The city symphony phenomenon : cinema, art, and urban modernity between the wars 9781317215585, 1317215583

Table of contents :
Introduction: the city symphony phenomenon 1920-40 --
László moholy-nagy and the city (symphony) --
Productive city: Ruttmann's Düsseldorf: Kleiner film einer großen stadt --
Minor Paris city symphonies --
Kaufman and Kopalin's Moscow --
A Parisian in Manhattan: Florey's skyscraper symphony --
D'Errico's Stramilano --
Belgian variations on the city symphony theme --
Koelinga's De Steeg: Palimpsest and parallax historiography --
Schuitema's de Maasbruggen: city and film as a process --
Von Barsy and Von Maydell's de stad die nooit rust: a port city symphony --
Hauser's Weltstadt in Flegelijahren: an Americanist city symphony --
One-way street: Conrad's Halsted street --
Leyda's a Bronx morning --
Kemeny and Lustig's São Paula: Sinfonia da Metrópole --
Sparling's Canadian city symphonies --
Steiner and Van Dyke's the city --
Survey of city symphonies 1920-40 --
About the contributors and editors --
About the American film institute --
Index.

Citation preview

THE CITY SYMPHONY PHENOMENON

The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of the city symphony, an experimental film form that presented the city as protagonist instead of mere decor. Combining experimental, documentary, and narrative practices, these films were marked by a high level of abstraction reminiscent of high-modernist experiments in painting and photography. Moreover, interwar city symphonies presented a highly fragmented, oftentimes kaleidoscopic sense of modern life, and they organized their urban-industrial images through rhythmic and associative montage that evoke musical structures. In this comprehensive volume, contributors consider a full 80 film corpus, from Manhatta and Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt to lesser-known cinematic explorations. Steven Jacobs is an art historian who specializes in the relation between film and the visual arts. His publications include The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock; Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts; and The Dark Galleries: A Museum Guide to Painted Portraits in Film Noir. He teaches at Ghent University and the University of Antwerp. Anthony Kinik’s work spans documentary, experimental, avant-garde, and industrial practices, and his principal focus in recent years has been on the cinematic depiction of the urban environment, including the city symphonies cycle of the interwar period and Montreal as a “cinematic city” in the 1960s. He is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies with the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. Eva Hielscher is a film scholar, curator, and moving image archivist. She holds an MA degree in “Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image” from the University of Amsterdam and has worked as a PhD researcher at Ghent University.

Previously published in the AFI Film Readers series Edited by Edward Branigan and Charles Wolfe Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies Warren Buckland World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives ˇ urovicˇová and Kathleen Newman Nataša D Documentary Testimonies Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker Slapstick Comedy Rob King and Tom Paulus The Epic Film in World Culture Robert Burgoyne Arnheim for Film and Media Studies Scott Higgins Color and the Moving Image Simon Brown, Sarah Street, and Liz Watkins Ecocinema Theory and Practice Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt Media Authorship Cynthia Chris and David A. Gerstner Pervasive Animation Suzanne Buchan The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture Tom Brown and Belén Vidal Cognitive Media Theory Ted Nannicelli and Paul Taberham Hollywood Puzzle Films Warren Buckland Endangering Science Fiction Film Sean Redmond and Leon Marvell New Silent Cinema Paul Flaig and Katherine Groo Teaching Transnational Cinema Katarzyna Marciniak and Bruce Bennett Fantasy/Animation Edited by Christopher Holliday and Alexander Sergeant For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

THE CITY SYMPHONY PHENOMENON Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity Between the Wars

EDITED BY

STEVEN JACOBS, ANTHONY KINIK, AND EVA HIELSCHER

First published 2019 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-66527-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-61998-9 (ebk) Typeset in Spectrum MT by Apex CoVantage, LLC

contents illustrationsix prefacexii acknowledgmentsxv part one introduction: the city symphony phenomenon 1920–403 steven jacobs, anthony kinik, and eva hielscher part two 1. lászló moholy-nagy and the city (symphony)45 malte hagener 2. productive city: ruttmann’s düsseldorf: kleiner film einer großen stadt56 michael cowan 3. minor paris city symphonies66 christa blümlinger 4. kaufman and kopalin’s moscow76 malcolm turvey 5. a parisian in manhattan: florey’s skyscraper symphony86 merrill schleier 6. d’errico’s stramilano96 john david rhodes 7. belgian variations on the city symphony theme106 steven jacobs 8. koelinga’s de steeg: palimpsest and parallax historiography117 ivo blom

9. schuitema’s de maasbruggen: city and film as a process127 floris paalman 10. von barsy and von maydell’s de stad die nooit rust: a port city symphony137 eva hielscher

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11. hauser’s weltstadt in flegeljahren: an americanist city symphony147 eva hielscher 12. one-way street: conrad’s halsted street158 tom gunning 13. leyda’s a bronx morning167 jan-christopher horak 14. kemeny and lustig’s são paulo: sinfonia da metrópole177 cristina meneguello 15. sparling’s canadian city symphonies187 anthony kinik 16. steiner and van dyke’s the city197 anthony kinik part three survey of city symphonies 1920–40211 eva hielscher, steven jacobs, and anthony kinik

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- manhatta (charles sheeler and paul strand, 1921) - jeux des reflets et de la vitesse (henri chomette, 1925) - rien que les heures (alberto cavalcanti, 1926) - moskva (mikhail kaufman and ilya kopalin, 1926) - berlin. die sinfonie der grosstadt (walter ruttmann, 1927) - twenty-four dollar island (robert flaherty, 1927) - études des mouvements à paris (joris ivens, 1927) - de brug (joris ivens, 1928) - de stad die nooit rust (friedrich von maydell and andor von barsy, 1928) - praha v zárˇi sveˇtel (svatopluk innemann, 1928) - shankhaiskii dokument (yakov bliokh, 1928) - sinfonia de cataguases (humberto mauro, 1928) - visages de paris (rené moreau, 1928) - paris express ou souvenirs de paris (marcel duhamel and pierre prévert, 1928)

212 213 214 216 218 220 222 223 225 226 227 229 230 231

232 233 235 236 237 239 240 241

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- études sur paris (andré sauvage, 1928) - la zone: au pays des chiffonniers (georges lacombe, 1928) - les halles (boris kaufman and andré galitzine, 1927 or 1929) - harmonies de paris (lucie derain, 1929) - vingt-quatre heures en trente minutes (jean lods and boris kaufman, 1929) - champs-élysées (jean lods, 1929) - les nuits électriques (eugène deslaw, 1929) - nogent: el dorado du dimanche (marcel carné, 1929) - impressionen vom alten marseiller hafen (vieux port) (lászló moholy-nagy, 1929) - markt in berlin (wilfried basse, 1929) - mit der pferdedroschke durch berlin (carl froelich, 1929)  - impressionen der großstadt (alex strasser, 1929) - prater (friedrich kuplent, 1929) - chelovek s kinoapparatom (dziga vertov, 1929) - vesnoy (mikhail kaufman, 1929) - regen (joris ivens and mannus franken, 1929) - hoogstraat (andor von barsy, 1929) - images d’ostende (henri storck, 1929) - midi (lucien backman, 1929)  - kermesse flamande (carlo queeckers, 1929) - stramilano (corrado d’errico, 1929) - a day in liverpool (anson dyer, 1929)  - skyscraper symphony (robert florey, 1929) - symphony of the rebuilding of the imperial metropolis (tokyo institute for municipal research, 1929) - são paulo: a symphonia da metrópole (adalberto kemeny and rudolpho rex lustig, 1929) - lisbôa: cronica anedótica (josé leitão de barros, 1930)  - esencia de verbena (ernesto giménez caballero, 1930) - à propos de nice (jean vigo, 1930) - montparnasse (eugène deslaw, 1930) - menschen am sonntag (robert siodmak and edgar g. ulmer, 1930) - a city symphony (herman weinberg, 1930) - aimless walk (alexandr hackenschmied, 1930) - douro, faina fluvial (manoel de oliveira, 1931) - weltstadt in flegeljahren: ein bericht über chicago (heinrich hauser, 1931) - manhattan medley (bonney powell, 1931) - city of contrasts (irving browning, 1931)  - a bronx morning (jay leyda, 1931) - a day in santa fe (lynn riggs and james hughes, 1931) - gamla stan (stig almqvist, erik asklund, eyvind johnson, and artur lundkvist, 1931)

243 244 246 247 248 249 251 252 253 255 256 257 258 260 261 262 263 265 266 267 268 269 271 272 273 274 276 277 279 280 282

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- pierement (jan teunissen, 1931) - de steeg (jan koelinga, 1932) - visions de lourdes (charles dekeukeleire, 1932) - berliner stilleben (lászló moholy-nagy, 1932) - großstadt-zigeuner (lászló moholy-nagy, 1932) - na pražském hradeˇ (alexandr hackenschmied, 1932) - beograd prestonica kraljevine jugoslavije (vojin djordjević, 1932) - ritmi di stazione (corrado d’errico, 1933)  - mediolanum (ubaldo magnaghi, 1933) - london medley (1933) - autumn fire (herman weinberg, 1933) - footnote to fact (lewis jacobs, 1933)  - chi sheyingji de nanren (liu na’ou, 1933)  - žijeme v praze (otakar vávra, 1934) - halsted street (conrad friberg, 1934) - rhapsody in two languages (gordon sparling, 1934)  - another day (leslie p. thatcher, 1934)  - the westminster of the west (gordon sparling, 1934) - city of towers (gordon sparling, 1935) - vibracion de granada (josé val del omar, 1935) - budapest: city of baths (istván somkúti, 1935) - odessa (jean lods, 1935) - stuttgart: die großstadt zwischen wald und reben (walter ruttmann, 1935) - kleiner film einer großen stadt… der stadt düsseldorf am rhein (walter ruttmann, 1935)  - vancouver vignette (gordon sparling, 1936) - así nació el obelisco (horacio coppola, 1936) - de maasbruggen (paul schuitema, 1937) - seeing the world (rudy burckhardt, 1937) - weltstrasse see, welthafen hamburg (walter ruttmann, 1938) - herää helsinki! (valentin vaala, 1939) - the city (ralph steiner and willard van dyke, 1939) - pursuit of happiness (rudy burckhardt, 1940)

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about the contributors and editors

283 284 286 287 288 289 291 292 293 294 295 297 298 299 300 301 303 304 305 307 308 309 311 312 313 314 315 317 318 320 320 322 324

about the american film institute328 index330

list of illustrations I.1 Manhatta (Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, 1921); Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt (Walter Ruttmann, 1927); Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929); Regen (Joris Ivens and Mannus Franken, 1929); À propos de Nice (Jean Vigo, 1930); and Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse (Henri Chomette, 1925) Digital Stills I.2 Cover Illustration, Movie Makers (September 1929) I.3 Lobby Card, Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt (Walter Ruttmann, 1927) I.4 Rien que les heures (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1926) Digital Stills I.5 De Brug (Joris Ivens, 1928) Digital Stills 1.1 László Moholy-Nagy, Dynamik der Gross-Stadt: Skizze zu einem Filmmanuskript—Spread from László Moholy-Nagy, Malerei—Fotografie—Film (Bauhausbuch, 1925) 1.2 Impressionen vom alten Marseiller Hafen (Vieux Port) (László Moholy-Nagy, 1929) Digital Stills 1.3 Berliner Stilleben (László Moholy-Nagy, 1932) (left) and Grossstadt-Zigeuner (László Moholy-Nagy, 1932) (right) Digital Stills 2.1 Kleiner Film einer großen Stadt . . . Der Stadt Düsseldorf am Rhein (Walter Ruttmann, 1935) Digital Stills 2.2 Kleiner Film einer großen Stadt . . . Der Stadt Düsseldorf am Rhein (Walter Ruttmann, 1935) Digital Stills 3.1 Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse (Henri Chomette, 1925) (left) and Nogent: El Dorado du dimanche (Marcel Carné, 1929) (right) Digital Stills 3.2 Études sur Paris (André Sauvage, 1928) (left) and La Zone: Au pays des chiffonniers (Georges Lacombe, 1928) (right) Digital Stills

6 8 17 24 29

47 49

52

60

61

69

71

illustrations

4.1 4.2 5.1 5.2

6.1 6.2 6.3 7.1 7.2 7.3 8.1 8.2 9.1 9.2 10.1 10.2 10.3

x

11.1 11.2

Mikhail Kaufman on the cover of Sovetskoe Kino 1 (1927) Moscow (Mikhail Kaufman and Ilya Kopalin, 1926) Digital Stills Skyscraper Symphony (Robert Florey, 1929) Digital Stills The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra (Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapich, 1928) and Skyscrapers: A Ballet (Set Drawing by Robert Edmund Jones, 1926) Stramilano (Corrado D’Errico, 1929) Digital Stills Stramilano (Corrado D’Errico, 1929) Digital Stills Stramilano (Corrado D’Errico, 1929) Digital Stills Midi (Lucien Backman, 1929) Still Images d’Ostende (Henri Storck, 1929–30) Digital Stills Visions de Lourdes (Charles Dekeukeleire, 1932) Digital Stills De Steeg (Jan Koelinga, 1932) Digital Stills Cover and Illustration from Herman van Dijkhuizen’s De Rotterdamsche roofholen en hun bevolking (1926) Stills from De Maasbruggen (Paul Schuitema, 1937) Digital Stills Poster Centrale Bond Transportarbeiders (1930) and Cover of Film Liga (1931), both designed by Paul Schuitema De stad die nooit rust (Friedrich von Maydell and Andor von Barsy, 1928) Digital Stills De stad die nooit rust (Friedrich von Maydell and Andor von Barsy, 1928) Digital Stills De stad die nooit rust (Friedrich von Maydell and Andor von Barsy, 1928) Digital Stills Weltstadt in Flegeljahren: Ein Bericht über Chicago (Heinrich Hauser, 1931) Digital Stills Weltstadt in Flegeljahren: Ein Bericht über Chicago (Heinrich Hauser, 1931) Digital Stills

77 80 87

90 98 101 103 107 109 111 118

123 128

129 139

140

142

149

152

153 160 163 165

illustrations

11.3 Weltstadt in Flegeljahren: Ein Bericht über Chicago (Heinrich Hauser, 1931) Digital Stills 12.1 Street Signs in Halsted Street (Conrad Friberg, 1934) Digital Stills 12.2 Halsted Street (Conrad Friberg, 1934) Digital Stills 12.3 Halsted Street (Conrad Friberg, 1934) Digital Stills 13.1 A Bronx Morning (Jay Leyda, 1931) Digital Stills 13.2 A Bronx Morning (Jay Leyda, 1931) Digital Stills 14.1 São Paulo, A Symphonia da Metrópole (Adalberto Kemeny and Rudolpho Rex Lustig, 1929), Promotion Ad and Poster 14.2 São Paulo, A Symphonia da Metrópole (Adalberto Kemeny and Rudolpho Rex Lustig, 1929) Digital Stills 15.1 Rhapsody in Two Languages (Gordon Sparling, 1934) Digital Stills 15.2 Rhapsody in Two Languages (Gordon Sparling, 1934), Lobby Card 15.3 City of Towers (Gordon Sparling, 1935) Digital Stills 16.1 The City (Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke, 1939) Digital Stills 16.2 The City (Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke, 1939) Digital Stills 16.3 The City (Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke, 1939) Digital Stills

172 173

179 183 189 191 194 202 203 204

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preface In 2008, when Steven and Anthony gave a series of lectures and seminars on city symphonies of the 1920s and 1930s, they were struck by the fact that a general book-length study on the topic has never been made despite the involvement of so many important figures from the realms of film, art, design, and criticism, as well as the fact that several city symphonies are considered canonical works in the history of documentary cinema and experimental film. A theoretical study still remained to be published, but a comprehensive overview of this vast international cycle of films had not been compiled either. Apart from well-known and often-discussed films by Walter Ruttmann, Dziga Vertov, Joris Ivens, and Jean Vigo, there were dozens upon dozens of other city symphonies that were produced in the 1920s and 1930s, many of which have long since fallen into oblivion. Aiming to offer just such a theoretical study and overview, this book project took off when Eva joined the team in 2013, thanks to a research project at Ghent University, which included the organization of the Beyond Ruttmann and Vertov: Minor City Symphonies symposium in December 2014. Designed to look beyond the most famous examples of the city symphony film—beyond Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) and Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), in particular—this symposium addressed a wider array of such films, which led to a fuller, more complete understanding of what this phenomenon entailed. Over the course of two days, 12 lesser-known city films were screened at KASK Cinema in Ghent: Moscow (1927), De Stad die Nooit Rust (1928), Skyscraper Symphony (1929), Stramilano (1929), Weltstadt in Flegeljahren: Ein Bericht über Chicago (1931), A Bronx Morning (1931), Ein Werktag (1931), Visions de Lourdes (1932), De Steeg (1932), Rhapsody in Two Languages (1934), Kleiner Film einer grossen Stadt . . . der Stadt Düsseldorf am Rhein (1935), and De Maasbruggen (1937). Scholars from Europe and North America, including a number of the contributors to this volume, presented papers introducing these films, and it is this set of presentations that forms the basis of this book. We were well aware that we would only be scratching the surface with this symposium, but the goal of expanding the discussion of such films beyond the most famous examples, and to watch these films in a cinema, on 35mm and 16mm prints and accompanied by live music,

preface

seemed a worthy one. At that point in time, we also had already identified a body of films numbering well over 80 titles and spanning four continents that were produced between 1920 and 1940 and that were either selfconsciously made in the style of the city symphonies (as the form had come to be known after 1927, in the wake of the release of Ruttmann’s Berlin), or that were very closely related to this form of filmmaking. In 2015 and 2016, in collaboration with the organizers of Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, we were able to curate a number of screenings of city symphonies—virtually all of them obscure, forgotten, or only known locally in their countries of origin: Weltstadt in Flegeljahren: Ein Bericht über Chicago, Großstadt—Zigeuner, Hoogstraat, De Steeg, Pierement, Montparnasse, Les Halles, A Day in Liverpool, Douro: Faina fluvial, We Live in Prague, and Prague by Night (in 2015), as well as Así nació el obelisco, São Paulo: A Symphonia da Metropole, Budapest: The City of Spas and Cures, Halsted Street, Symphony of the Rebuilding of the Imperial Metropolis, Belgrade: The Capital of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Aimless Walk, Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse, Les Nuits électriques, La Zône: Au pays des chiffonniers, and Prater (in 2016). This book is very much a product of this series of screenings in Belgium and Italy, and the observations, connections, and revelations they inspired. Combining close textual readings, theoretical analysis, and a comprehensive survey, this book consists of three parts. The first part is an extensive introductory chapter written by the editors, which explores the historical and theoretical aspects of the city symphony phenomenon. It discusses the rise, development, and proliferation of a specific form of city film shortly after the First World War, and it also addresses the demise of the city symphony from the late 1930s onwards. This introductory chapter also attempts to define the city symphony as a genre, describing and analyzing its semantic and syntactic characteristics. It presents the interwar city symphony as an “experimental documentary” on the city, while also emphasizing its reliance on elements of fiction, narrativization, and staging. Furthermore, the first part of this book draws attention to formal and thematic connections between city symphonies and contemporaneous trends in the arts—especially painting and photography—while also investigating how the city symphony form reflected the aspirations and concerns of several avant-garde movements that were active at the time. In addition, this essay attempts to demonstrate how interwar city symphonies make manifest many of the key topics of modern urban theory, as developed in the writings by Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin. In so doing, this book indicates that the city symphony cycle captures a specific moment in urban history: that of the modern and industrial metropolis characterized by centralization and congestion. In the process, the first part of this book refers extensively to famous examples such as Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1921), Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie

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preface

xiv

Camera (1929), Jean Vigo’s À propos de Nice (1930), and Joris Ivens’s Rain (1929), but it also discusses many lesser-known films made in dozens of countries around the world during the 1920s and 1930s. A (re)discovery and a revalorization of these lesser-known films is crucial to the rationale of this entire book and they constitute the focus of its second part. This middle part comprises a series of brief chapters, many of them focusing on a single film such as Walter Ruttmann’s Kleiner Film einer grossen Stadt . . . der Stadt Düsseldorf am Rhein (1935) by Michael Cowan, Mikhail Kaufman and Ilya Kopalin’s Moscow (1926) by Malcolm Turvey, Robert Florey’s Skyscraper Symphony (1929) by Merrill Schleier, Corrado D’Errico’s Stramilano (1929) by John David Rhodes, Jan Koelinga’s De Steeg (1932) by Ivo Blom, Paul Schuitema’s De Maasbruggen (1937) by Floris Paalman, Andor von Barsy and Friedrich von Maydell’s De Stad die Nooit Rust (1928) by Eva Hielscher, Conrad Friberg’s Halsted Street (1934) by Tom Gunning, Heinrich Hauser’s Weltstadt in Flegeljahren: Ein Bericht über Chicago (1931) by Eva Hielscher, Jay Leyda’s A Bronx Morning (1931) by Jan-Christopher Horak, Rudolph Rex Lustig and Adalberto Kemeney’s São Paulo: A Symphonia da Metropole (1929) by Cristina Meneguello, and Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke’s The City (1939) by Anthony Kinik. Other chapters deal with a small group of closely related films such as the essays on Moholy-Nagy’s contributions to the city symphony cycle by Malte Hagener, lesser-known Paris city symphonies by Christa Blümlinger, Robert Florey’s Skyscraper Symphony (1929) and his Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra (with Slavko Vorkapitch and Gregg Toland, 1927) by Merrill Schleier, the Belgian city symphonies by Henri Storck and Charles Dekeukeleire by Steven Jacobs, and Gordon Sparling’s four Canadian city symphonies—Rhapsody in Two Languages (1934), The Westminster of the West (1934), City of Towers (1935), and Vancouver Vignette (1936)—by Anthony Kinik. By drawing attention to these “minor” city symphonies, this book not only demonstrates the global proliferation and importance of the city symphony phenomenon, it also shows that it was much more complex and multi-layered than has been generally assumed. The third and final part of the book expands this collection of films further in the form of an extensive annotated filmography containing more than 80 both famous and lesser-known city symphonies made between the two world wars. Apart from offering a brief description of each film and an indication of its specific characteristics, this filmography also draws attention to how these films contributed to an interwar film culture that was the product of the intersection of documentary, experimental, avantgarde, amateur, commercial, and industrial practices, and that was propagated in film journals, in ciné-clubs, in film societies, and in conferences and festivals. In so doing, this filmography contributes yet another layer of context to what we hope is a thoughtful and comprehensive account of what was indeed a cinematic phenomenon.

acknowledgments As the origins of this book project go back to a series of lectures and seminars by Steven Jacobs and Anthony Kinik, we would like to thank the organizers and participants of these events, particularly of the “AvantGarde City Symphonies” summer course at HISK in Ghent (July 2008) and of similar seminars at Sint-Lukas College of Art in Brussels (December 2008) and the University of Antwerp (March 2010). These seminars were accompanied by screenings at venues such as ArtCinema OFFoff Ghent, Filmplateau Ghent, Cinematek Brussels, and Cinema Zuid Antwerp, and we would like to thank these institutions for their generous support. Because this book deals with many lesser-known, forgotten, or neglected films, organizing screenings became an important research tool. Over the years, we organized screenings of city symphonies in collaboration with institutions and organizations such as KASK Cinema Ghent, Courtisane, the Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem, and, particularly, Le Giornate del cinema muto in Pordenone, Italy. We would like to thank the organizers of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, in particular David Robinson and Jay Weissberg, for making this possible. Watching these films under such ideal conditions and with live musical accompaniment was not only a joy, it also helped us to discover previously hidden works, making new connections, and gaining original insights. We also would like to thank the archives that preserved and restored the city symphonies and made them available for our research and screenings, including the Royal Belgian Film Archive in Brussels, EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, Filmmuseum Düsseldorf, Archivo Luce in Rome, Cinémathèque Suisse in Lausanne, Georges Eastman Museum in Rochester, Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, and Filmoteca Buenos Aires, among others. In addition, we also owe a great debt of gratitude to several archives and libraries, in particular to the following individuals and institutions: the staff of Columbia University Archival Collections holding the Robert Flaherty Papers; Brook Silversides at the University of Toronto’s John P. Robarts Research Library, who manages the Sparling Archives; the staff of the Brooke Russell Astor Reading

acknowledgments

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Room at the New York Public Library (especially Tal Nadan), who oversee its 1939–40 New York World’s Fair collection; Martin Lanthier at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa; the staff at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec; Rommy Albers, Jata Haan and Simona Monizza at the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam; and Jean-Paul Dorchain at Cinematek Brussels. This book would not have been possible without the support of the BOF Research Fund of Ghent University that funded a four-year research project (2013–17) enabling Eva Hielscher to write a PhD thesis on the historiography of the city symphony concept, with Steven and Anthony as supervisors. This research project also made possible the symposium Beyond Ruttmann and Vertov: Minor City Symphonies, which took place in December 2014 at KASK Cinema in Ghent. Thanks to the support of VDFC, Cinematek Brussels, the Embassy of Switzerland in Belgium, Research Fund Flanders (FWO), and the Faculty of Letters of Ghent University, we were able to organize a series of screenings of (often rare) 16mm and 35mm prints of city films within the context of this event. We are grateful to the BOF Research Fund for this unique opportunity. At Ghent University, we also would like to thank the members of the Ghent Urban Studies Team (GUST) for their support and for many stimulating discussions on the topic of representations of the city. In addition, our ideas were further sharpened in the context of several conference panels such as a city symphony panel at the 2009 conference of the Film Studies Association of Canada at Carleton University, Ottawa, where Anthony and Steven presented papers on the films they discuss in their chapters in this volume. Likewise, Anthony and Eva presented papers in a city symphony panel at the 2015 Society of Cinema and Media Studies conference in Montreal. We thank co-chairs, other presenters, respondents, and audience members for their critical comments and valuable suggestions. This also applies to the many other conferences, panels, venues, and institutions that invited one of us to lecture on city symphonies—in particular we would like to mention the City in Film conference (2008) organized by the School of Architecture of the University of Liverpool, the Inter[Sections] Conference on Architecture, City, and Cinema (2013) in Porto and the sessions Cinematicity: City and Cinema after Deleuze at the 2014 conference of the Royal Geographical Society on Geographies of Co-Production. We also owe thanks to Ana Araujo, Flavia Barretti, Elena Beltrami, Franziska Bollerey, David Bordwell, Leontien Bos, Lisa Colpaert, Willem De Greef, Davide Deriu, Johan Derycke, Hilde D’haeyere, Edward Dimendberg, Bart Eeckhout, Alex Föhl, Stef Franck, Oliver Hanley, Adelheid Heftberger, Steven Humblet, Tatjana Karabegovic, Frank Kessler, Bart Keunen, Rubens Machado, Jr., Hans Martens, Kurutz Márton, Bruno Mestdagh, Hilde Nash, Tom Paulus, Fernando Martín Peña, Céline Ruivo, Robert

Stam, Will Straw, Dan Streible, André Stufkens, Catherine A. Surowiec, Andreas Thein, Luis Urbano, William Uricchio, Frank Vanderkinderen, Sofie Verdoodt, Bart Verschaffel, and Bart Versteirt. Last but not least, we would like to express our gratitude to all contributing authors for their essays, to Rachel Gruijters for the design of the grids of the images, and to Routledge and series editors Charles Wolfe and Edward Branigan for supporting this project. acknowledgments

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part one

introduction the city symphony phenomenon 1920–40

steven jacobs, anthony kinik, and eva hielscher basic characteristics The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise and development of dozens of films that were labeled city films, city poems, or, more commonly, city symphonies. Wellknown examples include Manhatta (Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, 1921), Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, Walter Ruttmann, 1927), Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera, Dziga Vertov, 1929), Regen (Rain, Joris Ivens and Mannus Franken, 1929), and À propos de Nice (On the Topic of Nice, Jean Vigo, 1930). These films helped to invent the avant-garde nonfiction film by handling documentary footage of the modern city in ways that could be abstract, poetic, metaphorical, and rhythmic. Instead of serving as a mere backdrop for a story, the city, here, is the protagonist of the film—it is its primary focus, its impetus, the very material of which the film is fashioned. In addition, the city symphony recognizes the city as an emblem of modernity (perhaps the ultimate

jacobs, kinik, and hielscher

4

emblem of modernity), and its modernist form represents an attempt on the part of the filmmakers to use the rapidly expanding language of cinema to capture what László Moholy-Nagy once called “the dynamic of the metropolis.”1 The vast majority of these films are notable for their oftentimes imaginative, even daring, use of editing, and this cycle as a whole made a major contribution to the discourse of montage aesthetics that was such a crucial aspect of the interwar period, deeply affecting the realms of film, the visual arts, literature, theater, and so on. As the moniker “city symphony” suggests, these films were often edited in such a way as to suggest a musical structure. Shots were treated like musical notes, sequences were organized as if they were chords or melodies, scenes were built up into movements or acts, and issues of rhythm, tempo, and polyphony figured prominently. But in all cases, the substance of these works was the city itself—or, rather, its cinematic representation—and the effect that was achieved was more poetic than expository in contrast to earlier scenics or travelogues that focused on touring urban landscapes. At the same time, most of these films combined their experimental nonfiction form with some basic elements of narrative. They eschewed the lives of individuals, focusing instead on the larger patterns that make up the urban fabric, but they frequently made use of a temporal structure to keep things from becoming overly abstract. Thus, we have films that focus on mornings and nights in the big city, alongside more typical dawn-till-dusk, dawn-till-late night, and dawn-till-dawn configurations, but virtually all of these films insist that they be understood as oneday-in-the-life of the city (or, in rare examples, cities) in question, regardless of how many weeks or months it might have taken to shoot them in the first place. Throughout the 1920s, the characteristic elements of the city symphony were established and codified, to the extent that its unusual perspectives, skewed angles, rapid and rhythmic montage, special effects, and iconography became a kind of cinematic shorthand for modern metropolitan life, one that would appear in quite a number of fictional feature films in the 1930s and beyond. Among other features, the city symphonies focused on the spaces of the contemporary city and the inhabitants who populated them, creating the sense of a cross-section of the locations, activities, and social groupings that constitute modernity, and they tended to give the impression that these images represented “life as it is,” or “life caught unawares,” as in Vertov’s famous turn of phrase.2 Many of these city symphonies were key contributions to the emergence of the documentary film in the 1920s and 1930s, however they avoid “pure” or “absolute” nonfiction form, and instead combine narrative elements with an emphatically experimental form.

In fact, they frequently feature the use of abstraction and defamiliarization techniques reminiscent of contemporaneous experiments in avantgarde painting and photography, and the highly fragmented, oftentimes kaleidoscopic sense of modern life that they present is organized through rhythmic and associative montage in such a way as to evoke musical structures.

The earliest examples of what can be called city symphony date from the early 1920s, when two key works were released. The first of these was Sheeler and Strand’s Manhatta, a ten-minute decisively modernist celebration of New York, which was conceived in 1919, shot in 1920, and received its theatrical premiere in 1921.3 The second was László Moholy-Nagy’s scenario A nagyváros dinamikája (Dynamic of the Metropolis, 1921–1922), a “Sketch of a Manuscript for a Film” whose urban-industrial iconography and attention to the “optical arrangement of tempo” would help codify the European city symphony in the years to come.4 First published in Hungarian in 1924, the screenplay was translated into German and combined with photographs and a modernist design in Moholy-Nagy’s 1925 Bauhaus book Malerei Photographie Film. Another important mid-1920s contribution to the phenomenon was Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (Nothing but Time, 1926), a film that is actually primarily a work of fictional narrative, but one that makes great use of its urban locations and attempts to show one day in the life of Paris’s down and out districts over the course of 45 minutes. Interestingly, in spite of its obvious fictional trappings, Rien que les heures was released at a time when filmmakers, scholars, and theorists were conceptualizing the documentary film for the first time, and, for some reason, the film was seen as one by many, and it has been connected to the city symphony phenomenon ever since. According to John Grierson, in Cavalcanti’s film, “Paris was crosssectioned in its contrasts—ugliness and beauty, wealth and poverty, hopes and fears. For the first time the word ‘symphony’ was used, rather than story.”5 Of course, Cavalcanti would go on to become one of the leading figures of the British documentary movement of the 1930s, which may help to explain why colleagues of his, like Grierson and Paul Rotha, were so eager to position Rien que les heures as a documentary. In any case, one of the ironies of the time was that at roughly the same time that Cavalcanti was producing and releasing his film, Robert Flaherty, the father of the modern documentary film, made Twenty-four Dollar Island (1927), but somehow this film tended to get overlooked by the same scholars.

introduction

rise, development, and proliferation

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Figure I.1  Manhatta (Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, 1921); Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt (Walter Ruttmann, 1927); Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929); Regen (Joris Ivens and Mannus Franken, 1929); À propos de Nice (Jean Vigo, 1930); and Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse (Henri Chomette, 1925)

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However, if these early texts were progenitors, it was Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin which fully established the genre, touched off the phenomenon, and whose subtitle, Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt, provided this movement with its nickname. And it was Berlin more than another film that first demonstrated how the everyday life of the city could be transformed into a modernist work of art. Berlin also caused a sensation. The cycle that it touched off reached its apex almost immediately, and 1929 saw the release of Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, Moholy-Nagy’s Impressionen vom alten Marseiller Hafen (Vieux Port) (Impressions of the Old Harbor of Marseille), Ivens and Franken’s Regen, Lucie Derain’s Harmonies de Paris (Harmonies of Paris), Corrado D’Errico’s Stramilano, Henri Storck’s Images d’Ostende (Images of Ostend), and Robert Florey’s Skyscraper Symphony, among others. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, the city symphony form had attracted the interest of a large number filmmakers whose names

introduction

would become prominent in the history of cinema: Marcel Carné, Manoel de Oliveira, Alexandr Hackenschmied (a.k.a. Alexander Hammid), Lewis Jacobs, Boris Kaufman, Mikhail Kaufman, Georges Lacombe, Jay Leyda, Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, Herman Weinberg, and so on, in addition to the aforementioned Strand, Sheeler, Moholy-Nagy, Cavalcanti, Flaherty, Ruttmann, Vertov, Ivens, Florey, and Vigo. By the late 1930s, this group would also include such luminaries as Rudy Burckhardt, Ralph Steiner, and Willard Van Dyke. In addition to the cinematic explorations of Berlin, Moscow, Paris, and New York—the cities that inspired the most famous of these films—filmmakers also turned their “kino-eyes” on Nice, Marseille, Lourdes, Düsseldorf, Milan, Ostend, Porto, Prague, Rotterdam, Montreal, São Paulo, Liverpool, and many other places. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, many city symphonies were made and probably even more were planned but never realized. Alfred Hitchcock, for instance, flirted with the idea of making an experimental “film symphony” entitled London or Life of a City in collaboration with Walter Mycroft: “The story of a big city from dawn to the following dawn. I wanted to do it in terms of what lies behind the face of a city—what makes it thick—in other words, backstage of a city.”6 In the early 1930s, the city symphony cycle continued to expand and it simultaneously also became increasingly professionalized and commercialized as several municipal authorities commissioned films in the style of Rutt­mann’s Berlin. Ruttmann’s own film can be understood on some level as a commissioned work, as it was produced as part of a quota program (”Kontingentfilm”) for Fox Europe. Other works, such as De Stad die nooit rust (The City that Never Rests, Andor von Barsy and Friedrich von Maydell, 1928), A Day in Liverpool (Anson Dyer, 1929), Praha v zárˇi sveˇtel (Prague by Night, Svatopluk Innemann, 1928), Fukkõ Teito Shinfoni (Symphony of the Rebuilding of the Imperial Metropolis, anonymous, 1929), or Ruttmann’s Kleiner Film einer großen Stadt . . . der Stadt Düsseldorf am Rhein (Small Film for a Big City: The City of Düsseldorf on the Rhine, 1935), Stuttgart: die Großstadt zwischen Wald und Reben—die Stadt des Auslanddeutschtums (Stuttgart, the Big City Between Forest and Vines—The City of Germans Abroad, 1935), and Weltstrasse See, Welthafen Hamburg (The Ocean as World Route, Hamburg as World Port, 1938) were made for or in cooperation with commissioning agencies or municipalities and were not infrequently used for city promotional purposes or even propaganda. In other cases, such as Bonney Powell’s Manhattan Medley (1931), produced by Fox Movietone, or Gordon Sparling’s Rhapsody in Two Languages (1934), which deals with Montreal and was produced by the Canadian outfit Associated Screen News, we can see clear examples of the further commercialization of the city symphony film. However, the vast majority of city symphonies were independent productions or personal projects by artists, although some of these artists, like Vigo and Florey, were professionals working in the film business who made city symphonies as personal project on the side. In the September 1929 issue of Movie Makers, Marguerite Tazelaar captured this personal/professional split in a profile of Florey. Tazelaar writes

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that Florey, while working for big film studios, “spends his spare moments shooting experimental pictures with his small movie camera in the by-ways and highways of New York, Los Angeles, or where-ever he happens to be.” Inspired by Florey’s Skyscraper Symphony, Tazelaar concludes that “the city” is the perfect topic for amateur filmmakers interested in an “experimental approach.”7 This interest in avant-garde representations of the city was widespread in amateur film circles in the late 1920s and early 1930s, as for example Leslie P. Thatcher’s prize-winning city symphony Another Day (1934), Friedrich Kuplent’s Prater (1929), Lynn Riggs and James Hughes’s A Day in Santa Fe (1931), or Liu Na’ou’s Chi sheyingji de nanren (The Man Who Has a Camera, 1933) demonstrate. Harry Potamkin in his discussion of the “montage films” by Cavalcanti, Ruttmann, and Vertov, urged amateurs to film and critique everyday aspects of American life or people outside the private confines of the home.8 As Patricia Zimmermann noted, “It is significant that Potamkin cited examples of films about public places; these examples attacked the amateur movie magazine emphasis on private life and personal travel.”9

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Figure I.2  Cover Illustration, Movie Makers (September 1929)

Many leading film critics and theorists of the period were inspired to write about these films, expressing intrigue, fascination, and, in some cases, consternation in response to this body of work. When he described the impact of Ruttmann’s Berlin, Grierson wrote,

Acknowledging the currency of “the symphonic form” or “symphony form” with aspiring filmmakers in particular, Grierson also noted, “Berlin still excites the mind of the young, and the symphony form is still their most popular persuasion.” To his dismay, he added that, out of 50 pitches that he, as a producer, might receive from his younger colleagues, “fortyfive are symphonies of Edinburgh or of Ecclefechan or of Paris or of Prague.”11 Of course, Grierson was most likely exaggerating, but the fact of the matter is that the city symphony form was a much more significant development in the history of cinema than has generally been granted. Far from a mere footnote to film history limited to a handful of famous and semi-famous films, the city symphony inspired an international movement between the late 1920s and the late 1930s, one that encompassed four continents, dozens of cities, and well over 80 films. It is our conviction that the story of this phenomenon is a neglected chapter in the history of cinema. This book intends to help rectify this state of affairs by offering a comprehensive overview of this international cycle of films, many of which have fallen into oblivion and received limited or no scholarly attention since their release. True, not all of them have the encyclopedic span and ambitions of Ruttmann and Vertov’s films—indeed, several of the films discussed in this volume might be labeled as “city sinfoniettas” rather than richly orchestrated symphonies. Many of these films also differ stylistically from Berlin or Man with a Movie Camera, sometimes quite dramatically so, demonstrating that the city symphony phenomenon was much more complex and multi-layered than generally assumed. As most of these films were primarily independent works that found screening possibilities outside the commercial cinema circuit, the proliferation of the city symphony phenomenon was largely made possible through the ciné-clubs and film societies that flourished in the second half of the 1920s and early 1930s.12 Moreover, these ciné-clubs were also meeting places where filmmakers were often invited to introduce their films or

introduction

No film has been more influential, more imitated. Symphonies of cities have been sprouting ever since, each with its crescendo of dawn and coming-awake and workers’ processions, its morning traffic and machinery, its lunchtime contrasts of rich and poor, its afternoon lull, its evening denouement in sky-sign and night club. The model makes for good, if highly formulaic, movies.10

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give lectures, contributing to an international network of film leagues and avant-garde ciné-circles. International meetings and events, such as the Werkbund exhibition Film und Foto in Stuttgart in 1929 and two editions of the Congrès International du Cinéma Indépendant (held in La Sarraz in Switzerland in 1929 and Brussels in 1930, respectively) also included screenings of city symphonies, and therefore further contributed to its currency.13 In many ways, the twists and turns in the exhibition history of Manhatta help to illuminate the peculiar status these short works of experimental nonfiction held in the 1920s. First screened amongst a small group of artist-friends in 1920, Manhatta received its public premiere in 1921 as a New York “scenic” on a variety bill under the title New York the Magnificent, before being screened as part of the Paris Dada group’s Soirée du coeur à barbe in July 1923 as Les Fumées de New York (The Smokes of New York). When it returned to New York, after having received this blessing from the Parisian avant-garde, it was understood differently, and it now carried the Whitmanesque title it has been known by ever since. Finally, in 1927, it played as part of the 18th London Film Society annual—again, under the title Manhatta—before disappearing soon afterwards, for not even Sheeler or Strand had a copy, apparently, only to reemerge in the archive of the British Film Institute in 1949.14 It was only then that Manhatta’s status and reputation began to be rehabilitated, and the film began to be recognized as a significant contribution to both experimental cinema and nonfiction filmmaking, eventually attaining some degree of canonicity. Lastly, the proliferation of city symphonies was also made possible extra-cinematically, through the circulation of film and art journals. Jay Leyda, for instance, was first inspired to make avant-garde films not by seeing them, for he grew up in Dayton, Ohio and had no access to such films at the time, but by reading about them in film and arts journals such as La Revue du cinéma, Der Querschnitt, Variétés, Theatre Arts Monthly, Hound & Horn, and Close Up, most to which he subscribed.15 Later, when he arrived in New York City to become Ralph Steiner’s darkroom assistant, he finally got the opportunity to see avant-garde films on screen and in earnest, and it was the “dazzling experience” of seeing Man with a Movie Camera at the Eighth Street Playhouse that provided the inspiration for him to make A Bronx Morning (1931).16

