Wednesday, 13 April 2011

When split screens were avant-garde


Upon viewing ‘Man with a Movie Camera,’ it was quite clear that Vertov’s creation is much more unreserved than Ruttman’s ‘Berlin: Symphony of a Great City’. It never fails to amaze me that even with censorship and the public expectation of modesty and inhibition, films were still able to somehow present the taboo, with nudity, child birthing and even an instance of divorce, which still carries a stigma in certain societies, making an appearance in Vertov’s film. Although Vertov uses ‘kinography’ to explain the lack of intertitles, scripting and theatrical components such as actors and sets, the film still manages an intriguing account of city life through the implementation of several filming techniques which are visually stimulating, and certainly would have been an object of fascination at the time. Vertov, aware of the poor sound quality of available equipment, recognised the impossibility of organising the many sounds people were confronted with daily. Instead, he sought comfort through the possibility of capturing the physical world with a movie camera: “Record the visible...Organise not the audible, but the visible world. Perhaps that’s the way out?”[1] In organising the visible world, Vertov, like Ruttman, is able to create the idea of noise generated by constant movement and a quick succession of images: sound is implied rather than heard. Speaking of his 1928 newsreel ‘The Eleventh Year’, Vertov remarked that “we already see montage connected with sounds. Recall how the machines thump, how absolute silence is conveyed.”[2] This musing can easily be applied to ‘Man with a Movie Camera’. Vertov adequately records the energy of motion, as slow and fast, industrial and mechanical, without employing the use of sound. Viewers today, who have been desensitised by the constant array of CGI enhanced images and sequences, are either unimpressed by the technical simplicity or captivated by something which was so technologically advanced for its time. It is interesting how what was once considered ‘avant-garde’ quickly descends into the realm of the conventional. Vertov, it seemed, was simply interested in the filmic capture of images and the mechanical portrayal and manipulation of our surroundings, writing that: “I am kino-eye. I am builder...I am kino-eye, I am mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it”.[3] His superimposition of his ‘man with a movie camera’ on top of a large building, overlooking the city captures both his advanced film making methods and also a metaphor, for the film-maker towering above everything and everyone, an all-seeing figure. The reality is that Vertov, as the man with a movie camera behind the man with a movie camera, is indeed a powerful figure, able to manipulate images in order to depict this sentiment. Cinema itself promises power as it allows time to be cut, edited, reversed and replayed.[4] One of the most interesting things about ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ is its self-reflexivity: it begins with an image of a camera, and as the film unfolds, we are made aware of the camera and the film-maker’s constant self reference and awareness.



[1] Vertov, as quoted in Douglas Kahn, Noise, water, meat: a history of sound in the arts, (The MIT Press: Cambridge, 1999), p. 140
[2] Ibid, p. 141.
[3] Dziga Vertov, ‘Kinoks: A Revolution’, in Technology and culture, the film reader, ed. Andrew Utterson, (Routledge: London, 2005), p. 102
[4] Peggy Phelan, Mourning sex: performing public memories, (Routledge: London, 1997), p. 160

Surprisingly loud for a film without sound


Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City is a portrait of Germany’s city, from ‘dawn ‘til dusk’, decades before it was divided into two, or characterised by the existence or the memory of a wall. The opening shots of the city, following the train sequence, display an empty shell of a city, of buildings and places that, although formative of a city’s history and identity, cannot be significant without the human interactions and events they shelter and shadow. Here, Berlin is a ghost city, perhaps Ruttman’s testimony to the effects of the First World War, but also a haunting prediction of the city’s fate during and after World War Two. Here, we see more than hear the silence, the length of the cuts underlining the slow movement, with Ruttman’s images of empty streets, closed blinds and solitary walks creating a sequence which mirrors a symphony’s ‘adagio’ after a fast paced, train packed ‘sonata’. The constant walking, sweeping, and everyday movement such as washing dishes and slicing food all work to create a rhythmic sequence interspersed with moments of tension and suspense, such as the fight and the suicide. We are familiar enough today with the sights and sounds to be able produce in our minds exactly what the sequence of shots would sound like, even if we have not heard these sounds directly, in real life. For instance, the sounds of prancing horse hooves and the taps and chimes of a typewriter are only familiar to me because I have so often heard them reproduced in various films. Therefore, I can assign each shot and every image a sound, or an absence of sound, which makes the viewing all the more exciting, for me at least, being forced to use your imagination in this way, without even music attempting to sway your emotions or control your impulses. The various shots are able to truly produce a soundless symphony, with every movement creating a rhythmic beat, even an elephant’s tail swishing back and forth mimicking the movement of a metronome. The lack of sound or music forces us to really focus on what the screen presents, the fractional seconds which would otherwise go unnoticed, and those “unconscious optics” which the camera seeks to reveal.[1] In this way, I can see how a film like this would appeal to people watching it at the time, whereas for people watching it today, it is not so much entertainment or even social commentary as it is historically and contextually significant. The film finally ends with a shot of a rotating searchlight, adhering with the ‘dawn ‘til dusk’ motif, but also reminiscent of how many movies begin today, with the logo for film production giant ‘Twentieth Century Fox’, established in the 1930s. The rush resembles a mad throng, which eventually leads to a fight, and even a suicide. Whereas Kracauer criticized the film for being devoid of social content[2], I think it adequately depicts the many facets of life for those of differing classes and occupations, and is certainly a portrait of Klaus Mann’s recollection of the era: “Within the city, millions of underfed, corrupt, sex-starved and pleasure-hungry men and women writhe and totter in a jazz-induced delirium. Dance had become a mania, an obsession, a cult...War cripples and profiteers, film-stars and prostitutes, former monarchs (with princely pensions) and retired schoolmasters (with no pension at all) – all twist and turn in gruesome euphoria”.[3] It is not difficult to see the blatant contrast that Ruttman makes between the wealthy and the poor, including a shot of a beggar woman followed by the retrieval of an expensive necklace from a shop window, effectively contrasting destitution with opulence. And although sex does not make an explicit appearance, it is still alluded to, through the lingerie bearing mannequins and also after the dance sequences, where men and women enter taxis, only for Ruttman to cut to a scene of a flashing neon sign reading ‘Hotel’. A shot of a woman’s skirts flying up with the wind is about as daring as it gets, this scene begging comparison to Marilyn Monroe’s iconic sequence in ‘The Seven Year Itch’ (1955). Furthermore, whereas Kracauer comments that the montage aesthetic gives rise to the mechanical processes of society, I’m with Walter Benjamin in saying that camera close-ups often capture the “hidden details of familiar objects”, and that the features of our urban landscape, our factories and offices, seem to have “locked us up hopelessly”.[4] If it was Ruttman’s intention to make this kind of a comment about urbanisation and industrialisation, he could not have been more accurate, and now, more than eighty years later, we are still struggling to come to terms with an increasingly modernised, fast- paced and noisy city.


[1] Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Technology and culture, the film reader, ed. Andrew Utterson, (Routledge: London, 2005), p. 117
[2] Alexander Graf, ‘Paris – Berlin – Moscow: On the Montage Aesthetic of the City Symphony Films of the 1920s’, in Avant-Garde Film, eds. Alexander Graf and Dietrich Scheunemann, p. 87
[3] Michael Simmons, Berlin, the dispossessed city, (Hamish Hamilton: London, 1988), p. 65
[4] Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, p. 116