Charney, Leo & Vanessa R. Schwartz (eds.), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995).

Gaughan, Martin, ‘Ruttmann’s Berlin: Filming in a “Hollow Space”?’ in Screening the City Mark Shiel & Tony Fitzmaurice (eds.) (London: Verso, 2003), pp. 41-57.

Grierson, John, 'First Principles of Documentary' in Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary Kevin Macdonald & Mark Cousins (eds.) (London: Faber and Faber, 1996).

Kaes, Anton, ‘Leaving Home: Film, Migration and the Urban Experience’ New German Critique no. 74, 1998, pp. 179-192.

Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film Rev. and expanded ed., Leonardo Quaresima (ed.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Lawton, Anna, ‘Rhythmic Montage in the Films of Dziga Vertov: A Poetic Use of the Language of Cinema’ Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 13, 1978, pp. 44-50.

Natter, Wolfgang, ‘The City as Cinematic Space: Modernism and Place in Berlin, Symphony of a City’ in Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle: A Geography of Film Stuart C. Aitken & Leo E. Zonn (eds.) (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), pp. 203-228.

Schaub, Joseph Christopher, ‘Presenting the Cyborg's Futurist Past: An Analysis of Dziga Vertov's Kino-Eye’ The Cyberpunk Project [Online] Accessed 22 October 2007. http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/cyborg_futurist_past.html

Strathausen, Carsten, ‘Uncanny Spaces: The City In Ruttmann and Vertov’ in Screening the City Mark Shiel & Tony Fitzmaurice (eds.) (London: Verso, 2003), pp. 15-40.

Turvey, Malcolm, ‘Can the Camera See?: Mimesis in Man With a Movie Camera’ October vol. 89, 1999, pp. 25-50.

Vertov, Dziga, ‘We: Variant of a Manifesto’ in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov Annette Michelson (ed.), trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press, 1984).

Vertov, Dziga, "The Council of Three," in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, Annette Michelson (ed.), trans. Kevin O'Brien (London: Pluto Press, 1984).

Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story

Throughout this course, our attention has been consistently drawn to the way in which cinematic modernism often seems intent upon drawing our attention away from the obvious grandeur and immediacy of the macrocosmic (e.g.: the city; conventional overarching plots, etc) and refocusing it on the subtleties of the microcosmic (e.g.: the depth of meaning in the everyday details we usually miss or dismiss; the unique attributes of film, the many layers of detail within a single shot and the cinema’s ability to interrogate and augment perception, etc). Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story is no different.

As with my Wise Blood experience, Tokyo Story affected me emotionally rather than on just a purely intellectual level like with most of the texts, largely, I think, because the cinematic space depicted in it is so absorbingly ethereal and almost uncanny. Narrative and temporal ellipses’ abound, such as when we only realise that the arduous, day-long trip from Onomichi to Tokyo discussed in the opening sequence has already taken place well into the next scene when Fumiko mentions to her son that his grandparents are moments away. Similarly, we are not told character names or how they are related with the other character until after having already met them, illustrating Ozu’s unwavering preference to show rather than tell. Domestic interiors are at once claustrophobic (as made clear by the boy humorously complaining about having no room to study and the difficulties encountered in making physical and, indeed, psychological space for the grandparents) and surprisingly transitory (the camera observes Fumiko weaving in and out of the rooms of her house to complete a seemingly impossible full-circle, alluding to the presence of sliding walls). The scene where Tomi is watching her grandson play outside becomes an internal monologue or narration of a psychological or imagined space that she subtly directs to camera. While we are shown very little of Tokyo itself (which is somewhat ironic given the film’s title) and the little we do see is vague and difficult to place (just as Noriko finds it difficult to point out the location of her house from the department store lookout), the city looms large as an isolating, all-pervasive, high expectation-dashing force, particularly for the grandparents, as captured by the following heart-breaking exchange between Tomi and Sukichi as they prepare to separate for the first time in the film thus far:

Sukichi: Tokyo is such a big place…
Tomi: Yes, if you get lost here, I would have to spend the rest of mylife looking for you.
(a rare long-shot is then used, heightening the unfamiliarity of their surrounds)

As clichéd as it may sound, watching Tokyo Story is like watching an intricate origami sculpture being assembled: a single, ridiculously small piece of paper that is seemingly insignificant in itself and easily discarded (or one episode out of an infinite number of interchangeable everyday occurrences, such as the before, during and after of rural-dwelling grandparents visiting their children and grandchildren in Tokyo) is, through experienced, careful and deliberate manipulation (or a disciplined palette of camera techniques parred back to only the most essential compositional elements), momentarily transformed into an object (or film) of revelatory beauty made all the more profound by its humble beginnings, skill execution and in-built transitoriness (just as the sculpture will eventually unfold or decay, so too will the film come to an end, yet both, as Bergson would argue, will live on in our cinematic memory-banks).

Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood

‘The army sent him halfway around the world and forgot him. He was wounded and they remembered him long enough to take the shrapnel out of his chest - they said they took it out but they never showed it to him and he felt it still in there, rusted, and poisoning him - and then they sent him to another desert and forgot him again.’ (Ch. 1, pp. 14-15).*

‘I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else’s, but behind all of them, there’s only one truth and that is that there’s no truth…[n]o truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach! Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place.’ (Ch. 10, p. 113).

I’m finding it excruciatingly difficult to put into words what I felt upon finishing Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. If anything it was a profoundly physical, gut reaction; a paralysis, mouth agape, forehead furrowed and eyes cringed in a conflicted mixture of sadness, horror and revelation aka: I loved it!

The above passages from Wise Blood represent the modernist dilemma in a nutshell and Hazel Moates it’s angry, disillusioned, at once direction-hungry and self-cripplingly aimless poster-child. This claim and the blog that follows is part me being confused about how the novel allegedly portrays a positive, reaffirming view of religion and part me taking a few liberties given that O’Connor herself asserted that the bleakness of the novel should not be confused with existentialism.

Fresh from an involuntary stint in the blood-soaked trenches of a World War (the spectre was a piece of ‘shrapnel’ embedded in modernism that victory claimed to remove but whose ‘poisoning’ presence one could still sense, here made to seem an eerily distant, indistinct, repressed figment of the collective unconscious by the lack of actual detail we are provided of his service), Haze the man unsurprisingly returns to find a world unlike that which he had left behind as an adolescent of eighteen. After Haze discovers that his family house is now nothing more than a boarded-up ‘shell’ (Ch. 1, p. 16) with its inhabitants long dead or scattered, he, like a vast majority of people during the first half of the rapidly urbanizing 20th century, inevitably finds himself forced into the city; a refugee in his own country. In Taulkinham, Haze finds himself in a new battlefield where the target is mental and spiritual rather instead of physical: an ambivalent, brashly and pervasively public realm of crowds filled with flashing neon advertisements, packed-out movie theatres trading on the ‘spectacle’ of schlock-horror flicks and flawed/degenerate, near monosyllabic inhabitants are becoming more animal-like in their characteristics and behaviour rather than more civilized or ‘modern’; a place where the ‘truths’ of religion and its duel promise of imminent damnation and salvation are comfortably peddled alongside potato peelers. Amidst this aggressive sensual saturation, Hazel yearns for ‘a private place to go’ (Ch. 2, p. 18), but in the modern age does such a place exist? Conversely, Enoch has been in the city for months and has still yet to make any friends, or meaningful, lasting interpersonal connection (i.e.: the public may be accessible to all but it does not necessarily entail a collective - alone in a crowd).