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nonfiction, narrative fiction, and the case of rien que les heures What is a city symphony precisely? What does it take for a film to be accurately called a city symphony? Simply put, a city symphony is an experimental documentary dealing with the energy, the patterning, the complexities, and the subtleties of a city. However, it is important to note that city symphonies originated at a time when the notion of the “documentary film” had not yet come into existence, and that “experimental” or “avant-garde” cinema was just coming into its own. In fact, several key

introduction

city symphonies such as Berlin, Man with a Movie Camera, Regen, and À propos de Nice were instrumental when it came to shaping the directions taken by both documentary and experimental filmmakers. And while city symphonies largely avoided resorting to storylines and characters, and instead focused on glimpses and impressions of city life, they differed from earlier urban-focused scenics and travelogues in that they did employ some basic narrative elements—notably, a “day-in-the-life-of-a-city” structure—in order to organize and give life to the enormous number of shots and scenes captured by their cameras. The case of Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures is illuminating here. A fictional film with actors playing imaginary characters, this often poetic film deals primarily with everyday dramas on the streets and in the alleys of Paris, at the margins of society. At the time of its release, the film circulated widely in cine-club and film society circles, and it was discussed at length, but, as far as we can tell, no one discussed it as being a “symphony” or a “symphonic” film from the start. However, in the wake of the release of Ruttmann’s Berlin, things changed drastically. The term “symphony” was no longer limited to abstract experimental films like Viking Eggeling’s Symphonie diagonale (Diagonal Symphony, 1924)—it now became perfectly acceptable to use the moniker “symphony” to describe a particular kind of film whose approach was grounded in the representation of “physical reality.” By 1929, in the wake of Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera and Ivens and Franken’s Regen, it was clear that a craze for such films was well underway, and critics and scholars scrambled to make sense of it. In an attempt to determine where this craze had come from and how it had gotten its start, they looked back to Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures because of the clear parallels it offers to aspects of Berlin, Man with a Movie Camera, and other such films, and it became “the first of the ‘day in the life of a city’ cycle,” regardless of the fact that it had been preceded by Strand and Sheeler’s Manhatta and Moholy-Nagy’s typo-photo Dynamic of the Metropolis, and was released around the same time as Robert Flaherty’s Twenty-four Dollar Island. One can surmise why this might have happened. Manhatta and Twenty-four Dollar Island were both rather obscure American films— although Manhatta was shown in Paris and London in the 1920s, and Twenty-four Dollar Island was made by the single most important documentarian of his day—and Dynamic of the Metropolis was not a film. What is harder to understand is why early critics and theorists such as John Grierson, Paul Rotha, Siegfried Kracauer, and others, were so insistent that Rien que les heures was a documentary, when it is quite clear that it is primarily a work of fiction, one that features long segments that are entirely theatrical in nature, and one that has relatively little documentary value. These same critics and scholars refrained from labeling Dimitri Kirsanoff’s Ménilmontant (1926) a documentary or a city symphony, and with good reason, but it was released the very same year as Rien que les heures, its similarly melodramatic action takes place in the same kind of down-and-out Parisian milieu, and it features a similar interest in

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using unusual compositions and quick editing in order to simulate the pace and energy of modern Paris. Eugène Deslaw’s La Marche des machines (The March of the Machines, 1927) is often grouped together with the “symphonic” films, but it is his Montparnasse from 1930 that is more pertinent here, for it shares a similar interest in la bohème and in the Parisian quartiers as these other two films, it, too, is a showcase for audacious cinematography and montage, and it also contains many colorful characters, but it doesn’t contain any actors or any story lines, and no one would confuse it with either of these earlier films. Harry Alan Potamkin was one of the few critics active in the 1920s and 1930s who was clear about the distinctions between Rien que les heures and films like Berlin and Man with a Movie Camera. He, too, grouped these three films together, but he did so in the context of “The Montage Film” and not according to that of the city symphony, and he was adamant that even though they shared some commonalities, the nature of these films was entirely different.17 “There is no motif that tells a story [in Berlin] as in Only the Hours,” he wrote. “Not individual human episodes but the City is the pattern. Only the Hours is romance; Berlin is document. Only the Hours is subjective; Berlin is objective”18 When it came to Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, Potamkin argued that it had taken a similar approach to Berlin, but had expanded upon it greatly. Here, he wrote, Vertov, has produced, upon the objective principle of Berlin, a film of amazing fluidity with successive images which do not always connect directly with each other. He has, in the typical Russian way, sought to make the images symbolic of the land and has endeavored to include in the film all the various contrasts of the city’s life, of human existence—work and pleasure, birth and death.19

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The city symphonies of the 1920s and 1930s may contain some basic narrative events—like a dawn-to-dusk structure, for instance—but, for the most part, they are not story films, and similarly, for the most part, they are not romances. Rien que les heures is narratively organized around the encounters of a streetwalker, a woman selling newspapers, a sailor, a landlady, a shopkeeper, and a thug, and the highly allegorical image of an old woman stumbling and crawling down Parisian back alleys before appearing to succumb to fatigue. Like Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures, Robert Siodmak, Edgar Ulmer, and Billy Wilder’s Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, 1930) has frequently been cited as being a canonical example of the city symphony, but it, too, features actors and scripted drama, and while the film benefits from a convincing and wide-ranging sense of “documentary truth,” it would be a stretch to characterize it as a work of nonfiction. Menschen am Sonntag is subtitled “a film without actors,” but this is simply because the interpreters were non-professionals whose day jobs were those that they portrayed in the film.

introduction

Thus, although Menschen am Sonntag is closely connected to the city symphonies genre, it also prefigures Neorealism in certain ways.20 Yet another film combining the city symphony formula with a sparse character-based narrative is Herman G. Weinberg’s Autumn Fire (1933), which depicts an encounter between a man living in New York and a woman living in the countryside, eventually leading to a climactic reunion in the city. As a result, the city in this film acts as “an externalization of character and emotion, metaphorically contrasting the city (man) with nature (woman).”21 Some other city symphonies have characters, too, but often these characters function more in a symbolic manner than as nuanced, psychologically convincing individuals. In Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, the titular character is in some ways an allegorical figure who looms over the city and the revolutionary society that created it. This cameraman, played by Mikhail Kaufman, Vertov’s brother and the film’s actual principal cinematographer, is also a perfect demonstration of the avant-garde’s fascination with reflexivity, for he, along with Elizaveta Svilova, the film’s editor, act as stand-ins for Vertov himself, playfully intervening in his very own artwork. Likewise, in Alexandr Hackenschmied’s Bezúcˇelná Procházka (Aimless Walk, 1930), we see the city through the eyes of a vaguely sketched figure strolling through the urban landscape. And in Footnote to Fact (Lewis Jacobs, 1933), it is a troubled woman sitting in her apartment, whose subjective thoughts and memories give us an impression of New York street life during the Great Depression. In these three examples, however, the characters are mere sketches—they may help to provide some sense of direction, but the films reject psychologism. Most city symphonies, however, are not character-based, and it is the city’s architecture, its technology and machinery, and the collective body of its anonymous population that are the true protagonists of these films. In so doing, these films broke from the narrative trajectory that Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1921) had mapped out, and which films such as Rien que les heures and Menschen am Sonntag had followed to a certain extent. Strikingly, Flaherty’s New York city symphony Twenty-four Dollar Island is his only documentary that doesn’t include individualized characters. René Clair’s Paris qui dort (The Crazy Ray, 1924), which had an enormous influence on Vertov and his conceptualization of Man with a Movie Camera, has also been mentioned in relation to the city symphony.22 Although Paris is certainly more than a mere backdrop in this film and although some scenes contain some of the visual effects used in several city symphonies, there is no question that Paris qui dort falls outside the limits of the genre due to the importance of its narrative development and its use of fanciful characters and professional actors. In the late 1920s, Clair also made another film that shares similarities with city symphonies: La Tour (The Eiffel Tower, 1928), which deals with the Eiffel tower, a key emblem of urban modernity and also a construction closely linked to the development of the new visual languages of Cubism, Constructivism, and the New Vision. Although the

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city of Paris appears in a few shots, this film is first and foremost a study of the tower unlike some similar films that give more attention to the relation between a building and its urban environment such as De Brug (The Bridge, Joris Ivens, 1928), Les Halles (The Central Market, Boris Kaufman and André Galitzine, 1927/1929), Así nació el obelisco (This Is How the Obelisk Was Born, Horacio Coppola, 1936), and De Maasbruggen (Bridges over the River Meuse, Paul Schuitema, 1937)—all films in which the building is also used as an optical device offering new and surprising vistas on the city.

the city symphony as genre

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Combining experimental documentary with elements from narrative cinema and sharing similarities with “absolute” films and “machine films,” the cycle of city symphonies is not easy to demarcate. This might explain why scholars often use generic terms in reference to the city symphony films, but never go as far as to state outright that this group of films constitutes a genre. Thus, John Grierson wrote of a “symphony approach” that had been initiated by Cavalcanti and expanded upon and popularized by Ruttmann.23 Likewise, Paul Rotha claimed that Cavalcanti and Ruttmann developed the “day in the life of a city cycle.”24 Siegfried Kracauer mentioned a “series of city symphonies” in the pages of Theory of Film, lumping these films under an avant-garde interest in “physical reality,” whereas in his earlier work, From Caligari to Hitler, he had discussed these films as a subcategory of the “montage film.”25 More recently, authors such as Annette Michelson, William Uricchio, Edward Dimendberg, Helmut Weihsmann, and Jan-Christopher Horak, among others have grouped and described many of the “city films” discussed in this volume—however, without explicitly labeling or defining them as a genre.26 We would like to make the case that the city symphonies phenomenon of the interwar years amounts to a full-fledged genre—not the strongest or most stable of genres, perhaps, but a full-fledged genre nonetheless, and one that exerted a powerful influence well outside its specific contours in its prime, and has continued to exert considerable influence decades later. Why the uncertainty? So much of the confusion comes from the fact that genre criticism was still in its infancy, and genre theory was years off from being formulated, at the time that the city symphonies phenomenon was at its peak. As mentioned earlier, experimental and avant-garde cinema had only really come into its own in the immediate aftermath of World War I. While the nonfiction film had existed since the very beginnings of cinema, the documentary film only began to be conceived in the 1920s, the term “documentary” as it applies to film was only coined in 1926 (by John Grierson), and the form was only beginning to be theorized by the likes of Grierson and others in the early to mid-1930s, although, clearly, Vertov had been doing so for quite some time in the Soviet Union in his

semantic elements: icons of urban modernity In contrast with earlier city vignettes, scenics, or travelogues, city symphonies are rarely interested in historical monuments and tourist sites that constitute the “official” face of the city. In their attempt to make a panoramic view of a city, some films, such as Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures, Corrado D’Errico’s

introduction

own peculiar way. Similarly, the self-consciously modernist art film was also a creation of the post-World War I era, including “absolute cinema” and “cinéma pur.” In other words, there was a considerable amount of flux at precisely the time when the city symphony was taking shape. Combining elements from experimental, documentary, and narrative film, the city symphony form embodied this flux, and the ensuing phenomenon erupted so quickly and so powerfully, even those commentators who were aware of such trends were nevertheless caught off guard and generally had a hard time taking stock of what was taking place before their eyes. Rick Altman’s “semantic/syntactic approach to film genre,” which he first published in the early 1980s, but which formed the foundation for his later Film/Genre (1999), is one that can help us to make a case for the city symphony as genre. As Altman explained, genre criticism in film studies continued to be marked by uncertainty and hesitation well into the 1980s.27 Issues of inclusivity versus exclusivity, of reconciling genre theory and genre history, and of whether to favor semantic approaches to genre or syntactic ones, were among those that continued to bewilder critics and scholars and had led to a body of work on film genres that was riddled with contradictions and mischaracterizations. Altman argued that the key was to combine the semantic approach with the syntactic approach, that these two approaches were complementary, that they could be easily reconciled, and that they provided a supple and probing model for the analysis of film genre.28 Doing just that, combining a semantic analysis of the city symphonies phenomenon with a syntactic one, not only helps to clarify this body of work as a genre, it can help us to be more precise about the genre’s development, its specificities, and its limits. The following paragraphs discuss the important themes and motifs that characterize the semantics of the city symphony. Next, we will focus on the structural, stylistic, and formal devices that constitute the syntax of these films, which show similarities with contemporaneous trends in painting and photography. As in any other genre analysis, these characteristics—both semantic and syntactic—are not meant to be used as a checklist, but virtually all of the 80+ city symphonies we’ve identified (see Part Three) meet most, if not all, of these criteria. In addition, we will demonstrate that, in the case of the city symphony, form and content (or syntax and semantics) go perfectly hand in hand. The city symphony is not only a film about the modern metropolis; its formal and structural organization is also the perfect embodiment of metropolitan modernity.

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Stramilano, André Sauvage’s Études sur Paris (Studies on Paris, 1928), Ubaldo Magnaghi's Mediolanum (1933), Otokar Vávra’s Žijeme V Praze (We Live in Prague, 1934), Jean Lods’s Odessa (1935), or Ruttmann’s films on Düsseldorf and Stuttgart may contain shots of historical landmarks, but they tend to present these monuments as part of the everyday life of the city, integrated into the mundane spaces of the modern metropolis. A few other city symphonies focus on “new” monuments, which acquired fame as masterpieces of modern engineering, such as the mobile iron bridges featured in De Brug, Impressionen vom alten Marseiller Hafen (Vieux port), and De Maasbruggen. Favoring contemporary cityscapes with modern buildings and advanced infrastructure, city symphonies are usually about “new cities,” cities that had only existed for a relatively short period of time, like Chicago, or cities such as New York, Berlin, Moscow, Milan, or Rotterdam, which underwent a process of rapid growth and radical modernization that wholly transformed them in a very short period of time. In the 1920s and 1930s, there were no city symphonies that dealt with places such as Florence, Venice, or Bruges, the image of which relied heavily on their preserved historical heritage—although José Val del Omar’s Vibracion de Granada (Vibrations of Granada, 1935) might be an exception. Some city symphonies do indeed deal with places that have a long past and a rich architectural heritage—such as Paris and Amsterdam—but they usually choose to present the metropolis as the locus of modernity. Consequently, the emblems of urban modernity—industry, large buildings, crowds, motorized traffic, billboards—not only abound in city symphonies, they are quite specifically foregrounded. City symphonies often present the viewer not only with the modern metropolis, but with a vision of the modern megalopolis. Many of the featured cities are large cities that are nevertheless rapidly enlarging because of the effects of the forces of industrialization and modernization. Strand and Sheeler’s Manhatta, Robert Flaherty’ Twenty-four Dollar Island, Ruttmann’s Berlin, and Adalberto Kemeny and Rudolpho Rex Lustig’s São Paulo: A Symphonia da Metrópole (São Paulo: A Symphony of the Metropolis, 1929) literally show the city being built, the city in the process of expanding, by drawing attention to impressive construction sites. In the films dedicated to New York and Chicago, these are construction sites with grids of steel girders of impressive skyscrapers, not only a prominent icon of urban modernity, and one that was a source of great fascination for both American and European modernists, but also a structure perfectly suited for the dramatic alternation of impressive high-angle and low-angle views favored by the vanguard photographers and filmmakers of the era.29 As its title indicates, Robert Florey’s Skyscraper Symphony focuses entirely on the impressive high-rise structures that, already in the late 1920s, had become a universal symbol of metropolitan growth, technological progress, and capitalist development. Strikingly, even though Berlin had no skyscrapers at the time, aside from its recently completed radio tower, when it came to creating the posters

introduction

and advertising materials for Berlin, Ruttmann used photomontages to do so, and he populated these images with New York skyscrapers, providing a particularly odd but notable example of the so-called “Americanism” of the European avant-garde.30 Apart from skyscrapers, all kinds of other high-rise structures, such as steel towers, bridges, and factory chimneys figure prominently in city symphonies. High-angle shots from tall structures as well as low-angle shots representing them are staples of these films, revealing a profound interest in the new vertical city, as opposed to the traditional horizontal city of the past. Thus, the Berlin Funkturm, which was completed in 1926, features in Berlin’s finale, whereas Man with a Movie Camera uses the dizzying heights of factory chimneys, bridges, and towers to evoke the energy and drive of the bustling metropolis and of a Soviet society that was rapidly modernizing and industrializing.

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Figure I.3  Lobby Card, Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt (Walter Ruttmann, 1927)

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City symphonies also emphasize the drive and energy of the metropolis by referring to its industry, acknowledging the process of industrialization as the main factor of urbanization. A large majority of city symphonies focus on “industrial cities” such as Paris, Berlin, Liverpool, New York, Chicago, Milan, or Rotterdam, extensively documenting their factories and the urban labor force. Factory buildings, gates, and chimneys are recurring topoi in city symphonies, as well as a wide variety of machines and their components, such as wheels, bolts, and pistons. Memorable shots illustrate the use and manipulation of machines—a topic that reaches its peak in Vertov’s Constructivist aesthetic, which intertwines the manual and the mechanical, suggesting an almost organic bond between man and machine. Through editing, entire sequences in Ruttmann’s Berlin, Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, Mikhail Kaufman and Ilya Kopalin’s Moskva (Moscow, 1926), Dyer’s A Day in Liverpool, and D’Errico’s Stramilano are marked by the rhythm of machines. Ivens’s De Brug, which focuses on a mobile bridge in the Rotterdam harbor as a node in the urban network, even shows a strong resemblance to what the critic Harry Potamkin in 1929 called “machine films,” such as Deslaw’s La Marche des machines or Mechanical Principles (Ralph Steiner, 1930).31 De Brug as well as Schuitema’s De Maasbruggen and Moholy-Nagy’ Impressionen vom alten Marseiller Hafen also illustrate the city symphony’s interest in harbors as a key locus of industrial activity in the modern metropolis. Indeed, a number of these films, such as Manhatta, Twenty-four Dollar Island, De stad die nooit rust, A Day in Liverpool, and Douro, faina fluvial (Labor on the Douro River, Manoel de Oliveira, 1931), depict the rhythm of passing ships, boats, and ocean liners, the nervous activity on the quays, the muscular labor of dock workers, and the mechanical ballet of impressive cranes and conveyor belts. Apart from depicting an industrial landscape of factories, chimneys, steel mills, silos, furnaces, and power stations, many city symphonies also emphasize that, in the words of Siegfried Giedion, “mechanization has taken command” of the lives of urbanites, depicting the invasion of modern technology into the everyday as illustrated by the prolific shots of printing presses, radio towers, dishwashers, elevators, and electric lamps. In addition, the city is unmistakably presented as a locus of labor in all its possible class manifestations, from street sweepers clearing dirt and debris to white-collar workers in state-of-the-art office spaces equipped with typewriters, telephones, and ticker-tape machines. An icon of modern telecommunication, the telephone switchboard is a popular motif in city symphonies and key films by Ruttmann and Vertov, as well as the films on Moscow and Liverpool by Kaufman, Kopalin, and Dyer respectively, also include striking shots of telephone operators, who are presented as unsung heroines of modernity, frantically working to keep communication channels flowing, against all odds. A similar role is played by the traffic policeman, whose hands almost magically direct the movements and tempos of the city in Ruttmann’s Berlin, Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, Dyer’s A Day in Liverpool, Derain’s Harmonies de Paris, and Kemeny and Lustig’s São Paulo. Motorized traffic, of course, is

introduction

another prominent symbol of urban modernity. In fact, the sheer movement of the chrome and metal surfaces of automobiles, streetcars, and trains alone is sometimes enough to create an impressive visual spectacle, as indicated by Henri Chomette’s Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse (Play with Reflections and Speed, 1925), which illustrates perfectly the French avant-garde’s interest in the “pure cinema” of optical phenomena. A similarly impressionistic approach can be found in Ivens’s modest Études des movement à Paris (Movement Studies in Paris, 1927), in which the filmmaker simply directs his jerky camera at cars speeding on the Paris boulevards, or in Alex Strasser’s Impressionen der Großstadt, a.k.a. Berlin von unten (Impressions of the Metropolis, a.k.a. Berlin from below, 1929), which is largely made of low-angle shots of hurrying feet, car tires, and traffic movement from “below” at several places in Berlin. Another striking image of traffic featured in many city symphonies is that of the elevated railways, which are especially apparent in films dedicated to New York and Chicago, such as Manhatta, Skyscraper Symphony, Manhattan Medley, Seeing the World: Part One, A Visit to New York, N.Y. (Rudy Burckhardt, 1937), and Weltstadt in Flegeljahren: Ein Bericht über Chicago (World City in Its Teens: A Report on Chicago, Heinrich Hauser, 1931), but such railways are also a key aspect of Berlin. Such imagery evokes the idea of floating streets and multi-layered cities celebrated by many utopian urban planners of the era, such as Antonio Sant’Elia, Raymond Hood, and Le Corbusier. The impact of motorized traffic is often emphasized through its juxtaposition with older means of transport. In Ruttmann’s Berlin, Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, and Oliveira’s Douro: faina fluvial, cars are confronted with a horse and carriage or some other beast of burden pulling loads of goods. As its title indicates, Mit der Pferdedroschke durch Berlin (With the Horse-Drawn Carriage Through Berlin, Carl Froelich, 1929) explores the German capital from the perspective of a horse-drawn carriage. Not surprisingly, given developments in the realms of retail, marketing, and advertising, most of the city symphonies also present the metropolis as a powerful locus of consumption. Factories mass-produce consumer items, people observe and purchase commodities of all kinds, fashion models parade around in haute couture, streets are lined with shops, meals and drinks are consumed, and the traffic in bodies and vehicles that figures so prominently in so many of these films attests to the commercial dynamism of these cities. Frequently, the camera draws attention to the spectacle of shop windows and the act of window shopping—and, indeed, window display mannequins are a striking presence in Ruttmann’s Berlin and Leyda’s A Bronx Morning, both of which recall the photographs of Eugène Atget, whose work had just recently been rediscovered by the Surrealists. Films such as Berlin, Sauvage’s Études sur Paris, and Conrad Friberg’s Halsted Street (1934) are among those that deal with the proliferation of advertisement through posters, billboards, columns, and outdoor electric advertising— evoking a forest of signs that parallels and illustrates Kracauer’s notion of the “surface culture” of modern urban commercial experience.32

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The image of the city as a realm of commodity fetishism is also emphasized by presenting the city as a place of leisure and entertainment. Some films, such as Marcel Carné’s Nogent: El Dorado du dimanche (Nogent: Sunday El Dorado, 1929), Vigo’s À propos de Nice, and Storck’s Images d’Ostende deal entirely with holiday or weekend destinations. However, Vigo and Storck create a rather bleak image of Nice and Ostend, respectively: Vigo combines his exploration of the upper-class beach resort with social criticism and Storck visits Ostend on a windy winter day, focusing on disconsolate images of the fishing port and the waves of the sea. What distinguishes Vigo’s film from Storck’s is his fascination with the working-class culture of le Vieux Nice, as well as the Surrealist pleasures of its Carnival. Many other city symphonies show urbanites visiting bars and restaurants; going to a concert or a zoo; and watching soccer games, boxing matches, horse races, and many other sporting events. Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures, Ruttmann’s Berlin, Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, Carné’s Nogent, László Moholy-Nagy’s GrossstadtZigeuner (Gypsies of the Metropolis, 1932), Powell’s Manhattan Medley, and Sparling’s Rhapsody in Two Languages feature footage of people dancing, and chorus lines and other extravagant displays also appear regularly. In addition, musicians abound in city symphonies, a characteristic that underlines the rhythms and musical structures that are so crucial to the genre. Often these scenes take place in night clubs and concert halls, but in some cases, such as Moholy-Nagy’s Grossstadt-Zigeuner and Pierement (Barrel Organ, Jan Teunissen, 1931), for instance, we find a focus on street musicians. Last but not least, city symphonies also deal reflexively with cinema spectatorship and the experience of cinema from time to time, with Symphony of the Rebuilding of the Imperial Metropolis and Berlin being two notable examples. Famously, of course, Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera develops this topic into one of the central elements of the film, contributing to its highly self-reflexive approach. Cinema-going is also a form of nocturnal entertainment—a topic often neglected in city films of the 1920s and 1930s due to technical limitations. Nonetheless, some city symphonies such as Berlin, Les Nuits électriques (Electric Nights, Eugène Deslaw, 1929), Rhapsody in Two Languages, Prague by Night, City of Contrasts (Irving Browning, 1931), and Manhattan Medley helped pioneer the cinematic depiction of urban nightlife and electrical illumination, and are consistent with the fascination with electricity and electrification that had been such an important part of industrialization and urbanization in North American since the 1880s, and that swept Europe in the 1920s. Indeed, electrification and the restructuring of the urban night were key aspects of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernity, as critics such as Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer pointed out, they were closely linked to both the rationalization of urban life, as well as to its reenchantment.33 Another important city symphony motif that symbolizes the energy and vibrancy of the modern metropolis is the crowd. By means of panoramic shots as well as a camera that plunges into the flow of pedestrians

introduction

in the streets, city symphonies depict streets, boulevards, and squares filled with people. These may consist of parades, religious processions, or specific festivities—such as the pilgrims in Charles Dekeukeleire’s Visions de Lourdes (Visions of Lourdes, 1932) or the carnival in the films on Nice and Düsseldorf by Vigo and Ruttmann respectively—but usually crowds are presented as a component of the everyday life in the modern metropolis, such as the masses of commuters in Manhatta, De Maasbruggen, and Nogent. Representing “the people” rather than “the mob,” crowds in city symphonies are not presented as dangerous and menacing organisms as they often were in late nineteenth-century crowd theory such as in Gustave Le Bon’s highly influential La Psychologie des foules (1895).34 City symphonies, first and foremost, cherish crowds as a cinematic spectacle, a kinetic and phantasmagoric swarm of shapes and colors. Instead of a threatening force moving in a single direction, crowds are instead represented as heterogeneous, atomized, and chaotic, emphasizing the kaleidoscopic qualities of metropolitan life. As a result, aside from the openly and explicitly revolutionary aesthetics of Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, city symphonies only focus on the potential for action or revolution that crowds seem to promise in passing, if at all. Furthermore, most city symphonies also acknowledge that the modern crowd is a highly diverse entity, made up not only of proletarian masses, but also of other social classes and groups. This is an issue of great importance, as the urban crowd is one of the city symphony’s key motifs. Although many city symphonies embrace the streets and boulevards filled with swarms of people, others show us deserted streets evoking urban loneliness and alienation.35 Reminiscent of the paintings by Giorgio De Chirico, Edward Hopper, or Paul Delvaux, films such as Rien que les heures, Regen, Images d’Ostende, Berliner Stilleben (Berlin Still Life, László MoholyNagy, 1932), Gamla Stan (Old Town, Stig Almqvist, Erik Asklund, Eyvind Johnson, and Artur Lundkvist, 1931), Autumn Fire, Paris express ou Souvenirs de Paris (Paris Express or Souvenirs of Paris, Marcel Duhamel and Pierre Prévert, 1928), and Études sur Paris, depict lonely, isolated, and contemplative figures in the modern metropolis, which, in this formulation, is presented as an uncanny or melancholic landscape. Instead of the hectic masses of people and the rhythms of motorized traffic that Ruttmann or Vertov loved to shoot, these films focus on the hidden streets, mysterious voids, and desolate suburban regions that can also be found in the works by many photographers associated with the Surrealist movement such as Eugène Atget, Brassaï, Marcel Lefrancq, Jacques-André Boiffard, and Eli Lotar.36 Often, these films show solitary roaming figures reminiscent of the twentieth-century flâneurs one finds in Surrealist novels, characters who delve into the maze of the city streets, a field of action that becomes the stage for surprising encounters and revelations of all kinds. Alexandr Hackenschmied’s Aimless Walk is entirely structured around the drift of a young man across the landscape of Prague, travelling from the city center

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to its outskirts on foot and by tram. In this particular group of films, there is also a striking interest in an urban landscape that is difficult to define, a terrain vague or wasteland around the edges of the city, such as the desolate port in Storck’s Images d’Ostende, the outskirts of Berlin in Moholy-Nagy’s Grossstadt-Zigeuner, and the Paris suburbs in Sauvage’s Études sur Paris. In fact, the heterotopic space of the banlieue is the main topic of Georges Lacombe’s La Zone: Au pays des chiffonniers (The Zone: In the Land of the Rag-Pickers, 1928), which portrays the daily life of rag-pickers living in the periphery of Paris much as Atget had in his photographic documents in earlier years. Strikingly, the cinematic exploration of these peripheral zones as well as of popular neighborhoods often contain images evoking some sort of pre-modern city life. Footage of children in films such as Ruttmann’s Berlin, Sauvage’s Études sur Paris, Moholy-Nagy’s Berliner Stilleben, Leyda’s A Bronx Morning, and Jan Koelinga’s De Steeg (The Alley, 1932) indicate that the city is not only a place of industry and commerce but also a place where people live, and the streets are more than just transportation arteries, they are inhabited. Along similar lines, many city symphonies also draw attention to stereotypical characters, such as street musicians, beggars, fortune tellers, and gypsies, again reaching back to the tradition of the nineteenth-century “urban picturesque.”

structure and syntax

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Interwar city symphonies not only share common themes and motifs, they are also characterized by a similar syntax and structural organization. First and foremost, these films are avant-garde documentaries on modern urban life. Eschewing stories and story lines and avoiding the use of hired actors, they are primarily works of nonfiction, tending to focus on “life caught unawares.” Furthermore, although some examples, including Visages de Paris (Faces of Paris, René Moreau, 1928), São Paulo, Lisbôa: Cronica anedótica (Lisbon: Anecdotal Chronicle, José Leitão de Barros, 1930), Esencia de Verbena (Essence of Verbena, Ernesto Giménez Caballero, 1930), Shankhaiskii Dokument (Shanghai Document, Yakov Bliokh, 1928), and Beograd Prestonica Kraljevine Jugoslavije (Belgrade: Capital of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Vojin Djordjevic, 1932), contain expository sequences, city symphonies generally avoid the expository mode of representation in favor of the poetic, and occasionally the reflexive.37 Of course, many of these films present generalities about the nature of life in the modern metropolis, and as the cycle became more commercial and less avant-garde in its orientation this tendency may have become more commonplace, but what’s often overlooked is the extent to which these films identify and examine the specifics of particular cities, neighborhoods, structures (and the areas that surround them), and events. Even Vertov’s Man with a Movie

introduction

Camera, which famously combines images of Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa into a composite of modern metropolitan culture in the Soviet Union, is notable for its treatment of very specific and profoundly meaningful structures and spaces in each of the cities depicted, such as Moscow’s Tverskaya Street, Revolution Square, and, most notoriously, the Bolshoi Theatre, which, as Yuri Tsivian has argued, was subjected to “symbolic destruction” precisely because its meaning was so hotly contested in the Soviet Union in the 1920s.38 Other films evoke the specificities of a particular neighborhood (Impressionen vom alten Marseiller Hafen, A Bronx Morning, Montparnasse, Gamla Stan), a particular street or square (Jean Lods’s 1929 short Champs-Élysées, Halsted Street, Andor von Barsy’s Hoogstraat from 1929, De Steeg, Prater, Wilfried Basse’s 1929 Markt in Berlin), or even an area surrounding a particular building, as in (Les Halles, De Brug, De Maasbruggen, Así Nació El Obelisco, Budapest Fürdöváros (Budapest: City of Baths, István Somkúti, 1935), Ritmi di stazione (Railway Station Rhythms, Corrado D’Errico, 1933), Na Pražském hradeˇ (Prague Castle, Alexandr Hackenschmied, 1931). By presenting themselves as nonfiction films, city symphonies use location footage extensively and position themselves in opposition to those cityscapes, many of them enormously impressive, that were created in the film studio or on studio backlots in the 1920s and 1930s. Key works of Weimar cinema such as Die Strasse (The Street, Karl Grune, 1923), Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1924), Metro­polis (Fritz Lang, 1927), and Asphalt (Joe May, 1929), as well as famous Holly­ wood productions, such as Sunrise (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1927), Just Imagine (David Butler, 1930), Street Scene (King Vidor, 1931), 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933), and Gold Diggers of 1935 (Busby Berkeley, 1935), evoke the pleasures and dangers of the modern metropolis thanks to impressive production design and special effects.39 Despite often dealing with themes that are similar as the ones tackled in these feature films, city symphonies are marked by an explicit preference for filming in the street and for submerging into the hustle and bustle of real city life. Although several city symphonies such as Ruttmann’s Berlin, Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, or Vigo’s À propos de Nice include staged events that are absolutely unmistakable, this was hardly atypical within documentary filmmaking up until the rise of direct cinema and cinéma vérité in the 1960s. For the most part, however, city symphonies avoid the controlled conditions of the studio and instead seek the charge that comes from the camera’s confrontation with the unexpected and unpredictable contingencies of urban modernity. Daring to create some kind of comprehensive sense of the modern city, the filmmakers who turned to making such films faced some obvious challenges. How does one create an encyclopedic sense of the city? Where does one begin? How does one organize and present this material? And just how

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much material is needed? What are the essential components necessary to capture the energy and dynamism of the modern metropolis? The most common device utilized by these directors was a “one-day-in-the-life-ofa-city” structure, one that simulated a chronological order—generally either a dawn-to-dusk or dawn-to-dawn narrative—but that was never actually shot in a single day. Such narratives often result in a series of sequences focusing on the patterns by which the city comes to life in the morning, the importance of labor, and finally all kinds of recreation. Apart from the most famous examples—Berlin and Man with a Movie Camera—we can also find similar structures in films such as Manhatta, Rien que les heures, Moscow, La Zone, São Paulo, Stramilano, Manhattan Medley, City of Contrasts, Jean Lods and Boris Kaufman’s Vingt-quatre heures en trente minutes (Twenty-four Hours in Thirty Minutes, 1929), the Fox Movietone production of London Medley (1933), Sparling’s Rhapsody in Two Languages and City of Towers (1935), and others, most of which have the effect of suggesting a temporal organization of the workday as a mainspring of the urban capitalist economy. Emphasizing the importance of rationalized time for modern metropolitan life, films such as Rutt­mann’s Berlin, Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, Kemeny and Lustig’s São Paulo, and Sparling’s Rhapsody in Two Languages prominently feature shots of clocks. In fact, in Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures, the passing of time is, as the film’s title indicates, the central theme of the film.

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Figure I.4  Rien que les heures (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1926)

introduction

Often combined with the dawn-to-dusk structure is the attempt to present the city as a living organism that works and rests, expends energy and then replenishes, sleeps and then awakens. Many city symphonies start with images of the awakening of the city—in Man with a Movie Camera, the opening of windows is literally juxtaposed to the opening of eyes of a woman getting out of bed, as well as to the lens of a motion picture camera being opened and closed, suggesting the awakening of the city, its inhabitants, and of the kino-eye aesthetic. In addition, machines, institutions, shops, and restaurants gradually come to life. Another key moment in the temporal organization of city symphonies is the motif of the arrival into the city, often featuring some form of modern transportation: the ferry transporting commuters in Manhatta, or the trains and trams bringing people to the city centers in Berlin, Man with a Movie Camera, Stramilano, Visions de Lourdes, A Bronx Morning, City of Contrasts, Rhapsody in Two Languages, and City of Towers. Like the scenes evoking awakenings, these scenes of transport also postpone and ritualize the film viewer’s approach to the city. In À propos de Nice, Jean Vigo stages the entering into the Mediterranean city by means of a toy train carrying tourists. Weltstadt in Flegeljahren includes a particularly elaborate introduction scene on a paddlewheel boat travelling the Mississippi, before crossing the state of Illinois in order to focus on Chicago. Apart from the dawn-to-dusk structure, city symphonies also often present themselves as cinematic cross-sections of a certain city—the metaphor was famously used by Siegfried Kracauer in one of the earliest attempts to discuss a series of films showing similarities: Rien que les heures, Berlin, Man with a Movie Camera, Markt in Berlin, and Menschen am Sonntag.40 Indeed, it was through the use of the cross-section montage approach that these films attempted to create a sense of the city in its entirety. In a film such as Friberg’s Halsted Street, this cross-section structure is used almost literally: Halsted Street is an axis crossing the city of Chicago, cutting through both its poor and working-class districts, as well as its more affluent neighborhoods. Attempting to create a cross-section of the spaces and communities of the metropolis, city symphonies often highlight the contrasts and the diversity of the city. In fact, the “city of contrasts” trope—which provides the title for Irving Browning’s 1931 city symphony—is often used in order to display a series of stark juxtapositions: old versus new, light versus dark, rich versus poor, blue-collar versus white-collar, religious versus secular, traditional versus modern, et cetera. Not infrequently, these contrasts enable filmmakers to critique social conditions. Rather than simply describing and documenting a space, filmmakers such as Ruttmann, Vertov, Vigo, Moholy-Nagy, Hauser, and Friberg also create a sense of the socio-economic make-up of the subjects of their city symphonies by drawing attention to labor and housing conditions—topics that a number of notable social documentaries of the 1930s, such as Housing Problems (Arthur

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Elton and E.H. Anstey, 1935), Les Maisons de la misère (Houses of Misery, Henri Storck, 1937), and The City (Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke, 1939), would eventually address in greater depth. These contrasts are first and foremost visualized through editing, and especially through the use of sophisticated montage, and Kracauer was among those who noted the contributions of city symphonies and other cross-section films to the development of cinematic montage, and who credited “the Russians” with having provided the inspiration for Rutt­ mann’s Berlin.41 Rejecting simple causal relations and linear narrative, many city symphonies became the testing ground for Soviet montage practices inspired by Eisenstein’s “montage of attractions” or Pudovkin’s idea of “linkages.” Although the contribution by Soviet filmmakers to the genre is limited to Kaufman and Kopalin’s Moscow, Mikhail Kaufman’s Vesnoy (In Spring, 1929), Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, as well as parts of his Kinoglaz (Kino-Eye, 1924) and Shestaya Chast’ Mira (A Sixth Part of the World, 1926), and Bliokh’s Shanghai Document, many city symphonies are marked by Soviet-inspired montage practices. As non-narrative films, city symphonies are often structured according to rhythmic editing, the rapid succession of shots evoking the hectic rhythm of machines and the throbbing activity of the city streets. In addition, making observations on the conditions of urban modernity, many city symphonies also borrow associative, metaphorical, and dialectical montage techniques from the Soviet cinema. In so doing, the attention for the spatial and social contrasts in the modern city is emphasized by visual juxtapositions through editing: high-angle and low-angle shots, panoramic views and close shots at street level, darkness and light, et cetera. Through editing and camera work, city symphonies present the city as an optical spectacle. Given this perspective, many city symphonies are not only marked by Soviet montage but also by the impressionist aesthetics of the French cinéma pur. This is particularly the case in Chomette’s Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse and Deslaw’s Les Nuits éléctriques, both of which were made by directors working in the context of the French avant-garde. In addition, the city symphonies made by Sheeler and Strand, Ivens, Storck, Sauvage, Kaufman, Lacombe, Carné, de Oliveira, and Weinberg share the impressionist fascination for the photogénie of atmospheric effects and the flux of ephemeral phenomena, such as light, smoke, clouds, and water.

music, visual arts, and the avant-garde Characterized by rhythmic and associative editing and an impressionist sensibility for atmospheric effects, city symphonies have been described frequently as city poems. Eschewing expository sequences, these films tend toward poetry rather than prose—in the case of Manhatta, this tendency is explicit, as the film includes intertitles based on Walt Whitman’s Leaves

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of Grass as a key element of its form. However, it is significant that these films became known primarily as city symphonies and not city poems, that they may have pursued a form of ciné-poetry, but that frequently they avoided text or any other kind of narration in favor of the abstraction of musical rhythms and structures the way Ruttmann’s famous film on Berlin had in 1927.42 In the wake of Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt, several other films include the term “symphony” in their title or subtitle: Sinfonia de Cataguases (Symphony of Cataguases, Humberto Mauro, 1928), Skyscraper Symphony, São Paulo: A Symphony of the Metropolis, the anonymous Japanese film Symphony of the Rebuilding of the Imperial Metropolis, and A City Symphony (Herman Weinberg, 1930).43 Other musical terms pop up in other titles such as Études des mouvements à Paris, Études sur Paris, Harmonies de Paris, Mélodie bruxelloise (Brussels Melody, Carlo Queeckers, 1929), Manhattan Medley, Ritmi di stazione, and Rhapsody in Two Languages. Moreover, many city symphonies self-consciously adopt a musical structure, and are frequently organized in terms of “movements.” Rutt­ mann’s Berlin, for instance, is divided into “acts,” each one dominated by a certain pace and rhythm as a result of which the entire film can be compared with a musical piece consisting of an allegro, andante, and a presto. Largely based on the rhythmic organization of images through editing, city symphonies took their cue from abstract experimental films that looked to music in order to find form, such as Hans Richter’s 1921–25 Rhythmus series, Viking Eggeling’s 1924 Symphonie diagonale, and, of course, Ruttmann’s 1923– 25 Lichtspiel series, which carry the subtitles Opus 1 through 4. The link with these experiments in “visual music” is even made explicit in Ruttmann’s Berlin and Ivens’s De Brug, both of which open with abstract animation sequences, showing an interest in abstract painting, as well as a desire to bridge the realms of abstract art on canvas and in galleries and the abstract forms found in the everyday world. These links between the filmmakers who were responsible for the city symphonies of the 1920s and 1930s and the art world were both numerous and strong. Several directors of city symphonies such as Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler, Walter Ruttmann, László Moholy-Nagy, André Sauvage, Paul Schuitema, Ralph Steiner, and Willard Van Dyke were active as painters, photographers, or graphic designers whereas Dziga Vertov, Joris Ivens, Charles Dekeukeleire, Henri Storck, Alexandr Hackenschmied, Eugène Deslaw, and Jay Leyda were all actively involved in avant-garde art circles. Many shots and sequences of city symphonies evoke the imagery of the art movements of 1910s and 1920s such as Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Constructivism, the New Objectivity, or Surrealism, in which the modern city is a key topic.44 Most of the visual motifs of city symphonies—motorized traffic and crowds, industrial activity and leisure, high-rise structures and skyscrapers, billboards and shop windows—also feature abundantly in the paintings, photographs, collages, and photomontages of vanguard artists of the era. Furthermore, the cinematography of many city symphonies

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echoes the fragmented compositions, canted angles, and unusual perspectives favored by these artists whereas cinematic devices such as hectic editing, nervous camera movements, split screens, and multiple exposures contribute to the evocation of a hectic and kaleidoscopic urban environment. Even films that tend toward the expository, such as Prater or São Paulo, also include emblematic shots marked by special effects evoking the kaleidoscopic nature of urban modernity. In particular, these shots evoke the famous photomontages by Dadaist and Constructivist artists such as John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, Paul Citroen, Gustav Klutsis, László Moholy-Nagy, Alexander Rodchenko, and Kazimierz Podsadecki, which depict the modern metropolis as a kaleidoscopic simultaneity of fragments. Evoking associations with the machine and engineering, photomontages also made visible the process of their own making, thus answering to the avant-garde principle of self-reflection.45 City symphonies transposed these procedures to film, a medium inherently marked by editing and hence the juxtaposition of images and, at that time, under the influence of Soviet montage experiments. While the city symphony genre is most closely associated with the furiously paced montage found in some of the most renowned sequences in Berlin and Man with a Movie Camera, it is important to point out that other portions of these same films feature a very different approach to content and editing, which results in a sense of tempo and tone that is markedly more subdued, and which adds to the tensions that Ruttmann and Vertov are working with. Many city symphonies made great use of such contrasts in tempos and approaches to editing, but some preferred to maintain such a steady, measured pace throughout, and in some notable cases we see a shared interest in the urban imagery found in Surrealism, with its absurd juxtapositions and oneiric strollers. It is primarily in a group of city symphonies made in France, Belgium, Holland, and Portugal that one finds the strongest affinities with the photography of artists who were affiliated with the Surrealist movement, either as active members or as inspirations or fellow travelers, artists such as Eugène Atget, Jacques-André Boiffard, André Kertesz, Brassaï, and Eli Lotar, although Leyda’s A Bronx Morning which was directly inspired by Atget’s images of the strange sights found in shop windows, stands as a notable exception.46 In contrast with the darkroom experiments of other Surrealist artists (double exposures, photograms, solarization, montages), these photographers attempted to show the surreal in the real, exploring the marvellous and the startling in the mundane spaces of the city, and they inspired these filmmakers to do the same. This is particularly the case in the films that explore derelict spaces of the city, as well as the uncanny of modern city streets devoid of traffic. Not unlike Dadaist, Constructivist, or Surrealist artworks, city symphonies frequently attempt to disorient their spectators or to defamiliarize their subject matter. In so doing, they present themselves as part of

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the culture of the avant-garde. Apart from showing formal similarities with the vanguard visual arts of the day and using abundantly experimental techniques, they also are marked by an avant-garde interest in selfreflexivity. Apart from representing urban modernity, city symphonies reflect on the ways cityscapes are the cinema’s ultimate subjects. Celebrating the dynamics of industrial speed and the frenetic pace of modern urban life and its highly fragmented and kaleidoscopic nature, city symphonies take the pulse of the city and quite literally translate it into the rhythm of cinema. They make explicit the connection between film spectatorship and the stimulus-response mechanisms said to be produced by metropolitan modernity and its sensory overload.47 The dynamic and fragmented structure of cinema is presented as being an extension of the city itself— the shifting perspectives, the pace of the editing, the special effects are all presented as both expressions and products of modern metropolitan life. City symphonies, thus, indicate that cinema is the ultimate medium to depict the city or, conversely, that the city was the ultimate subject matter for the camera-eye. In other words, the city symphony demonstrates the correspondence between the flash-like and disjointed succession of images inherent to cinema and the receptive disposition of the modern city-dweller. Given this perspective, the city symphony reached its most radical expression in Man with a Movie Camera, as this film not only deals with the city but also, in a highly self-reflexive way, with its cinematic representation.

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Figure I.5  De Brug (Joris Ivens, 1928)

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Reaching its apex in 1929, the city symphony phenomenon coincides with and is generative of the avant-garde’s “documentary turn.” Facing a large-scale reorganization of the production and exhibition of films following the introduction of sound in the late 1920s, as well as the rise of fascism, many progressive and independent filmmakers turned to documentary representation as a means of expression.48 So, for instance, in 1931, having made the city symphonies De Brug and Regen, Joris Ivens wrote that the “documentary film is the only means left to the avant-garde cinéaste” in his battle against the big film studios, and that “in the current state of the cinema, documentary provides the best means of discovering the cinema’s true paths.”49 Clearly, these “true paths” included the cinematic exploration of both the most spectacular constructions and the mundane elements of urban modernity as seen in so many city symphonies. Moreover, many city symphonies depicted the metropolis as a site of social contrasts, drawing the viewers’ attention to overlooked spaces and neglected communities. However, this social critique was always combined with formal innovation and stylistic experiment, frequently provoking the reproach of a “formalist” agenda or art-for-art’s-sake aspirations. Kracauer, for instance, noted the “surface approach” of Ruttmann’s editing, which “relies on the formal qualities of the objects rather than on their meanings,” emphasizing “pure patterns of movement.”50 Even when Ruttmann juxtaposes hungry children with opulent dishes in some restaurant, these contrasts “are not so much social protests as formal expedients,” according to Kracauer.51 Likewise, facing the dozens of variations on Ruttmann’s film, Paul Rotha stated that these films were inspired by nothing more serious than kindergarten theory, their observations on the contemporary city scene being limited to obvious comparisons between poor and rich, clean and dirty, with a never-failing tendency towards rhythmic movements of machinery and the implications of garbage cans. Providing excellent fodder for the film societies, these films were typical product of an artfor-art’s-sake movement.52

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simmel, benjamin, kracauer, and the city symphony The emphatic fascination for the modern metropolis among filmmakers and visual artists in the 1920s was hardly an isolated phenomenon. The era of the city symphony was also the golden age of the modern urban novel, which saw the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925), Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926), André Breton’s Nadja (1928), and Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), among

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many others.53 These literary and artistic representations and evocations of the city are, of course, inherently linked to the accelerated processes of urbanization and modernization that characterized the entire Western world after the First World War. Most if not all of the city symphonies discussed in this book can be seen as responses to the startling changes that came with this. For novelists, poets, artists, and filmmakers, the city was the stage of modernity, the place where the processes associated with modernity—capitalism, socialism, industrialization, rationalization, social mobility, alienation, mass consumption, et cetera—were most glaringly visible. Modernity and metropolis came to be seen as inherently intertwined concepts, the one being used to describe or to explain the other. From the late nineteenth century onwards, theorists such as Georg Simmel noticed that the modern city also entailed new modes of perception and experience, creating a new psychological condition for urban dwellers. Simmel interpreted the metropolis as a web or network of intersecting spheres, the locus of various intellectual and cultural circles, a place marked by the division of labor. However, for Simmel, the metropolis is a realm characterized by flux: a place where ever-new needs and short-lived fashions are constantly being created, and that is characterized first and foremost by the accelerated commodity exchange of the modern money economy—the key topic of his 1900 Philosophie des Geldes (Philosophy of Money).54 In Simmel’s analysis, the city is a sphere of circulation and exchange, in which differences of value and class are obscured. These notions are also central in his oft-quoted essay “Die Grossstädte und das Geisteleben” (“Metropolis and Mental Life,” 1903), in which he analyzes the effects of the big city on the mind of the individual.55 For Simmel, life in the modern metropolis is characterized by a continuous flow of stimuli to the senses. The spectacle of anonymous crowds, motorized traffic, colorful shop windows, and bold billboards brings about an intensified form of sensory stimulation. Simmel speaks of “the intensification of nervous stimulation” induced by the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions. This hyperstimulation is almost suffocating, resulting in phenomena such as stress and shock (both of which were often interpreted as a syndromes that were symptomatic of modern city life). As a result, metropolitan dwellers created a distance between their inner selves and the tumult of impressions generated by the big city. Because living in the modern metropolis would become unbearable without this psychological distance, the modern urbanite had developed a defense mechanism against overstimulation: the blasé attitude. Many city symphonies echo Simmel’s analysis of the modern metropolis, presenting kaleidoscopic passages that suggest the hectic pace and disorientation of modern urban life, and depict the city as a site composed of fragments, contrasts, disjunctions, and noise. With the help of cinematic

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devices such as editing, camera movements, contrasting camera angles, and multiple exposures, city symphonies show us the hustle and bustle of the metropolis and the hyperstimulation of the senses experienced by both its inhabitants and its visitors. As in many Futurist, Dadaist, or Constructivist paintings or photomontages, the city symphonies frequently appropriated, interiorized, or aestheticized the sensuous overstimulation of the metropolitan environment, submerging the viewer in the tumult of metropolitan street life. Many city symphonies are a perfect demonstration of the notion that the metropolis had become a place where “shock experiences have become the norm,” as Walter Benjamin once put it.56 For Benjamin, the modern city was not only a new kind of space determined by the logics of industrial capitalism, it was also a new sensory experience marked by the rise of the fetishistic nature of commodities. According to Benjamin, street life was both a manifestation of modernity’s transitory and fleeting sensations, as well as an expression of the sediment of the mythic dream-state of commodity fetishism, one that created the illusion of the re-enchantment of a world that had been shaped by the forces of industrialization and rationalization. This “phantasmagoria” could be found in the ever-changing constellations of traffic, crowds, advertising posters, glass facades, outdoor electric advertising, and the displays of commodities in arcades, department stores, and shop windows that were so characteristic of the modern city.57 In this urban landscape of transitory images and fleeting impressions, the experience of the street was set up for a spectatorship commanded by the peripatetic eye of the flâneur, whom Walter Benjamin presented a key embodiment of the modern urbanite.58 In line with Charles Baudelaire, Benjamin saw the nineteenth-century figure of the flâneur as a drifting stroller perfectly capable of reading the streets, a sophisticated spectator of urban shapes, structures, and signs. On the one hand, the flâneur is completely immersed in the intensities of big city street life. On the other hand, the Baudelairian flâneur distances himself from the flux of the metropolis, turning even the seemingly banal aspects of modernity into poetic material and discovering the beauty of gaslights, traffic, and asphalt. A product of an environment that is increasingly turned into a visual spectacle, the flâneur explores a metropolis that presents itself as a series of surfaces, engendering an unfocused and decentered form of experience that Siegfried Kracauer called Zerstreuung (distraction). For Kracauer, in the sensory overload of the modern metropolis and its new visual culture exemplified by the illustrated press and the cinema, “the stimulations of the senses succeed each other with such rapidity that there is no room left for even the slightest contemplation to squeeze in between them.”59 Emphasizing aspects of flux, surface, and distraction, both Benjamin and Kracauer described the modern metropolis in cinematic terms. Having written important essays on both film and the metropolis, Kracauer and

demise and postwar afterlife Containing well over 80 titles, the annotated filmography in this book testifies to the importance and the widespread proliferation of city symphonies in the interwar era. As mentioned earlier, already in the early 1930s John Grierson had complained about the unending wave of such film projects that had become a stereotypical formula of independent filmmaking.

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Benjamin indicated that cinema was the ultimate medium to depict the city or, conversely, that the city was the perfect subject matter of the cinematic apparatus.60 “Only the cinema,” Benjamin writes, “commands optical approaches to the essence of the city, such as conducting the motorist into the new center,”61 a notion that the filmmakers of the city symphony phenomenon turned into practice on many occasions. Both Kracauer and Benjamin admitted that cinema, in its most frequent manifestations, was a superficial form of popular entertainment, determined by the logics of Taylorization and reification.62 However, the medium of film also offered possibilities to create an alternative public sphere and possibilities to restructure human experience. Both Benjamin and Kracauer were convinced that the antidote to mass culture was to be found within mass culture itself. Whereas Benjamin ascribed an emancipatory power to the medium of film in general, Kracauer stressed the importance of specific cinematic languages and distinct genres such as the city symphony—in several of his writings, Kracauer applauded the city poems by Vertov, Ivens, and Vigo. With their loose narratives, episodic structures, mobile camerawork, and swift editing, city symphonies illustrated Kracauer’s notion of distraction, whereas their defamiliarizing perspectives offered new ways to cope with the dangerous and destructive forces of modernization. Moreover, using shifting street-level viewpoints and conjuring fleeting modes of urban perception, city symphonies evoke the restless, impressionistic gaze of the flâneur. Many films discussed in this book not only comprise footage of strolling characters, they also turn the activity of the street into an aesthetic experience not unlike the art of flânerie. Hackenschmied’s Aimless Walk and Friberg’s Halsted Street even take the scopophilia of flânerie as a structural principle, letting the viewer to accompany the sketchy protagonists during their stroll through Prague and Chicago respectively. Not coincidentally, both films not only explore the shining surfaces of the city center, but also the neglected spaces found in the city’s periphery, spaces that seem to contain the very debris of modernity. In so doing, city symphonies do not just adapt the film viewer to the imperatives of the metropolis and the capitalist economy, they also emphasize cinema’s power as a cognitive instrument, using the mastery of the stimuli of the metropolis as the basis for creative responses, artistic reflections, and critical interpretations.

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Furthermore, “mainstream” cinema appropriated and assimilated characteristics of city symphonies quite early on, inserting “miniature city symphonies” into feature-length narrative films, often in a contrapuntal manner.63 Several fiction films of the late 1920s such as The Crowd (King Vidor, 1927), Downhill (Alfred Hitchcock, 1927), Lonesome (Paul Fejos, 1928), and Asphalt (Joe May, 1929), for instance, contain entire sequences establishing a metropolitan environment that show striking similarities with the kaleidoscopic imagery of city symphonies. In addition, musicals such as Applause (Rouben Mamoulian, 1929), 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933) and Gold Diggers of 1935 (Busby Berkeley, 1935) include elaborate musical numbers that turn the city into a modernist assemblage of euphoric activities defined by the mechanico-industrial rhythms of syncopated jazz.64 The city symphony formula also survived in the so-called “montage sequences” most commonly associated with the work of Slavko Vorkapich, which summarize a topic or compress a passage of time into brief symbolic or typical images.65 As montage sequences were frequently used to establish an urban locale, their rapid sequence of tilted angles, dissolves, multiple exposures, and wipes evoke the dynamism of the metropolis reminiscent of Ruttmann and Vertov. However, in these films, such avant-garde extravaganzas are justified by the narrative, and they are integrated into the pseudo-realist aesthetics of classical cinema. Meanwhile, by the mid- to late 1930s, interest in the city symphony itself began to wane, in large part because of the tensions and the loss of idealism that came with the crippling effects of depression economics, growing political uncertainty, and outright conflict. In many ways, the film that brings the genre to a close is Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke’s The City (1939), a film that attempted to turn the city symphony against itself, as it were, incorporating the conventions and the techniques of the city symphony as part of its American Institute of Planners-sponsored tirade against the modern metropolis. In this strategy, The City was not alone. Years earlier, Ruttmann’s recycling of urban footage of his 1927 Berlin in the Nazi propaganda film Blut und Boden: Grundlagen zum neuen Reich (Blood and Soil: A Basic Concept of National Socialism, Walter Ruttmann, Rolf von Sonjevski-Jamrowski, Hans von Passavant, and Ernst Th. Bruger, 1933) in the service of an anti-cosmopolitan message consistent with fascist ideology augured a radical shift in how the modern metropolis was understood and represented.66 The golden age of the city symphony not only coincided with an optimistic belief in the possibilities of the modern metropolis, but also with what Frank Lloyd Wright called the era of the “centripetal city” in his 1932 book The Disappearing City.67 Urban development in the 1920s and 1930s not only implied massive expansion—both outward and upward—but also the maximal concentration of people, functions, and buildings, resulting in what Rem Koolhaas has described as a “culture of congestion.”68 The

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density of the interwar metropolis, which was perfectly evoked in the kaleidoscopic imagery of photomontages and city symphonies, however, made room for suburban expansion after the War. In the US and also in Europe, where urban centers were transformed in landscapes of rubble during the War, the nature of the city definitely changed. The cycle of city symphonies came to an end when the urban landscape itself started to transform and when the city became rather a condition than a well-defined space.69 The later twentieth century saw the rise of an environment that combines characteristics of the former city, suburb, and countryside developing into a post-urban landscape marked by sprawl and decentralization. While Berlin, Paris, and New York had been the emblems of urban modernity visualized by city symphonies, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Disneyland became the paradigmatic spaces of the postmodern era. These spaces too, of course, have been filmed abundantly, but they generated a quite different kind of imagery than the density, hyperstimulation, fragmentation, simultaneity, and proximity of the metropolis featuring in the interwar city symphonies. There were still some lingering traces of the city symphony immediately after World War II, and some of these films show a striking resemblance to the city symphonies of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1949, Arne Sucksdorff won an Academy Award for Best Documentary for Människor i stad (literally People in the City but released internationally as Symphony of a City, 1947), his portrait of post-war Stockholm, and this acclaim renewed interest in the form to a certain extent. Avant-garde and experimental filmmakers continued to turn to the city as inspiration, and occasionally they constructed these films according to musical rhythms and structures, as in the case of D.A. Pennebaker’s Daybreak Express (1953/8), Francis Thompson’s N.Y., N.Y. (1957), and William Klein’s Broadway By Light (1958), all three of which were New York films made by artists who were on their way to becoming prominent filmmakers. In other cases, such as Helen Levitt’s In the Street (1948), Rudy Burckhardt’s Under the Brooklyn Bridge (1953), Shirley Clarke’s Bridges-go-round (1958), and Marie Menken’s Go! Go! Go! (1962–4), we are presented with four more New York films that share some of the concerns of the classical city symphonies—such as street life, architecture, traffic, and choreography—but none of these films attempts to create a comprehensive vision of the city. Cities had changed by this point in time, but so had filmmaking practices, and so had the larger film culture, and if the city continued to fascinate avant-garde and experimental filmmakers, and city films continued to be produced, there was no longer the sense of an international movement of city symphonies or even city poems the way there had been just a few decades earlier. Whereas a certain faith in the city, in technology, and in progress had been widespread in the 1920s, even among the avant-garde, by the post-World War II era this faith had eroded, certainly among progressive artists, and even homages to the city tended to be more limited and often more ironic (with Andy Warhol’s 1964 film

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Empire, his ultra-minimalist epic, being the ultimate example). Perhaps no other film expresses both the lasting relevance of the city symphony form, its ability to captivate audiences, and the fact that attitudes among many within the avant-garde toward the city, toward technology, and toward notions of progress had changed radically since the heyday of the city symphony in the 1920s and 1930s more powerfully than Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1983). Reggio’s apocalyptic portrait of America as a culture that was both “out of balance” and self-destructive, may have had a focus that was national and not strictly speaking metropolitan, but it revived the symphonic avant-garde documentary of the interwar years, as well as the utopian dream of a primarily visual, non-textual, universal language of cinema, it found a large international audience in a way that experimental non-narrative cinema had rarely done since the days of Ruttmann’s Berlin, and the film was notable for a number of extended passages that focused quite specifically on the American city of the late twentieth century, especially its twin poles: New York and Los Angeles. But one of its most telling and poignant sequences stitched together shots of ruined, and seemingly bombed-out neighborhoods in the Bronx with haunting aerial footage of the failed Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, a project that had been designed by Minoru Yamasaki in the mid-1950s, less than 20 years earlier. Two low-angle shots of the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe set off a “symphony of destruction” sequence that includes a number of large-scale buildings being demolished in the middle of major urban centers, and points toward the events of 11 September 2001 and the collapse of the World Trade Center—yet another Yamasaki design. Already, the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe complex between 1972–6 was seen by many observers at the time as being an epochal event, one that marked the end of a utopian project in architecture and urban planning that had begun in the period between the world wars. Koyaanisqatsi provided testament that the city symphony form was still alive, but the conditions and the dreams that had brought this genre of filmmaking into existence were now in ruins.

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1 László Moholy-Nagy, “Dynamik einer Gross-Stadt: Skizze zu einem Filmmanuskript,” in Malerei, Fotografie, Film (Dessau: Bauhaus, 1927), 122–35. 2 “Life caught unawares,” the famous phrase that Vertov used to express his preference for spontaneous, unscripted, and nonfiction filmmaking, was also the alternate title for his 1924 film Kinoglaz (Kino-Eye), which attempted to turn the kino-eye philosophy into praxis. See Vertov’s 1929 essay “From the History of the Kinoks” for more on this philosophy and its development in Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 92–101.

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3 Jan-Christopher Horak, “Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s ‘Manhatta’,” in Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 270–1. 4 László Moholy-Nagy, “Dynamik einer Gross-Stadt: Skizze zu einem Filmmanuskript,” in Malerei, Fotografie, Film (Dessau: Bauhaus, 1927), 122–35; see also Edward Dimendberg, “Transfiguring the Urban Gray: László MoholyNagy’s Film Scenario Dynamic of the Metropolis,” in Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (eds.), Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 109–26; and Jan Sahli, Filmische Sinneserweiterung: László Moholy-Nagys Filmwerk und Theorie (Marburg: Schüren, 2006). 5 John Grierson, quoted in Emir Rodriguez Monegal, “Alberto Cavalcanti,” The Quarterly of Film Radio and Television 9, 4 (Summer 1955): 341–58. 6 See Steven Jacobs, The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2007), 42–3. 7 See Marguerite Tazelaar, “Amateurs Point the Way: Their Experimental Approach Is Lauded by French Directional Find,” Movie Makers (September 1929): 573–4, 599. 8 Harry Potamkin, “The Montage Film,” Movie Makers (February 1930): 88–9. 9 Patricia Zimmermann, “Startling Angles: Amateur Film and the Early Avant-Garde,” in Horak, Lovers of Cinema, 151. Zimmermann also emphasizes that the amateur film movement saw avant-garde technique as an experimental vanguard that would invigorate and energize filmmaking in general and that avant-garde discourse popped up occasionally in amateur journals as a method for filmic exploration and artistry. 10 John Grierson, “The Course of Realism,” in Grierson on Documentary (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 75. 11 John Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary,” in Grierson on Documentary (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 150. 12 The London Film Society was founded in 1925, the Dutch Filmliga was active from 1927 to 1933, and in Germany the Volksfilmverband für Filmkunst held screenings and other activities between 1928 and 1931. In France, a variety of different alternative screening institutions arose, including cinéclubs, such as the Club des Amis du Septième Art, and specialized avant-garde and art film theatres, like the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier or Studio 28. See Malte Hagener, Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919–1939 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007). 13 The 1929 FIFO film and photography exhibition in Stuttgart comprised a film program, curated by Hans Richter, which included screenings of Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, Ruttmann’s Berlin, Chomette’s Jeux de reflets de la vitesse, and Ivens’s De Brug and Regen. See Film und Foto: Eine Ausstellung des Deutschen Werkbunds, Stuttgart 1929: Rekonstruktion des Filmprogramms (Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1988). CICI 2 in Brussels in 1930 comprised screenings of Rien que les heures, Skyscraper Symphony, Images d’Ostende, À propos de Nice, and Champs-Élysées, as well as Ernesto Giménez Caballero’s Esencia de Verbena (1930, indicated as Poèmes de Madrid in the program), Daniel Abric and Michel Gorel’s Bateaux Parisiens (1929), and a (now lost) “Lyrical Reportage on Antwerp” by Charles Dekeukeleire. 14 Horak, “Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler,” 270–1. 15 Jay Leyda, “A Note on A Bronx Morning,” statement written for FIAF Symposium (Lausanne, 1979), Jay Leyda File, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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16 Elena Pinto Simon, “Four Men Who Made a Difference: Jay Leyda,” Film History II (1988): 395–6. See also Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960), 251. 17 Harry Alan Potamkin, “The Montage Film,” in Yuri Tsivian (ed.), Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties (Gemona, Italy: La Giornale del Cinema Muto, 2004), 372–4. Potamkin’s essay first appeared in Movie Makers (February, 1930): 88–9. 18 Potamkin, “The Montage Film,” 372. 19 Potamkin, “The Montage Film,” 372. 20 A similar work in this regard is the lesser-known Ein Werktag (A Work Day, Richard Schweizer, 1931), which also uses individualized characters playing themselves, moving through the city of Zürich. But while Menschen am Sonntag uses characters in order to guide the viewer through the urban landscape of Berlin, the Swiss film first and foremost does this to focus our attention on labor conditions and the protagonists’ involvement in a demonstration, making it hard to present Ein Werktag as a city symphony. 21 Uricchio, “The City Viewed,” 305. 22 Annette Michelson, “Dr. Crase and Mr. Clair,” October 11 (Winter 1979): 29–53. 23 Grierson, “The Course of Realism,” 75. 24 Paul Rotha, The Documentary Film: The Use of the Film Medium to Interpret Creatively and in Social Terms the Life of the People as It Exists in Reality (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 85–6. 25 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997 [1960]), 180–81; and Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), 181–9. 26 See Peter Weiss, Avantgardefilm (Stockholm: Wahlström and Widstrand, 1956), 88–96; Jay Chapman, “Two Aspects of the City—Cavalcanti and Ruttmann,” in Lewis Jacobs (ed.), The Documentary Tradition: From Nanook to Woodstock (New York, NY: Hopkinson and Blake, 1971), 37–42; Richard Meran Barsam, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History (New York, NY: E.P. Dutton, 1973), 16–36; Annette Michelson, “Dr. Crase and Mr. Clair,” October 11 (Winter 1979): 29–53; William Uricchio, Ruttmann’s Berlin and the City Film to 1930 (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York, NY: New York University, 1982); Dominique Noguez, “Paris—Moscou—Paris: Paris et les symphonies de ville,” in Prosper Hillairet, Christian Lebrat, and Patrice Rollet (eds.), Paris vu par le cinéma d’avant-garde 1923–1983 (Paris: Paris Expérimental, 1985), 31–7; Jean-Paul Colleyn, “La Ville-rythme: les symphonies urbaines,” in François Niney (ed.), Visions Urbaines: Villes d’Europe à l’écran (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1994), 23–7; William Uricchio, “The City Viewed: The Films of Leyda, Browning, and Weinberg,” in Jan-Christopher Horak (ed.), Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde 1919–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 287–314; Helmut Weihs­ mann, “The City in Twilight: Charting the Genre of the City-Film 1900– 1930,” in François Penz and Maureen Thomas (eds.), Cinema & Architecture: Méliès, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia (London: BFI, 1997), 8–27; Colin McArthur, “Chinese Boxes and Russian Dolls: Tracking the Elusive Cinematic City,” in David B. Clarke (ed.), The Cinematic City (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), 19–45; Edward Dimendberg, “Transfiguring the Urban Gray: László Moholy-Nagy’s Film Scenario ‘Dynamic of the Metropolis’,” in Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (eds.), Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida:

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Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 109–26; Carsten Strathausen, “Uncanny Spaces: The City in Ruttmann and Vertov,” in Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (eds.), Screening the City (London and New York, NY: Verso, 2003), 15–40; Myriam Juan, “Le Cinéma documentaire dans la rue parisiènne,” Société & représentation 1, 17 (2004): 291–314; Alexander Graf, “Paris—Berlin—Moscow: On the Montage Aesthetics in the City Symphony Films of the 1920s,” in Alexander Graf and Dietrich Scheunemann (eds.), Avant-Garde Film (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 77–92; Laura Marcus, “’A Hymn to Movement’: The ‘City Symphony’ of the 1920s and 1930s,” Modernist Cultures 5, 1 (2010): 30–46; Chris Dähne, Die Stadtsinfonien der 1920er Jahre: Architektur zwischen Film, Fotografie und Literatur (Bielefeld: transcript, 2014); and Eselsohren: Journal of History of Art, Architecture and Urbanism II, 1+2 (2014) (theme issue on “City Symphonies: Film Manifestos of Urban Experiences”). 27 Rick Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” Cinema Journal 23, 3 (Spring 1984): 6. 28 Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” 6–11. 29 On the skyscraper as a symbol of modernity, see Merrill Schleier, The Skyscraper in American Art, 1890–1931 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1990); and Merrill Schleier, Skyscraper Cinema: Architecture and Gender in American Film (Saint Paul, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 30 On the “Americanism” of European popular culture, the European avantgarde, and European modernist architects, see Rudolf Kayser, “Amerikanismus,” Vossische Zeitung (29 September 1925). Reprinted and translated in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (eds.), The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 395; Frank Becker and Elke Reinhardt-Becker (eds.), Mythos USA: Amerikanisierung in Deutschland seit 1900 (Frankfurt and New York, NY: Campus, 2006), JeanLouis Cohen and Hubert Damisch (eds.), Américanisme et modernité: L’idéal américain dans l’architecture (Paris: Flammarion, 1993), and Jean-Louis Cohen, Scenes of the World to Come: European Architecture and the American Challenge 1893– 1960 (Paris: Flammarion, 1995). 31 See Harry Alan Potamkin, “On the Magic of Machine Films,” Movie Makers (November 1929): 722–3, 744. 32 See also Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001). 33 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995); Joachim Schlör, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London 1840–1930 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998). 34 Gustave Le Bon, La Psychologie des foules (1895), translated as The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York, NY: MacMillan, 1896). See also Christine Poggi, “Futurism and the Crowd,” Critical Inquiry 28, 3 (Spring 2002): 709–48. 35 See Steven Jacobs, “Amor Vacui: Photography and the Image of the Deserted City,” History of Photography 30, 2 (2006): 108–18; and Steven Jacobs, “Metropolis and Melancholy: Cityscapes in Magic Realism, Surrealism, and Poetic Realism 1925–1950,” in The Melancholy Metropolis: Cityscapes Between Magic and Realism, 1925–1950 (Arnhem: Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem, 2013). 36 On Surrealism and urban photography, see Ian Walker, City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); and David Bate, Photography & Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004).

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37 For more on these modes of documentary representation, see Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), 1–41. 38 Yuri Tsivian (ed.), Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties (Gemona and Udine, Italy: Le Giornate del cinema muto, 2004), 18–21. 39 On the city in film in the 1920s, see Anton Kaes, “Sites of Desire: The Weimar Street Film,” in Dietrich Neumann (ed.), Film Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner (Munich: Prestel, 1996), 26–32; Dietrich Neumann, “Before and After Metropolis: Film and Architecture in Search of the Modern City,” in Neumann (ed.), Film Architecture, 33–38; Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 99–122; and Weihsmann, “The City in Twilight.” 40 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 181–9. 41 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 185. 42 Jiri Kolaja and Arnold W. Foster, “ ‘Berlin, the Symphony of a City’ as a Theme of Visual Rhythm,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 23, 3 (Spring 1965): 353–8. 43 The term continued to be used into the 1940s, as evidenced by the English title of Arne Sucksdorff’s Academy Award-winning Människor i stad (Symphony of a City (1947), which is a portrait of Stockholm, as well as Pricˇa jednog dana: Nedovršena simfonija jednog grada (Story of the Day: Unfinished Symphony of a City, Maks Kalmic´, 1941), which deals with Belgrade, and Symphonie einer Weltstadt (Symphony of a World City, Leo de Laforgue, 1943), which depicts Berlin. 44 On the metropolis in the visual arts, see Jean Dethier and Alain Guiheux (eds.), La Ville: art et architecture en Europe 1870–1993 (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1994); and La Ville magique (Paris: Gallimard, 2012). 45 See Dawn Ades, Photomontage (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993) and Matthew Teitelbaum (ed.), Montage and Modern Life 1919–1942 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 46 In fact, Lotar would go on to make a city symphony of his own about the impoverished Paris suburb of Aubervilliers in 1946. 47 For more on hyperstimulus and the modern city, see Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2001). 48 Malte Hagener, Moving Forward, Looking Back, 205–34. See also Bill Nichols, “Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry 27, 4 (Summer 2001): 580–610. 49 Joris Ivens, “Reflections on the Avant-Garde Documentary” (1931), in Richard Abel (ed.), French Film Theory and Criticism: 1907–1939, Volume II: 1929–1939 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 78–80. 50 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 184. 51 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 185. 52 Paul Rotha, Documentary Film: The Use of the Film Medium to Interpret Creatively and in Social Terms the Life of the People as It Exists in Reality (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 85. 53 On the modernist urban novel, see William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock (eds.), Visions of the Modern City (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Mary Ann Caws (ed.), City Images: Perspectives from Literature, Philosophy, and Film (New York, NY: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1991);

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James Donald, Imagining the Modern City (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); and Bart Keunen, De verbeelding van de grootstad: Stads- en wereldbeelden in het proza van de moderniteit (Brussels: VUB Press, 2000). 54 Georg Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes (1900), translated as The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge, 2011). 55 Georg Simmel, “Die Großstädte und das Geisteleben” (1903), translated as “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in David N. Levine (ed.), Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1971), 324–39. On Simmel and film, see Daniel Fritsch, Georg Simmel im Kino: Die Soziologie des frühen Films und das Abenteuer der Moderne (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2009). See also David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). 56 Walter Benjamin, “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire,” in Gesammelte Schriften I, 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 614. On Benjamin and the modern metropolis, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); and Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1996). See also Ghent Urban Studies Team (GUST) (ed.), The Urban Condition: Space, Community, and Self in the Contemporary Metropolis (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1999), 110–17. 57 See Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Weimar Germany (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001). 58 On the flaneur, see Keith Tester (ed.), The Flaneur (London: Routledge, 1994); and Anke Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 59 See Siegfried Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction (1926),” in Siegfried Kracauer (ed.), The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 323–8. See also Henrik Reeth, Ornaments of the Metropolis: Siegfried Kracauer and Modern Urban Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 60 See Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), and Anthony Vidler, “Metropolitan Montage: The City as Film in Kracauer, Benjamin, and Eisenstein,” in Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 111–22. 61 Walter Benjamin, “Berliner Chronik,” in Gesammelte Schriften VI (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 470. 62 See Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012). 63 Steven Jacobs, “Urban Montage Sequences: City Symphonies and Their Incorporation into Classical Cinema,” in Julia Hallam, Richard Koeck, Robert Kronenburg, and Les Roberts (eds.), City in Film: Architecture, Urban Space, and the Moving Image (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 97–103. 64 Scott Bukatman, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 157–83. 65 Barbara Kevles, “Slavko Vorkapich on Film as a Visual Language and as a Form of Art,” Film Culture 38 (1965): 1–46; David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1988), 74.

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66 Michael Cowan, Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity: Avant-Garde, Advertising, Modernity (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 99–132. 67 Frank Lloyd Wright, The Disappearing City (New York, NY: William Farquhar Payson, 1932), 19. 68 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York, NY: Monacelli Press, 1994 [1978]), 9–11. 69 See Ghent Urban Studies Team (GUST) (ed.), The Urban Condition: Space, Community, and Self in the Contemporary Metropolis (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1999).

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part two

lászló moholy-nagy and the city (symphony) one

malte hagener László Moholy-Nagy is remembered mostly as a visual artist who worked in photography, painting, and sculpture, while his oeuvre as a filmmaker remains largely unknown. The Hungarian born polymath also gained recognition as a teacher and educator, first at the German Bauhaus from 1922 to 1928 (in Weimar and Dessau), later as the founder of the School of Design in Chicago in 1939. Arguably one of the central artists of the first half of the twentieth century, Moholy-Nagy explored the basic properties of artistic production in various media, such as light and shadow, movement and stasis, material and perspective. The modern city was one of the central topics of his work and consequently this thematic preoccupation can be found across the wide array of his different artistic, organizational, and didactic endeavors. It comes as no surprise that the city appears prominently in his filmic work as well, on which I will concentrate in this essay, but with an artist such as Moholy-Nagy it is practically impossible to limit oneself just to one medium.