For some reason, Wise Blood reminded me a lot of the absurdist drama of Samuel Beckett, particularly Waiting for Godot. Both are deceptively monotonous in pacing and the excruciating everydayness of their narrative arcs; confront the possibility that truth is relative; feature grotesque, unlikable, pitiable characters; and, most importantly, feature God as the proverbial pink elephant of the narratives (Godot will never arrive so what’s the point of waiting? Enoch finds the ‘new Jesus’ but it explodes into a cloud of dust like the bodies of the war dead). If Nietzsche’s claim that ‘God is dead’ was a prediction, then the World Wars can be considered its realisation, at least in terms of how the slaughter by technology-driven horrors of two generations of youths manipulated by leaders they never saw for causes they never fully understood could lead even the most steadfast of Christians to question their faith, even for just a second. However, implicit in the claim that God has died is one’s belief in Him in the first place and it is this fact, in my opinion, that Hazel finally comes to realise by the end of the novel and it is what prompts him to blind himself - an attempt at a final (perhaps first) autonomous act; a rejection of the gift of sight and the ability to see God’s creations; self-severance of himself from the world.

* All quotes from Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood (London: Faber and Faber, 2000).

Dziga Vertov's Man With The Movie Camera

Dziga Vertov’s Man With the Movie Camera is an incredibly demanding film that is inherently (and perhaps even deliberately) suited to multiple viewings. The mise-en-scene is so visually dense, technically complex and overtly fast-paced that the eye is simply left incapable of unpacking everything that it sees in a single sitting; exposing a profound gap between human and mechanical or cinematic perception.

Consequently, if the self-proclaimed ‘experimental’ aim of the film is to create a ‘truly international language of cinema,’ then the proverbial guinea-pig upon whom this new language is tested (because what’s the point of inventing a language if nobody can understand it?) is the audience (particularly the film’s contemporary audience who, unlike our film-studies-versed selves, would not have been as exposed to the cinema and the mechanics of its specific formal qualities). Indeed, that our relationship with the film is meant to be a didactic one is made apparent in two particular, self-reflexive ways. Firstly, the numerous instances of the cameraman’s lens being pointed to camera seem to suggest that our behaviour and reactions to the film should mirror those of the cinema audience Vertov depicts watching either portions of the film that we have already been privy to (e.g.: a full-screen shot of three airplanes flying in formation cuts to a long-shot of the cinema screen as the exact same image is projected upon it) or the camera and its tripod moving about on screen unaided, i.e.: respectful devotion of one’s full attention and a receptive sense of awe at what effects the camera can so convincingly achieve.

This mindset is also encouraged by the second way in which our perception is primed for the new cinematic language, namely the demystification of cinematic ‘tricks’ moments before or after they appear on screen. The sequence where the cameraman is seemingly being run over by a train in a blur of extreme close-ups of carriage, rail and flailing foot is later exposed as the result of burying the camera under the tracks and clever editing. Full-screen static, portrait-like stills of youths are intercut with shots of the same stills as they appear on a piece of film being edited and are then seen full-screen again but now moving as part of the mise-en-scene.

Ultimately, Vertov seems to be attempting to cultivate us into actively receptive, cinema-literate viewers. Indeed, the closer you read the film and its infinite surfaces the more rewarding they become. For instance, it wasn’t until I watched the film a second time whilst painstakingly stopping and starting it to take notes (on YouTube: arguably the cinema’s new frontier) that I really noticed the numerous intriguing, blink-and-you’ll-miss-them details that litter the mise-en-scene, momentarily rupturing its continuity. The pigeons landing on a rooftop that are in reality actually taking off (i.e.: the shot is played backwards); the rapidly quick extreme close-up of a pair of eyes that is not on screen long enough to identify whether they are human or belong to the mannequins in the shots that precede and proceed it; and the close-up of the cameraman’s hand winding his camera as he films a homeless man being then barely noticeably shown upside-down a few frames after are just some examples. These discordant moments (coupled with Vertov’s interest in conveying the passing of time through, for example, shots of objects silhouetted against time-lapse sped up clouds and the recurring, ever-rapidly swinging clock pendulum in the film’s final moments) bring to mind Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the ‘time-image,’ i.e.: images that make apparent the temporally equivocal status of a shot as an image of essentially a past event being viewed in the present, refracting and thus confusing memory and physical time as if through a crystal.*

* Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2 - The Time-image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone, 1989), p. 81.