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dynamic of the metropolis

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Moholy-Nagy can be considered as one of the founders of the city symphony genre, as he created one of its earliest examples, albeit in writing, photography, and design, a multi-media work he himself termed a “typophoto.”1 First conceived probably around 1921/22, and subsequently published in Hungarian in September 1924, his screenplay Dynamik der Gross-Stadt (“Dynamic of the Metropolis”) made a lasting impression in its 1925 republication as part of his Bauhaus-book Malerei Photographie Film, which included photographs and was marked by the use of bold modernist design. This text can be considered as a “city symphony on paper” and a model for many of the genre’s classics, which would appear in the years to follow, including his own contributions to the cycle of city films.2 The modernist collage exhibits equal interest in the new visual configurations that the city affords and in the optical possibilities of the relatively new medium of film. With its conscious and persistent employment of superimposition, forced perspective, reverse motion, slow motion, and many other tricks, it is a veritable companion of the visual possibilities of the camera and of post-production. A film based on the script was never shot and it is one of many unrealized plans in Moholy-Nagy’s career, who constantly generated new ideas.3 In fact, it has been argued that due to its experimental visual design, Dynamik der Gross-Stadt was not even meant to be realized, but in all likelihood, it influenced Walter Ruttmann, who knew Moholy-Nagy’s influential book.4 At first sight, Moholy-Nagy’s juxtaposition of text, images, and graphic elements on the flat surface of the page appears to owe more to the simultaneity of the collage than to the temporal sequence of montage. Yet, the arrangement of these different elements, the interest in graphical composition, and the insistence on the social diversity of the urban environment point forward to Moholy-Nagy’s engagements with the city as a multifaceted and open-ended entity. Most importantly, it stands in line with the interest in the city as an environment that at once demands and creates different modes of perception—by necessity, human perception and the reality of the urban stand in a mutual process of co-evolution that leads to ever higher levels of complexity. Of course, the modern metropolis became one of the key topics of modern art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—in painting (Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Constructivism, Futurism, et cetera), literature (James Joyce, John Dos Passos, Alfred Döblin), and other artistic forms, it has inspired and driven artists to new and innovative forms of expression.5 Moholy-Nagy’s script is a fascinating hybrid that attempts to find an aesthetic form for the experience of the modern city by combining text, images, and graphic composition. In this sense, the script is more “than merely a storyboard for an unrealized film, both the Hungarian and German versions . . . suggest themselves as kinetic works of visual

Figure 1.1  László Moholy-Nagy, Dynamik der Gross-Stadt: Skizze zu einem Filmmanuskript—Spread from László Moholy-Nagy, Malerei—Fotografie—Film (Bauhausbuch, 1925)

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and verbal poetry that mimic the dynamism of their subject.”6 The terms “script” and “scenario” might indeed be misleading in that they position the cinema as the natural and given telos of the ideas expressed in the manuscript. In fact, the text is a rather an open-ended investigation into the perceptual dynamics that the city necessitates and that the typoscript proposes. In this sense, the manuscript could be said to point forward to and anticipate Walter Benjamin’s idea of cinema as the “training ground” of perception, as it attempts to replicate a complex multi-media environment in a performative form.7 It is not the similarity of the images, texts, and graphical elements to specific configurations in the city that is at stake in Moholy-Nagy’s work, but rather an isomorphism with regards to the perceptual dynamics stimulated by the urban. It is furthermore exactly the dynamism of the composition that echoes and mimics the way the city challenges human perception constantly; no fixed form such as a monument or a painting could render the city adequately because movement and relational dynamics require a spectatorial position that is likewise destabilized and constantly in motion. Moholy-Nagy’s position can only be fully understood if considered in relation to his theoretical writings. In one of his key texts, “Production— Reproduction,” first published in 1922 in the magazine De Stijl, Moholy-Nagy proposes to move from artistic work concerned with the reproduction of the existing reality to works concerned with the production of new relations: “Since it is primarily production (productive creation) that serves human construction, we must strive to turn the apparatuses (instruments) used so far only for reproductive purposes into ones that can be used for productive purposes as well.”8 This argument provides a key to understanding his work on the city—a complex configuration such as the city perpetually generates new and different relations, so the city dweller is forced to constantly produce new schemata and mechanisms to cope with the environment. In a formulation that brings to mind key aspects of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964), MoholyNagy describes art and aesthetic experiences as perceptual extensions of the human system that are capable of supporting, mediating, and enhancing these reactive functions which, ultimately aim at coping with perceptual overload, shock, and confusion.9 In this perspective, art is not providing mimetic representations of a pre-existing reality, but it is rather generating this reality through the productive employment of its different techniques.

impressions and still-lifes The city as a topic can be traced through Moholy-Nagy’s overall filmic, photographic, and theoretical work from the 1920s to the 1940s. While his

moholy-nagy and the city (symphony)

first filmic work Impressionen vom alten Marseiller Hafen (Vieux Port) (Impressions of the Old Marseille Port, 1929/1932) includes impressive footage of the pont transbordeur in the harbor of Marseille, a landmark of modern engineering filmed in Moholy-Nagy’s characteristic constructivist style favoring high angles, tilted views, and graphical compositions verging on the abstract, the film also contains scenes shot in the city’s popular quarters, marking his interest in the documentation of social reality to be found in the margins of urban environments. The film opens with a map of Marseille in which the area of the old port is cut out from below with a pair of scissors. As soon as the cutting is completed, a film starts within this cut-out surface, effectively merging the cartographic space of the map with the actual documentary images. Moreover, Moholy-Nagy’s characteristic constructivist, multiperspectival approach can be found in views of bustling traffic shot from above and filmed through the grids of balconies, but the film also contains documentary images of city life less obsessed with novel visual composition and rather interested in observing the life of people in the city. In some scenes, characters acknowledge the presence of the camera through direct address and a look into the lens, while other scenes appear to have been filmed with a hidden camera. The heterogeneity of the city, as well as the many different forms in which film and photography as media can present this formation in ever novel ways became a central topic for Moholy-Nagy, as his “modernist approach theorized that the only way to liberate audience consciousness was through the use of multiple perspectives, whereby

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Figure 1.2  Impressionen vom alten Marseiller Hafen (Vieux Port) (László Moholy-Nagy, 1929)

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it was up to the viewer to construct an objective vision through the act of reception.”10 Like his earlier script on the dynamic of the metropolis, the film does not follow the typical structure of “a day in the life,” but instead explores just a smaller section of the city. Moholy-Nagy’s distance from the narrative model is telling, just as he turned his own limitation—he had limited raw material at his disposal—into a conscious decision on the part of the filmmaker.11 Berliner Stilleben (Berlin Still Life, shot probably in 1931/32, even though some sources give 1926) shows the city and its vibrant life in a social realist spirit. The film opens in the better bourgeois quarters of Berlin with a signature high-angle shot of children playing on a boulevard taken from a balcony (quite possibly from Moholy-Nagy’s own flat) and then proceeds with a streetcar ride into the dirty tenement houses of Wedding, where it shows an eviction, children playing in dirt, and other stereotypical images of poverty and poor living conditions. It has consequently been seen either as a social documentary and accusation of injustice, or it has been interpreted as an exercise in “slumming,” the expedition of a bourgeois artist into the underbelly of the city. The film’s “impressionistic, tourist perspective” exhibits a fascination with dirt, decay, and rubble.12 Yet again, the film concentrates on the most visible material surfaces of the city that are normally ignored—the paving and concrete of the streets, the bricks and plaster of the façades, the shadows and reflections created by light. The shots are often presented in odd and stark angles so typical for the city symphony genre, yet they defy the logic of “a day in the life” which characterizes the majority of this cycle of films. The formal parameters, such as mise-en-scène, montage, and camera movement, emphasize the constriction and lack of space that characterize the working-class boroughs of Berlin and other industrial cities. However, the overall structure of the film accepts poverty and misery as given conditions, the roots and causes of social imbalance remain beyond the scope of the film. The film is typical of Moholy-Nagy’s cinematic approach in that it features a polyfocal array of perspectives and modalities aimed at forcing the spectator to adopt different point of views, while, at the same time, the film avoids digging too deeply into social, political, or other causes. While Moholy-Nagy’s Impressionen and Stilleben appear somewhat improvised and spontaneous, they also correspond with more conceptual considerations put forward in his texts. For Moholy-Nagy, it was the act of reception that put the various perspectives and aspects of the city back together, it was the viewer that was necessary for creating a synthesis and making sense of the disparate elements. Consequently, a 1927 essay addressed the act of reception by proposing a so-called “polykino,” a cinema with a variable screen and projection apparatus in which the

moholy-nagy and the city (symphony)

format could be adapted according to the presented images. The aim of such an apparatus was, as always with Moholy-Nagy, to train the perceptual capabilities of the spectators: “The vast development both of technique and of the big cities have increased the capacity of our perceptual organs for simultaneous acoustical and optical activity.”13 Time and again, Moholy-Nagy’s art investigated the new perceptual possibilities afforded by modern life and technology, but in this case not within the filmic texture itself, but transferred to the reception situation. Here, Moholy-Nagy’s ideas were in tune with his contemporaries such as Siegfried Kracauer and especially Walter Benjamin who believed that the tremendous changes brought about by modernization had to be approached dialectically, taking stock of both of the losses and of the potentials of modern media. At around the same time Moholy-Nagy shot what is probably his most well-known filmic work: Ein Lichtspiel: Schwarz—Weiss—Grau (1932), made as a companion piece to his sculpture Lichtraummodulator. Unlike his other films, this work has entered the canon of experimental cinema because it is more easily classifiable as a (largely) abstract film dealing with light, shadow, and reflection created by a kinetic sculpture. Indeed, this design was very similar to the one Moholy-Nagy employed for the special effects on the H.G. Wells adaptation Things to Come, shot only a few years later in London, but there it was used to very different ends.14

gypsies and giraffes Moholy-Nagy’s filmic activities were not limited to works that provide cross-sections of the city, but it also encompassed films that approach documentary formats dealing with one specific topic. In the spring of 1932, he shot what came to be known as Gross-Stadt-Zigeuner (Urban Gypsies 1932,), a 12-minute film focusing on gypsies living in a peripheral zone of Berlin.15 The film was never shown publicly prior to Moholy-Nagy’s death and exists in at least two different versions, which, as Robin Curtis has argued, encourage either an optical or a haptical mode of reception.16 In the perspective provided by the former, the film’s use of authoritative voice-over pities the gypsies and their desperate lives among dismal living conditions, as well as commenting on how their superstitions have contributed to their appalling state. The other version fits within the cycle of city films— if we understand them ultimately as a perceptual experiment geared towards developing new forms of sensory stimulation—as part and parcel of Moholy-Nagy’s investigation of different experiential registers and intermodality. The hand-camera and the sudden cuts underline the subjective experience of the visit to the gypsy camp: “Such images produce, firstly, an unusually strong impression of kinaesthetic or haptic perception

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Figure 1.3  Berliner Stilleben (László Moholy-Nagy, 1932) (left) and Grossstadt-Zigeuner (László Moholy-Nagy, 1932) (right)

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and secondly, point unavoidably to the presence of Moholy-Nagy behind the camera.”17 Unlike many other city films in which either a given structure—e.g., a symphony (as in the case of Ruttmann), or the capabilities of the medium beyond human intervention (as in the case of Vertov)—are taken as starting points for the films, Gross-Stadt-Zigeuner clearly presents a subjective approach to the topic. In the summer of 1933—Moholy-Nagy seemed to have not yet made up his mind whether to stay in Germany or whether to leave for good—he took the opportunity to film Architekturkongress (Architectural Congress, 1933,), a filmic documentation of the famous CIAM Congress on modern architecture, featuring many luminaries of the epoch such as Le Corbusier and Fernand Léger. The conference took place during a cruise in the Mediterranean from Marseille to Athens and back over the course of two weeks, from 29 July to 13 August, 1933.18 The film resembles an amateur travel

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film more than it does a serious engagement with the topic of the meeting: “the functional city.” This “mixture of a favor for friends and interesting opportunity to work in the context of international and interdisciplinary avant-garde connections” nevertheless exhibits some of Moholy-Nagy’s trademarks.19 The film begins with shots of the pont transbordeur taken from Impressionen vom alten Marseiller Hafen, while the scenes on board and during the port of call excursions mirror Moholy-Nagy’s interest in fluid handheld camerawork. Even though we do not really come to understand the topic of debates and lectures, it is evident that Moholy-Nagy is interested in the different visual registers of the trip: we repeatedly see different city maps that accompany the talks and incidental happenings, as well as touristic impressions of the Greek capital and islands, but also strong graphical structures tending towards abstract and geometrical shapes and many overhead shots, both of which had become something of a Moholy-Nagy signature. Despite these preoccupations, the film remains more of a social “diary” of the events than an insightful examination of the theme underlying the conference. During his first exile in Great-Britain, a different attempt to deal with the city as a topic can be seen in Moholy-Nagy’s contribution to the big-budget science-fiction film Things to Come (William Cameron Menzies, produced by Alexander Korda, 1936,), for which he was hired as a designer of special effects and for a specific sequence showing the city of the future. Of his design, only interspersed shots were used in the finished film, a disappointment for the artist who was hoping for a breakthrough in commercial filmmaking.20 This detour into mainstream movies remained an exception in Moholy-Nagy’s career, who subsequently only shot commissioned films. The New Architecture at the London Zoo (1936) is an example of such a commission. He received it from the Museum of Modern Art in New York in order to document recent architectural developments at the London Zoo, as the title suggests. This institutional endorsement was geared toward a marriage of modern architecture and its dynamic portrayal in a modern form. The film has often been seen as a rather straightforward and traditional documentary, but it does show some of Moholy-Nagy’s typical trademarks. The film exhibits movement and stasis both of architecture as well as the image by extensive movement of the camera (travelling, pans). As in previous films, a mixture of text, graphics, and photographic aspects give a specific and mediated impression of an environment, in this case the new buildings. Textual descriptions in titles, sketches, and floor plans, as well as shots of the actual buildings from different angles and perspectives show the complexity of the architecture, as well as the different registers needed to adequately reflect this in cinematic form. The film is an exercise in how to transpose modern

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architecture into film which, as Benjamin remarked, is experienced through use, into a different form which typically employs a mixture of different aspects and perspectives instead of limiting oneself to just one perspective.21

conclusion malte hagener

The filmic work of László Moholy-Nagy does not easily fit into the standard understanding of the city symphony. However, the relationship of these films to Moholy-Nagy’s larger artistic and theoretical preoccupations provides us with an invaluable understanding of the context out of which the city symphony emerged. More specifically, the series of short films and mixed media texts, produced over a period of roughly 15 years, highlight various aspects and modulate central concerns of the urban, and of modernity more generally, as seen by Moholy-Nagy. Nevertheless, they do not limit themselves to one overarching perspective or position. In its variety of topics, styles, and manners of addressing the spectator, as well as in the different ideas of what the cinema could be in terms of its production context (amateur film, commissioned film, independent artists’ cinema, filmic diary), this body of work present the modern city as a complex and multi-dimensional environment that can never be grasped in its entirety. Instead, the films share a poly-focal approach to a similarly poly-focal topic. Nevertheless, certain interests typical of Moholy-Nagy’s work can be traced all through the films: slanted and overhead perspectives abound in the films, but also alternate with documentary glimpses into city life, especially in the poorer quarters, as well as different visual registers (maps, graphs). Despite this marked interest in social differences, the films do not inquire into the social and political causes behind inequality, but they turn toward a Constructivist fascination with patterns, forms, and visual structures, which is manifested in the change of perspectives and points of view. While they may not show political engagements with questions of inequality and segregation, Moholy-Nagy’s complex approach toward the visual dynamism of the urban environment continues to fascinate and inspire viewers until today.

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notes 1 László Moholy-Nagy, Malerei—Fotografie—Film (Köthen: Druckhaus, 1925), 120. English edition: Painting—Photography—Film (London: Lund Humphries, 1969). 2 Krisztina Passuth, “Moholy-Nagy und Berlin: Berlin als Modell der Metropole,” in Gottfried Jäger and Wessing Gudrun (eds.), Über MoholyNagy (Bielefeld: Kerber, 1997), 37–44.

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3 For overviews, see Jan Sahli, Filmische Sinneserweiterung: László Moholy-Nagys Filmwerk und Theorie (Marburg: Schüren, 2006); and Jeanpaul Goergen, “Lichtspiel und soziale Reportage: László Moholy-Nagy und die deutsche Filmavantgarde,” in Doménico Chiappe and Luisa Luciux (eds.), László Moholy-Nagy: Kunst des Lichts (München: Hirmer, 2010). 4 Sahli, Filmische Sinneserweiterung, 121. 5 Andreas Haus, “László Moholy-Nagys ‘Dynamik der Groß-stadt’ und die City-Symphonien der 20er Jahre,” in Thomas Tode (ed.), bauhaus & film (Wien: Böhlau, 2011), 75–93; Chris Dähne, Die Stadtsinfonien der 1920er Jahre: Architektur zwischen Film, Fotografie und Literatur (Bielefeld: transcript, 2013). 6 Edward Dimendberg, “Transfiguring the Urban Gray: László MoholyNagy’s Film Scenario Dynamic of the Metropolis,” in Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (eds.), Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 112. 7 Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (dritte Fassung)” (1939), in Gesammelte Schriften 1.2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 471–508. 8 Moholy-Nagy, Painting—Photography—Film, 30. 9 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1964). 10 Jan-Christopher Horak, “László Moholy-Nagy: The Constructivist Urge,” in Making Images Move: Photographers and Avant-Garde Cinema (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 114. 11 László Moholy-Nagy, “Neue Filmexperimente” (1933), in Krisztina Passuth (ed.), Moholy-Nagy (Weingarten: Weingarten, 1986), 332–6. 12 Horak, László Moholy-Nagy, 123. 13 Moholy-Nagy, Painting—Photography—Film, 43. 14 Sahli, Filmische Sinneserweiterung, 144f. 15 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality (New York, NY: Harper and Brothers, 1950), 75–80. 16 Robin Curtis, Conscientious Viscerality: The Autobiographical Stance in German Film and Video (Berlin: Edition Imorde, 2006), 89. 17 Curtis, Conscientious Viscerality, 99. 18 Sybil Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy, 90–5. 19 Sahli, Filmische Sinneserweiterung, 173. 20 Johannes Kamps, “Lichte Zukunft für ‘Everytown’: László Moholy-Nagys Mitarbeit an dem englischen Science-Fiction-Film Things to Come,” in Christoph Andreas, Maraike Bückling, and Roland Dorn (eds.), Festschrift für Hartmut Biermann (Weinheim: Acta Humaniora VCH, 1990); Christopher Frayling, Things to Come (London: British Film Institute, 1995), 71–5. 21 Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk.”

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productive city ruttmann’s düsseldorf: kleiner film two einer großen stadt

michael cowan In June 1935, planning began in Düsseldorf for what would become the largest exhibition of the Third Reich with some seven million visitors: Schaffendes Volk: Große Ausstellung Düsseldorf Schlageterstadt 1937 (Productive Volk: The Great Exhibition of Düssseldorf Schlageterstadt 1937). Although less well-known today than the Degenerate Art exhibition held in Munich the same year, Schaffendes Volk was undoubtedly the more important event for the Nazi government, intended as it was to showcase the “productivity” of the new regime—in particular the “four-year plan” of industrial investment, public works, and rearmament—to the outside world. But Schaffendes Volk also offers a good example of urban rebranding after 1933. Düsseldorf was already known as Germany’s premier city for art and exhibitions, where the largest exhibition of the Weimar Republic—the famous GeSoLei exhibition of hygiene (Gesundheitspflege), social welfare (Soziale Fürsorge) and physical exercise (Leibesübungen)—had taken place in 1926. In many ways, Schaffendes Volk drew on the GeSoLei legacy, but the new exhibition, as the title “Schlageterstadt” suggests, featured an entirely different symbolic

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geography. Rather than occupying the existing exhibition buildings and grounds, it was laid out to the north of the city around the memorial for Leo Albert Schlageter, a member of the German Freikorps executed by occupying French troops in 1923 and subsequently mythologized by the Nazi party as a resistance leader and “the first soldier of the Third Reich.”1 Erected in 1931 on the site of the execution, the Schlageter memorial had become an integral part of Düsseldorf’s urban identity after the Nazi seizure of power, its massive steel cross featuring prominently in every guidebook to the city. Capitalizing on this iconic status, the organizers of Schaffendes Volk transformed the fields around the memorial into a new housing district—the “Schlageter district” (today the Siedlung Golzheim)—to emphasize the exhibition’s broader role as witness to the “rebirth” of the nation and its industry. The same year that planning for Schaffendes Volk began, the Propaganda Office of the city of Düsseldorf also commissioned another project in which both the Schlageter monument and the brand image of the “productive city” figured centrally: Walter Ruttmann’s Kleiner Film einer großen Stadt . . . der Stadt Düsseldorf am Rhein (Small Film for a Big City . . . the City of Düsseldorf on the Rhine, 1935). For any city commissioning a filmic portrait, Ruttmann (who himself had created the film advertisement for the GeSoLei exhibition in 1926) was an obvious choice. Not only had he pioneered the city symphony form with his Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt of 1927. By 1935, he had also become a go-to expert for short form promotional films. Ruttmann had already made two such films for the newly founded Office of the Reich Peasant Leader (Stabsamt des Reichsbauernführers), Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil, 1933), and Altgermanische Bauernkultur (Ancient German Peasant Culture, 1934), as well as one film for the German Council on Steel Usage (Beratungsstelle für Stallverwendung), Metall des Himmels (Metal from the Sky, 1934–5). In 1935, after taking up a full-time position in the advertising department of the Ufa, he then embarked on a series of films on the subject he was best known for, creating city portraits of Düsseldorf (1935), Stuttgart (Stuttgart. Die Großstadt zwischen Wald und Reben, 1935), and later Hamburg (Welstrasse See—Welthafen Hamburg, 1938). Commissioned directly by urban PR departments and produced under the aegis of Germany’s largest film company, these miniature city films (of approximately 15 minutes) have a decidedly different feel from Ruttmann’s Weimar work. In Berlin, Ruttmann had sought to convey the experience of the modern industrial city as such, depicting it as a “complex machine,” whose daily cycles of work and leisure served to manage the sheer excess of bodies, traffic and information circulating within it.2 To this end, he also avoided focusing on famous monuments, depicting Berlin rather as a collection of “any-spaces-whatever”—of streets, canals, offices, factory floors, restaurants, theaters, cinemas, sports arenas, et cetera.3 By contrast,

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Ruttmann’s later city portraits were explicit exercises in branding, which sought to demonstrate the city’s role in the national “reawakening” after 1933. The Stuttgart film, for example, showcased the city’s traditional tourist destinations, while also foregrounding modern building projects and above all Stuttgart’s new role as the “City of Germans Abroad” (Stadt des Auslanddeutschtums) and home of the Deutsches Auslands-Institut, which had become the headquarters for efforts to propagate National Socialist ideology to Germans living abroad.4 Düsseldorf undertakes an analogous branding operation. Far from the nameless spaces of labor and leisure foregrounded in Berlin, the film highlights one highly symbolic place after another. From the opening titles displayed over the famous monument of the Duke Jan Wellem, Ruttmann then takes spectators on a virtual tour of signature sites and architecture: the ruins of Barbarossa’s imperial palace in the Kaiserswerth district; the houses of the Altstadt; the Rheinhalle and planetarium (originally constructed for the GeSoLei); the Königsallee with its exclusive shops and terrace cafes; or the Imperial Gardens (Hofgarten) with its famous sculptures and fountains (e.g., the Märchenbrunnen and the “Grüner Junge”); at the same time, the film highlights—in a manner reminiscent of Metall des Himmels—Düsseldorf’s “productivity” through a focus on key industrial buildings, such as the offices of the Henkel conglomerate, the Stahlhof (home of the Association of Steel Works), and the headquarters of Mannesmann steel production (designed by Peter Behrens). This is, indeed, the same combination of places highlighted in contemporary guidebooks, and Düsseldorf is, by any measure, a tourist film, modeled broadly on contemporary guidebooks, which themselves sought to rebrand Düsseldorf from an “art and garden city” to a center of steel production.5 This focus on symbolic places finds an echo in the film’s symbolic temporality. Whereas Berlin condensed its action into a single random day— an “any-day-whatever”—to convey the typical functioning of the urban apparatus, Düsseldorf, as Carolyn Birdsall has pointed out, follows a ritual timeframe by highlighting urban festivals and rituals over the space of a single year, from the opening shots of January Carnival celebrations to the closing sequence featuring the traditional St. Martin’s festivities in November (where children’s choirs descend into the streets).6 Between the two, the film features a lengthy sequence of the annual July fair organized by the St. Sebastianus Schützenverein, which was celebrating its 500th anniversary during the filming of Düsseldorf in 1935. Here, too, one can find direct equivalents in the guidebooks.7 Within this parade of privileged times and places, Düsseldorf carefully avoids any overt references to National Socialist party politics.8 Nonetheless, the film is at pains to represent a new city fit for new times. Many of

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the sites foregrounded in the film were explicit “achievements” of the Nazi government, including the newly rebuilt railway station (1932–6) and the extension of the silos at the Plange mill (1934). At the same time, the film strives to imbue Düsseldorf with a sense of history, giving particular attention to the all-important Schlageter monument. Just after the opening shots, featuring a parade of carnival masks, the film cuts to a different kind of mask: a series of death masks—followed by gravestones—of significant artists and intellectuals (the “sons of the city”): the authors Karl Immermann and Christian Dietrich Grabbe, the painters Peter von Cornelius and Alfred Rethel, and the composer Robert Schumann. Notably absent is the city’s most celebrated poet Heinrich Heine, whose works had been banned. This parade of founding figures then culminates in a sweeping camera movement, which pans through the sky to land on the 88-foot cross of the Schlageter memory site. As one review published just after the film’s premiere on 15 November 1935 described it, the sequence served to link two types of “heroes”: “This soaring upward movement of the camera is like a soaring up of the spirit—a symbolic image, whose wondrous arc binds together the heroes of the spirit and the fighter for the new times.”9 The reviewer’s language here recalls, once again, contemporary guidebooks, which touted the monument as the site where “the German hero revolted and German spirit raised itself up.”10 Forming the culmination of an illustrious line of forefathers, the Schlageter monument thus serves in Ruttmann’s film to inscribe the list of “Dichter und Denker” into a narrative of national sacrifice and national “reawakening.”11 Indeed, the “soaring” camera movement of the Schlageter sequence can be understood in analogy to other Nazi ritual performances of that same narrative and national resurrection. In Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (for which Ruttmann himself had shot a prologue that was ultimately excised), one such performance is on view in a scene where the names of WWI battles are called out as the Nazi flags are gradually lowered to the ground, only to be lifted up toward the sky as the speakers of the workers’ brigades explain that the martyrs of Nazism’s prehistory are not dead: “You are not dead. You live in Germany.” In the Schlageter sequence, Ruttmann’s camera movement performs a similar gesture. As the names of illustrious ancestors appear one by one along with their death masks, the camera leads the gaze of spectators downward toward the gravestones and eventually to the earth (quite literally in a tilt downward from the Immermann gravestone). As the musical score grows more solemn, the camera then abruptly turns upward to the sky and—through a conspicuous dissolve of clouds—lands on a low-angle shot of the Schlageter cross. Not unlike other Nazi commemoration ceremonies, Ruttmann’s camera here performs a “resurrection” of fallen heroes, whose sacrifice is redeemed through a rebirth of the German nation.

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Figure 2.1  Kleiner Film einer großen Stadt . . . Der Stadt Düsseldorf am Rhein (Walter Ruttmann, 1935)

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The “wondrous arc” of the Schlageter sequence in fact forms part of a broader pattern of camera movement in Düsseldorf. Unlike the mostly stationary shots of Berlin, the camera in Düsseldorf is in constant motion. On one level, as Lutz Philipp Günther suggests, such pervasive camera movement forms part of the film’s tourist mission, taking viewers on “phantom rides” through the city streets.12 Indeed, the film is full of the kinds of pans, tilts, and travelling shots that imitate the gaze of a tourist surveying the city, its monuments, vistas, buildings, and skylines. In some cases, the film even mimics verbatim the suggestions of guidebooks on how to experience the city visually; for example, one sequence, in which a street-level shot of the Wilhelm-Marx-Haus (“Düsseldorf’s trademark” according to contemporary guidebooks) is followed by a panorama of the urban vista from the platform atop the same building, reproduces the instructions of contemporary guides to take the elevator to the top of the building for the best “long view” (Fernsicht) of the city.13 Within this system of camera movement, Ruttmann’s film places a key emphasis on verticality, as the camera tilts up and down to scan the facades of the city’s buildings. But as much as these shots function to imitate a tourist gaze, they also take part—not unlike the low-angle shots in Triumph of the Will—in a reverential observation of the newly awakened nation, and in particular of the German steel industry, whose central companies the

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Figure 2.2  Kleiner Film einer großen Stadt . . . Der Stadt Düsseldorf am Rhein (Walter Ruttmann, 1935)

film carefully identifies for spectators.14 Many of the companies featured here had already figured in Metall des Himmels, whose molten steel imagery Ruttmann also repeats in Düsseldorf in a lengthy sequence of steel production, and both Henkel and Mannesmann would go on to form subjects of independent promotional films by Ruttmann.15 All were key players in a central National Socialist narrative of “awakening” through reindustrialization and rearmament after the years of occupation, reparations, and demilitarization. In this sense, Düsseldorf illustrates well how the formal means of experimental filmmaking could be applied to ideological ends after 1933. Indeed, such formal features included not only camera movement, but also montage, in particular Ruttmann’s signature use of visual and thematic parallels. In Berlin, the pervasive parallels between people, machines, and animals served to generate an effect of statistical “regularity,” showing what the city’s various actants typically do at given moments in the course of a day.16 After 1933, and in particular beginning with Metall des Himmels, a distinct change in Ruttmann’s editing patterns becomes visible, where such parallels no longer serve to convey regularities but rather a sense of historical continuity, whereby industrial production appears as the culmination of a long history of Germanic “productivity.”17

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Düsseldorf offers a good example of this montage of continuity. Just after the Schlageter sequence, the film cuts to a field of tulips, followed by a landscape filmed through the window of a moving train, soon revealed as a train travelling to Düsseldorf from the surrounding countryside. In contrast to the famous opening sequence of Berlin, the smooth train-ride of Düsseldorf positions the city not as the embodiment of a technological modernity that “interrupts” nature, but as a city firmly “rooted” in the landscape. Shots of the tulips give way to trees gliding past the windows, then to the water of the Rhine flowing elegantly, and finally to the agricultural industry along the river banks, before turning to frolicking bathers, water-skiers, and sailboats on the river. In a preliminary written sketch for the film, Ruttmann described his intention to show the city “embedded” in the surrounding landscape,18 and many of his visual parallels perform a similar function of “embedding” the industrial city in a deep tradition. Typical, in this respect, is a sequence in which Ruttmann cuts from the neoclassical Doric columns of the Ratinger Gate in the old city to the newly completed silos of the Plange Mill. The graphic match effects a juxtaposition of visual forms familiar from Ruttmann’s earlier work, but it also takes on a new ideological function of embedding industrial buildings within a national architectural tradition. Such uses of experimental film language were, in fact, a frequent trope of non-fiction filmmaking under Nazism. Guido Seeber featured similar parallels in his film Ewiger Wald (1936) to compare the rows of trees in the “eternal forest” to lines of Prussian soldiers, and Ruttmann himself would feature a similar use of montage in his Mannesmann film (1937), where the steel pipes of the Mannesmann factory dissolve into the trees of the forest around Remscheid where the factory was founded. Such parallels worked to convey a semiotics of “rootedness,” where industry appears as the outgrowth (rather than the interruption) of artisanal labor, where modern architecture builds upon (rather than supplanting) classical traditions, and where the city itself appears embedded in both history and the landscape. In this sense, Ruttmann’s montage in Düsseldorf strives to realize the project he laid out in an interview from 1935:

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I would be happy if this idea . . . could provide me with the opportunity to create the epos of a German landscape, which would lead organically from the Stone Age through all of the nation’s historical struggles to the joy of Germany’s reawakening.19

The silo montage prefigures a more extended rhetorical parallel towards the end of the film. Just after a sequence showing the Imperial Gardens and their famous sculptures, the film takes viewers into a montage of artists at work. Reminiscent of the Schaffende Hände (Productive Hands)

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series of artist portraits created in the 1920s by Hans Cürlis, the sequence shows a series of sculptors, wood-cutters, metal workers, architects, and painters at work—all meant to represent Düsseldorf’s strong artistic and artisanal tradition. As the camera then tracks forward towards a painting of an urban industrial scene, Ruttmann cuts abruptly to a shot of a factory with smoke billowing from the chimney. On one level, this visual juxtaposition simply emphasizes film’s ability to bring still paintings to life. But like the cut from the Doric columns to the modern silos, it also establishes a semiotic “arc” leading from the “productive hands” of artisans to the industrial productivity of Düsseldorf’s steel factories, from the chiseling of wood, metal, and plaster to the forming of steel parts by giant factory machines. From the outdoor shot of the billowing smoke, the film then proceeds into the factory interiors: the packaging plant of Henkel, the pipe production of Mannesmann, and the myriad images of machines parts and molten metal that formed a recurrent motif in Ruttmann’s work from Acciaio (1933) to Metall des Himmels (1935) to Mannesmann (1937) to Deutsche Panzer (1941). The result of this transition from “productive hands” to “productive machines” is a rhetorical depiction of industrial Düsseldorf not as a break with the past, but as a “productive city,” whose traditions of artisanal labor flow “organically” into the modern production of steel factories. As the review of 1935 put it: “The sculptor’s cautious chisel work and the infernal pounding of the steel hammers—both activities are nothing other than witnesses of the same productive spirit [schaffenden Geistes] in the same city.”20 This celebration of “productivity” as the thread of historical continuity forms one of the central rhetorical arguments of Ruttmann’s post-1933 city portraits. In this sense, the lines spoken by a character in Ruttmann’s Stuttgart film could easily have served as the motto for Düsseldorf: “Motivation, proficiency and a sense of quality work . . . this has been our way down to the present day in manual labor as in industry, and this is why we have continued to improve steadily despite all the crises.”21 Like Stuttgart, and like Schaffendes Volk, Düsseldorf sought to convey this sense of national continuity through its many juxtapositions of hands and machines, countryside and city, ancient and modern architecture. Unlike Berlin, which showed a city without history, Düsseldorf shows us a city shot through with places and traces of national memory: with the ruins of Barbarossa’s palace, the 500 years of the Schützenverband or the graves of the city’s many “heroes.” But the film also portrays these past figures as precursors and agents of a “sacrifice,” who led the way toward the heroic productivity of the newly industrialized city. In this sense, Düsseldorf takes part in a particular National Socialist narrative of urban “reawakening,” which would find another expression two years later in the exhibition Schaffendes Volk.

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1 For Schlageter’s importance to the Third Reich and Düsseldorf in particular, see Carolyn Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space in Germany 1933–1945 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 31–52. 2 See Walter Ruttmann, “How I Made My Berlin Film” (1927), trans. Michael Cowan, in: The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory 1907–1933, ed. Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer and Michael Cowan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 463–464 (here 464). 3 Gilles Deleuze adapted the term “any-space-whatever” from Pascal Augé to describe the deterritorialized spaces of a post-WWII cinema, in which perception became uncoupled from action. Here, I use the term in a sense closer to that of Augé to describe how Ruttmann’s film captures the anonymous, transitory spaces created by modern urban planning, in which individuals are depersonalized. 4 For more on the Stuttgart film, see Michael Cowan, Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 135–36. 5 On Düsseldorf as a tourist film, see also William Uricchio, “Ruttmann nach 1933,” in Jeanpaul Goergen (ed.), Walter Ruttmann: Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Deutsche Kinemathek, 1989), 61; Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes, 154. 6 Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes, 152. I am grateful to Eva Hielscher for pointing out that Düsseldorf carnival season officially begins on 11 November, the same day as the St. Martin’s celebration. Hence Ruttmann’s film in fact covers an entire year from November to November. 7 One such guidebook, Düsseldorf und seine nähere Umgebung (1937) includes a text by Hans Müller-Schlösser explaining the various Volksfeste of the city, which covers precisely the same festivals featured in Ruttmann’s film: Carnival, the Schützenfest, and the Kinderfest (St. Martins Day). MüllerSchlösser admits begrudgingly that Carnival might have been influenced by France, but insists on the Germanic origins of the Schützenfest and St. Martins Day. See Hans Müller-Schlösser, “Wie Düsseldorf Volksfeste feiert,” in Düsseldorf und seine nähere Umgebung (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1937), 178–84. See also Düsseldorf: Kunst- und Gartenstadt am Rhein im Jahre der großen Reichsausstellung ‚Schaffendes Volk’ Düsseldorf 1937 (Düsseldorf: Landesfremdenverkehrsverband Rheinland e.V., 1937), 7. 8 The censors even removed one image of the Swastika and the words NSDAP from a montage of light advertisements (though the name of a local Nazi paper, Die braune Post: NS-Sonntags-Zeitung, is still visible among the titles shown in the sequence). See Goergen, Walter Ruttmann, 144. 9 Cited in Goergen, Walter Ruttmann, 144. 10 Düsseldorf und seine nähere Umgebung, 57. 11 In Hans Johst’s drama Schlageter (1930), which was dedicated to Hitler and shown in more than 1000 German cities, the execution of the closing scene is accompanied by the words “Deutschland erwache!” 12 Lutz Philipp Günther, Die Bildhafte Repräsentation deutscher Städte: Von den Chroniken der frühen Neuzeit zu den Websites der Gegenwart (Cologne: Böhlau, 2009), 251. 13 See Düsseldorf und Umgebung: Grieben Reiseführer (Berlin: Grieben, 1935), 36; Düsseldorf und seine nähere Umgebung, 46. 14 On low angle shots of industrial buildings in the film, the review of 1935 had this to say: “[D]ie Bilder [sehen] die Bauten in monumentaler Schrägstellung: Das ist keine ästhetische Verspieltheit, das ist der geistesverwandte

ruttmann’s düsseldorf

Bildausdruck für die Kraft der Stadt.” Cited in Goergen, Walter Ruttmann, 144. 15 For an extended analysis of Ruttmann’s steel films, see Cowan, Walter Ruttmann, 133–73. 16 As I’ve argued elsewhere, this “regularity also served to mitigate the contingency of the 1000s of photographic representations used in Berlin. Cowan, Walter Ruttmann, 75–82. 17 See Cowan, Walter Ruttmann, 149–53. 18 “Aus dem Entwurf,” in Goergen, Walter Ruttmann, 144. 19 “Ruttmann plaudert,” unidentified newspaper clipping, reprinted in Goergen, Walter Ruttmann, 92. 20 Cited in Goergen, Walter Ruttmann, 144. 21 Stuttgart, die Großstadt zwischen Wald und Reben, censor card no. 40866, dated 4 December 1935, Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Berlin, 2.

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minor paris city symphonies three

christa blümlinger With its World’s Fairs, boulevards lined with street lights, and shopping arcades, Paris had become the epitome of urban modernity and an international meeting place for the literary, musical, artistic, and cinematic avant-gardes. Paris was not only the city where Marinetti published the first Futurist Manifesto (1909) and James Joyce published Ulysses (1922), it also became the location and subject of several city symphonies.1 Apart from Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926), films by Marcel Carné, Henri Chomette, Lucie Derain, Eugène Deslaw, Joris Ivens, Boris Kaufman, Georges Lacombe, and André Sauvage among others documented the spaces and inhabitants of the city. Most of these filmmakers were part of the French film avant-garde, which is often associated with swift editing, unusual points of view, and a non-narrative film form preoccupied with the play of light and optical sensations, rhythm, movement, variations in speed (slow motion, time lapses), and abstract shapes evoking a cinéma pur.2 Several artists connected these ideas of a pure cinema with the optical effects of motorized traffic and urban space. However, city symphonies often undermine this notion

minor paris city symphonies

of aesthetic purity as their subjects were entrenched in reality. Given this perspective, Henri Chomette’s Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse (1925) is a documentary on the Paris railways and waterways as well as a kinetic study of speed and moving light. As in his Cinq minutes de cinéma pur (1926), Chomette opens his film with images of geometric figures and reflections. In the second part of the film, the city is presented as a stage of spinning movements, speed, and light effects as well as contrasts between backgrounds and surfaces, shadows and reflections, and sky and water. At the end of the film, the Eiffel tower is tilted in a dizzying swing, the camera is mounted under a train, and bridges and rails merge in a dynamic montage. In so doing, Chomette demonstrates how the body of modern man is exposed to the sensory stimuli of the metropolis—a topic that is also crucial in Eugène Deslaw’s Les Nuits électriques (1928), in which the electrified and wired city becomes an attraction for the crowds gathering in front of illuminated shop windows and glittering amusement halls. Shot in Berlin and Paris, Deslaw’s film turns the nocturnal city, with its pulsating spectacle of machines and artificial light, into a vitalist flux. In his comment on Walter Benjamin’s 1929 Vogue article entitled “Paris, la ville dans le miroir,” Patrice Rollet aptly noted the interconnections between city and film, referring to the visual experiences they have in common. Whether filmed or not, the city reigns. The city determines the cinema from one side to the other. . . . From the 1920s onwards, the avant-gardes exchanged the city for the flashing of its signs or its jeux de reflets et de vitesse; Paris escapes us. Because it has become cinema itself. Light and movement. Trace et défilement. Espace quelconque.3

Rollet does not only explicitly refer to Chomette’s film and cinéma pur, he also touches upon the similarities between film and city by means of an implicit reference to the Deleuzian notion of an “espace quelconque.”4 This “any­space whatsoever” marks quite a few city films of the Paris avantgarde, as their close ups, framings, and montage result in spatial disconnection and discontinuity. This is illustrated, for instance, by the 20-minute documentary Les Halles (1927) by Boris Kaufman and André Galitzine, which opens with the nocturnal darkness of the periphery, its depths illuminated by swiftly shifting car lights. In the following shots, delivery trucks and horse-drawn carriages appear one by one in the beams of headlights, disconnected from urban space. Next, the film shows how heavy jute bags and filled baskets are unloaded from freight wagons, focusing on the gestures of the laborers. The subtle encounter between man and machine emphasizes different rhythms and technologies and it structures the entire film. It marks not only the opening sequence, set in the nocturnal interior of the market, but

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also the latter parts of the film, which take us outside the market halls of glass, cast iron, and steel in the light of dawn. As in Émile Zola’s 1873 novel Le Ventre de Paris or “The Belly of Paris,” Kaufman and Galitzine present the awakening city as defined by a tension between old and new forms of urban organization, visualized by the contrasts between birds’ eye views of motorized traffic and swarming crowds on the one hand, and portraits of individual retailers with handcarts, day laborers, and gleaners on the other. Finally, an accelerated montage of garbage trucks and sweepers indicates the rapid transition to the busy day. Following François Albéra, cultural historian Myriam Juan sees this debut film by Dziga Vertov’s youngest brother as merely a montage of picturesque shots, lacking the avant-garde characteristics of modern speed and mechanics.5 Nonetheless, Juan discerns elements of an avant-garde aesthetic in some of the framings. In the film’s opening sequence, Kaufman evokes the hectic rhythm of the modern metropolis. In later parts of the film, his montage and shot compositions develop a simultaneity of different styles and optical paradigms. Rendered in low-angles, the shots of facades and columns evoke a constructivist and high-modernist style, which also marks the shots of the flow of pedestrians at the subway entrances. These human flows point to another part of the urban “body” and they show, through a montage of contrasting movements, the intense hustle and bustle around Les Halles. By means of shot compositions and editing, Kaufman and Galitzine develop a rhythm, which is first and foremost determined by the gestures, gazes, and pace of men at work. The film adopts the gaze of the flâneur or a “moving photograph,” as Victor Fournel, a contemporary of Baudelaire, puts it: a vision “with all its changing reflections, the flow of things, the city’s movements, the multiple physiognomy of public attitudes.”6 In so doing, quite “marginal” films such as Les Halles and other Paris symphonic films question established categories such as cinéma pur, modernism, constructivism, and Neue Sachlichkeit, blending these aesthetic concepts with a form of experimental documentary cinema. Many little-known “minor” Paris films eschew the conventional opposition between “documentary” and “abstract” cinema.

the city seen from the water 68

Water seems to be a recurrent motif in many 1920s avant-garde films on Paris. This not only relates to the topographical situation of a city bordering the river Seine and three canals, it also offers aesthetic possibilities as a light reflecting substance. Harmonies de Paris (1928) by Lucie Derain, for instance, is frequently punctuated by abstract images of reflecting water surfaces. Likewise, in Marcel Carné’s Nogent: Eldorado du Dimanche (1929), the camera repeatedly moves along the Marne riverbank in order to

minor paris city symphonies

Figure 3.1  Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse (Henri Chomette, 1925) (left) and Nogent: El Dorado du dimanche (Marcel Carné, 1929) (right)

capture, in tilted framings, the contrasting structures of reflecting waves and reed. Prosper Hillairet and Dominique Païni among others have emphasized the crucial role of water as a flux, which tallies with modernism’s fascination for movement and speed as well as with the principles of the film medium. 7 Given this perspective, the role of water can be compared with the play of urban reflections in the aforementioned films by Henri Chomette, who demonstrated that film is “not restricted to a representative mode.”8 Études sur Paris (1928) by André Sauvage is also determined by the traffic route of the river but develops this more elaborately. Using surprising angles and selecting unusual motifs, Sauvage takes a subjective approach that triggered the praise of the Surrealists.9 Produced by Sauvage himself, this documentary film offers a mobile vision on the city, which does not so much evoke the frenzy of modern speed but rather a personal exploration of the topography of Paris through its waterways. By means of a series of short sequences, Études sur Paris focuses on the everyday activities of boatmen, their gestures contributing to a filmic study of a flow of movements. Intertitles enable us to situate the islands, bridges, and locks on an imaginary city map or they connect the various travel distances to one another. The movements of the boats on the river and the canals continue on land with cars, subways, and public elevators. Eventually, the camera is mobilized independently: famous monuments and Haussmann’s buildings

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are captured by circular movements and horizontal and vertical panning shots. The movements are modulated by short, static, and carefully composed shots, giving the impression of a constantly changing glissade. The montage emphasizes the variation of speeds, juxtaposing motorized vehicles with other means of transport running on human or animal power: cars, busses, trains, and tramways are alternated with coaches, child carriages, handcarts, as well as pedestrians and horses. In the underground waterways, Sauvage emphasizes the dynamic interplay of oblique light beams and passing vessels. Aesthetically, the waterways are reminiscent of the documentary attractions of early cinema, in particular the phantom rides as Dominique Païni has noticed.10 Gilles Deleuze interprets the predilection for water of the French avant-garde as the promise of an extended human perception.11 For Deleuze, such films leave behind the solid matter of space as a “molar” environment in order to discover in liquid forms a finer, further, “molecular” perception, which corresponds to Vertov’s “kino-eye.”12 Performing this contrast, the rhythm of the shots of the waterways in Études sur Paris follows a logic opposed to the arrangements of the city scenes: while views of the riverbank and short scenes on the quays punctuate the filmic flow, the movements on land create a connection between important urban places.

the perspective of strollers

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A topographical approach of the 1920s Paris city films also offers the possibility to investigate different forms of spatial representation of the city. In this context, Michel de Certeau’s concept of urban space seen from the perspective of the walker is useful. Crucial for de Certeau is the urbanite’s walk as an “art of ‘diverting’ itineraries” in the sense of “turning” phrases.13 In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau distinguishes two forms to narrate space: one designs a route indicated by the direction that should be followed to reach a certain destination; the other resembles a map showing the places next to each other.14 Georges Lacombe’s La Zone: Au pays des chiffoniers (1928), which was produced by Charles Dullin, can be analyzed according to De Certeau’s distinction in the sense that it resolutely presents the city from the perspective of the walker but not that of the flâneur.15 Instead of detached observers, the Paris rag-pickers are portrayed as a sub-proletarian class, working fixed hours from morning to night. The film opens with an animation of a city map, which is measured by a large needle in a clockwise direction. With these circular movements, the dynamic spatial lay-out of the city is presented as a temporal function, which corresponds to the paths of the rag-pickers, who travel from the miserable quarters in the urban fringes into the city center, thus also presenting the film’s structure.

minor paris city symphonies

Figure 3.2  Études sur Paris (André Sauvage, 1928) (left) and La Zone: Au pays des chiffonniers (Georges Lacombe, 1928) (right)

Early in the morning, before the city awakens, rag-pickers start searching garbage cans of wealthy neighborhoods for paper, cardboard, or glass. They move the collected materials through the urban center, hurrying past places where other urbanites use motorized vehicles, and bringing them into “the Zone,” where the division of the garbage takes place. Juxtaposing their manual labor to mechanical forms of waste collection and recycling, the film shows that the rag-pickers perform a very precise kind of manual labor that answers to the modern organization of transport, separation, and processing of waste. In a dynamic sequence, La Zone presents the chiffonniers as urbanites who are perfectly adapted to the rhythms and spaces of the metropolis. Intertitles situate the transports in the morning and in a sequence of several minutes, they are visualized as a speedy route through the city, undertaken by a group of two men and two women by foot with a heavily loaded handcart.

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the new vision: between film and photography

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With its interest in the suburbs, Lacombe’s film is an exception that shows more affinities with photographic works by André Kertézs or Germaine Krull than with other Paris city symphonies, which often include footage of famous sites and viewpoints. In her account of 1920s documentary films on Paris, Myriam Juan emphasizes the symbolical dimension of shots of urban monuments.16 Films such as Lucie Derain’s Harmonies de Paris (1928), in which an entire sequence is entitled “The Stone Lace of the Monuments of Paris,” foreground the commemorative function of these buildings, which is also underscored visually by means of framing, viewpoints, and linear movements. Following Evelyne Cohen, Juan demonstrates in which way this film recurs to a “mental geography,” constructed out of images of memorial sites.17 Jacques Aumont calls Derain’s film “pseudo-modern.” Comparing the film unfavorably with Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927), he states that cameraman Nicolas Rudakov’s work was already outdated in 1928 and that Derain rather imitates the avant-garde. As an example, Aumont refers to a high-angle shot of an intersection showing the pavement and glittering tram rails.18 Though somewhat more nuanced, David Robinson, too, criticizes Derain’s montage and shot compositions as conventional, especially the use of short cuts, fades, and distortions, but he praises Rudakov’s striking framings and sinuously moving camera.19 In many films of the era, high-angle shots are used to display the act of seeing itself. In addition, they expand the gaze of the pedestrian and enable us to situate it almost cartographically. Eugène Deslaw’s Montparnasse (1928), for instance, opens with a high-angle shot of a traffic intersection, introducing a dynamic montage of tilted shots of streets, traffic lights, lively sidewalks, and boulevards, organized according to opposite diagonals. Deslaw explores and analyzes the movements of the bustle of the metropolis not unlike Joris Ivens in his short film Études de mouvements à Paris (1927), which consists first and foremost of low-angle shots of Paris traffic intersections between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde. Taken from amidst the hustle of pedestrians, Ivens’s footage evokes the perception of the moving body of a flâneur. Several shots resemble the compositions of photographers of the day, in particularly the work of Germaine Krull. At the time, both artists were not only united in a paper marriage, they interacted also artistically.20 Comprising shots of speeding cars in oblique angles, Ivens’s 1927 film shares formal similarities with Krull’s 1928 photograph entitled Paris, vue en plongée. Likewise, Krull’s picture entitled Trafic à Paris (1926), showing a car driver in the middle of traffic, is reminiscent of a shot in Ivens’s film. A comparison between Ivens and Krull, who published the landmark urban photography book 100 x Paris in 1929, makes apparent their common interests as well as the differences between film and photography, between “une image

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moyenne” (Deleuze) taken from the flux of movement of the film and the decisive moment of a snapshot.21 This dialectic between the filmic and photographic image also marks Deslaw’s Montparnasse (1928), which is not only characterized by a predilection for movement but also by an interest in images of stasis. Including references to art galleries in his cinematic survey of the famous Paris neighborhood, Deslaw creates a kind of cinematic paragone, a comparison between various artistic disciplines not unlike Ricciotto Canudo, who labeled film as the “Seventh Art.”22 In Montparnasse, shots of shop windows, photographs, objects, paintings, and books are integrated in a dynamic view on the city. With this serial configuration of display devices, the film presents itself as a montage of images, emphasizing the similarities between city and film. In so doing, Deslaw ingeniously invokes a scene from the beginning of Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926), which consists of a series of pictorial representations of Paris, thus juxtaposing film, the art form capable of representing life through a sequence of images, with painting. This high level of self-reflection is also visible in the opening credits of Cavalcanti’s film. A shot of fashionable people descending a staircase suddenly halts and the frozen image is subsequently torn as a photograph, thus emphasizing the importance of stereotypes and preexisting images. The Eiffel tower, too, is presented as a replica and Paris becomes a scale model under a glass bell. All of the films discussed in this chapter contain passages that meditate on the tension between movement and stasis. Like Dziga Vertov, both Sauvage and Deslaw present shop window mannequins and automatons as tokens of the city’s energy, meanwhile emphasizing film’s aesthetical capabilities to animate objects. By means of the motif of the shop window, the pedestrian is also turned into a flâneur, an urban observer acting as a proxy of the spectator. Such a duplication of the film’s spectator is also included in Carné’s Nogent: Eldorado du Dimanche (1929) that contains a brief scene set on the Marne riverbanks, in which a photographer is at work among Sunday strollers, reminiscent of a similar scene in Menschen am Sonntag by Robert Siodmak and Edgar Ulmer released in the same year. Apart from touching upon the dialectics between filmic and photographic modes, the scene also draws our attention to the importance of spectacle in the modern metropolis. Likewise, Montparnasse comprises a scene with a shadow play as entertainment for visitors of a coffee house. In Les Halles, the cranking cameraman is visible through his shadow. In the films by Kaufman, Deslaw, and Carné as well as the photographs by Germaine Krull and Eli Lotar, images of shadows, photographs, and paintings serve a double ambition. On the one hand, they present the visual possibilities of the cinematic apparatus perfectly adapted to the visual dynamics of the metropolis. On the other hand, they establish a dialogue with the other arts and hence evoke the artistic and intellectual atmosphere of 1920s Paris.

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notes

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1 See Dominique Noguez, “Paris-Moscou-Paris: Paris et les symphonies des villes,” in Prosper Hillairet, Christian Lebrat, and Patrice Rollet (eds.), Paris vu par le Cinéma d’Avant-Garde 1923–1983 (Paris: Paris Expérimental, 1985), 31–7. 2 Patrick de Haas, Cinéma intégral: De la peinture au cinéma dans les années vingt (Brussels: Transédition, 1986). 3 Patrice Rollet, “Passage des Panoramas,” in Paris vu par le Cinéma d’Avant-Garde 1923–1983, 9–16, quote on p. 16. 4 See Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 1: L’Image-mouvement (Paris: Les Editions de minuit, 1983), 155. 5 See François Albera, “Les Halles vues par les avant-gardes cinématographiques,” in Jean-Louis Robert and Myriam Tsikounas (eds.), Les Halles, Images d’un quartier (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2004), 159–68; and Myriam Juan, “Le cinéma documentaire dans la rue parisienne,” Société & représentation 1, 17 (2004): 291–314, retrieved from www.cairn.info, 15 August 2016. Albera’s text is probably based on a shorter print of the film. 6 See Victor Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris (Paris: E. Dentu, 1867), 268. 7 See Prosper Hillairet, “Un homme court sur les Champs-Elysées: Petite nomenclature cinégraphique de Paris,” in Paris vu par le Cinéma d’AvantGarde, 1923–1983, 57–65, quote on 61–2; Dominique Païni, “Au film de l’eau,” in Gabrielle Claes, Claudine Kaufman, Dominique Päini, and Serge Toubiana (eds.), A rebours: pour une histoire anachronique du cinéma français (Brussels: Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, 2000), 61. On the motif of water, see also Eric Thouvenel, Les images de l’eau dans le cinéma français des années 20 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010). 8 Henri Chomette, “Seconde étape,” quoted in Thouvenel, Les images de l’eau, 53. 9 See Jacques-Bernard Brunius in La Revue du cinéma 3 (1929). 10 Païni, “Au film de l’eau,” 61. 11 Apart from Jacques Brunius, also Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo admired Sauvage’s Études de Paris for its water footage. See Éric Le Roy, “La Collection André Sauvage,” Cinémathèque 2 (November 1992); and Isabelle Marinone, André Sauvage, un cinéaste oublié: De La traversée du Guépon à La Croisière jaune (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008). 12 See Deleuze, L’image-mouvement, 115–16. Deleuze does not mention Études sur Paris, which was not available at the time. 13 Michel de Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien, Vol. 1, Arts de faire (Paris: Union générale éditions 10/18, 1980), 183–4. 14 Michel de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien, 210–15. 15 This is one of the ways to describe the Parisian “flânerie” as it was constructed through the 19th century, namely as a new mode of vision of urban landscapes, See Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris, 1 and 268. 16 Myriam Juan, “Le cinéma documentaire dans la rue parisienne.” 17 See Évelyne Cohen, Paris dans l’imaginaire national de l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999), 26–32. 18 Jacques Aumont, “ ‘Harmonies de Paris’ de Lucie Derain,” in La Persistance des images, Tirages, sauvegardes et restaurations dans la collection films de la Cinémathèque française (Paris: Cinémathèque française, 1996), 86–7. 19 See David Robinson, “ ‘Harmonies de Paris’: Program Notes,” in Le Giornate del cinema muto (Gemona and Pordenone, Italy: La Cineteca di Friuli and

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Cinemazero, 2009), 89–90. Firma Albatros, the film’s producer, brought film critic Lucie Derain into contact with Nicolas Roudakoff, who had previously worked with René Clair and Jean Epstein. 20 In 1928, Krull published several often-noted photographs in the book Paris by Mario von Bucovich. In the same year, Métal, her portfolio of architectural photographs (including the Eiffel tower) makes her “the most noticed avant-garde photographer of Paris.” See Michel Frizot, Germaine Krull (Paris: Editions Hazan, 2015), 256. For a short time, Krull also experimented with film and in Il partit pour un long voyage (1932), she tested the dynamics of film shots, in which characters are appearing from the shadows of the Pont Marie and walk along the banks of the Seine in the direction of the Notre Dame, exploring the depths of the image. 21 See Deleuze, L’Image-mouvement, 11. 22 See Ricciotto Canudo, “Le septième art et son esthétique” (1921), in L’Usine aux images, édition intégrale (Paris: Nouvelles éditions Séguier and arte, 1995), 106–11.

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moscow four

malcolm turvey After its release in 1926, Moscow was embraced by opponents of the films of Dziga Vertov and his group of kinoks, even though it had been made by two members of the group: Mikhail Kaufman, Vertov’s brother and cameraman, and Ilya Kopalin. In the second half of the 1920s, the kinoks were embroiled in an increasingly fierce battle over the “correct” direction of Soviet cinema and art, and Vertov’s films were subject to growing criticism as they became more formally audacious. Yet, some of Vertov’s most outspoken antagonists heaped praise on his brother’s film. In enumerating the kinoks’ “mistakes,” for example, Sergei Eisenstein singled out for exception “Kaufman’s brilliant work Moscow,” arguing that, unlike Vertov’s films, it “shows kinoculism the healthy path and the area—newsreel— which it should occupy in the construction of Soviet cinema.”1 Another major Soviet montage filmmaker, Lev Kuleshov, paired Moscow with what he viewed as the apogee of Soviet documentary of the period, Esfir Shub’s compilation newsreel film The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927). Referring to both works as “the greatest cinematic impression on our screens,” he celebrated Moscow for opening “our eyes to the routine Moscow that we see

kaufman and kopalin’s moscow

Figure 4.1  Mikhail Kaufman on the cover of Sovetskoe Kino 1 (1927)

so often,” and contrasted its editing with what he derided as the “subjectiveartistic montage” practiced by Vertov.2 And Ippolit Sokolov, a journalist and screenwriter who was one of Vertov’s most vociferous opponents, commented approvingly that Moscow had been made “according to principles that are completely opposed to those of [Vertov’s film] A Sixth Part of the World,” which was released around the same time.3 Contemporary commentators, however, have tended to emphasize continuities between Moscow and Vertov’s films, especially his city symphony Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Annette Michelson suggests that Moscow’s “structure, relating a day in the life of a great industrial city, seems to have influenced both Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) and Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (1929),”4 a claim echoed by Richard

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Barsam, who writes that Moscow “influenced the city-symphony genre.”5 And Graham Roberts concludes his discussion of Moscow by observing both that it is “very derivative” of Vertov’s work, and that a number of its “sections are repeated in very similar style” in Man with a Movie Camera.6 As we will see, there are many similarities between Kaufman and Vertov’s films, especially Man with a Movie Camera. What, then, explains the admiration of Vertov’s critics for his brother’s work? Doubtless, they were using it to score points against Vertov in the highly combative climate of the late 1920s and perhaps drive a wedge between the brothers. Indeed, Kaufman would go on to break with Vertov after the filming of Man with a Movie Camera. But is this all there was to it? Or is Moscow, despite its resemblances to Man with a Movie Camera, a significantly dissimilar work that deserves to be considered in its own right? After describing Kaufman and Kopalin’s city symphony, I will argue that there are differences between it and Vertov’s films that were genuinely important to Vertov’s detractors given their ideological and aesthetic commitments and that, at least in part, motivated their positive reaction to Moscow.

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For its first two-thirds, Kaufman’s film follows the “day-in-the-life of a city” structure that became a convention of city symphonies in the 1920s. It begins with shots of trash and street cleaning in the morning before focusing on Moscow’s transportation network starting up. Trams, taxis, and other types of vehicles are shown as the workday commences and people arrive at a train station. High angle shots, some of them pans, of major transportation hubs and intersections in Moscow are intercut with shots taken from the front of moving vehicles as they traverse the city’s roads and waterways. The film momentarily singles out people doing their jobs in the street—postmen picking up mail, drivers, newspaper and cigarette vendors—as well as a homeless boy riding between carriages on a tram. A sequence devoted to shopping and trading, in which we move inside a department store and out again to a street market and storefronts with mannequins, is followed by a section on communication that includes a busy post office as well as telegraph and telephone operators. The film shifts to industrial labor. Shots of machines introduce a sequence devoted to the manufacture of cigarettes. A section about textile production precedes one about steel. Then, as if to suggest that the workday is over, we travel with a tram to residential districts where new housing is being constructed, and the focus switches to leisure. People visit a museum to look at and discuss statuary, and the zoo, where a range of wild animals is on view. They ride bikes, watch races at the hippodrome, and enjoy merry-go-rounds and swings. Water sports, such as rowing and diving, are depicted, and a seaplane takes

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off, with the camera inside. Young people march and engage in athletic events in a field until, finally, the sun goes down. Lights come on and shoppers purchase food at a deli. As before, the camera films the street from the front of a moving car. Children asleep in a dormitory are juxtaposed with street urchins. Men and women drinking and smoking in a nightclub are contrasted with workers at a club, who read, play chess, and enjoy physical activities and a live orchestra before the sequence culminates with shots of city lights. The final third of the film departs from the “day-in-the-life of a city” pattern of the first two, and is largely about official Moscow and the workings of government. Shots of the Kremlin introduce a long section depicting various ambassadors and other foreign dignitaries as well as their flags, embassies, and monuments. Trade agreements are signed, and delegations of scientists, workers, and students are welcomed from abroad. People are assisted at government offices, and a council conducts business. Lenin’s residence is shown, along with a chair on which he sat. We see a panorama of buildings, monuments, theaters, and churches, as well as a crèche where young children are cared for, and a laboratory where students conduct experiments. A fragment from a 1912 newsreel about the unveiling of a pre-revolutionary monument is followed by one from 1918 in which the monument is being dismantled. We then see the Soviet-era monument that replaced it. The film ends by returning to the seat of government with shots of Red Square, the Lenin Mausoleum, and the gravestones of officials around the Kremlin, as well as the hall where the Politburo meets along with portraits of a number of its members. The final low angle shots reveal a new radio tower extending high into the sky.

ii Those acquainted with Man with a Movie Camera will recognize from this description that Vertov’s city symphony covers many of the same subjects as his brother’s, and also employs its “day in the life of a city” structure, albeit more consistently. Man with a Movie Camera depicts buildings and streets being cleaned in the morning, and an urban transportation network starting up. Steel and textile production are featured, as well as telephone operators and storefronts with mannequins. When the workday is over, we see leisure activities such as swimming, diving, and athletics, and there are shots of horses racing at a hippodrome and people enjoying a merry-go-round. Like Moscow, Man with a Movie Camera singles out the homeless, and its sequence in which marriages, divorces, births, and deaths are registered showcases the functioning of government. The commonalities extend well beyond subject matter, however. As is to be expected given that Kaufman was Vertov’s cameraman, the cinematography of Man with a Movie Camera is highly reminiscent of Moscow’s to the extent that some shots

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Figure 4.2  Moscow (Mikhail Kaufman and Ilya Kopalin, 1926)

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look (and perhaps are) identical. In both there is a striking shot taken from beneath a train, and the camera is often placed on moving vehicles. The low-angle shots of chimneystacks and other structures in Vertov’s film echo the final footage of the radio tower in Kaufman’s, and both works frequently make use of high-angle shots of streets and intersections taken from atop buildings. “Life” is repeatedly “caught unawares” in Moscow, a method closely associated with Vertov’s films, and those who realize they are being filmed tend to look at the camera inquisitively. Stop motion is used to make a stuffed bear appear to move in Moscow and the movie camera walk around in Man with a Movie Camera, and the former contains at least one split-screen shot of the street taken from a moving vehicle, a schema that will be used on multiple occasions in the latter. These are not the only correspondences between the two films’ visual style. Vertov famously advocated the use of slow, fast, and reverse motion because he wished to free filmmaking from the limitations of human perception and create a visual experience of the world as different as possible from our ordinary human one, thereby revealing truths inaccessible to the eye. “Until now, we have violated the movie camera and forced it to copy the work of the eye,” he proclaimed in 1923. “Starting today we are liberating the camera and making it work in the opposite direction—away from copying.”7 Hence, in Kino-Eye (1924), reverse motion is employed to reveal the “origins of objects and of bread,”8 and slow motion in Man with a Movie Camera enables the viewer to see the movements of horses, athletes, and other bodies in motion in precise detail. Moscow, too, contains a slow

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motion sequence of a horse, and another of divers also utilizes reverse motion. There is even a freeze-frame in Moscow during a shot of a young woman on a swing, a technique that is famously exploited in Man with a Movie Camera to reveal that the appearance of motion in the moving image is created from a series of still frames. Similarly, in Moscow, the film is slowed both before and after the freeze frame to the point that the image flickers and individual still frames become visible. Moscow also anticipates some of the editing structures in Man with a Movie Camera. On several occasions, it cuts between close-ups of a worker’s face and the dexterous movements of his or her hands as they skillfully and rapidly perform a task, for instance in the section about telegraph operators. Vertov’s film will do the same in the scene of the worker folding boxes at a workbench. And Moscow frequently uses editing to create ideological contrasts, as when it cuts from the decadent men and women drinking and smoking in the nightclub to the mentally and physically “healthy” activities of the workers in their club. Man with a Movie Camera contains an almost identical sequence, except that a disorienting hand-held camera is used to convey drunkenness. The editing of Moscow never becomes as rapid as Man with a Movie Camera’s, in which shots are sometimes less than a second long. But it is certainly faster than the comparatively sedate pace of the film with which Kuleshov coupled it, Shub’s The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, which is why Kuleshov, who otherwise praised the film, faulted Moscow for its “failure to abandon a penchant for rapid montage.”9 None of this means, of course, that Man with a Movie Camera is derivative of Moscow. Many of the techniques employed in the earlier film had already been discussed in Vertov’s writings or had appeared in his work, such as the reverse motion in Kino-Eye. Stop motion is used to animate crates of goods in A Sixth Part of the World, for instance, while editing creates an ideological contrast between the Western bourgeoisie enjoying themselves, and laboring workers, including slaves in colonies. But without getting into the vexed issue of the authorship of Vertov (and Kaufman’s) films, it is clear that their work is of a piece in many ways. Why, then, did Kuleshov and other harsh critics of Vertov’s approach to cinema embrace Moscow?

iii Kuleshov, like Eisenstein and Vertov, was associated with the Left Front of the Arts (Lef), a group that by the second half of the 1920s was advocating factography, the “fixing of fact” through a documentary practice. Cinema and photography were valorized as “accurate, rapid, and objective means of fixing fact”10 along with nonfictional, often first-person forms of writing such as letters, memoirs, biographies, diaries, travel sketches, and journalism. As Leah Dickerman points out, the artist’s role, according to the factographic model, was a “self-consciously restrained” one consisting of the

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discovery, collection, organization, and exhibition of facts rather than their creation.11 This is one reason Shub’s The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, which was comprised of re-edited newsreel footage rather than original content, was so admired by Lef’s members. Another is that Lef artists conceived of themselves as enabling “the frank perception of contemporary life” through the clear presentation of facts in their work.12 Artistic devices were supposed to serve this perspicuous presentation and not the other way around. Hence, in praising The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty in Novyi lef, Kuleshov argued that “the material must be revealed to a maximum degree by the montage, served to a maximum degree by the montage,” which, he believed, was the case with Shub’s editing.13 Vertov’s films increasingly came under fire from Lef and others precisely because their artistic techniques, particularly the editing, did not appear to serve the lucid exposition of facts. In 1926, Viktor Shklovsky started accusing Vertov of depriving newsreel of “its soul—its documentary quality.” “The whole meaning of newsreel lies in the date, the time, and the place,” Shklovksy inveighed, and it was this concrete specificity that was missing in Vertov’s films.14 In a critique of A Sixth Part of the World (1926), Shklovsky singled out Vertov’s use of “lyrical” intertitles, asserting that they merely “paralleled” subsequent shots in order to increase their “emotional significance” rather than identifying their content. “When they give us an intertitle, ‘The child sucks at the breast,’ and then show us the child, suckling at the breast,” he complained, “I realize that they have turned us back towards lantern slides.”15 Meanwhile, Kuleshov felt that, rather than serving “the material in the cause of its best possible presentation,” as in Shub’s films, “subjective-artistic montage” predominated in Vertov’s, remaining “an individual creative element of the work of the editor” and resulting in “a combination of gaudy shots or a succession of symbolic images.”16 Vertov’s editing, in other words, constituted a subjective artistic distortion of the facts rather than a clear presentation of them. Eisenstein, too, accused Vertov’s films of being too artistic in spite of the kinoks protestations to the contrary. Arguing that “controlling the emotions of the viewer, provoked by a particular kind of effect, is a purely artistic problem,” he maintained that Vertov’s films “make a pathetic attempt to move their audiences emotionally.” Moscow, by contrast, lacks “any emotional claims,” like a newsreel.17 Arguably, these criticisms display a profound misunderstanding of Vertov’s project,18 but they do allow us to pinpoint why Moscow stood apart from it in the eyes of Vertov’s opponents at the time of its release. First, Kaufman’s city symphony provides the concrete specificity that was perceived to be lacking in Vertov’s films, in part because of its intertitles, which usually identify the particular places, buildings, monuments, and other sights we are shown as if guiding us on a tour of Moscow. In the last third of the film, they also supply the names and titles of many of the ambassadors

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and other dignitaries. Moscow, in other words, is very much about the city of Moscow, its geography, the work and leisure activities of its inhabitants, and its political institutions. It is also, at times, about the history of parts of the city and the new, socialist purposes they are serving, as when it juxtaposes newsreel footage of the pre-revolutionary monument being unveiled and dismantled along with shots of the Soviet-era structure that has replaced it. This is perhaps why Kuleshov wrote admiringly of Kaufman’s film that it “opens our eyes to the routine Moscow that we see so often.”19 While the intertitles in A Sixth Part of the World and other Vertov films of this period certainly contain some expository information, they rarely if ever name an individual person or place, as Shklovksy complained. Meanwhile, Man with a Movie Camera rejects intertitles altogether, and it freely combines footage of several unidentified cities to illustrate city-life in general in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s rather than depict a specific city, as does Moscow. Second, while it contains some intercutting, Moscow lacks what Vlada Petric aptly calls Vertov’s “disruptive-associative” montage style, which consists of the “apposition of often unrelated and contradictory” themes.20 Vertov often edits between two, three, or more seemingly unconnected subjects, thereby encouraging the viewer to find a link between them or retroactively supplying one through an intertitle. A Sixth Part of the World spends 12 minutes hailing different peoples throughout the Soviet Union engaged in a wide variety of activities—“you, who are eating your venison raw . . .  /you, who suckles at your mother’s breast”—before making explicit the relation between them—“you, the owners of the Soviet land/ hold in your hands a sixth part of the world.” And Man with a Movie Camera cuts between mining, steel and textile production, hydroelectric generation, trams, and filmmaking in a sequence that climaxes in an ecstatically rapid montage. Although Vertov did this in order to represent what he saw as an objective fact—that Soviet citizens are interconnected economically in the new socialist state as joint owners of the means of production—this style of editing made him vulnerable to the charge that he was subjectively manipulating footage in order to create his own metaphorical associations and symbols, thereby placing the factual material in the service of his art rather than the other way around. So did his use of reflexivity, which reaches its zenith in Man with a Movie Camera and its sustained depictions of its own making, but which is already present in A Sixth Part of the World in its titles (“I see you/and you/ and you . . .”) and its shots of viewers in a movie theater watching its footage. By incorporating the act of filmmaking and film viewing into his film practice and using overt, self-conscious techniques, such as split-screen shots, Vertov foregrounded his own role—and what his enemies disparaged as his artistic subjectivity—in the construction of his films. Except for the freeze frame and the occasional use of slow and reverse motion, the reflexive dimension of Vertov’s films is absent from Moscow. And while it sometimes makes use of contrastive editing to draw

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attention to ideological and economic relations between different Muscovites, as in the scene comparing the night clubbers with the workers, on the whole it is much more concerned with clearly displaying specific people and places in Moscow rather than their interconnections, which is why it avoids Vertov’s brand of disruptive-associative montage. It is doubtless for these reasons that Kuleshov wrote, malcolm turvey

It is especially valuable that the new points of view that Kaufman uses are not used in order to show his originality, from a desire to show everything in an unusual way [as in Vertov’s films], but really are the best and clearest way to show contemporary Moscow.21

Moscow has a lot in common with Vertov’s films, and it is not surprising that contemporary commentators have taken note of the continuities between them. But the acclaim with which it was received by Vertov’s critics reminds us that its differences—its concrete specificity as well as its avoidance of disruptive-associative montage and reflexivity—carried a great deal of weight when it was released due to the ideological and aesthetic concerns of the day. It deserves to be considered an important contribution to the genre of the city symphony in its own right, and not merely a preparatory sketch for Vertov’s more famous example.

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1 Sergei Eisenstein, “Sergei Eisenstein’s Reply to Oleg Voinov’s Article,” in Yuri Tsivian (ed.), Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties (Sacile and Pordenone: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004), 145. 2 Lev Kuleshov, “The Screen Today,” in Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, 273. 3 Ippolit Sokolov, “A Letter to the Editor,” in Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, 243. 4 Annette Michelson, “Introduction,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), XXIV. 5 Richard M. Barsam, Non-Fiction Film: A Critical History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 76. 6 Graham Roberts, Forward Soviet: History and Nonfiction Film in the USSR (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999), 80. One exception is Vlada Petric, who maintains that “Vertov’s film is light-years ahead of the conventional manner in which Kaufman depicts a city.” See Vlada Petric, Constructivism in Film; the Man with the Movie Camera: A Cinematic Analysis (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 71. 7 Dziga Vertov, “Kinoks: A Revolution,” in Kino-Eye, 16. Kaufman makes similar arguments about the superiority of the movie camera over the human eye in a text published after he broke with Vertov. See Kaufman, “Film Analysis,” in Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, 394–6. 8 Dziga Vertov, “On the Film Known as Kinoglaz,” in Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, 34. 9 Kuleshov, “The Screen Today,” 273.

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10 Unsigned editorial, “We Are Searching,” Screen 12, 4 (Winter 1971): 67; quoted in Leah Dickerman, “The Fact and the Photograph,” October 118 (Fall 2006): 139. 11 Dickerman, “The Fact and the Photograph,” 144. 12 Dickerman, “The Fact and the Photograph,” 144. 13 Kuleshov, “The Screen Today,” 272. 14 Viktor Shklovsky, “Where Is Dziga Vertov Striding?” in Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, 170. 15 Viktor Shklovsky, “On the Fact That Plot Is a Constructive Principle, Not One from Daily Life,” in Lines of Resistance, 268–9. 16 Kuleshov, “The Screen Today,” 273. 17 Eisenstein, “Sergei Eisenstein’s Reply to Oleg Voinov’s Article,” 143–5. 18 See my “Vertov, the View from Nowhere, and the Expanding Circle,” October 148 (Spring 2014): 83–8. 19 Kuleshov, “The Screen Today,” 273. 20 Petric, Constructivism in Film, 95. 21 Kuleshov, “The Screen Today,” 273.

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a parisian in manhattan florey’s skyscraper symphony five

merrill schleier Made at the peak of the city symphony cycle, Robert Florey’s Skyscraper Symphony (1929) explores the implied effects of modernity, while employing a combination of documentary and experimental techniques. Like Strand and Sheeler’s Manhatta (1921) and Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927), Skyscraper Symphony captures spatio-temporal flux in urban space. Yet Skyscraper Symphony does not simply record modernity in generic terms or create a clichéd sense of urban intoxication as it has previously been characterized; rather, Frenchman Florey captures the impact of post-World War I urban transformations in New York in particular, which create a tension in the film. While the director invokes a sense of a material “place” that is identifiable as post-war Manhattan; ultimately, he is more interested in using subjective camerawork to convey how the city’s specific type of modern metropolitanism affects a European transplant. In contrast to other New York variations of the city symphony cycle, however, the film overlooks Manhattan’s traditional status as a bustling commercial seaport with its skyline serving as an image of progress, instead Florey focuses almost solely on the city’s tall buildings as modernity’s dystopian ciphers while simulating

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Figure 5.1  Skyscraper Symphony (Robert Florey, 1929)

the destabilizing physical and psychic effects of city life.1 In this regard, his film shares a vision similar to that of Metropolis (1927) by another European, Fritz Lang, whose own journey to New York in 1924, resulted in images of an overwhelming megalopolis crowded by mountains of impinging skyscrapers. As a “Parisian in America,” Florey thus amplifies the city symphony genre, by combining both a tourist’s excitement and humor with ambivalence toward his adopted home, devoting considerable footage to architectural contrasts, often juxtaposing traditional stylistic idioms with the angular configurations of the new Ziggurat-like Art Deco skyscrapers, which began to fill mid-town Manhattan in response to New York’s 1916 Zoning Ordinance and the development of the area around Grand Central Station. Previously American painters and photographers such as Joseph Pennell, Alfred Stieglitz, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and John Marin had rendered the disparity between a rapidly expanding modernity and the city’s

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historical structures.2 Likewise, Florey juxtaposes old and new New York, to reflect a sense of loss and nostalgia, a yearning for a former way of life that may have reminded him of his country of origin. The film may be seen as a cross cultural journey, in which the circularity of the voyage is a metaphor for a foreigner’s yearning for home, from the site of American modernity to a starting point and back again.3 Florey renders time as non-sequential, which prompts the viewer’s vicarious disequilibrium and sense of unease. It is an excursion in reverse, beginning with a massive, impenetrable skyscraper complex in upper Manhattan, a synecdoche for an expanding urban congestion, and ends downtown at a construction site. He also undoes upper and lower spatiality in other respects, often reducing towering edifices to horizontal entities, thereby depriving them of their height and preeminence. Displaying the influence of cinéma pur and other modernist stylistic tropes (e.g., Cubism, Futurism, Dada) seen in his use of fragmented geometric shapes, mechanomorphic forms, and humorous machine antics, combined with the unconventional temporal character, he creates a proto-narrative message about the effects of skyscraperization on Manhattan.4 Robert Florey arrived in the United States in 1921 as a correspondent for Cinémagazine. After working in the French and Swiss film industries, he soon became a publicist and an assistant director in Hollywood. He made several experimental shorts before Skyscraper Symphony, of which Life and Death Of 9413: A Hollywood Extra (1926–7) with Slavko Vorkapich and Gregg Toland, and The Loves of Zero (1928) survive. Inspired by George Gershwin’s urbanist musical composition Rhapsody in Blue (1924), Life and Death features many qualities of the city symphony cycle. David E. James claims that it sketches the “social conditions of studio film production and the architectural fabric of the city in which it takes place.”5 The film further foreshadows Skyscraper Symphony in its divided nature—nightmare sequences explore the adverse psychic effects of urban life while incorporating a tourist’s gaze that features various Hollywood landmarks. Both films also end grimly, in contrast to most commercial Hollywood ventures of the day, the former with tombstones and the latter with a gaping hole in the ground. Florey went on to become a Hollywood director for various studios, including Paramount and Warner Brothers, working in a number of genres. He continued to employ subjective camerawork and architectural settings in such films as Hollywood Boulevard (1936) and the noir-inspired Johnny OneEye (1950). According to Brian Taves, in preparation for the latter film, he made very abstract photographs of New York and various skyscraper views from street level, continuing the experimental vision of Skyscraper Symphony in his feature films.6 Life and Death commences with images of a generic city of saw-toothed skyscrapers more characteristic of New York than Los Angeles in the 1920s, whose oppressive silhouettes threaten to encroach on all who enter their

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lair. It chronicles the arrival of an aspiring actor or outsider who like Florey is trying to break into the film industry, but whose forehead is stamped with the moniker 9413 to underscore his anonymity and interchangeability in cutthroat Hollywood. The identification 9413 may even relate more closely to Florey—the number three may refer to him and his two collaborators, while 941 may be an inversion of Florey’s birthday, which was 14 September. One scene in particular shows the nameless aspirant’s struggle to achieve fame and fortune, ascending the metaphorical stepping-stones of success, a skyscraper-like staircase. However his frustrated gestures are repeated in an endless cinematic loop to illustrate the oppressive, assemblyline-like effort he must undergo, leading to his eventual plummeting and failure. Instead of 9413, a generic actor who performs with a stereotypical, routinized smile is selected for the part and receives accolades. The major precursor to Skyscraper Symphony is a now lost three-reel travelogue entitled Bonjour New York!, in which Florey recorded French actor Maurice Chevalier’s arrival in the city in October of 1928 before the latter returned to Hollywood.7 Reportedly, the two Parisians embarked on a sightseeing excursion to Greenwich Village, the Bowery, the Bronx, Fifth Avenue, Wall Street, the Brooklyn Bridge, and a visit to various New York skyscrapers, a device he would use again in the feature film Hollywood Boulevard (1936) to evoke a tourist’s gaze. This led to Florey’s Skyscraper Symphony the following year, which he shot while working the night shift at Paramount’s Astoria Studios. Kept awake by the pounding of riveters’ guns in the early morning hours after work, Florey would go out into the city streets to take in impressions and eventually shoot his film. Giuliana Bruno refers to the mobile exploration of the city as “siteseeing,” whereby an embodied spectator activates the architecture of the urban sphere, associating it with the kinetic and emotional character of cinema itself.8 Her analysis takes into account the impact of gender on urban voyages, while also considering the way foreigners employ travel films in an imperialist manner as a mode of possession. Expanding on Bruno’s work, I suggest that Florey’s tourist excursion is a foreigner’s search for identity in dialogue with American modernity. Hence, both the enthusiastic reaction of two recent European arrivals to New York City and Florey’s sleeplessness and feelings of displacement can be understood as a record of this psychophysical tour, which is exactly what gives Skyscraper Symphony its divided or ambivalent character. Skyscraper Symphony must be seen against a backdrop of urban development, crowding, dehumanization, and almost religious awe, or what Perry Miller and David Nye call the “technological sublime.”9 New York was undergoing what I have termed, a “skyscraper mania,” which affected both urban geography and popular imagery.10 After World War I, a massive building boom ensued, which the New York Times proclaimed with the bold headline “Titanic Forces Rear a New Skyline,” asserting that every area of the city

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had fallen under the spell of reconstruction. Architectural critic James C. Young reported, “A host of workers were striving to complete some 350 new buildings by the winter of 1925 and 900 other structures were in the process of rehabilitation.” 11 Between 1918 and 1930, office use in modern buildings increased tenfold, reported Frederick Lewis Allen in Only Yesterday (1931).12 The Titan City Exhibition at the Wanamaker’s department store in 1925 further celebrated the skyscrapers of the present and future with a fantastic mural-sized rendering of “The Growth of New York” by soon-to-be film set designer Willy Pogany and murals by architects Harvey Wiley Corbett and architect and Hugh Ferriss, which featured the megalopolitan, setback structures that dominated the reconstruction of New York City after the 1916 Zoning Ordinance.13 Ferriss published his urban fantasies widely throughout the 1920s, which were later enshrined in his book The Metropolis of Tomorrow in 1929.14 While Ferriss and Corbett perceived skyscrapers as the solution for New York’s urban congestion, detractors such as architectural critic and writer Lewis Mumford explored the negative impact of tall buildings on metropolitan dwellers. In “The Intolerable City,” the latter inveighed, “One need not dwell upon the ways in which these obdurate overwhelming masses take away from the little people who walk in their shadow any semblance of human dignity as human beings.” Similarly, John Alden Carpenter’s ballet Skyscrapers (1926), with predatory set designs by Robert Edmond Jones, provided a nightmarish vision of a typical day in the life of New York and its denizens, complete with death-like skyscraper skeletons rendered in jagged shapes against a backdrop of inferno-like red and black. Likewise, Sophie Treadwell’s popular play Machinal (1928) featured a harried stenographer who worked in a skyscraper office. Rebelling against the routinization her machine existence, she murdered her slogan-spewing, boss-husband and was tried, convicted, and executed by modernity itself,

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Figure 5.2  The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra (Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapich, 1928) and Skyscrapers: A Ballet (Set Drawing by Robert Edmund Jones, 1926)

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in the form of electrocution.15 Numerous articles in popular journals also remarked on the auditory assault of riveters’ drills and the massive excavation sites that filled the city, which provided inhabitants with a visual sidewalk show and a cacophonous auditory symphony, the very same din that inspired Skyscraper Symphony.16 Skyscraper Symphony was shot in three days with a hand-held De Vry camera, which underscores the immediacy of the journey. This is corroborated by Florey who called the film “an architectural study of New York skyscrapers seen from way high or from down shooting up with wide and sometimes distorted angles, 24mm shots and quick pan shots with fast editing.”17 Brian Taves, who has written extensively on the filmmaker, divides Skyscraper Symphony into three discreet parts: the urban hive as still life, the shaky panning of a succession of buildings, and the introduction of the elevated train and the contrast of movement and stasis.18 I suggest that Florey also offers an experiential journey through the city, creating a sense of a newcomer’s wonder, while employing spatial strategies to underscore the skyscrapers’ scale, sameness, and overwhelming character, to signify the crushing effects of conformity, as he had in Life And Death. Skyscraper Symphony is also heir to the emerging tradition of the New York City symphony films of both Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1921) and Robert Flaherty’s Twenty-Four Dollar Island (1926).19 These earlier films focus largely on Manhattan’s southern port of entry and downtown region, the seat of its trade and commerce, picturing the island replete with travelling barges and billowing smokestacks, a seemingly autonomous organism that moves, breathes, creates, and expels energy. Both films record the burgeoning city as it rises—Twenty-Four Dollar Island begins with a text that reports on early Dutch settlers who built thirty houses. The filmmaker uses a match cut to transition to the congested city of eight million c. 1926, pictured by a bird’s eye view of the city’s southern tip with its dense concentration of skyscrapers. The labors of construction workers, the perennial movement to and fro of enormous mechanical shovels, and the poetic dance of crisscrossing static beams and mobile derricks underscore the theme of relentless building. Strand and Sheeler’s film pays homage to a heroic Manhattan interspersed with Whitman’s verse, from its disembarking commuters at dawn to a lone tugboat returning to port at dusk, establishing a day-in-the-life structure that would become a defining aspect of the city symphony cycle. Yet, it is also an ambivalent film, one that features ominous images of cemeteries and massive skyscraper-formed canyons that overwhelm pedestrians while Flaherty’s crowded, smokefilled metropolis captures his typically dystopian vision of modernity. Unlike the earlier cinematic renditions of Manhattan, Skyscraper Symphony commences uncharacteristically in uptown Manhattan with an almost four-minute exploration of James Gamble Rogers’s New York Presbyterian

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Hospital, a skyscraper complex of more than twelve buildings located between 165th and 168th street, which had just opened to the public in 1928.20 The new “skyscraper hospital” or “hospital block” architecture was a response to medical specialization and its increasing dependence on modern technology to cure illness, which is registered in the multitude of similar cubical, stepped-back buildings.21 Florey renders the hospital as shorthand for the city’s urban congestion and its pervasive modernity, a veritable walled city within a city, especially its former psychiatric facility, which is seen as an impenetrable compound through a succession of dissolve transitions. Each view of its multiple skyscraper fragments dominate the frame, emphasizing its scale and scope, a panoply of darkened, interlocking cubical parts and seemingly impenetrable, fortress-like views. Florey employs the dissolves and cascades of interlocking forms to simulate disorientation. The mobile camera enters the hospital’s courtyard, which is bordered by impinging walls that dwarf and entrap, the muted light of which augments its forbidding nature. Various portions of skyscrapers are seen from radically oblique angles to underscore their abstract shapes, showing Florey’s indebtedness to Cubism and other modernist vocabularies, but also to evoke a loss of balance. Suddenly what is vertical becomes horizontal, transforming the skyscraper into an ersatz train platform, thereby thwarting its lofty hegemony, and creating a sense of what Ed Dimendberg has referred to in another context as a “nonsynchronous return of the past,” a nineteenth-century way of perceiving modernity in a twentieth century vertical city.22 Before exploring the tall courtyard buildings with up and down movement to enumerate height, the camera pauses at the walled entranceway, which resembles the nightmare sequence in Life and Death in which 9413 tries to climb the steps of a massive setback structure to no avail. Here, however, the vision is meant to emphasize the massive buildings’ density. In the next section of the film, we are situated amidst the canyons of downtown and midtown, which register more congestion. Florey explores the dynamic shapes of the new setback skyscrapers, which resulted from Hugh Ferriss and Harvey Wiley Corbett’s structural and design solution to the 1916 Zoning Ordinance. Their zigzag contours provided visual artists with new ways of viewing skyscrapers, which one commentator noted, “cut shadowy perpendicular slices out of the sky.”23 Florey juxtaposes the zigzag-edged skyscrapers with Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building (1913), which was nicknamed “the Cathedral of Commerce” and was still the tallest structure in Manhattan until the completion of the Empire State Building in 1931. Architect Gilbert rendered the Woolworth in a French Gothic idiom to add to its civic cachet and spiritual associations, which Florey differentiated from its ultramodern architectural neighbors.24 The contrast between these two stylistic idioms—the French Middle Ages with jazz-age modernity— is a rhetorical way of rendering the city’s ever-changing topography, thereby

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creating seemingly discontinuous chronotopes, while referencing the director’s own French heritage. In addition, Florey photographs the Woolworth Building from a distant, mid-range shot, reducing the grandiose building to its tiny tip and wiggling the camera—a technique also seen in Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy’s Ballet mécanique (1924)—to show both his experimental prowess while adding a bit of Dada sexual humor, thereby depriving the Woolworth of its scale and spiritual pretensions. In the final sequence, which resembles a segment of Strand and Sheeler’s Manhatta, Florey juxtaposes the stalwart, vertical stability of the skyscraper with the diagonal motion of an elevated train, a ballet of movement and stasis. Subsequently, the viewer is presented with a kaleidoscopic view of moving skyscraper fragments that act as a stand-in for the viewer’s urban confusion or overstimulation, which is followed by an oblique angle shot which leaves no room between the stalwart canyons. Florey employed this device again in Hollywood Boulevard (1936), as shorthand for disorientation and stimulus overload. At various points in the film, the viewer is provided with a sense of location and specificity, providing signposts for those familiar with New York’s skyscrapers. In one scene, Florey situates us downtown on Barclay and Vesey streets, the home of Voorhees and Gmelin’s New York Telephone Building (1925). Yet the filmmaker does not simply identify architectural monuments; rather, he offers up a series of visual and written cues through the use of montage and asks us to connect the dots, through a metonymic chain of images and words, revealing his semiotic imagination. The camera fixes on both the facades of The Bank of the United States and the Fred French Building by Ives, Sloan and Robertson (1927, 45th and 5th Ave.), the keys to both Florey’s dual identity and the city’s architectural tensions. Skyscraper Symphony ends at a point of origin with the gaping hole of a construction site—or, rather, a nascent building—which was a common sight in 1920s Manhattan, which imbues the film with a circular logic and interminability. This image is a synecdoche for the relentless rebuilding in New York noted by many commentators since the nineteenth century, therefore identifying the subterranean chasm of an emergent structure as an absent presence. The repeated crosscutting from the enormous gap to the camera’s vertical upward and downward exploration of an adjacent skyscraper, signals that the latter will metamorphose into the former, a chronotope, or a “present future.”25 Florey employs the mobility of the cinematic apparatus, linking the past, present and yet to come, to depict the unfolding of time. Yet the construction site assumes a multivalent meaning, also acting as a burial site that threatens to engulf and perhaps submerge urban inhabitants. We may view Skyscraper Symphony thus as both a symphony and an elegy to Manhattan modernity by a Parisian in New York, bringing us back once again to the film’s outset and the hospital’s looming and threatening walls.