E.A. Dupont's Piccadilly

Anna May Wong’s confident, exotic, sexually-charged, hypnotic Shosho may outshine Gilda Gray’s fawning, snobbish, ‘shimmying,’ hysterical Mabel in E.A. Dupont’s Piccadilly but the real scene-stealer for me would have to be Jameson Thomas’s Valentine or, more correctly, his left eyebrow which is capable of conveying everything from fury when he prepares to punch Victor to revelation when noticing Shosho’s nodding Buddha inspires him to rehire the scullery maid as his new attraction. Given that Piccadilly’s conventional love-triangle/whodunit plot is nothing spectacular; its the visual details and nuances like these that make the film unique.

We are made particularly well aware of this fact by the deliberate exclusion of a large portion of the inter-titles that would normally accompany onscreen verbal exchanges in silent films so as to force us to rely upon cinematic forms of narration rather than dialogue; a telling, even defiant move considering that this silent film was made on the brink of the sound cinema era which would begin to embrace theatre conventions at the expense of filmic ones (and also, of course, the rise and rise of Hollywood and the relegation of cinema to the primary status of entertainment rather than art. With this is in mind, what is the significance of Piccadilly being a multi-national production with German director, cinematographers etc, British setting and actors, Chinese and American actors etc?).

For instance, when Victor professes his love for Mabel in her change room, a close-up of Victor’s hand reaching for and achingly hovering millimeters from Mabel’s exposed arm better reveals the extent of his affection than any monologue. We also see Mabel’s haughty, smirking dismissal of Victor’s claim that ‘Valentine only wants you because he thinks you are a success’ transform into profound self-doubt thanks to attention drawn to her anxious hand-wringing and shoulder stroking and the shadow artfully cast over her lower-face highlighting her fearful eyes. Dupont also draws attention to the expressivity of film by juxtaposing straightforward, two-dimensional written English with the cinematic qualities of Chinese characters which, as the article we were given by Ernest Fenollosa observed, are each self-contained visual ‘thought-pictures’ in addition to being mere words in a sentence, much like film shots.*

Piccadilly’s nightclub setting is a further element of interest that demands a visually perceptive viewing stance. We are introduced to the film by a panning shot of disembodied neon signs suspended in the darkness, cultivating a sense of excitement with a hint of subversion given the lateness, the promise of alcohol, courting and entertainment and the confusion of public and private realms that comes from being in a crowd yet still part of something desirably exclusive: ‘But is it a club? Do clubs have electric signs?’ asks one patron. ‘Of course it isn’t a club,’ another answers. ‘They call it a club and so everybody wants to come into it.’ Arguably, it is the nightclub’s profoundly liminal space that allows Valentine, like the distracted, swaying scullery maids, to become hypnotised by Shosho, challenging employee/employer, Chinese/English, poor/wealthy distinctions. This recalls artist Piet Mondrian’s observation, from same period, that the nightclub with its jazz music already demonstred elements of the progressive, utopian, conflict-free reorganisation of living according to pure rhythm rather than form that he advocated under his Neo-Plasticism movement:

There is no emptiness, no boredom: rhythm fills everything without creating new oppression - it does not become form. No link with the old remains, for in the bar only the Charleston is seen and heard. The structure, the lighting, the advertisements - even in their disequilibrium - serve to complete the jazz rhythm. All ugliness is transcended by jazz and by light.**

* The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1936), pp. 8-9.
** ‘Jazz and the Neo-Plastic’ (1927) in The New Art - The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), p. 221.

Image above: Piet Mondrian. Broadway Boogie Woogie. 1942-43. Oil on canvas, 50 x 50" (127 x 127 cm).