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1 Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 95. 2 See my “The Traditional Building and the Skyscraper,” in The Skyscraper in American Art, 1890–1931 (New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 1990), 20–4; Rufus Rockwell, New York: Old and New, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, PA: J. P. Lippincott Co., 1909); John C. Van Dyke, The New New York, illustrations by Joseph Pennell (New York, NY: Macmillan Co., 1909); F. Hopkinson Smith, Charcoals of Old And New New York (New York, NY: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1912). 3 Giuliana Bruno, The Atlas of Emotions (New York, NY: Verso, 2002), 87. 4 Jan-Christopher Horak, “Discovering Pure Cinema: Avant-garde Cinema in the 20s,” Afterimage 8, 12 (Summer 1980): 4–7. 5 David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-garde: Histories and Geography of Major Cinema in Los Angeles (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 39. 6 Brian Taves to Merrill Schleier, 11 September 2016. 7 Brian Taves, “Robert Florey and the Hollywood Avant-Garde,” in Jan-Christopher Horak (ed.), Lovers of Cinema: The First American Avant-Garde, 1919–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 113. 8 Bruno, The Atlas of Emotions, 16. 9 Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965); David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 10 Schleier, The Skyscraper in American Art, 69. 11 James C. Young, “Titanic Forces Rear a New Skyline,” New York Times (15 November 1925): sec. 4, p. 6. 12 Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1931), 287. 13 Inaugurating the New Wanamaker Building and a Tercentenary Pictorial Pageant of New York (New York, NY: Wanamaker Store, 1925). 14 Hugh Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow (New York, NY: Ives Washburn, 1929). 15 See my “The Skyscraper, Gender, and Mental Life: Sophie Treadwell’s Play ‘Machinal’ (1928),” in Roberta Moudry (ed.), The American Skyscraper Cultural Histories (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 16 Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 144–5. 17 Robert Florey to Anthony Slide, n.d., quoted in Brian Taves, Robert Florey: The French Expressionist (London and New Jersey, NY: Scarecrow Press, 1987), 98. 18 Brian Taves, Robert Florey, 98. 19 See my Skyscraper in American Art, 78–80, 100–2; Jan-Christopher Horak, “Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s ‘Manhatta’,” in Horak (ed.), Lovers of Cinema, 267–86. 20 Robert A.M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin, and Thomas Mellins, New York 1930 (New York, NY: Rizzoli, 1987), 112–13; John William Robson, A Guide to Columbia University with Some Accounts of Its History and Traditions (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1937), 149–57. Joshua Glick was the first to identify the hospital in the film but did not examine its architectural structure or its meaning as a thematic or psychophysical device. See The New York Avant-Garde and the Cinematic Production of New York City (Bachelor of Arts, College Scholar Honors Thesis, Cornell University, 2006), 58.

21 AnnMarie Adams, Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), VIIIXII. 22 Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, 96. 23 Mary Borden, Flamingo (New York, NY: Doubleday and Page), 416. 24 Schleier, The Skyscraper in American Art, 53–7. 25 Andreas Huyssen, Past Presents: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 5–6. My notion of a present future was inspired by Huyssen’s notion of a past present.

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john david rhodes The city symphony—whether major or minor—is a mode of ambivalence. Laura Marcus writes that city symphony films “sought to renew the medium . . . by returning to cinema’s origins in the documenting of reality, but with the particular twist given by the perspectives and angles of modernism.”1 The “documenting of reality” obliges a film to record and report on a city’s particularity, while the “particular twist” provided by modernism—a tendency toward experimentation, innovation, and abstraction—might function to de-particularize the city or cities in question. Documenting and legitimizing the emerging reality of a particular modern city might often be as pressingly important as the obligation to formal experimentation. Moreover, the city in question may not be altogether so thoroughly modern; it may need the city symphony to make the case for its uneven or under-developed modernity. The film’s appeal to modernist strategies of shooting and cutting compensates for the city’s ambiguous modernity, and in some senses, these agents of a potential de-particularization actually put on display what is uniquely compelling about the film in question and the city it means to celebrate.

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This essay deals with one example of a city symphony that, in many ways, is not so impressively or obviously modernist and that is about a city that is ambiguously modern. The city in question is Milan, and the film Stramilano, directed by Corrado D’Errico in 1929. I want to place the film in a specifically Italian context, but I hope that in doing so, the specificity of the context will illuminate some of the more general or generic concerns that seem to be typically at work or under pressure in the city symphony. Milan’s population hovered at just around one million in the late 1920s and was substantially larger than that of Rome at that time, whose population was roughly 800,000 during the same period. Italian cities grew significantly across the 1920s, despite official state policy that sought to limit the growth of urban populations. The urban itself was a fraught subject under Fascism, which sought to embrace certain forms of technological modernity, many of which are associated with the city, while maintaining or regressively returning to the traditional values associated with rural and provincial life. The ambiguity of producing a version of modern Italy that would somehow sidestep or displace the urban reveals itself through projects such as the città nuove of the Roman Pontine Marshes.2 These were small towns built to the south of Rome that rehoused relocated working class Romans in order to deploy them as an agricultural labor force. Though the rural-agrarian pastoral imaginary governed this undertaking, a modern urbis, of modest proportions, was the result: a town form, built according to the most modern principles of Fascist architecture. Similarly, the rayon industry, which was promoted heavily by the Fascist government (and about which I will have more to say), produced a modern fabric from organic, agriculturally produced materials (cane).3 Fascist Italy’s engagement with the modern was, as I have suggested, an ambivalent affair, in which attempts to proclaim the arrival of an absolute modernity tended to coincide with some form of anti-modernism, or unintentional quaintness. Stramilano gives evidence of this conflict. The tension between Strapaese and Stracittà exemplifies these ambivalences and bears directly on Stramilano. The terms, which loosely mean “ultra country” and “ultra city” (one could substitute “super” in place of ultra) referred to discourses current in the 1920s and 1930s which exalted the values of traditional regional cultures (Strapaese) in contradistinction to a modernist aesthetic culture, associated with urban life (Stracittà). Mino Maccari, one of the proponents of Strapaese defines it as “the bulwark against the invasion of foreign values or ways of thinking and of modernist civilization.”4 Stramilano, in its very title, clearly summons the context of these debates and locates itself on the Stracittà side of things. While the film, as we shall see, obviously celebrates urban life, its emphasis on the specificity of Milan and environs offers a version of urban living that is uniquely Italian,

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but not so convincingly modern(ist) in many ways. The film attempts two not entirely compatible projects: to exalt the modern city as such, while insisting on Milan as a specific, thoroughly Italian, yet thoroughly modern city. Stramilano was produced by the Za Bum Spettacoli music hall company and distributed by Istituto LUCE, the official documentary film production agency of the Fascist government, established in 1924, only two years after the Fascists’ rise to power.5 The film’s implicit association with LUCE obliges us to some extent to read it as not just a documentary made during Fascism, but as a document of Fascism. Corrado D’Errico, the film’s director, edited and wrote for various Fascist trade and professional newspapers.6 On the subject of the documentary he wrote, In order to be a success, the documentary must place itself outside the chronicle of everyday life and reflect the mood of the century. . . . It is through documentary that cinema realizes its true function as recorder of history and its tremendous responsibility, particularly in an age such as ours when the poetic ideals are brought to the highest expression.7

If we are to read Stramilano in D’Errico’s terms, then the film appears as both document and invention: the reflection of a mood.

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Figure 6.1  Stramilano (Corrado D’Errico, 1929)

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The film opens with a strong articulation of urban modernity: four tall smokestacks, or factory chimneys organize the image vertically. The tracery of the branches of denuded winter trees overlap with the chimneys to create some dialectical tension between the technological and the natural, or organic. The following shot offers a slightly off-center view of a wide urban thoroughfare with a typical row of trees planted alongside the street’s border; the same chimneys from the first shot appear in the background, scoring the morning sky, while horse- and human-drawn means of transport move unhurriedly in the bottom of the shot. In the middle of the shot, an electric street light, its lamp now turned off in the dawn light, stands vigil over the boulevard. The camera’s oblique angle vis-à-vis the factory chimneys produces a staggered and dramatic visual rhythm across the image’s horizon, however this is rhythm in stasis. The gentle pace of the traffic on the street and the fact that the means of locomotion are provided by various human and non-human animals all make this shot a highly ambivalent one and encourage us to consider the mixed nature of 1920s urban modernity: heavily industrialized, electrified, and yet still dependent on the horse and the human body as means of transportation. This shot also strongly echoes the painted cityscapes of Mario Sironi, produced throughout the 1920s, which depict the factories, new apartment blocks, tramline and rail systems that characterize the developing Italian urban landscape. Sironi’s works are specifically given titles that locate them in the urban periphery (e.g., Periferia industriale, a painting produced in 1928). The iconography of Stramilano’s opening shots, therefore, also clearly locates us in exactly these same border zones, where the most industrialized elements of the city overlap with a landscape that is not yet quite fully urban. Such spaces have been exactly where modernist practices of representation find their most fertile territory. We might think here not only of Sironi, but of the kinds of nineteenth-century French painting T.J. Clark analyses in his The Painting of Modern Life, or the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini.8 Subsquent shots—all taken from a static camera—do the work of moving us from periphery to center, and in so doing show us various forms of human labor, especially the work of street cleaners (spazzini) and those employed in loading, unloading, and selling produce at the central market. The scale of the market itself indicates synecdochically the scale of the city that we are entering, slowly. The tone or tempo throughout these first several shots could be described as rather languidly busy, and in this sense the film draws to mind the opening moments of Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Stramilano, however, will maintain this tempo more or less across its 15 minutes of duration. Abruptly, following a fade out of a final image of the market, we suddenly find ourselves in a gleaming modern factory, shown to us in a panning shot, all tubes and pipes and heavy machinery, but with no humans

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in sight. Several more shots confirm the striking modernity of the factory that seems to await its summoning into productive activity. The film forestalls any sense of what this activity will look like by returning us to the market via shots of cows—in close up and long shot—and then to the tram shed from which, seemingly in pairs, the city’s street cars rumble out into the city. We see shots of these moving along boulevards, shots of morning commuters squeezing into the press of bodies onboard. A city awakens into life. So far then, Stramilano has introduced us to the city’s periphery and its center, its urban infrastructure, its technological modernity, and the scale of alimentary provision necessary for its inhabitants to reproduce their labor. In what are probably the film’s most arresting and formally daring few seconds, very low angle moving shots (both tilting, it seems) of the factory chimneys described earlier are superimposed over one another in a manner that finally asserts of the dynamism of the film medium itself. As Leonardo Quaresima points out, this sequence is the film at its most modernist, and even perhaps its most Futurist, the point at which it most resembles the experiments of Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927), which was without doubt an influence on D’Errico.9 The formal experimentation and dynamism of this moment are what carry us back into the factory itself—not the factory we have seen earlier, but another one, involved, it seems, in the manufacture of heavy machinery. The camera moves (panning, slightly) to track the movement of the factory machinery. We also visit another site of industrial production, a steel mill, shots of which look forward to Ruttmann’s Acciaio (Steel, 1933). Cinema’s energies are allied with and compared to Milanese industry in a mode of reciprocity. The film then moves from the enclosed space of the factory and into the city’s center, showing us ever so briefly shots of the Piazza del Duomo, Milan’s greatest, most iconic landmark. Long and wide shots, taken, we assume, from the rooftops of tall buildings, show us other tall buildings and various forms of motorized traffic—automobiles and trams.10 Milan seems to have been not quite modern at daybreak but more fully modern by mid-morning. Having established a basic horizon of urban modernity and having consistently allied this with the materiality of industrial production, the film then settles down to show us yet another factory in a bit more detail. This time we visit a rayon factory. Long lateral tracking shots reveal row after row of machines involved in the conversion of cane to rayon. The emphasis on rayon feels proleptic. The rayon industry was privileged under Fascism, particularly in the 1930s, following the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and Italy’s resultant economic isolation. Rayon could be produced in Italy from cane grown on Italian soil. Thus it was a commodity that could be produced under conditions of “autarchy,” Fascist jargon for economic

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autonomy. In her feminist-materialist analysis of the rayon industry during Fascism, Karen Pinkus stresses the way in which rayon was proposed as a commodity available and appropriate to every social class.11 The production of rayon was a highly dangerous and toxic affair, due to the chemicals and high temperatures needed to produce the textile, and despite official Fascist policy that discouraged or disallowed women from working in order to focus their energies on reproduction, the rayon industry maintained a largely female labor force.12 We see these productive female laborers in the tracking shots that show us the row up row of complicated machines required in spinning artificial silk from cane.13 In these shots our gaze is confronted by the gaze of these female workers who barely pause in their efforts in order to look back at the moving camera. These are some of the only extended examples of the camera’s mobility in the entire 15 minutes of the film, as well. We see the various stages of rayon’s production, which culminates in shots of the fabric issuing from the factory machinery almost like liquid metal or, more suggestively, liquid filmstrip.

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Figure 6.2  Stramilano (Corrado D’Errico, 1929)

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Rayon touched women’s lives as both producers and consumers, and Stramilano shows us this by moving us seamlessly to a site of rayon consumption. This is a fashion show of dresses, made, we infer, from the rayon which we have just seen being fabricated. As female models slink around an art deco interior, wealthy, well-dressed women look on admiringly. One woman is shown several samples of rayon fabric by the women working in what we take to be a small fashion house. In other words, the film moves us swiftly from production to consumption. Time slows here and we, the film’s spectators, mirror the activity of the fashion show’s spectators, and because these spectators are all women, our activity of looking is also feminized. Like the visitors to the fashion house, we admire the shimmering commodities and covet the modernity they embody. The time of consumption, the film seems to say, is a time of leisure, and yet, of course, there are here bodies at work: the fashion models who move and pose so as to exhibit both the cut and feel of these dresses. What they also labor— effortlessly, it seems—to exhibit is the modern materiality of rayon itself as it clings to the body’s surface, revealingly—as if rayon were a new medium (like film) that could reveal—perhaps better than other fabrics—what a body really looks like. The languid tempo of this sequence is emblematic for Stramilano’s alternating temporality and suggests that the modern—in Italy or anywhere, perhaps—consists in periods of tediously fascinated waiting and looking. From this scene of visual and corporeal lassitude and fascination, we move, via a very explicit intertitle that tells us where we are going, to the Teatro del Verme (Via San Giovanni sul Muro) where we will see Yia Ruskaya (Evgenija Borisenko) and the members of her school perform. Ruskaya was a refugee from the Soviet revolution who emigrated to Milan and eventually married the editor of the Corriere della Sera, Aldo Borelli. In this scene, the modernist dancer demonstrates a kind of laborious aesthetic activity: whereas ballet traditionally concealed the body’s labor, modern dance emphasizes its own effortful undertaking. The scenes of dancers performing synchronously in groups brings to mind the Fascist era spectacles of bodies performing calisthenics en masse. The film offers some impressive close-ups and one or two jump cuts that organize the material in a more charged manner, but for the most part the film is content to situate its point of view on the proceedings from what feels like the position of an audience member. The camera watches, as do we: the buzz of modern life is registered via the content of the performance, rather than the film’s form in responding to it. That relationship of camera to the profilmic changes slightly when the film cuts to another site of consumption: a brasserie cum nightclub in which the camera responds mimetically to the rhythms of the jazz band. Extreme close-ups taken by a camera that excitedly bobs and shakes in

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response to the movement of musicians produce fleeting currents of synaesthetic harmony between the camera and its object of representation. The scene in the dance hall is framed with a higher degree of abstraction and plasticity than is the case elsewhere, as if the film itself had finally reached a frenzy of excitement commensurate to the life of the city it seeks to represent. In keeping with the momentum the film seems to be enjoying at this point, it sends us off on a furious early morning car trip outside Milan to Lake Como. A slow panning shot from above the lake allows us to survey its beauty, but at the expense of introducing the outdated tempo and aesthetic of early cinema vedutismo, as if the trip outside the city immediately results in a slackening of the film’s modernity. The film remembers itself, however, and returns us via a single edit to Milan’s Stazione Centrale— in 1933, Corrado D’Erico would celebrate the musicality of train stations and railways in his Ritmi di stazione. What we see, via a high-angle long shot, is the city’s nineteenth-century station (designed by Louis-Jules Bouchot and opened in 1864), but not the new station (designed by Ulisse Stacchini) which was at the time of filming under construction and eventually opened in 1931. Next we are offered a screen split diagonally that shows us one train leaving as another departs. The film at this point nearly seems to overcompensate for having lost track of its ambitions on the short jaunt to Como, and thus seeks to over-emphasize its ability to be modern and modernist in this graphic division and multiplication of screen space.

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Figure 6.3  Stramilano (Corrado D’Errico, 1929)

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Finally the film concludes anachronistically by returning us to a night time skyline and its flashing neon lights advertising all that could be bought and consumed in Italy in the 1920s. Conspicuous among this electric riot of signs and symbols are advertisements for Fiat, Italy’s largest car manufacturer, and Magnesia San Pellegrino, a popular cure for constipation. Somewhat unconsciously (we imagine), then, Stramilano ends by gesturing towards questions of production and consumption that one could take to be its consistent concerns, from the first shot of the factory chimneys, to those of the central market, to rayon production, to the fashion show and to this finale of frenzied neon display. Production, we have seen, is quickness, exertion, and speed; consumption, like constipation, or like the fashion show of rayon dresses, is a mode of deceleration. The film seems to have a hard time deciding between which mode it wants to emphasize. In fact, the film may be compelling us to entertain speed and slowness as two core constituent elements of (Milanese) urban modernity. The film’s closing shots feature the Milan duomo. The penultimate shot features two irised exposures of trains moving along train tracks, with the duomo hovering behind. These double-exposed irises disappear, and we are left with only the duomo itself, that most iconic signifier of Milan. These final seconds suggest that Milan’s ancient history happily englobes its modernity: the film offers a synthesis of past and present. The dated effect of the iris (a quaint effect by this point in film history), however, lingers and mingles with the conservatism of leaving us with this final image of ecclesiastical authority. Perhaps nothing in the films feels quite as old-fashioned as this odd conclusion. Stramilano’s charm as a historical artefact extends from what I take to be its ambivalence and awkwardness in relation to its subject: modern Milan. Presumably D’Errico’s imperative was to make Milan—and thus Italy— seem like the most modern of places. Instead, the film offers a number of the signs, indices, and experiences of modernity but in a stylistic and iconographic manner that feels oddly less than convincingly up-to-theminute. City symphony films are always, to some extent, no matter how completely modernized the city in question might be, an advertisement for—and an assertion of—that city’s modernity. Given its emphasis in the closing few seconds on the neon signs flashing gaudily in the night sky, it seems fitting to suggest that Stramilano presents a version of modern Milan—and modern Italy—that might be more advertised than realized.14

notes 1 Laura Marcus, Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 89. 2 See Diane Ghirardo, Building New Communities: New Deal American and Fascist Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).

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3 On rayon manufacturing under Fascism see Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising Under Fascism (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 213–27; and Jeffrey Schnapp, “The Fabric of Modern Times,” Critical Inquiry 24, 1 (Autumn 1997): 191–245. 4 Quoted in James Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy: The Passing of the Rex (Bloomington, IN and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 132. Hay has an entire chapter on Strapaese: “ ‘Terra madre’ and the Myth of ‘Strapaese’,” 132–49. 5 Giovanni Lista, Cinéma et photographie futuristes (Milan: Skira, 2008), 125–31. 6 See his short obituary in La Stampa (4 September 1941): 3. 7 Quoted in Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy, 207. Originally published in “Stile LUCE,” Lo schermo (June 1936). 8 See T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). 9 Leonardo Quaresima, “ ‘STRACITTÀ’: Cinema, Rationalism, Modernism, and Italy’s ‘Second Futurism,’ ” in Giorgio Bertellini (ed.), Italian Silent Cinema: A Reader (New Barnet, Herts: John Libbey Publishing, 2013), 215. 10 We might recall the appearance of “the huge double-deckered trams” that make a fleeting but significant appearance at the beginning of F.T. Marinetti’s “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism 1909,” in Umbro Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 19. 11 See Pinkus, Bodily Regimes, 213–27. 12 Pinkus, Bodily Regimes, 217. 13 Pinkus is especially interested in the alchemical dimensions of rayon production. 14 D’Errico made two other films that can be considered contributions to the city symphony genre. Ritmi di stazione (1933) offers a jaunty account of a day in the life of a train station. Milizie della civiltà (1940–1) gives us a day in the life of a city under construction, the city being EUR, the Esposizione Universale Romana which was to have marked the twentieth anniversary of Fascist rule. Both films, along with Stramilano can all be streamed on the website that houses the Istituto Luce’s archive: www.archivioluce.com/ archivio/

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belgian variations on the city symphony theme seven

steven jacobs masereel, backman, queeckers Having only a very small film industry but equipped with a high number of film theatres and a thriving network of ciné clubs, Belgium played a minor but nevertheless significant role in the history of city symphonies.1 Films such as Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927) or Joris Ivens’s Regen (1929) were enthusiastically received by the artists and theorists of the Belgian avant-garde, and they were celebrated in art journals such as Variétés.2 These films corresponded with an interest in the theme of the modern metropolis that was already very much present among Belgian artists, above all Frans Masereel, whose The City (1925) can be considered a veritable “city symphony on paper.”3 Published simultaneously in France and Germany, Masereel’s series of 100 woodcuts depicting life in the modern metropolis can almost be read as an illustrated storyboard for Ruttmann’s Berlin city symphony. Illustrious commentators such as Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig noted the “cinematic” qualities of

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Figure 7.1  Midi (Lucien Backman, 1929) Still

Masereel’s work, and there’s no question that the similarities between La Ville and Ruttmann’s famous city symphony are striking: the dawn-todusk structure, the juxtaposition of panoramic shots and closer views, the opening sequence depicting the arrival in the city by train, the evocation of hectic city life, the street as a site of social protest, the bustle of entertainment and nightlife, the machines in factories, the phantasmagoria of commodities in shop windows, et cetera. Even specific scenes, such as the horse fallen in traffic and the suicide attempt of a woman, also appear in La Ville. According to William Moritz, there can be no doubt that Ruttmann’s film was based on Masereel’s best-selling book. Referring to the film’s credit title “From an Idea by Carl Mayer,” Moritz ironically suggests that Mayer’s idea was: “Let’s make a film like Masereel’s book.”4 Apart from Masereel’s “city symphony on paper,” several Belgian city poems were also made on celluloid. In 1929, the year of the release of city symphonies by Dziga Vertov, Joris Ivens, Robert Florey, and others, at least two Belgian avant-garde filmmakers made films dealing with Brussels city life, both of which are now unfortunately lost. Lucien Backman, a cameraman who became one of the leading figures in the Union belge des cinéastes amateurs in the early 1930s, made Midi (Noon, 1929), which deals with urban life as the clock strikes noon in the style of Ruttmann. According to press reviews, the film shows floods of office clerks leaving through doors, fullypacked trams, construction sites coming to a standstill, restaurants filling with clients, and road workers having their lunch or taking a nap, in an ironical montage orchestrating all the details typical of a city at noon.

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As in his La Vie à l’envers (1930), Backmann used reverse motion effects in Midi evoking Vertov.5 In addition, painter Carlo Queeckers depicted the popular Marolles neighborhood in Kermesse flamande (1929), made in collaboration with Paul Flon and Camy Cluytens. La Nation belge described the film as made of

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shots that are not only original but that also give away a sophisticated artistic taste. Of particular interest is the tour of the Hôtel de Ville that we only discover gradually and that literally launches its Saint Michael into the sky. We like its quarters, churches, and panoramas seen from unexpected angles. . . . This film is an excellent work, full of rhythm and movement [but] its too rapid succession of images hurts the eye.6

In the same year, Queeckers also made Mélodie bruxelloise (1929), one of the many city films with a musical term in its title.7

images d’ostende and CICI II

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The year 1929 also saw the release of Images d’Ostende, Henri Storck’s lyrical portrait of the Belgian seaside town where he was born in 1907. After seeing Robert Flaherty’s Moana (1926) in a Brussels ciné-club—a veritable revelation to him—Storck (1907–99) founded a highly successful film club in his native city in 1928.8 Seeking advice from other ciné-clubs, he began an intense correspondence with Jean Vigo, who was establishing a film club in Nice at that time. This international network of film clubs proved very important for the proliferation of city symphonies as well as for Storck’s own film career.9 Soon after, Images d’Ostende began its own tour of ciné-clubs. In Paris, Storck got advice from Boris Kaufman, Vertov’s brother who collaborated on Vigo’s À propos de Nice (1930). In this context, he also met Joris Ivens, the driving force behind the Amsterdam Filmliga. In the late nineteenth century, Ostend had become a fashionable Belgian seaside resort and, in the early twentieth century, it turned into an important cultural center, being the residence of writers such as de Michel de Ghelderode and Fernand Crommelynck, and painters such as James Ensor, Léon Spilliaert, Constant Permeke, and Félix Labisse. The city and its beaches became an important motif in their works, in particular those of Ensor and Spilliaert. As a young man, Storck had close contacts with these artists and they certainly inspired him. Ostend became one of Storck’s favorite subjects, featuring in several films of the early 1930s and also in many later ones.10

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Figure 7.2  Images d’Ostende (Henri Storck, 1929–30)

As in so many of the city symphonies of the 1920s and 1930s, in Images d’Ostende the tourist’s city remains largely out of sight. Storck filmed on a windy winter day—“Aspects intimes de la ville, l’hiver,” an intertitle states. Just a few strollers face the wind on the beach. As the titles of the visual chapters indicate, the film focuses on the port, the anchors, the foam, the dunes, and the North Sea. By means of a series of panning shots or shots characterized by gentle camera movements, Images d’Ostende visualizes the places and natural elements that constitute Ostend and its immediate surroundings. Focusing on water and wind and the graphic patterns they create in the sand, Storck deals with the favorite motifs of an earlier generation of artists, such as Impressionist painters and Art Nouveau designers. In his 1931 article on Storck, Oswell Blakeston wrote about the “ephemeral, fleeting beauty on which the condensation of cinema imposes the living rhythm of dance.”11 Ephemeral elements such as water and sand moved by the wind connect Images d’Ostende with French impressionist cinema and the aspirations of the cinéma pur. In his 1938 Histoire de l’art cinématographique, Carl Vincent called Images d’Ostende “one of the most beautiful works of pure cinematographic poetry that silent cinema has left us.”12 Contrary to other city symphonies that favor the mechanical, Storck draws only to a certain extent attention to the urban infrastructure of the coastal town such as the harbor, the dikes, and the jetties. His main interest is unmistakably the natural world of shifting sensations, a world which the medium of film can evoke perfectly. Evoking ideas of French impressionist film theory

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of the 1920s, Carl Vincent states that Images d’Ostende is a discovery of the “photogenic secrets of beings, nature, and things, through the plasticity of their life,” and he notes “the expressive beauty of the image” as well as “the insistent and musical rhythm in the way of a symphony.”13 In the works of Belgian and Dutch documentarists such as Storck, Dekeukeleire, and Ivens, Vincent recognized “a remarkable perfection in the plasticity, an emphatic sense of rhythm, a care for the composition of images and the movement of sequences.” For Vincent, in short, Images d’Ostende is “a kind of symphonic composition.”14 With its focus on water and the sea, Images d’Ostende shares characteristics with À propos de Nice (1930), Vigo’s city symphony on the French seaside town, which opens with images of waves. Water, of course, also pervades Rain (1929), the city poem made by Ivens showing the city of Amsterdam through the lens of a shower of rain. As Ivens’s film on Amsterdam, Storck shows how nature intervenes in the fleeting life of the urban environment. In the following years, Storck would collaborate with both Vigo and Ivens: he would act as an assistant director for Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (1932) and he would co-direct Misère au Borinage (1934) with Ivens. Prior to these collaborations, Storck, Vigo, and Ivens were present at the second International Conference of Independent Film (CICI II), which took place in Brussels between 27 November and 1 December 1930.15 At this conference, both Images d’Ostende and Vigo’s À propos de Nice were screened in the presence of many prominent members of the European film avant-garde, including Hans Richter, Boris Kaufman, Léon Moussinac, Enrico Prampolini, and Oswell Blakeston. Also present was Germaine Dulac, who just had become artistic director of Gaumont-Franco-Film-Aubert and who invited Storck, as well as Vigo and Charles Dekeukeleire, to work with her.16 Storck and Vigo’s city symphonies were a perfect fit for the conference program, as it also included screenings of several other lyrical city films such as Rien que les heures (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1926), Skyscraper Symphony (Robert Florey, 1929), Poèmes de Madrid (probably Esencia de verbena by Ernesto Giménez Caballero, 1930), Champs-Elysées (Jean Lods and Boris Kaufman, 1928), Bateaux Parisiens (Daniel Abric and Michel Gorel, 1929), as well as a (now lost) “Lyrical Reportage on Antwerp” by Charles Dekeukeleire.

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visions de lourdes Dekeukeleire (1905–71), who was, together with Storck, the leading Belgian avant-garde filmmaker of the 1920s and 1930s, would also become the author of another city poem: Visions de Lourdes (1932). Having close contacts with the avant-garde group and journal 7 Arts, which propagated the theories of Constructivism and the idea of pure art, Dekeukeleire expressed his admiration for filmmakers such as Epstein, Dullac, and Vertov in many of his writings.17 After having made some highly original avant-garde films

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such as Combat de boxe (1927), Impatience (1928), Histoire de détective (1929), and Witte vlam (1930), he turned to making documentaries. Marking this shift to documentary cinema, Visions de Lourdes was triggered by the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne (JOC), the Catholic Young Worker’s Movement, which undertook a pilgrimage to Lourdes. This small town in the foothills of the Pyrenees had developed into a major place of Christian pilgrimage after a series of apparitions of the Holy Virgin that are reported to have occurred to Bernadette Soubirous in 1858.18 The spring water from the Grotto in which the Virgin appeared is believed to possess miraculous healing properties. Consequently, the pilgrimage to Lourdes entails the consumption of or bathing in the water, which pours out of the Grotto. One of the world’s leading Catholic Marian shrines, Lourdes became the site of several churches and places of worship as well as impressive candlelight and sacrament processions. In the political context of the Third Republic, marked as it was by fierce debates between Catholics and anticlerical republicans, Lourdes became a controversial site that also inspired novels such as Émile Zola’s Lourdes (1894) and feature films such as La Tragédie de Lourdes (Julien Duvivier, 1923) and La Vie merveilleuse de Bernadette (Georges Pallu, 1929). In the late 1920s and 1930s leading members of the avant-garde discovered the site. Famous journalist and photo-reporter Egon Kisch, for instance, dedicated an extensive essay on Lourdes in the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung and Jean Vigo played with the idea of making a film on the town.19 A questioning and critical catholic, Dekeukeleire elaborately shows all the

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Figure 7.3  Visions de Lourdes (Charles Dekeukeleire, 1932)

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elements that constitute Lourdes as a religious site through a swift succession of shots. Like so many city symphonies, Visions de Louvres opens its exploration of the town with images of a train approaching the city. This time, however, trains carry diseased and disabled pilgrims, who end up in an urban landscape marked by churches, crucifixes, religious statues, candles, and monstrances. Streets and squares are filled with priests, nuns, and monks. Pilgrims are praying on their knees. People collect holy water. Huge crowds gather in processions by day as well as by night, resulting in shots of hundreds of candles and torches passing in front of a church lit by hundreds of light bulbs. Dekeukeleire’s style is sober and straightforward. Only once in a while does he appeal to a modernist or avant-garde sensibility by using highangle shots (of crowds scattered over the squares) or low camera angles (depicting some of the procession’s participants or candle sellers against the sky). As Storck’s film on Ostend, Dekeukeleire’s city poem on Lourdes is characterized by a predilection for the sensuality of natural elements. Visions de Lourdes opens with beautiful images of clouds, the nearby mountains, snow, water, and even the waves of the sea, which is situated far away from this place of pilgrimage. Dekeukeleire’s camera also glides gently and sometimes restlessly along the jagged rock formations in a cave that suddenly changes into the Grotto containing a statue of the Holy Virgin. In contrast with Storck’s film on Ostend, Dekeukeleire also focuses his camera on people and on the crowds. Apart from cherishing the beauty of the natural environment, Dekeukeleire’s observational style provides a respectful approach of Lourdes and its devout pilgrims. Nonetheless, the film is also marked by a critical and even acerbic approach, and, indeed, it was considered subversive in Catholic circles.20 As in his documentary on Dixmude (1931), the site of annual mass gatherings of Flemish nationalists, Dekeukeleire does not hesitate to demystify the place.21 Lourdes is also presented as a site of naïve credulity. Endless processions of pilgrims slide past shrewd and greedy sellers of candles and rosaries. The camera tracks impressively through a street lined with endless rows of shops packed with religious merchandise, evoking the transformation of religion into a commodity. Sick people awaiting a miracle are delivered in great numbers. Holy water pours down through taps. Thousands of letters are displayed behind metal bars. Evoking a timeless realm of nature and faith, the film also presents Lourdes as a place of superstition that is organized as a factory.

surrealist documentary Although Images d’Ostende and Visions de Lourdes are lyrical portraits inspired by French impressionist cinema (on which Dekeukeleire had written enthusiastically during the 1920s), they also give us information on the topography of a Belgian seaside resort and a French place of pilgrimage. In so doing,

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they mark the “documentary turn” of many progressive filmmakers in the early sound era—an evolution that became clear at the Brussels CICI conference.22 However, the documentaries by Storck and Dekeukeleire do not necessarily stand in contrast to their avant-garde or more abstract films— at the time, film programs often combined screenings of Images d’Ostende or Visions de Louvre with other, more “abstract” films by the same directors.23 Like Joris Ivens, these Belgian filmmakers demonstrated that a personal or auteurist documentary film could be seen as the last stand of the avantgarde against the film industry.24 In addition, the city poems by Storck and Dekeukeleire also show affinities with Surrealism—undoubtedly the most important avant-garde movement in Belgium in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Images d’Ostende, for instance, shares with Surrealism a fascination for waste, garbage, dust, debris, and derelict spaces in its remarkable sequence of images of deserted docks, smoking fishing boats, rusty chains, withered anchors, and stagnant and sordid water full of rubbish. Reminiscent of the works by writers and photographers associated with Surrealism such as André Breton, Louis Aragon, Georges Bataille, Man Ray, André Kertesz, and Eli Lotar, this aesthetics of the l’informe turns the urban landscape into a Surrealist terrain vague and site of estrangement, suggesting wreckage or raw forces hidden beneath cultured surfaces.25 This sense of unease is also the result of Storck’s fascination for an uncanny emptiness—another trope of Surrealist urban imagery. In novels such as Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926) or Breton’s Nadja (1927, with photographs by André Boiffard), or in the photographs by Eugène Atget, admired and rediscovered by the Surrealists, empty streets and squares are presented as stages for an existential drama.26 Similar imagery can be found in urban photographs by Man Ray, Eli Lotar, and many others. In contrast with the fascination for the urban masses characterizing many city symphonies, Images d’Ostende does not only focus on water and sand, it also emphatically shows a harbor, beaches, and boardwalk without its tourists crowds—Storck focused later on Ostend’s crowded beaches in Trains de Plaisir (1930) and Ostende, reine des plages (1931). In Images d’Ostende, only a few characters can be seen in some long shots of a pier, the embankment, the beaches, and the dunes. However, instead of animating the empty spaces, these solitary figures emphasize the emptiness of the city—a notion that was also evoked by a striking shot of the wind blowing in empty deck chairs. Shrouded in an uncanny and gloomy atmosphere, Visions de Lourdes, too, is marked by Surrealist elements. Explicitly juxtaposing the divine and the commercial, the magical and the industrial, Visions de Lourdes comes close to Surrealism’s oxymoronic fascination for Roman Catholicism, combining an interest in the supernatural with an obsession for irrational beliefs, physical pain, the grotesque, and strategies of desecration.27 In particular the uncanny shots of crutches suspended in the Sacred Grotto and the

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striking images of floors strewn with leather corsets, wooden legs, and other prostheses speak unmistakably of a Surrealist sensibility. Not coincidentally, both Storck and Dekeukeleire are mentioned in Ado Kyrou’s 1953 Le Surréalisme au cinema, one of the few books on Surrealist cinema drawing attention to documentaries.28 Like the “straight photography” admired by the Surrealists, documentary cinema could reveal the surreal or the marvelous in the real.29 Like other key figures of the history of documentary film close to Surrealism such as Jacques Brunius, Georges Franju, Humphrey Jennings, Eli Lotar, Jean Painlevé, and Jean Vigo, Storck and Dekeukeleire brought a poetic ambivalence to their films, creating unsettling juxtapositions within and between images.

notes

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1 On Ciné clubs in Belgium, see André Thirifays, “Les Clubs de cinema,” Reflets (Numéro special: Le cinema en Belgique) (1940): 41–50; and Daniel Biltereyst, “Ciné-clubs en het geheugen van de film: over de eerste Belgische filmclubs en de constructie van de filmgeschiedenis,” in Daniel Biltereyst and Christel Stalpaert (eds.), Filmsporen: Opstellen over film, verleden en geheugen (Ghent: Academia Press, 2007), 30–49. 2 See Paul Fierens, “La Symphonie d’une grande ville,” Variétés (June 1929): 114–15; and Menno Ter Braak, “Un auteur de films Hollandais: Joris Ivens,” Variétés 12 (1929): 651–3. 3 La Ville or Die Stadt was published by Kurt Wolff Verlag in Munich and Albert Morancé in Paris. See Steven Jacobs, “ ‘Die Stadt/La Ville’ (1925): Frans Masereel’s City Film on Paper,” in Masereel: Frans Masereel and Contemporary Art (Ostend: Muzee, 2017), 217–33. Masereel’s series of woodcuts, can be found on-line: www.frans-masereel.de/15427_Die_Stadt.html 4 See William Moritz, “Bartosch’ ‘The Idea’,” in Jayne Pilling (ed.), A Reader in Animation Studies (New Barnet: John Libbey, 1997), 96. The similarities between Masereel’s La Ville and Ruttmann’s Berlin were already noticed in the early 1930s; see, for instance, Georges Chabot and Hubert Devoghelaere, “Frans Masereel,” Opbouwen: Maandschrift voor jonge en oude kunst (May‑June 1931): 128. 5 See Paul Davay, Cinéma de Belgique (Gembloux: Duculot, 1973), 162; Marianne Thys et al., Belgian Cinema/Le Cinéma belge/De Belgische film (Ghent: Ludion, 1999), 162. 6 “La Kermesse flamande,” La Nation belge 12, 188 (1929): 7. 7 See Francis Bolen, Histoire authentique du cinéma belge (Brussels: Memo and Codec, 1978), 89; and Thys, Belgian Cinema, 163. Francis Bolen, Histoire authentique du cinema belge (Brussels: Memo and Codec, 1978), 89. 8 On the Club du Cinéma d’Ostende, see Daniel Biltereyst, “Filmclubs en de explosie van Potemkin: Over Storck, Eisenstein en actieve cinefilie,” in Johan Swinnen and Luc Deneulin (eds.), Henri Storck memoreren (Brussels: VUB Press, 2007), 96–110. 9 On Storck, see the “Storck Issue” of Revue Belge du Cinéma (August 1979); Hommage aan Henri Storck: Films 1928–1985, Oeuvrecatalogus (Brussels: Fonds Henri Storck, 1997); Vincent Geens, “Le Temps des utopies: L’ambition cinématographique d’Henri Storck, de 1907 à 1940,” Bijdragen tot de Eigentijdse

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Geschiedenis 7 (2000): 189–237; Laura Vichi, Henri Storck: de l’avant-garde au documentaire social (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2002); and Johan Swinnen and Luc Deneulin (eds.), Storck memoreren (Brussels: VUB Press, 2007). 10 Other Ostend films by Storck include Les Fêtes du centenaire (1930), Trains de plaisir (1930), and Ostende: reine des plages (1931). 11 Oswell Blakeston, “The Romantic Cinema of Henri Storck,” Architectural Review 69, 414 (May 1931): 173. 12 Carl Vincent, Histoire de l’art cinématographique (Brussels: Editions du trident, 1938), 215. 13 Vincent, Histoire de l’art cinématographique, 214. 14 Vincent, Histoire de l’art cinématographique, 214–15. 15 See Pepa De Maesschalck, Het internationale avant-garde filmmilieu tijdens het interbellum in België, ca. 1923–1933: Het Deuxième Congrès International du Cinéma Indépendant (CICI), een kantelmoment (Unpublished MA Thesis, Ghent University, 2014). 16 Raymond Borde, “À propos du 2ième Congres international du cinéma indépendent à Bruxelles 1930: Interview de Henri Storck,” in Protocole du troisième congress international du cinema independent (Lausanne: Sidoc, 1964), 145. 17 On Dekeukeleire and his early works, see Kristin Thompson, “(Re)discovering Charles Dekeukeleire,” Millennium Film Journal 7–9 (1980–1): 115–29; Henri Storck, “Hommage à Charles Dekeukeleire,” Travelling 56–7 (1980): 82–3; and Philippe Dubois, “Petite suite en mineur a propos des premiers films de Charles Dekeukeleire,” Travelling 56–7 (1980): 90–5. 18 See Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (London: Penguin Books, 1999). 19 Egon Erwin Kisch, Eintritt verboten (Paris: Edition du Carrefour, 1934); Jean Vigo, “Lourdes (scénario),” Positif 7 (May 1953): 59–60. 20 See Paul-Gustave Van Hecke, “Visions de Lourdes,” Le Rouge et le noir 3, 21 (1932): 5. 21 See Jacques Polet “Charles Dekeukeleire: parcours analytique d’une oeuvre,” Revue belge du cinéma I, 1 (1982); and Lieve Spaas, The Francophone Film: A Struggle for Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 9–10. 22 See “Deuxième congrès international du cinema indépendant,” Les BeauxArts 6 (1930): 7. See also Pierre Bourgeois, “Plaidoyer pour le film documentaire,” Les Beaux-Arts 8 (1930): 1–2. 23 The 20 May screening 1932 at the Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts, for instance, combined Visions de Lourdes with Witte Vlam, see “Une Scéance de Keukeleire,” L’Eventail 29 (1932): 8. 24 Joris Ivens, “Quelque réflections sur les documentaires d’avant-garde,” La revue des vivants 10 (1931): 518–20. On the relations between the avant-garde and documentary cinema, see Bill Nichols, “Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry 27 (Summer 2001): 580–610; and Malte Hagener, Moving Forward, Looking back: The European Avant-Garde and the Invention of Film Culture 1919–1939 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 205–34. 25 Ian Walker, City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). 26 Steven Jacobs, “Amor Vacui: Photography and the Image of the Deserted City,” History of Photography 30, 2 (Summer 2006): 108–18. 27 See Dennis Hollier, “Surrealism and Its Discontents,” Papers of Surrealism 7 (2007), retrieved from www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/ journal7/

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28 Ado Kyrou, Le Surréalisme au cinéma (Paris: Le Terrain vague, 1963). On Surrealism and the documentary, see also Jeffrey Ruoff, “An Ethnographic Surrealist Film: Luis Buñuel’s ‘Land Without Bread’,” Visual Anthropology Review 14, 1 (Spring‑Summer 1998): 45–57; Michael Richardson, Surrealism and Cinema (Oxford: Berg, 2006); and Bruce Hodson, “Surrealist Documentary: Reviewing the Real,” Senses of Cinema (2005), retrieved from http:// sensesofcinema.com/2005/feature-articles/surrealist_documentary/ 29 See Walker, City Gorged with Dreams; and David Bate, Photography & Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011).

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koelinga’s de steeg palimpsest and parallax historiography eight

ivo blom Jan Koelinga’s involvement in avant-garde circles during the production of De Steeg (The Alley, 1932) and his relations with the Nazi film industry in the 1940s are well-known facts in the Netherlands, but less has been written on his early work, situated in the area of photography and the socialist press. De Steeg can be considered a palimpsest, hiding under its surface remnants of both social photography and avant-garde cinema. As a result, this multi-layered film answers to Agnes Petho˝ ’s concept of a parallax historiography, which refers to the way in which earlier forms of cinema get to be revisited and re-interpreted from the perspective of newer media forms of moving images, or reversely, how these newer media forms can be interpreted from the perspective of earlier forms of cinema.1

Appropriating elements of Koelinga’s earlier photographic work, De Steeg can also be described as what Irina Rajewsky called a form of “trans-medial

intermediality,” being “the appearance of a certain motif, aesthetic, or discourse across a variety of different media.”2

a city symphony with social commitment

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Koelinga’s De Steeg was the initiative of the filmmaker himself and it was distributed by De Uitkijk, the Amsterdam cinema of the Dutch Filmliga. In his dissertation Cinematic Rotterdam, Floris Paalman states that the film shows the turn within the avant-garde towards explicit social engagement, which was extra motivated by the international financial crisis that started in October 1929. It is a shift of focus that is also recognizable in the works by people like László Moholy-Nagy, who had been a guest of the Filmliga Rotterdam shortly before.

Indeed, in contrast to earlier “a-social” Dutch city symphonies such as Joris Ivens’s cine-poems De Brug (1928) and Regen (1929), De Steeg gives a characteristic image of life in the Rotterdam slums in the Depression Era. Starting with iconic images of modern and modernist Rotterdam such as the Coolsingel avenue with its luxurious department store De Bijenkorf, the camera subsequently explores the poor and destitute in the nearby slums, showing children afflicted by diseases such as scabies, a cat in a window, and a mother breast-feeding her child. From the wealthy life in the elegant

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Figure 8.1  De Steeg (Jan Koelinga, 1932)

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center, we take a sidestep to the forgotten lower-depths of the modern metropolis, not unlike other contemporaneous city symphonies such as Moholy-Nagy’s Impressionen vom alten Marseiller Hafen (Vieux Port) (1929).3 In other scenes, De Steeg continues alternating between high and low life, e.g., in the sequence juxtaposing musicians in the park versus a street musician with an accordion, making a strong social-realist statement despite some symbolic imagery. The film’s exact location was the Schoorsteenvegersgang alley, near Hofplein. While the press conceived the film as a protest against the poverty in the Rotterdam slums, Koelinga also wanted to show the beauty in ugliness. More than just registering, Koelinga used a quite romantic representation of life in the slums as seemingly uncomplicated, straightforward, and solidary.

“a very rare debut”: praise and critique De Steeg premiered on 3 December 1932 at De Uitkijk. Filmliga did not only exhibit many foreign avant-garde and documentary films, it also stimulated local productions, which were often crossovers between documentary and avant-garde, such as the early works by Ivens, which, just like De Steeg, were shot with a Kinamo, the first handheld camera made in the 35mm format. At De Uitkijk, De Steeg was screened together with another avant-garde documentary, De Trekschuit (The Barge, 1932) by Otto van Neijenhoff and Mannus Franken. Dutch newspapers wrote positively about Koelinga’s debut.4 In Filmliga, the homonymous journal of the Dutch film society, Henrik Scholte called it “a splendid and strong cine-poem.”5 Chr. de Graaff, in the Amsterdam-based liberal newspaper Handelsblad, wrote, What a famous Russian filmmaker such as Vertov only achieves by turning the world on its head and by use of all kinds of film tricks: the relentless attention to a spectacle, in which actually nothing special happens, our young compatriot manages to realize in a Rotterdam alley by just a few popular types, an accordion player, a woman at a washtub, some mothers with children, two chattering old females.6

De Graaff also praised Koelinga’s compassion and expression of joy of living, contrasting with what he called the “conventional sour ‘socialist’ vision.”7 The critic lauded Koelinga’s individualization of the masses, thus showing his humanist stance. “Koelinga, who didn’t take advantage of any intrigue, any scene, has succeeded in this almost unattainable what the French Unaminists have almost vainly sought to give in their literature. And this makes this a very rare debut!”8 Filmliga critic Menno ter Braak was more disapproving. When a sound version of the film with music by Arthur Bauer was released in May 1933,

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he denounced Koelinga’s symbolism, such as the park and sea motifs when the accordion is played, and advised him to stick to realism. Ter Braak made clear that the park and sea images were poetic as such, but it was the montage of them together that made them banal, serving as moral comments on the slum images. Ter Braak also thought Koelinga was too strongly influenced by Ivens’s style and should start working on his own. He complained that the camera was too restless and the editing too jerky, but explained this by Koelinga’s lack of means. Yet, he considered the film a “hors d’oeuvre” tasting for more and he liked its unsentimental focus on the alley inhabitants: The objectivity of the camera constantly has a tragic side effect by the touching and correct way in which Koelinga records the details of life in the alley. . . . Thus Koelinga’s look at the human types in the slums, of which he now and then has excellently struck the mood, is without sentimentality. These are really inhabitants of the alley he filmed, not extras cockeyedly gazing into the lens in a studio setting. Especially his children’s faces are peculiarly innocent and therefore naturalistically true.9

After screenings at De Uitkijk, the Centraal Bureau voor Ligafims distributed the film to various local cinéclubs and regular theaters throughout the 1930s, often as a short preceding a feature.10 Both left-wing socialist and conservative catholic newspapers praised De Steeg, when it was screened together with Paul Fejos’s Marie: légende hongroise (1932) about the downfall of pregnant housemaid.11 De Steeg was also included in a program of avantgarde documentaries at the Antwerp conference of the Catholic Film Center in 1933.12

a dark past overshadowing a career

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Despite the favorable reviews of De Steeg, Koelinga’s career did not develop as film projects stranded.13 However, Koelinga did shot memorable footage of the Depression era such as police putting down riots in the Amsterdam Jordaan quarter—images that heavily contrasted with the idyllic image of the quarter in Dutch fiction films at the time. Koelinga was also one of the cameramen of the 1934 avant-garde spy story Blokkade by Willem van der Hoog, a not too successful attempt by Filmliga members to make a fiction film that was halfway between mainstream and avant-garde. Disappointed because of the Depression and the lack of Dutch governmental support, the desperate Koelinga accepted an offer by UFA in the early 1940s to take shots in the Netherlands—some of which would be inserted in the antiSemitic propaganda film Der ewige Jude (Fritz Hippler, 1941). Koelinga always

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claimed he did not know about this, though he also continued working for UFA during the war, producing anti-Allies comical shorts among others.14 Shortly after the war, Koelinga was interned for several months and he could not work for three years, not getting any state commissions while most documentary filmmakers were dependent on subvention. He did manage to make a handful films in the post-war era, though local and national authorities kept making his life difficult. In a 1973 Dutch TV documentary, Koelinga was bitter about the way the Dutch government had treated him and about others who had been much more active in Nazi propaganda. After the May 1940 German bombing of Rotterdam, Koelinga had shot the ruins on behalf of the Germans, not intended for commercial use but for documentation. According to Floris Paalman, Koelinga’s Verwoestingen in Rotterdam (Destructions in Rotterdam, 1940) shows people strolling through the city, watching the remnants that have almost become an ‘attraction.’ Different from most static recordings by others, Koelinga made use of all kinds of mobile framing, including overview shots taken from a train. These well-made and unique images have long been left unconsidered. The reason might be that Koelinga moved from a socialist engagement towards national-socialist sympathies, which caused him to collaborate on various pro-German propaganda films, although that was not yet at issue in this case.15

After the war, many inhabitants of Rotterdam as well as broadcasting companies were eager to view this material over and again, but resistance organizations kept Koelinga’s dark past alive to prevent screenings. Koelinga’s reputation of a contaminated film director also affected projections of De Steeg, even though it was shot several years before his involvement with Ufa. Koelinga remained rather poor and only in 1982, when the German television showed De Steeg, he finally made some money.16

photography versus film, topics versus style Paalman points out that Koelinga had accompanied the first screenings of De Steeg with photo collages on display in the cinema theater. In his review of the 1933 sound version, Menno ter Braak mentions that ten photomontages by Koelinga were exhibited at the Rotterdam cinema Lumière, during screenings of De Steeg.17 It isn’t exactly clear what kind of photos were shown but it is quite likely that there was a relationship between Koelinga’s filmic debut and his earlier photographic work. After having worked for some years as a sales agent in the mid-1920s, Koelinga had become a photographer for Voorwaarts, the social-democrat daily for Rotterdam and

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surroundings. On behalf of Voorwaarts, journalist Herman van Dijkhuizen published in 1926 a special issue, entitled De Rotterdamsche roofholen en hun bevolking (Rotterdam’s Robber Dens and their Population), subtitled “Peregrinations of a Voorwaarts editor through the neighborhoods of Rotterdam, where prostitution and crime are rampant.” First included in Voorwaarts, the text was later published as a separate book in several reprints.18 To give the publication prestige, a foreword by substitute prosecutor Mr. C.F.J. Gombault was added. Van Dijkhuizen’s book was a virulent pamphlet against usurers, pimps, prostitution and the extortion of women, forcing them to work in prostitution, the deliberate poor housing related to this, and the robbing of clients. The text ended with a plea to authorities to take action. While Van Dijkhuizen had noble intentions, the booklet though led to a court case. Two ladies working in the so-called Deli-Bar on Katendrecht, a typical low-life area of Rotterdam, had protested against their picture being printed in the publication. They sued the editor in chief of Voorwaarts, who, after a first appeal, was judged to a fine, as the young photographer had taken their picture under false pretenses. As Koelinga was at that time the only photographer in the service of Voorwaarts, it is safe to conclude that the (sometimes heavily retouched) photographs of slums, prostitutes, and pimps in the publication are all his, even though the booklet does not mention him. Apparently, Koelinga’s interest in the literally dark side of the city already existed when making these photographs. From the slums of Voorwaarts to the alley of De Steeg is not such a big step. However, Koelinga’s intentions with De Steeg are not clear. He surely did not use it to better the situation of crime and prostitution, as had been the goal and also the effect of Van Dijkhuizen’s booklet: better housing started in Dutch main cities in the 1920s on a large scale, even if not for everybody’s purse. It is generally accepted that most social housing projects in big cities such as Hendrik Petrus Berlage’s development plan for Amsterdam were beneficial mostly to lower middle classes, but not below this level, like the inhabitants of Koelinga’s slums. Moreover, Koelinga’s film differs stylistically from his earlier photographic works. His photography for De Rotterdamsche roofholen en hun bevolking had been pretty straightforward and is not marked by any unusual angles. People were mostly photographed “en face” or “en profil,” either full length, half-sized, or up to the knee. Overviews of streets were often in diagonals to show depth, and often shot on eye-level. That all changes with De Steeg, in which style becomes a highly important ingredient, as indicated by unusual camera angles, the increased use of close ups, and avant-garde-like editing. It is clearly inspired by French Impressionist filmmakers or the innovative editing and cinematography of the Dutch film Handelsbladfilm (Cor Aafjes, 1927), which was shown at the Paris art house Studio des Ursulines. In short, for Koelinga, form becomes important in De Steeg.

Figure 8.2  Cover and Illustration from Herman van Dijkhuizen’s De Rotterdamsche roofholen en hun bevolking (1926)

missed opportunities

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The improvement of the 1920s modernist architecture shown briefly at the beginning of De Steeg is still out of reach for the lower classes, Koelinga seems to say—even when he does not show housing but shops. On a meta-level, we might say this denial for improvement applies to Koelinga himself. In the February 1933 issue of Ons Eigen Tijdschrift, critic Van Melrose positively overviews young Dutch art cinema, but at the same time regrets that so many filmmakers, Koelinga included, are not getting more opportunities.19 The complaint was typical for its time, as the international avant-garde had a hard time because of the polarization and politicization of society, the costly introduction of sound cinema, and the loss of the primacy of the image. Moreover, while Dutch public financing was minimal, Dutch private financiers rather preferred to invest in film exhibition, film technology, and mainstream feature films.20 In March 1934, Koelinga was one of the signatories of a manifesto in Filmliga, proposing to help to rebuild the Dutch film industry, albeit with room for artistic experiment. Yet the Dutch trade association NBB, which owned Dutch film production to a large extent, focused on entertainment and thought artistic experiments too expensive. According to Ansje van Beusekom, “The crisis made the grapes extra sour and some filmmakers and critics, who rather preferred a new national cinema by the avant-garde filmmakers than the frivolous films being produced, reacted extremely vindictively to these developments.”21

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1 Agnes Pethö, “Intermediality in Film: A Historiography of Methodologies,” Acta Universitatis Sapientiae. Film and Media Studies 2 (2010): 55. 2 Irina O. Rajewsky, “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality,” Intermédialités 6 (2005): 46. Transmedial is one of the four categories Jens Schröter proposes in his seminal text “Intermedialität: Facetten und Probleme eines aktuellen medienwissenschaftlichen Begriffs” (1998). The other categories are synthetic, transformal, and ontological intermediality. 3 Floris Paalman, Cinematic Rotterdam: The Times and Tides of a Modern City (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011), 133–4. 4 See Algemeen Handelsblad (3 December 1932); De Tijd (4 December 1932); and De Telegraaf (3 December 1932). 5 Filmliga (December 1932). 6 D.g. [Chr. de Graaff], “Nederlandsche Filmkunst,” Algemeen Handelsblad (3 December 1932): 11. 7 De Graaff, “Nederlandsche Filmkunst.” 8 De Graaf, “Nederlandsche Filmkunst.” 9 Menno ter Braak, “Don Quichotte: De Steeg: Lumière,” NRC (7 October 1933).

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10 At the cinema De Uitkijk, the film was prolonged, together with Paul Fejos’s Marie: légende hongroise (1932); see De Tijd (28 April 1934). The “first night” of De Steeg was as supporting program to Morning Glory (Lowell Sherman, 1933) at the cinema Studio Theater in The Hague; see Het Vaderland (22 November 1934). The Groningen cinéclub Kunstkring showed De Steeg on 28 May 1934 as part of a program containing an early Pathé movie, abstract animation by Oskar Fischinger, Entr’acte (René Clair, 1924), and Menschen am Sonntag (Robert Siodmak and Edgar Ulmer, 1930); see Nieuwsblad van het Noorden (26 May 1936). At the Maastricht cinéclub Filmkring M’33, De Steeg was coupled with an early Max Linder, an animation short, and Eisenstein’s Thunder over Mexico (1934); see Limburger koerier (20 April 1935). The same cinéclub showed De Steeg again in 1939, now coupled with shorts by Ruttmann, George Pal, and Fischinger, as well as Carol Reed’s Bank Holiday (1938); see Limburgs Dagblad (4 December 1939). In The Hague, De Steeg was shown again on a Sunday morning in 1938 at the Gebouw van Kunsten and Wetenschappen, in a special screening attended by Dutch filmmakers, also including Van Neijenhoff’s films Zee and De Trekschuit; see Het Vaderland (17 December 1938). 11 De Tribune (23 April 1934); De Tijd (21 April 1934). 12 De Tijd (16 July 1933). At the Antwerp film conference of the Katholieke Filmcentrale, De Steeg and De Trekschuit were screened among other films. One of the speakers at the conference was Dutch film critic Janus van Domburg while a keynote about The Consciousness versus the Film was given by Father Morlion. For more on Morlion and his involvement in film, see the chapters by Elena Dagrada and Tomaso Subini in Daniel Biltereyst and Daniela Treveri Gennari (eds.), Moralizing Cinema: Film, Catholicism, and Power (New York, NY: Routledge, 2015). 13 After De Steeg, Koelinga worked in 1933 on a feature film, entitled Johnny 12 P.K., shot at the village Sluipwijk at the lakes near Gouda, and based on an original script. The cast consisted of amateur actors, such as a shop girl from the Bijenkorf department store and a shipwright assistant. The film (never finished) was intended as a part-talkie, with music but no dialogue. See e.g., Algemeen Handelsblad (11 May 1933); Het Volk (13 May 1933); Bataviaasch nieuwsblad (3 June 1933). 14 In 1942, Koelinga was commissioned by UFA to make 12 documentaries on the Netherlands for the German newsreel studio Deutsche Wochenschau. This probably included seemingly neutral items such as Gouda and its pipes manufacturing and cultivation of orchids at the Rotterdam zoo. The shorts were probably intended for screening in the Dutch Cineac cinemas but also for export to 28 countries. See Dordrechtsche Courant (5 September 1942). 15 Paalman, Cinematic Rotterdam, 191–3. In his study, Paalman has indicated that contacts existed between Filmliga members and the Rotterdam architecture journal De 8 en Opbouw. In a special issue on children’s colonies by Lottie Stam-Beese, pictures from De Steeg were included in a photomontage, see De 8 en Opbouw 10, 8 (1939): 77. 16 Het Vrije Volk (25 February 1985). 17 The film functioned as supporting film to the premiere that night of G.W. Pabst’s Don Quichotte (1933). Menno ter Braak, “Don Quichotte: De Steeg: Lumière,” NRC (7 October 1933).

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18 Herman van Dijkhuizen, De Rotterdamsche roofholen en hun bevolking: Omzwervingen van een Voorwaarts-redacteur door de buurten van Rotterdam, waar de prostitutie en misdaad hoogtij vieren (Rotterdam: Voorwaarts, 1926). For my research, I used a sixth edition of this publication. 19 Van Melrose, “Jongste Nederlandsche filmkunst: Nieuwe krachten ontwaken,” Ons Eigen Tijdschrift 5 (1 February 1933): 98–101. 20 Karel Dibbets, De komst van de geluidsfilm in Nederland, 1928–1933 (Amsterdam: Otto Cramwinckel, 1993). 21 Ansje van Beusekom, Kunst en Amusement: Reacties op de film als een nieuw medium in Nederland, 1895–1940 (Haarlem: Arcadia, 2001), 253.

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de maasbruggen nine city and film as a process

floris paalman introduction Dutch designer Paul Schuitema (1897–1973), pioneer of New Typography, started making films in the 1930s.1 Elaborating on Joris Ivens’s The Bridge (1928), he made De Maasbruggen (1937), which was shot at the same location: the bridges across the river Maas in Rotterdam, artery of the city, its port, trade, and industry. This 14-minute film shows Rotterdam as a busy city, through the microcosm of the traffic crossing its main bridges. When ships have to pass, the bridges open and the traffic has to wait. When the bridges close again, the bicycles, cars, trams, and trains continue. By focusing on patterns and close-ups of people, vehicles, and constructions, and by a deliberate use of cuts to create juxtapositions, including sonic counterpoints, the film provides an analysis of human movement in interaction with engineering works and of individuals forming a crowd and swarm in response to the built environment.2 The film has most of the features of

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Figure 9.1  Stills from De Maasbruggen (Paul Schuitema, 1937)

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the city symphony, as defined by Alexander Graf:3 urban congestion, traffic flows, movement, expressive montage and compositions; it has no story or explanatory titles, but it shows the experience of the city and of individuals moving in crowds. It does not follow, however, the dawn till dusk format, but by not using such a conceptual structure, it actually amplifies the sense of movement and rhythm. De Maasbruggen can be seen as a condensed example of the city symphony, as an expression of the experience of modernity, in which the aesthetics of cinema converge with the rhythms of the modern city. However, such a reading obscures the purposes and conditions of the film, and hides the relationship between representation, production, and exhibition.4 While the film may seem to be a typical exponent of the city symphony as a genre, a closer look at it raises several important questions. First, while Schuitema had established his name as a designer, what motivated him to engage with film? This implies an examination of cross-disciplinary connections and visions. Second, why did he choose a subject that was so similar to that of Ivens? This concerns the film’s aim and touches upon what might be called its existential ontology.5 Third, since Schuitema had a reputation for being an innovator, and if De Maasbruggen is regarded as a city symphony, why was the film released so late, years after the heyday of the city symphony? This is a question of periodization. Through these questions, I will develop my overall argument that film,

like the city, should primarily be seen as a process. It requires a methodology that pays attention to the connections between text and conditions, while taking into account its aims, which implies a network-based approach.

schuitema and film? schuitema’s de maasbruggen

After initially studying to be a painter, Schuitema became a graphic designer.6 Among his earliest works is a poster from 1923, for the influential modernist design and architecture association Opbouw in Rotterdam. Opbouw flourished in this city dedicated to shipping and industry, with a strong labor movement, and propagating progress. Within this hotbed, and node of the international network of the avant-garde, Schuitema began to apply new forms and techniques. Inspired by Moholy-Nagy’s idea of the “Typophoto,” he started to use photographs in his designs, and he subsequently made photographs himself. Historian of photography Flip Bool points to Schuitema’s famous Turning gramophone record (1929), with its suggestion of movement, as a work that points toward Schuitema’s transition from graphic design to film.7 This explanation, however, is based on formal considerations. Instead, I will deliver two different arguments. The first foregrounds a cross-disciplinary network, and the second articulates Schuitema’s social agenda.

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Figure 9.2 Poster Centrale Bond Transportarbeiders (1930) and Cover of Film Liga (1931), both designed by Paul Schuitema

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In 1927, the Filmliga was founded in Amsterdam as an association dedicated to screening avant-garde films, and it rapidly established branches across the Netherlands. Many architects and designers associated with Opbouw became actively involved. Schuitema was not among the first, but as the secretary of Opbouw,8 he was well informed. Later he became active in the Filmliga too (1931–4). While Rien que les heures and Berlin: Sinfonie der Großstadt were screened in Rotterdam in regular theaters in 1927, the Filmliga showed many other city films.9 In April 1928, it screened Kaufman’s Moscow, under the Dutch title Moskou: de stad als organisme—The City as Organism, a term that Schuitema would borrow afterwards. Next came The Bridge, which Ivens made with the help of Sybold van Ravesteyn, a Filmliga member and an architect for the Dutch railways. In November 1928, the Filmliga also showed Andor von Barsy’s The City that Never Rests (1928), a film about Rotterdam and its port (see Chapter Ten). Many more would follow, but these must have informed Schuitema when he began to consider making a city film of his own. In December 1928, Schuitema gave a lecture called “Yesterday and Today: To Propagate Has Always Been the Basis of Art.”10 He argued that art should not be autonomous to transcend everyday life or to achieve a higher aim, but that it should elevate everyday life, by being part of it. “Rather than to escape routine, it should change it, while changing the perception and organization of the conditions.” Film, he said, is the best medium to accomplish this endeavor. This remark is of particular importance, as this statement was made before Schuitema was actively involved with film himself, and it can be considered something of a foundation for his later work. To explain his thoughts, Schuitema gave the example of the traffic policeman, who is, and this seems to be no coincidence, a common figure in city symphonies.11 According to Schuitema, this figure is “necessary to minimize the chaos as a result of growing traffic.” However, “this policeman is only a provisional measure. When the urban organism will have changed and adapted to the pressure of the conditions, a traffic policeman will become superfluous.” The new form that will come instead, according to Schuitema, emerges out of the requirements of the time, and that applies to all circumstances of modern life. In 1931 Schuitema bought a camera and travelled to the Soviet Union, where he made a short travel report, Rusland, which he presented in May 1932.12 Together with his footage of a demonstration in The Hague—the seat of the national government—against budget cuts (Betogingen, 1932),13 it emphasizes Schuitema’s interest in the social potential of film. Social issues became all the more urgent as the Great Depression made itself felt, and the social aspirations of the avant-garde were put to the test.

schuitema like ivens?

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In a 1985 study of De Maasbruggen, Arij de Boode and Pieter van Oudheusden wondered why Schuitema chose almost the same subject as Ivens.14 They find the choice unoriginal, even objectionable, since they consider The Bridge an excellent film that could not be surpassed, having handled its subject matter with mastery. In comparison, they find Schuitema’s film too chaotic, composed of too many conflicting movements. Instead of a comparison that regards Ivens’s film as necessarily superior, it is my intention to understand Schuitema’s film on its own terms. I will therefore elaborate on the aim stated by Schuitema himself: “While Ivens has elaborated on the movement of objects, I have made an attempt to study the movement of people.”15 The Bridge has been recognized as a profound study of a single object, the newly built railway elevator bridge that soon became an icon of Rotterdam’s modernity. Ivens showed this construction in motion, together with the motion of the trains crossing it, through a montage of close-ups and different perspectives. Comparing The Bridge to the architectural theories of Siegfried Giedion, Tom Gunning has argued that Ivens approached the architectural ideal of visual simultaneity, in which different parts are seen together.16 In the late 1920s, Gunning explains, both film and architecture were considered as modes of perception. The railway bridge was effectively dissolved into pure vision in Ivens’s film. In so doing, Ivens was essentially elaborating on the concept of the absolute film, to which he explicitly refers at the end, with an animated black square. While “the absolute film” was first applied in reference to the abstract animations by Ruttmann, by that time Ruttmann himself had renounced absolute film as l’art pour l’art. With Berlin, according to Anton Kaes, Ruttmann called for social responsibility beyond formal experiments.17 This call was reinforced by the Great Crash of 1929, and picked up by many filmmakers, among them Moholy-Nagy and Ivens, who started to make politically motivated films around this time. For Schuitema, the crossing over the Maas was a place where modernity fully exercised its forces. It had become a bottleneck in the circulation of the city, as the system was outpaced due to rapid urban growth—a fact widely discussed by architects and planners since the late 1920s.18 This condition was not addressed by Ivens, who focused on a new construction and mechanical movement. Schuitema was interested in technology, vision, and movement too, but in connection to people—particularly striking are the movements of cyclists—as a part of modern urban life. Schuitema therefore used film to explore film’s own characteristics—movement and photographic realism, montage and composition—while simultaneously investigating how the city could move forward. He sought a synthesis between form and representation, not only to acknowledge reality, but to engage with it as well.

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With the production of De Maasbruggen, Schuitema embarked on an expedition into modernity. Like any experiment, it is not the result that counts most, but the attempt to elaborate on observations and ideas, which entails a promise for something to be developed out of the experiment. As such, De Maasbruggen is like a research project, or literally een filmstudie (“a film study”), as the film’s subtitle indicates. It was not only an elaboration of abstract ideas, but also an encounter with the object itself, both film and what it makes visible, the urban traffic as a symptom of the modern condition, which was also a focus of a discussion on urbanism in which Schuitema participated too. His film was therefore part of the environment that is represented in the film itself.

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De Maasbruggen is generally dated 1937, the year it was brought to the censor. As a city symphony, it appeared rather late. Practical reasons have been mentioned by others.19 My claim is that the film is not late, but that it shows a different temporal logic. First of all, the film is an attempt to come to terms with the socio-economic developments of the 1930s. In the midst of the Great Depression, within a changing discourse, Schuitema emphasized once more the social function of avant-garde film, in an article published in De 8 & Opbouw in 1935.20 Instead of making explicitly political films, as Ivens started to do, or to document social circumstances, Schuitema kept to the initial impetus. He sought for a new form in its representational connection to the city, looking for ways the city could be organized. Sound became an additional factor in that search. Schuitema asked composer Koos van de Griend to make a musical soundscape that emphasized the movements in the film. This took another year, and was only finished late in 1938. Since De Maasbruggen incorporates different discourses, it is not simply an “image” from a particular moment. That may still apply to the photographs Schuitema made around 1931, the first studies for his film, which were published as a promotional booklet for printer Chevalier with the title Foto’s van Rotterdam.21 But film creates meaning through sequences of shots made at different moments, in this case between 1932 and 1937. Different people appear one after the other, who were never together at the same time. It is rather a configuration of different situations, to highlight larger patterns. The film was not just an image, but also a discussion piece. While Schuitema worked on the design of Ben Stroman’s novel Stad, he and his colleague Gerrit Kiljan developed a plan to make it into a film.22 They made a serious attempt, through their Filmliga network, but the plan failed and Schuitema moved on in a different direction. He showed the first version of De Maasbruggen to his students at the academy in The Hague, where he and

conclusion As soon as we ask why a film (or a building) exists, and inquire about its actual value, we observe a process. An ontological approach, taking into account a film’s reason to exist and its place in the world, relates its formal features to the conditions of existence. Taking De Maasbruggen as a case, I have thus raised three questions: what were the reasons that Schuitema engaged with film in the first place; why did he take a subject that had

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Kiljan were teachers and had led a film group since 1934.23 As such, the film had an educational function. In January 1936, Schuitema showed another version together with Ivens’s The Bridge and other films at the Czechoslovak Society for Scientific Cinematography in Brno, where he was invited by architect František Kalivoda.24 Another way of understanding the film’s temporality has to do with the ontological interconnections between cinema and the city. In his 1928 lecture, Schuitema spoke about the traffic policeman as a functional element to coordinate collective movement, but also as a sign of a changing system, which needed another form of organization. This idea informed De Maasbruggen, in which the traffic policeman is prominently present. At the same time, traffic in Rotterdam was also discussed by architects and planners, and Schuitema was among them. Even before his film was released, the decision was made to build a tunnel under the river, the first of its kind in the Netherlands, to solve the problems of congestion—the tunnel was eventually built in 1942. Films are usually associated with the year of release, but not in the case of De Maasbruggen. However, distribution is another factor impacting the film’s temporality. By 1938, few opportunities were left to screen avantgarde films, and when World War II started these opportunities evaporated entirely. During the war, Schuitema was part of a group preparing new plans for the Dutch film industry, which would be implemented once the war was over, including an obligatory distribution of shorts in regular theaters. Film historian Bert Hogenkamp remarks with surprise that Schuitema’s films from before the war were selected.25 However, this had been the reason for Schuitema to make the plans in the first place, as exhibition was inherent to the social purpose and the concept of his work. De Maasbruggen finally had its premiere in 1946, at the Cannes film festival. It was shown together with his other city symphony, Les Halles de Paris, which is also about movement, not in connection to technology, but to the delivery of food, for the city to live (it was recorded in 1934, during a period of four months).26 De Maasbruggen was well-received in the press, and distributed in 1947. In so doing, it actually marks the onset of the post-war Dutch School in documentary, which applied the insights of the avant-garde within the context of a social realist agenda.

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already been explored quite famously by his compatriot Ivens; and why did the film appear on the scene at such a late date? I have argued that Schuitema’s engagement with film was first of all a result of a crossdisciplinary network. Besides that, it was not just because of an aesthetic interest in movement, but as part of a social concern. This led him to choose a similar subject and location as Ivens, to show a different perspective, one where cinema’s absolute features were combined with photographic realism. Moreover, Schuitema also engaged with a discussion among planners, looking for new ways the city could be developed. While the city was changing, the discourse about cinema changed too, and De Maasbruggen reflects both. There are 19 years between the conception and final distribution of this film, even though it is only a 14-minute short. Its main value is not to be found in an image of a particular moment and location, but in a configuration of different moments, perspectives, and discussions in which Schuitema participated himself. Altogether, this supports the argument that film, like the city, should primarily be seen as a process, rather than as a fixed image of a particular situation. This case-study has shown how De Maasbruggen offers a view on the world and suggests directions for reflection. This insight could be used to study all kinds of city symphonies, not only shorts with a long lifetime like De Maasbruggen, but also long films with a short lifetime, such as The City That Never Rests. In the case of the latter, certain parts were soon cut out and reconfigured. In general, different parts of a film may have their own production histories, meanings, implications, and potentialities, which are also highlighted in different discourses at different moments, which relate to different conditions with their own temporalities. The ontological approach presented here observes specificity, of form, subject, and location. It ranges from medium specific elements—such as the shot, cut, or musical counterpoint, presenting specific urban fragments to address a particular problem (e.g., close-ups of cyclists highlighting congestion)—to a specific subject that serves as a synecdoche for a city. The latter is not only the case in De Maasbruggen, but also, for example, in Les Halles de Paris (1939), in which the central market is a microcosm reflecting Paris in its entirety. The common denominator connecting different instances of specificity is scale; each time, specificity illuminates a larger issue, without reducing the value of the specific phenomenon, as it remains embedded in reality. Scale is a continuum, which can be further extended: specific films can similarly be related to a larger corpus. The synecdoche in the work of Schuitema is different from the omniscient perspective in, among others, Ruttmann’s Berlin, which latter has become the touchstone for a corpus of city symphonies. However, Ruttmann’s collage is not less specific. It contains visible and hidden traces of spatio-temporal coordinates, which could be plotted as a choreography of the film as a process. Moreover, these coordinates may show a network

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of connections between textual elements and conditions, part of yet a larger network, connecting different actors: Ruttmann—Ivens—Schuitema and many others, among them various designers and architects. Any of their works is a network within a larger one. When a film is thus seen in terms of a process and a network, instead of in terms of originality, intrinsic values, or generic features, it might be understood as a study or a research project motivated by social objectives, which evolves through evaluation and envisioning or anticipation, generating different temporal horizons. Such might be the implication of this study of De Maasbruggen: an ontological model to investigate the reasons of existence of both unknown and well-known films and cities, both parts and whole; their presumptions, purposes, and aims; their connections to the environment in which they came into existence and that they represent and let us perceive; their actual uses and potentialities with different temporalities; and the way these parameters have become manifest in a form that accounts for the poiesis of the process in which both films and urban projects find their value, as each other’s ontological extensions.

notes 1 Dick Maan, Paul Schuitema: Visual Organizer (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2006). 2 Floris Paalman, Cinematic Rotterdam: The Times and Tides of a Modern City (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011), 106. 3 Alexander Graf, “Paris—Berlin—Moscow: On the Montage Aesthetic in the City Symphony Films of the 1920s,” in Alexander Graf and Dietrich Scheunemann (eds.), Avant-Garde Film (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 77–91. 4 This argument is based on Charlotte Brunsdon, “The Attractions of the Cinematic City,” Screen 53, 3 (2012): 209–27. 5 This means an ontology different from photographic realism usually associated with ontology in film theory. 6 Maan, Paul Schuitema, 133. 7 Flip Bool, “Paul Schuitema,” Fotolexicon 6, 12 (1989): np. digital available through Depth of Field, retrieved from http://journal.depthoffield.eu/ vol06/nr12/f03nl/en, 9 March 2016. 8 Bool, Paul Schuitema. 9 Ansje van Beusekom and Ivo Chamuleau, “Programmaoverzicht,” in Tom Gunning, Céline Linssen, and Hans Schoots (eds.), Het Gaat Om De Film! Een Nieuwe Geschiedenis van de Nederlandsche Filmliga, 1927–1933 (Amsterdam: Bas Lubberhuizen and Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1999), 279–99. 10 Het Vaderland, “Gisteren en Vandaag: Paul Schuitema over kunst: Het propageren is ten allentijde basis van kunst geweest. Kunst is een verouderd begrip,” Het Vaderland (17 December 1928): B, 5. The lecture took place at Arti et Industriae, an association for art and design in The Hague. 11 In scenes of urban traffic, the traffic policeman is often to be seen, and in some cases also prominently framed, for example in Moscow (Mikhail Kaufman, 1926), Berlin: Sinfonie der Großstadt (Walter Ruttmann, 1927), A Day in Liverpool (Anson Dyer, 1929). 12 “Organisatie Nieuws: Uit de VVSU,” De Tribune (10 May 1932): 3.