Walther Ruttmann's Berlin, Symphony of a City

I found Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a City way confusing. Sure I was impressed by Ruttmann’s clever evocation of how the body and mind experience the rhythms of the city through both shot composition (for example, where the stationary camera shoots through the windows of a speeding tram through which pedestrians walking at a much slower pace are visible, juxtaposing mobile and immobile, slow and fast) and editing and repetition (for example, one can almost hear the sound of the train chugging along as it travels towards Berlin due to the repetitive sequence of quick, alternating, multiple angle shots of the tracks, the landscape passing through carriage windows and the wires overhead). But it troubled me that I couldn’t work out whether this visual ‘symphony’ was meant to portray a positive or negative characterisation of urban life.

On the one hand, you have a camera that exalts in the exhilarating scale of the city, frequently shooting upwards from a low angle or downwards from high above playing on or panning and travelling to embrace the horizontal. The ordinarily mundane opening of tram depot doors becomes a slow, dramatic, ceremonial unveiling shot from a variety of angles while the synchronized spinning and pounding of machines becomes an intricate techno-ballet of intimate close-ups that infinitely gather momentum and observe the mechanical participants anthropomorphically ‘perspire’ heroically in the name of progress. Having worked all day, Berliners both rich and working class are united in their reward of freedom to use every minute of free-time to enthusiastically indulge in the seemingly endless amusements the city has to offer, from every sport under the sun to shopping (a past time upon which the city’s existence undeniably relies) to meeting socially in bars, restaurants, parks, nightclubs, theatres and cinemas.

On the other hand, the individuals we meet are completely two-dimensional not only in terms of personality depth (understandable if the city is considered the sole protagonist) but also behaviourally. Ruled by the rigid structure of the working day, Berliners swarm drone-like to and from work in a mass synchronised movement made all the more disturbing by the fact that the film was put together out of a years-worth of hidden-camera footage that seemingly revealed no diversion from routine and also by the film’s juxtaposition of adults and children doing the same activities (going to work/school, pushing prams, getting/pretending to get married etc) to highlight how the city seems to socialise us into acting in certain collective ways within it. The danger this unnaturalness presents is exposed when two men get into a fight and the crowd, distracted from their preordained paths, surges forward unpredictably and almost violently to watch. The crowd is similarly distracted when, in perhaps the film’s only internal, psychological moment, a wild-eyed woman commits suicide by jumping off a bridge into the river below as if driven to do so by the city itself given the images cut into the sequence of being on a rollercoaster that is shortly after inter-cut with a shot of a train menacingly racing towards the screen, quick successive close-ups of previously reliable arrows that disorientingly change directions and a spinning, blurred merry-go-round-like shot of the city. Furthermore, though class extremes are evident in the presence of street beggars and rich, cigar-smoking aristocrats, Ruttmann ultimately seems to suggest that humans in a city, whether well-off or disadvantaged, are no better than animals in a zoo (for example, images depicting both ends of the class spectrum eating and resting are inter-cut with a lion ripping through a piece of meat and a elephant lying down respectively).

I found that Berlin’s incoherencies are forgivable and in fact significant if you interpret the film, with the benefit of the distance or hindsight, as very much a product of the distinct, inherently contradictory context in which it was conceived: Weimar Germany. In the wake of WWI, the new, unfamiliar socio-democratic form of governance that was imposed upon Germany by the victors along with the devastatingly harsh ‘war guilt’ reparations of the Versailles Treaty left the nation in a state of uncertainty, instability and alienation. Germany’s consequent need to redefine its collective identity lead to a boom in cultural production, particularly in silent cinema, suitably characterised by different, conflicting styles and tendencies all evident in Berlin, from expressionism (the suicide scene) to the Neue Sachlichkeit or ‘new objectivity’ (the documentary aims and techniques) to Dada (use of montage). Thus, Ruttmann’s underplaying of class conflict when in reality the later years of the Weimar Republic saw painfully high inflation and unemployment, his naturalisation of the city’s compulsory foreign military presence and his valorisation of an industrialised urban space that regulates human behaviour can be understood as attempts to present a united, stable German identity.

Le Sang d'un Poète - Jean Cocteau

Why start off a survey of modernist cinema with surrealism or, more specifically, Jean Cocteau’s Le Sang d'un Poète? Well, arguably, the reality-destabilising challenges to accepted modes of perception and expression posed by the melting clocks, exquisite corpses and fur-covered cutlery of Breton and the like appear to prompt a more open mind-set for approaching film. This is of particular use to a contemporary film student considering that, as Victor Burgin notes in The Remembered Film, one’s experience of cinema is not restricted to a one-way exchange of meaning from screen to audience but is dynamically heterotopic, encompassing everything from the film’s promotional materials to personal memories and associations.*

Consequently, though I found Cocteau’s stubbornly deliberate refusal to privilege any reading of the film and rejection of linear narrative in favour of provocative, disturbing and unexpected audio-visual juxtapositions unnerving, frustratingly pretentious and often unintelligible in any conventional sense, these same attributes struck me as not only strangely amusing but also quite liberating in the sense that any expectations of what a film should be go straight out the window, leaving you to your own innate interpretive devices.

For instance, are the images of the collapsing factory chimney that bookend the film merely a repetition emphasising the circularity of the themes and the unity of the otherwise disjointed mise-en-scene? Or do they imply that the action which passed between their appearances occurred in the split-second it took for the collapse to take place, disrupting the link between space and time? In any case, it is not really the meaning but the interrogative experience encountered that matters.

One of the things I enjoyed most about Le Sang… was the manner in which Cocteau playfully took advantage of the lee-way accorded to amateurs in his use of numerous clever, self-consciously experimental yet stagy and obvious film tricks, inadvertently (or perhaps deliberately?) drawing attention to film as a tool for creating evocative, highly poeticised images. For instance, scenery is constructed on the floor and then filmed from above to enable the characters to appear magnetically pulled along, inextricably attracted to, or levitating against the walls but the trick is used so frequently and for such long periods that one’s initial reaction of awe is demystified when given too much time to grasp the mechanics behind it.

Cocteau also seems to acknowledge film as an unpredictable, independently creative element beyond his control in a signed note displayed onscreen in his own handwriting that reads ‘I got caught in a trap by my own film.’ Indeed, the suitable haziness of the snowball episode was in fact created by the chance combination of cleaners sweeping the set and the camera’s mechanical ability to select, distort and modify.**

Of course, the note can also be interpreted as referring to the reoccurring theme or motif in Le Sang… of the poet-artiste’s creative processes as based on both self-inflicted suffering for one’s art (consider the poet-protagonist’s irresistible urge to gaze voyeuristically through the hotel-room key holes only to find decidedly sado-masochistic scenes; the suicide of the card-player when he is caught and exposed for the unoriginal act of cheating, etc) and punishment by Art itself for even attempting to produce it (consider the statue exiling the poet-artiste through the mirror; the chunk of statue concealed in the snowball that kills the boy, etc).

In line with modernism's tendency to rework and interrogate past movements, this strongly recalls Romanticism’s preoccupation with the inevitable failure of the poet-artist who though uniquely able to commune with the simultaneous beauty and ferocity of the Sublime, is incapable of recapturing the experience exactly in art form and thus ultimately doomed to a lifetime of underachievement and unwanted solitude. Given that the movie camera is basically an extension of the filmaker's eye, would the Romantics' dilemma have been solved if they had had such technology?

Speaking of solitude, my conflicted but rewarding experience was seemingly heightened by the fact that watching Le Sang… alone in the library prevented me from looking to the facial expressions and comments of others for reassurances that I was “getting” what was happening on screen. Was it any different watching it in a group?


* Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film, London, Reaktion Books, 2004, 7-28.
** Jean Cocteau Films: The Blood of the Poet, http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~lenin/jean_cocteau_boap.html, (Accessed 13 August 2007).