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13 It concerns a demonstration organized by the social democrats (SDAP), in which other left wing groups participated as well, in The Hague on 16 June 1932. The subject and date of this film have been determined in a discussion of the author with historian Wim Pelt, October 2014. 14 Arij de Boode and Pieter van Oudheusden, “Een tijd van massale bewegingen,” in De ‘Hef’: Biografie van een spoorbrug (Rotterdam: De Hef, 1985), 76–88. 15 Quoted in De Boode and Van Oudheusden, “Een tijd van massale bewegingen,” 83. 16 Tom Gunning, “Ontmoetingen in verduisterde ruimten: De alternatieve programmering van de Nederlandsche Filmliga,” in Gunning, Linssen, Schoots, Het gaat om de film! Een Nieuwe Geschiedenis van de Nederlandsche Filmliga, 1927–1933, 257. 17 Anton Kaes, “The Absolute Film,” in Leah Dickerman (ed.), Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art (New York: MOMA, 2012), 348. 18 Paalman, Cinematic Rotterdam, 109. 19 De Boode and Van Oudheusden, “Een tijd van massale bewegingen,” 83. 20 Paul Schuitema, “Welke vragen rijzen als we over de hedendaagsche film spreken?” De 8 & Opbouw 6, 21 (1935): 229–30. 21 Maan, Paul Schuitema, 39. 22 De Boode and Van Oudheusden, “Een tijd van massale bewegingen,” 80–1. 23 Het Vaderland, “Filmstudiegroep,” Het Vaderland (26 March 1933): A, 2. 24 Het Vaderland, “Paul Schuitema te Praag,” Het Vaderland (15 January 1936): B, 5. 25 Bert Hogenkamp, De Documentaire Film 1945–1965: De bloei van een filmgenre in Nederland (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2003), 45. 26 Bool, Paul Schuitema.

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von barsy and von maydell’s de stad die ten

nooit rust a port city symphony

eva hielscher “a little sister of berlin”1 Apart from a few short references by Dutch film historians in the 1980s, De Stad die Nooit Rust (The City that Never Rests, 1928) by Friedrich von Maydell and Andor von Barsy has been an overlooked film.2 Only recently, in his study of Cinematic Rotterdam, Floris Paalman gave an in-depth account of its production history, an endeavor that also resulted in a full restoration of this substantial and significant city symphony in 2010.3 The City that Never Rests is a film about Rotterdam, which had transformed from a small town in the 1850s to a colossal industrial port city in the early twentieth century. Moreover, local administrators, press, and artists presented the city in a much more modern way than it actually was at the time.4 Likewise, The City that Never Rests evokes a vivid metropolis with busy streets, bridges, canals, and markets, before moving gradually from the smaller inner harbors to the enormous outer seaport, shown in its different sections and manifold activities.5

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The film is almost an hour long, and it was made by the German Friedrich von Maydell (1899–1938) and the Hungarian Andor von Barsy (1899–1965) for the Rotterdam-based production company Transfilma.6 Von Maydell had established Transfilma in 1927 and Von Barsy was the company’s cameraman. Even though Von Maydell was officially credited as the director of the film in the opening titles and the original list of title cards, the film is usually attributed to Von Barsy due to his outstanding cinematography. Before shooting The City that Never Rests, he and Transfilma had already made several films for industrial companies and for the municipality of Rotterdam. Later, Von Barsy worked, among others, on Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938) and was awarded prizes for best cinematography at the film festivals in Venice and Berlin.7 In 1929, he also made Hoogstraat, which can be described as a small city symphony dealing with Rotterdam’s main shopping street. At the time of the film’s release, the press described The City that Never Rests in close connection with the city symphony phenomenon, echoing the filmmakers’ intentions. In the early stages of the production, the film’s working title was Rotterdam: Symphonie van den Arbeid (Rotterdam: Symphony of Labor). This underlined Transfilma’s ambitious plan to make an equivalent to Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt (1927) or to compose “a little sister” of the Berlin portrait: “een Rotterdamsche filmsymphonie.”8 According to Von Maydell, the film should be defined by tempo and should become strongly rhythmic; no shot should be longer than five meters of film so that the tempo would be even more brisk than the one Ruttmann featured in Berlin.9 However, in the process, the direct city symphony references in the film’s title disappeared. While the filmmakers had already started filming, Transfilma approached the municipality for sponsorship and the film turned into a commissioned production, planned as a jubilee film for the 600th anniversary of Rotterdam. This was accompanied by a change of title: Van Visschersdorp tot Wereldhavenstad (From Fishing Village to World Port City), which after the premiere was replaced again by The City that Never Rests.10

displaying rotterdam: imagery

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In The City that Never Rests, the modern and industrial big-city imagery typical for city symphonies is strongly connected to the predominant role the port plays in the film. Roughly speaking, the film can be divided into two parts: The first quarter depicts the city center whereas the second, much longer part, concentrates on the harbor. The port is represented as being one of the biggest and most important in the world with its endless parade of ships, dockyards, factories, silos, and all kinds of modern technology for loading and unloading masses of goods such as cranes, elevators, and conveyor belts. The camera focuses on details of machines, such as shovels, pipes, and claws, and on their movements. Special attention is paid to the ferryboat on the river Maas and the railroad lift bridge “De Hef” (The Lift). Built between 1925

de stad die nooit rust

Figure 10.1  De stad die nooit rust (Friedrich von Maydell and Andor von Barsy, 1928)

and 1927, “De Hef” immediately became an icon of modern engineering and, in 1928, Joris Ivens also paid tribute to it with his film De Brug (The Bridge). In line with a Futurist and Constructivist fascination with the dynamics of machinery and fast-paced city life, The City that Never Rests celebrates the functional architecture of the harbor, underlining Rotterdam’s industrial modernity and metropolitan character as a global port city. The first part of the film, dedicated to the city center, also shows image­ ­ry of moving machinery and modern urban life, containing shots of the arrival in the city by train, crowded shopping streets, bridges with all kinds of modern traffic, billboards, the Waalhaven airport, Rotterdam’s skyscraper “Het Witte Huis” (The White House), and the modern Coolsingel boulevard. A critic of the time described the scenes as “an explosion of technical force,”11 while another one summarized the portrayal of Rotterdam as “a life song of the modern big city.”12 However, the film also contains shots that present Rotterdam as a smaller, pre-industrial city: a picturesque canal with historical warehouses, an old-fashioned windmill

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in the Delfshaven, children playing in a courtyard. Like most city symphonies, The City that Never Rests emphasizes disjunctions and dichotomies characterizing modern metropolitan life, such as big versus small, poor versus rich, new versus old, countryside versus city. In The City that Never Rests, though, the pictures of the older city and playing children are not only there to heighten the impact of the modern urban-industrial imagery, they are presented as being essential aspects of the city of Rotterdam. This is not a new city, the film insists, like Chicago, New York, or even Berlin, this is a city with a history, one that has been an industrial and maritime force for quite some time, a city with traditions and regional significance. This parallels with Marlite Halbertsma and Patricia van Ulzen’s remark about interwar Rotterdam: “Opposite the city striving for progress, there was a Rotterdam that was not modern and dynamic at all. The old and new Rotterdam were interwoven.”13

writing rotterdam: intertitles Compared with other city symphonies marked by a high degree of abstraction and the pursuit of a purely visual film language, The City that Never Rests features an unusually great number of intertitles (almost 20 percent of the film), making the film profoundly expository.14 Many of the 62 intertitles identify a specific location and link the succeeding shots with historical facts, a function of the displayed site, a particular port activity, or with Rotterdam’s modernity, metropolitan character, and international

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Figure 10.2  De stad die nooit rust (Friedrich von Maydell and Andor von Barsy, 1928)

de stad die nooit rust

importance. In so doing, the title cards determine the interpretation of the images, promoting Rotterdam as a world port city and underlining the city’s identity and uniqueness. In addition, together with aerial views and numerous (animated) maps, they clarify the city’s different expansion phases. As devices of spatial orientation, these aerial views and maps show the viewer the exact position of the displayed sites within the greater cityscape. The extensive use of intertitles is considered uncommon for city symphonies. Referring to Ruttmann’s Berlin and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) as prototypes, Alexander Graf points out that these films often “display an almost total suppression of intertitles.”15 However, this is certainly not always the case as Jesse Shapins has demonstrated in his analysis of Mikhail Kaufman and Ilya Kopalin’s Moscow (1926), in which intertitles “create a filmic map of Moscow, guiding the spectator through the distinct spaces, pointing out the city’s important monuments, political representatives, and municipal achievements.”16 Like Moscow, The City that Never Rests privileges “architectural and geographic specificity over abstract spatial representation.”17 Through its particular use of title cards in combination with its visual material, it represents Rotterdam in its very own nature as a unique and specific city.18

editing rotterdam: montage As Graf describes, city symphonies are characterized by a rhythmic and associative montage, representing “the pace and rhythm of urban life expressed through editing techniques.”19 They internalize the rhythm of the city as their structuring principle instead of dealing with the modern city purely on a pictorial level. The City that Never Rests shows a dynamic montage style that I would like to describe as a flow. The editing in general is rather even and calm insofar as length and tempo are concerned. Shots succeed each other in a relatively constant manner and the film is not extremely fast-paced. Its average shot length is 6.9 seconds, whereas that of Berlin is almost half as long, at 3.5 seconds, and Man with a Movie Camera only a mere 2.3 seconds.20 The flow is also supported by the discreet use of associative montage. Instead of juxtaposing contrasting phenomena, the editing pattern is first and foremost based on a series of connecting images. In this regard, the film follows Pudovkin’s idea of linkage rather than Eisenstein’s montage of attractions. An example is a sequence of shots of traffic intersections in the city center, where the shape of 90-degree corners and the corresponding direction of movement connect different street spaces. In the first shot the audience is provided with a high camera position, and we see a junction with trams crossing. The next shot shows another intersection with trams passing at a right angle from a similar position, followed by a shot of a third

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Figure 10.3  De stad die nooit rust (Friedrich von Maydell and Andor von Barsy, 1928)

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junction at street level where a tram has just turned the corner. We are now introduced to the street at ground level via the shape of 90-degree corners and trams, so that the next shot of a street without trams and rails is linked fluently to the previous ones. Another example of the film’s associative montage is the loading and unloading of goods in the harbor and the repeated downward and upward movements between the docks and the decks. Even though these are diametrically opposite movements, in The City that Never Rests they become part of the same flowing motion. Rather than based on editing patterns, the film’s dynamic style—there is hardly a static shot in The City that Never Rests—mainly relates to motion within the images showing traffic, people, ships, machines, and goods in motion, steam, and the endlessly moving water of the harbor, canals, and the sea.21 In addition, the dynamic style is also the result of the panning and travelling camera, often placed on a ship or vehicle. All these movements are equally paced. There is no extremely fast motion but a continuous flow of atmospheric images. A certain rhythm or alternation in tempi arises from the density of motion and directions of movement within the frame and the change of these movements between shots. In this regard, one could say that the film starts with an allegro movement, which captures the rapid development of Rotterdam from the age of water and reed, to “the age of rapid transit”22 and the images of a fast-moving train. After arriving in the city, the tempo slows down into a flowing andante throughout the rest of the film. Within this flow, there are again a few shots of a slightly faster motion such as images of waves that briefly speed up the

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tempo. The intertitles, on the other hand, slow down the tempo in regular intervals. This flow corresponds to the rhythm of a port city as it represents and internalizes the flowing-waving movement of the sea, water, and ships—in combination with urban motion.23 Therefore, the specificity of Rotterdam is also addressed on the level of its montage. In addition, this flowing rhythm distinguishes the film from the city symphonies Berlin and Man with a Movie Camera, with their representation of a hectic city pulse as a quick succession of contrasting impressions.24 Its flowing rhythm, however, answers perfectly to John Grierson’s notion of “the symphonic form” in film: The symphonic form is concerned with the orchestration of movement. It sees the screen in terms of flow and does not permit the flow to be broken. Episodes and events, if they are included in the action, are integrated in the flow. The symphonic form also tends to organize the flow in terms of different movements, e.g. movement for dawn, movement for men coming to work, movement for factories in full swing, etc., etc.25

multiple versions In short, The City that Never Rests employs a modern big-city imagery that is characteristic for many city symphonies. Rotterdam is portrayed as a modern global port city with metropolitan features. In this regard, Rotterdam is represented as bigger and more metropolitan than it actually was, with its rather limited size and half a million inhabitants in the 1920s and 1930s. The big-city features, however, also allow for the presence of small-scale and pre-modern elements that coexist with the metropolitan ones as two parallel aspects of the city, emphasizing the city’s history and tradition. Moreover, in the combination of photographic material with intertitles and maps, Rotterdam is represented in its geographical, historical, and economical specificity. This peculiarity is also emphasized structurally on the level of the montage, particularly through the slower-paced and flowing rhythm that corresponds to the pulse of a port city that also includes smaller harbors and village-like surroundings. The hybrid character of The City that Never Rests, oscillating between promotional film, documentary, and city symphony, could explain why the film has been absent from the discourse on city symphonies.26 However, there is another reason for this neglect, which is related to the film’s own exhibition history. After its premiere on 15 August 1928, the film underwent numerous changes that resulted in various shortened release versions, often not exceeding half of the original’s length.27 In these versions (some of them also including supplementary new shots),

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the sequences dedicated to the city center were cut out, reducing Rotterdam almost exclusively to the port. As a result, the film became rather a promotion film for the Rotterdam harbor than a city film. Moreover, due to the constant re-editing and re-use of the images in multiple versions, the original premiere version became completely inaccessible. The only traces left were shortened and fragmented elements that made their way to the archives of the EYE Filmmuseum and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. The original city symphony, however, was lost until the restoration in 2010 by EYE and the Municipal Archive of Rotterdam. This attempt to reconstruct the original premiere version out of the surviving pieces made the city symphony accessible again to scholars, historians, and audiences.28

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1 An extended version of this chapter was published in Eselsohren: Journal of History of Art, Architecture and Urbanism 2, n 1+2 (2014): 159–81. 2 Bert Hogenkamp, De Nederlandse documentaire film, 1920–1940 (Amsterdam: Van Gennep and Stichting Film en Wetenschap, 1988), 21–2. Nico Brederoo, “De Invloed van de Filmliga,” in Karel Dibbets and Frank Van der Maden (eds.), Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Film en Bioscoop tot 1940 (Weesp: Wereldvenster, 1986), 201. 3 Floris Paalman, Cinematic Rotterdam: The Times and Tides of a Modern City (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011). 4 Patricia van Ulzen, Imagine a Metropolis: Rotterdam’s Creative Class, 1970–2000 (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2007), 46–59. 5 This description and the following analysis refer to the premiere version from August 1928, restored by EYE Filmmuseum in cooperation with Municipal Archive of Rotterdam in 2010. 6 The premiere version was 64 minutes long; the restored version is 57 minutes long. 7 In Venice, he won the price for Dood Water (Dead Water, Gerard Rutten, 1934); in Berlin he was awarded for Jonas (Ottomar Domnick, 1957). Paalman, Cinematic Rotterdam, 131–9. 8 “De Symphonie van den Arbeid: Een filmopname bij avond van een kolenknijper in werking,” Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant (27 March 1928): 2; “Rotterdam, Symphonie van den Arbeid: Met de ‘Kurbelkaste’ de haven in,” Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad (29 February 1928): 1. 9 “Rotterdam, Symphonie van den Arbeid,” Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad. 10 Paalman, Cinematic Rotterdam, 142–3. Van Visschersdorp tot Wereldhavenstad remained the subtitle in the Dutch version. The jubilee celebration of Rotterdam’s 600th anniversary was finally cancelled because of the sudden death of Mayor Wytema and the fact that, as it turned out, there wasn’t such an anniversary until 1940. 11 Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad (16 August 1928). 12 “De stad die nooit rust,” Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant (6 October 1928): 1. 13 Marlite Halbertsma and Patricia van Ulzen, “Op het hoekje van de Zwanensteeg,” in Marlite Halbertsma and Patricia van Ulzen (eds.), Interbellum Rotterdam: Kunst en Cultuur 1918–1949 (Rotterdam: NAi, 2001), 12.

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14 As an indication, of the total 480 shots of the restored version, 65 are intertitles (ten minutes of the total 55 minutes). For the detailed analysis, see the “Cinemetrics” measurement, retrieved from www.cinemetrics.lv/ movie.php?movie_ID=16127, 1 May 2014. 15 Alexander Graf, “Paris—Berlin—Moscow: On the Montage Aesthetics in the City Symphony Films of the 1920s,” in Alexander Graf and Dietrich Scheunemann (eds.), Avant-Garde Film (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 79. 16 Jesse Shapins, A Filmic Map of Moscow: Traveling Through Mikhail Kaufman’s City Symphony ‘Moscow’ (Unpublished paper, Harvard University, 2008): 3. Retrieved from www.jesseshapins.net/writings/JShapins_KaufmanMoscow. pdf, 13 January 2014. 17 Shapins, “A Filmic Map of Moscow,” 2. 18 This does not mean that urban specificity in city symphonies per definition goes together with the use of intertitles, as e.g., Impressionen vom alten Marseiller Hafen (Vieux Port) (Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 1929) or Douro: Faina Fluvial (Manoel de Oliveira, 1931) demonstrate. Berlin also includes a sequence with the Berliner Dom as a landmark, and Man with a Movie Camera prominently displays the Bolshoi Theatre as a geographically specific site. 19 Graf, “Paris—Berlin—Moscow,” 79. 20 See ‘Cinemetrics’ measurements retrieved from www.cinemetrics.lv/movie. php?movie_ID=16127, www.cinemetrics.lv/movie.php?movie_ID=12670 and www.cinemetrics.lv/movie.php?movie_ID=2001, 1 May 2014. The shot length comparison between The City That Never Rests and Berlin is particularly interesting in the light of the earlier mentioned newspaper article quoting Von Maydell, who said that his film’s tempo should exceed the one of Berlin. 21 As the ‘Cinemetrics’ measurement shows, there is a maximum of 5 percent of static shots (intertitles and maps excluded). 22 Intertitle N5. 23 Further city symphonies, such as Images d’Ostende (Henri Storck, 1929‑1930), Regen (Joris Ivens, 1929) and À Propos de Nice (Jean Vigo, 1930), also combine urban and natural elements. 24 It needs to be said that there is a divergence between reviews at the time The City That Never Rests premiered and the analysis presented in this chapter. Whereas I emphasize the rhythm of a somewhat slower-paced and flowing city—comparable to the movement of a sailing ship—the critics in 1928 emphasized “the chasing tempo” of Rotterdam and the film. [“Rotterdam als Film-Epos,” Het Vaderland (16 August 1928): 11]. For sure, an audience in 1928 had a different perception of speed. Nevertheless, the film cannot have been that fast-paced, unless a musical accompaniment intensified the rhythmic effect. From a 2018 perspective, it seems that The City That Never Rests was a fast-paced big city symphony rather on paper than in the form of the actual film. 25 John Grierson, “Documentary (3): The Symphonic Film,” Cinema Quarterly 2, 3 (1934): 155. See also John Grierson, “Documentary (2): Symphonics,” Cinema Quarterly 1, 3 (1933): 135–9. However, Grierson attributes the flow aspect to Berlin as well: “Wheels, rails details of engines, telegraph wires, landscapes and other simple images flowed along in progression, with similar abstracts passing occasionally in and out of the general movement.” Grierson, “Documentary (2): Symphonics,” 135. 26 Despite the contemporaneous enthusiastic reviews and screenings in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and the Dutch East Indies.

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27 According to film restorer Simona Monizza and Floris Paalman the version screened on 15 August 1928 (which already differed from the version sent to the censor) was immediately changed after the premiere. This resulted in the Dutch release version from October 1928 (35 minutes) that was screened among others in theatres in The Hague and at the Filmliga in Rotterdam. Moreover, versions in French, German, and English were released, having a length of about 860 meters, yet again differing among each other. In 1930 once again different shortened versions were released. In addition, the Austrian compilation filmmaker Albrecht Viktor Blum used the film to make diverse sound versions and educational films. Finally, in 1931 the municipality wanted to make a Rotterdam sound promotion film (which Joris Ivens was to direct), which in the end became another silent version made by Andor von Barsy with supplementary material and the new title Rotterdam (1934, 18 minutes). 28 It is necessary to keep in mind that the restoration is an attempt to get as closely as possible to the original premiere version. About 10 minutes of material are still missing. And due to a missing reference print, the restoration might still differ from the original version. I would like to thank Simona Monizza for providing information regarding the restoration and different versions of The City That Never Rests, and Jata Haan, Rommy Albers, and Sofie Simões for facilitating the access to the film’s materials. My thanks also go to Floris Paalman who shared his knowledge and ideas about the film with me.

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hauser’s weltstadt in

flegeljahren eleven an americanist city symphony

eva hielscher the outsider city symphony In the spring and summer of 1931, Heinrich Hauser (1901–55) made a car trip through the United States, which resulted in his book Feldwege nach Chicago (Dirt Tracks to Chicago) as well as in his silent documentary feature Weltstadt in Flegeljahren: Ein Bericht über Chicago (literally World City in Its Teens: A Reportage on Chicago, also translated as Chicago: A World City Stretches Its Wings).1 While the film focuses on Chicago, the book covers his entire journey. A sailor, soldier, miner, medical student, steel worker, engineer, farmer, pilot as well as a writer, ghostwriter, translator, traveler, photographer, and journalist, Hauser was considered an outsider to the professional world of cinema.2 In the Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, for instance, Fritz Olimsky wrote that Weltstadt in Flegeljahren was “not a product of the proper film industry” but that it was a “film reportage of an outsider, the writer Heinrich Hauser,” which “broadened one’s horizon by miles.”3 Likewise, in Die neue Rundschau, Siegfried Kracauer noted that it was Hauser’s independence from the film industry that determined the freshness of his film, which was not concerned with the “disputable demands of distribution,” but which simply recorded “what good eyes could see.”4

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For his contemporaries, Hauser was first and foremost a journalist working for various papers including the Frankfurter Zeitung and a prolific writer of novels, science fiction, travel and photo books. His first novel Das zwanzigste Jahr (The Twentieth Year) was published in 1925 and for his 1928 novel Brackwasser (published in English as Bitter Waters), he received the prestigious Gerhart-Hauptmann Prize.5 He consequently acquired some fame as “a filming writer” or “an auteur-amateur filmmaker.”6 Apart from Weltstadt in Flegeljahren his cinematic oeuvre consists of a handful of other films, including the successful “Kulturfilm” Die letzten Segelschiffe (The Last Sailing Ships, 1930), which was distributed, like the Chicago film, by Naturfilm Hubert Schonger.7 Together with his friend and writer Liam O’Flaherty, Hauser also made a film on the Aran Islands, six years before Robert Flaherty made Man of Aran (1934).8 Hauser would eventually become a geographical outsider as well. In 1938 he emigrated voluntarily to the United States.9 After the war, he returned to Germany, where he worked for the weekly Der Stern but he never felt at home again. Unable to acquire a new visa to return to America, he was psychologically and literally stuck “between two worlds.” This phrase evidently held great poignancy for Hauser—he himself had used these very words as a title for one of his manuscripts as well as for the first paragraph of the preface to Feldwege nach Chicago.10 Finally, Weltstadt in Flegeljahren itself can be considered an outsider film as it was rejected as an educational film by the Film Department of the Institute for Education (Bildstelle des Zentralinstituts für Erziehung und Unterricht) due to accusations that it was confusing and chaotic. Because of this negative pronouncement, which was strongly objected to by Rudolf Arnheim, among others, Weltstadt in Flegeljahren received very poor distribution and was hardly screened in regular theaters.11 Consequently, despite some very positive reviews, the film fell into oblivion soon after its October 1931 premiere at the Alhambra theater in Berlin. For many decades, the film was even considered lost. In 1984, the original nitrate negative was discovered at the Bundesarchiv Filmarchiv in Koblenz as part of the Naturfilm Hubert Schonger film collection, where it was restored in 1993.12 In addition, a nitrate print with Dutch intertitles, which originated in the distribution collection of the Dutch Filmliga, was restored in 1990 by the Netherlands Filmmuseum (today EYE Filmmuseum). As a result, only recently German scholars have rehabilitated the film and connected it to the city symphony phenomenon of the interwar years.13

chicago cross sections Lasting 74 minutes in total, Weltstadt in Flegeljahren consists of five acts, in which Hauser draws attention to the specificities of Chicago, including its

hauser’s weltstadt in flegeljahren

architecture, skyscrapers and skyline, the Loop, its views along the Chicago River, and its industry.14 Intertitles play an important role as they identify the images directly as parts of Chicago. The Loop, for example, is described as “the blustering heart of Chicago.” Showing the Mississippi River and life on and along the river, Act I is comparable to the opening scenes illustrating the arrival in the city that appear in many city symphonies. Hauser takes an almost ritual approach to Chicago via the Mississippi River, which, of course, does not run through Chicago, or even near it, passing roughly 150 miles to the west of the city. Taking almost a quarter of an hour, the film’s first act gradually shows the transition from rural life and manual labor (farmers harvesting hay, life on a river steamboat) to mechanized labor and modern life in the industrial metropolis. Visualizing the actual arrival in the city, Act II opens with a series of panoramic shots showing the city’s skyline, followed by various long shots using a closer perspective. Combining shots taken at street level with those taken from skyscrapers, Hauser explores the impressive architecture of Chicago as well as its busy streets filled with crowds and motorized traffic, including

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Figure 11.1  Weltstadt in Flegeljahren: Ein Bericht über Chicago (Heinrich Hauser, 1931)

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the elevated railway that is such an integral element of The Loop. Act III continues this exploration of the city but shifts its focus to labor: office work, assembly lines in factories, port activities, construction sites, and the meat producing and packing industry. Focusing on street life, particularly on Madison Avenue and the Jewish market on Maxwell Street, Act IV combines footage of children playing in the streets with images of urban poverty: the slums hidden behind the skyscrapers, unemployed men, homeless people, and a drunken man poisoned with car antifreeze. Act V finally is dedicated to leisure: sports activities in parks, the Riverview Amusement Park, and life at Lake Michigan. By means of these five acts, Hauser constructs a comprehensive “cross-section” of Chicago without using the typical style of montage associated with this concept. As Michael Cowan has explained, the term Querschnittfilm (“cross-section film”) was originally used in the late 1920s for archival compilation films before it became associated with experimental and documentary films such as Ruttmann’s Berlin.15 Antje Ehmann emphasizes that while Hauser’s film does not adhere to the conventions of the cross-section concept, it still establishes a complex portrait of 1931 Chicago by means of an accumulation of detailed observations.16 Indeed, it is primarily because of its diversity and not so much because of its montage technique that Weltstadt in Flegeljahren evokes the scale and multiplicity of Chicago. In contrast to Ruttmann’s experimental, rhythmic, and associative editing, Hauser’s montage is instead additive or enumerative: traffic policemen conduct masses of cars, a street vendor sells pencils, office clerks work on their typewriters, bananas pass on a conveyor belt in the harbor, skyscrapers are under construction, bridges open and close, and a man gives a speech about Soviet Russia to a huge crowd of bystanders in a park monitored by baton-wielding cops. Hauser’s observational style can be compared with a succession of moving photographs—framed images layered with different depths and elements in the fore- and background. With their inner-frame montage, some of these images are very powerful, such as the shot of an enormous parking lot in front of the city’s skyline that follows shots of endless streams of cars entering the city, anticipating similar sequences in Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke’s The City (1939) by nearly a decade. Another example is the highly ironic, almost surreal shot of unemployed men lying on the grass in Grant Park with the heroic statue of General John Logan behind them and the towers of the Stevens Hotel looming in the background. However, at other times, as also Ehmann acknowledges, Hauser’s film does resemble a cross-section film in the style of Berlin. Ehmann refers to the market sequence in Act IV, which she labels as “querschnitthaft” (“cross-section like”) and which evokes Wilfried Basse’s Markt in Berlin (1929). Similarly, she mentions the beach

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sequence in Act V that is reminiscent of Ruttmann and Vertov.17 Both sequences present their subject matter by a cross-sectional montage of market respectively beach impressions: Market stands are intercut with street vendors, customers, goods, and street performers whereas bathing people are intercut with men and women sleeping at the beach, a man distributing books, a pretzel vendor, and various beach games. Moreover, Weltstatdt in Flegeljahren is loosely marked by the day-in-the-life-of-the-city structure, typical of cross-section city films. First, we see an empty city, people on their way to work, and morning routines such as shop window cleaning. Similarly, labor dominates the middle part of the film whereas leisure and popular entertainment such as baseball and amusement park rides are featured towards the end of the film.

from chicago to america: hauser’s americanism In Weimar Germany, modernity was considered by many to be a specifically American phenomenon.18 This identification of the US with rationalization, mechanization, and the metropolis was developed to a large extent without drawing upon empirical research.19 Numerous European intellectuals discussing modern phenomena and America had never actually crossed the Atlantic. In his September 1925 newspaper article entitled Amerikanismus, Rudolf Kayser summed up this development: Americanism is the new European catchword. . . . Trusts, highrises, traffic officers, film, technical wonders, jazz bands, boxing, magazines, and management. Is that America? Perhaps. Since I have never been there, I can make no judgment.20

According to Frank Becker, “the country across the Atlantic was solely the geographical peg for a discourse that started revolving around the pros and cons of modernization.”21 However, some writers, artists, and architects based their vision of American modernity on their own travel experiences. Both filmmaker Fritz Lang and architect Erich Mendelsohn, for instance, visited the United States in 1924. Lang processed his impressions of the nocturnal New York skyline in Metropolis (1927) while Mendelsohn documented his trip in his photo book Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten (1926).22 With his illustrated book Feldwege nach Chicago and his film Weltstadt in Flegeljahren, Heinrich Hauser can be situated in the context of this debate on Americanism. Although he draws attention to the peculiarities of Chicago’s topography and inhabitants, Weltstadt in Flegeljahren is also a reflection on modernity, the American city, and the United States. In the preface to

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his book, at the very beginning of his journey on board of an ocean liner, Hauser describes the objective of his travels. For Hauser, America seems a country with only straight roads and orthogonally organized cities. There seem to be no deviations—either on the map, on the actual ground, or in the people’s minds. However, he does not really believe in this vision of America and therefore sets out to find its dirt roads and back alleys.23 In other words, Hauser aimed to dispel the myth of America as it had been constructed by German intellectuals. Nevertheless, in his book and film, he creates an image of America in his turn. In Weltstadt in Flegeljahren, this picture is condensed in Chicago and the Mississippi River.24 Chicago certainly seems to answer to Hauser’s preconceptions of America as a world marked by straight lines as he depicts the vertical city with its high-rise structures as well as the horizontal grid dominated by crowds and car traffic.25 A striking detail is the Coca-Cola sign that reappears at several points during the film, presenting the city as having been inscribed by consumerism. Hauser’s emphatic attention to mechanized work, efficiency, rationalization, and the assembly line reveal a fascination with the doctrines of Fordism and Taylorism, which were widely discussed elements of the European discourse on Americanism at the time.26 Hauser’s take on this subject matter is not merely enthusiastic—it underlines disparities, labor issues, and destitution.

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Figure 11.2  Weltstadt in Flegeljahren: Ein Bericht über Chicago (Heinrich Hauser, 1931)

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By focusing extensively on the Mississippi at the beginning of the film, Hauser situates the city in a broader spatial context not unlike many other city symphonies. In so doing, the city of Chicago as an emblem of a modernized, industrialized, and progressive America is linked to a Mark Twain/ Huckleberry Finn adventurous idea of America through a rather romantic image of the Mississippi River with its wheel steamers.27 The journey to Chicago via the Mississippi visualizes the urbanization of nature, which is emblematic for the project of modernity. This theme of an on-going urbanization reappears in Act III when the camera depicts cranes and excavator shovels and intertitles explain: “The dinosaurs of our modern time . . . destroy all fields and landscapes.” Moreover, this extensive Mississippi prologue also evokes the Great Migration, which channeled thousands upon thousands of African-Americans from the Deep South to the streets of Chicago—later in the film, Hauser’s camera focuses on African-Americans and their function in the economic and social structure of Chicago. In so doing, the film is a remarkable and fascinating study of the place of African-Americans in American society of the early 1930s. It highlights hierarchies of class and race, suggesting a Jim Crow America without stating so outright. However, Hauser looks at this from the viewpoint of an outsider for whom Chicago and its multicolored population is somewhat exotic. His drive is first and foremost his unstoppable curiosity for a world unknown to him. This curiosity also concerns the depiction of different social and ethnic groups, presenting American society as diverse and multi-ethnic. In so

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Figure 11.3  Weltstadt in Flegeljahren: Ein Bericht über Chicago (Heinrich Hauser, 1931)

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doing, Hauser’s cross-section also includes a sample of city dwellers, playing on the contrast between rich and poor. Some of these images might feel disturbing but Hauser integrates them in his enumerating and observational way of filmmaking. Undeniably, an element of voyeurism and exoticism is at stake, making more explicit his position of an outsider. In this regard, he shows squirrels in a park just as he films different ethnic groups, including Jews, African-Americans, and European immigrants. Weltstadt in Flegeljahren speaks of his desire to literally show everything, adding and piling up as many facets as possible. Hauser is clearly fascinated by the new and unknown of Chicago, which he describes as “the most beautiful city of the world . . . anticipating the future of civilization.”28 As Ehmann writes, Hauser’s style is mainly observational, clearly different from the more formalistic and artistic approach used by Ruttmann in Berlin.29 Weltstadt in Flegeljahren also contains a powerful critique of America and modernity, something that was picked up by critics at the time of the film’s release and that distinguishes Hauser’s work from other city symphonies. It was generally valued as a film with a social responsibility, showing sharp and honest images of real life, of the common man in the streets, and of the real America in contrast to Hollywood. Hans Taussig, for example, wrote in the Reichsfilmblatt in October 1931: Many city films have made their way into the cinema, good and bad ones, wrong and right ones, staged and factual ones, as propaganda or for charitable purposes. City films that did not allow the audience to stop yawning. . . . For the very first time in the history of the Kulturfilm and the city film, this film shows a city as it really is—namely from its negative side, without ignoring the positive side either. This film deserves special appreciation.30

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An example of Hauser’s critical stance is the already mentioned urbanization of nature, in an intertitle described as “the destruction of the landscape.” Another example concerns mechanized work in Act III and a sequence shot at the assembly line of the tractor factory of the International Harvester Company. “Where are the people?,” an intertitle asks. In Act IV, Hauser turns to unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, and crime, highlighting the negative effects of mechanized work and the modern American metropolis, marked by the devastation of the Great Depression. The last two acts could even be put under the titles “estrangement” and “escapism.” Act IV includes the most explicit critique and one of the strongest parts of the entire film. While images of unemployed men waiting in front of labor agencies powerfully speak for themselves, Hauser adds a sequence in which he makes use of parallel and associative editing, intercutting car wrecks with unemployed and homeless men. An intertitle underlines the visual statement: “Wrecks of

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society.” Nonetheless, Hauser ends on a more positive note as the last shots show smiling and waving children.31 In conclusion, Hauser’s image of America and Chicago in Weltstadt in Flegeljahren is highly ambivalent. On the one hand, it is the image of an outsider spurred by fascination, curiosity, and captivation. On the other hand, it is marked by a certain fear and vehement criticism. Hauser’s film combines a topographical approach to the city—and its cross-section— with a critical reflection on the downsides of modernity and America. In so doing, the film can be seen as part of the broader cultural phenomenon of Americanism in Weimar Germany, hovering between fascination and fear, curiosity and critique, enthusiasm and reservation.

notes 1 Heinrich Hauser, Feldwege nach Chicago (Berlin: Fischer, 1931). 2 Antje Ehmann, “Heinrich Hauser: Der Mann und die Medien,” in Klaus Kreimeier, Antje Ehmann, and Jeanpaul Goergen (eds.), Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland: Band 2: Weimarer Republik: 1918–1933 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005), 464. 3 Fritz Olimsky [Oly], “Weltstadt in Flegeljahren,” Berliner Börsen-Zeitung (3 October 1931), reprinted in Jeanpaul Goergen, Weltstadt in Flegeljahren: Ein Bericht über Chicago (Deutschland 1931) aufgenommen von Heinrich Hauser: Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Ed. Goergen, 1995), 13–14. 4 Siegfried Kracauer, “Literarische Filme,” Die neue Rundschau (December 1931), reprinted in Siegfried Kracauer, Kleine Schriften zum Film: 1928–1931, 3 vols., Vol. 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004), 575. 5 Ehmann, “Heinrich Hauser,” 465. See also Grith Graebner, Heinrich Hauser: Leben und Werk: Eine kritisch-biographische Werk-Bibliographie (Aachen: Shaker, 2001). 6 In his review in Film-Kurier, Hans Feld wrote about Weltstadt in Flegeljahren as an “Autorenfilm”—the film of a writer, author, or auteur. Hans Feld, “Weltstadt in Flegeljahren,” Film-Kurier (3 October 1931), reprinted in Goergen, Weltstadt in Flegeljahren, 13. 7 Feld, “Weltstadt in Flegeljahren,” 9. 8 Graebner, Heinrich Hauser, 175–6. 9 In the early 1930s, Hauser showed some sympathies for Nazism but later distanced himself from the movement. Ehmann, “Heinrich Hauser: Der Mann und die Medien,” 464–5. Graebner, Heinrich Hauser, 342–68. 10 Graebner, Heinrich Hauser, 382; Hauser, Feldwege nach Chicago, 7. 11 Goergen, Weltstadt in Flegeljahren, 4, 9. See also Rudolf Arnheim, “Paukerfilme,” Die Weltbühne 28, 5 (2 February 1932): 185, reprinted in Goergen, Weltstadt in Flegeljahren, 15–16. 12 The restoration premiered at the conference “100 Years of Cinema” at the Arsenal theater in Berlin in 1995. In 1998 a new soundtrack for the film was made including city sounds recorded in Chicago and a voice-over with quotes from Hauser’s book Feldwege nach Chicago, which was broadcasted on German television in the same year. An English version of this sound version premiered in Chicago in 2002. Goergen, Weltstadt in Flegeljahren, 3; Ehmann, “Heinrich Hauser,” 463, 471.

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13 See Goergen, Weltstadt in Flegeljahren; Mathias Güntner, Weltstadt in Flegeljahren ein Bericht über Chicago: Ein Film von Heinrich Hauser (Unpublished Magister Thesis, Hamburg: Universität Hamburg, 1998); Guntram Vogt, Die Stadt im Film: Deutsche Spielfilme 1900–2000 (Marburg: Schüren, 2001), 183; Ehmann, “Heinrich Hauser,” 465; Jeanpaul Goergen, “Das wahre Gesicht der Riesenstadt,” in Guntram Vogt, Die Stadt im Film, 170–2; Antje Ehmann, “Wie Wirklichkeit erzählen? Methoden des Querschnittfilms,” in Geschichte Des Dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland: Band 2: Weimarer Republik: 1918–1933, 597; Chris Dähne, Die Stadtsinfonien der 1920er Jahre: Architektur zwischen Film, Fotografie und Literatur (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013), 189; Helge Svenshon, “ ‘Weltstadt in Flegeljahren’: Heinrich Hausers Filmbericht über Chicago,” Eselsohren: Journal of History of Art, Architecture and Urbanism 2, 1+2 (2014): 71–86. 14 The original length of the film was 1687 meters, which results in a running time of 74 minutes (20 frames per second). While the Dutch restoration has also a running time of 74 minutes, with 1502 meters/66 minutes, the German restoration is a bit shorter. In the analysis in this chapter, I refer particularly to the Dutch version, restored by the Netherlands Filmmuseum in 1990. For more details on specific buildings and skyscrapers see Svenshon, “Weltstadt in Flegeljahren,” 71–86. 15 Michael Cowan, Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity. Avant-Garde, Advertising, Modernity (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 62–5. See also Ehmann, “Wie Wirklichkeit erzählen?” 576–99. 16 Ehmann, “Heinrich Hauser,” 469. 17 Ehmann, “Heinrich Hauser,” 469. Hauser’s beach scenes are also reminiscent of Weegee and Sid Grossman’s Coney Island photographs from the 1940s. In fact, Ehmann assumes that the beach scenes in Hauser’s film were indeed shot in Coney Island. However, I am grateful to Jan-Christopher Horak for pointing out that the shots show the Riverview Amusement Park in Chicago and the shores of Lake Michigan. 18 See Frank Becker and Elke Reinhardt-Becker, “Unter dem Atlantik hindurch—über den Atlantik hinweg (Einleitung),” in Frank Becker and Elke Reinhardt-Becker (eds.), Mythos USA: Amerikanisierung in Deutschland seit 1900 (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 2006), 10–11. Dieter Heimböckel, “Zivilisation auf dem Treibriemen: Die USA im Urteil der deutschen Literatur um und nach 1900,” in Becker and Reinhardt-Becker, Mythos USA, 51: Frank Becker, “Amerikabild und ‘Amerikanisierung’ im Deutschland des 20: Jahrhunderts—ein Überblick,” in Becker and Reinhardt-Becker, Mythos USA, 20–3. 19 Becker, “Amerikabild,” 20. 20 Rudolf Kayser, “Amerikanismus,” Vossische Zeitung (29 September 1925), reprinted and translated in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (eds.), The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 395. 21 Becker, “Amerikabild,” 20. 22 Erich Mendelsohn, Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten (Berlin: Rodolf Mosse, 1926). On Lang and the US, see Holger Bachmann, “The Production and Contemporary Reception of ‘Metropolis’,” in Michael Minden and Holger Bachmann (eds.), Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis:” Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear (Rochester: Camden House, 2000), 4–9. 23 Hauser, Feldwege nach Chicago, 10.

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24 In this regard, the film differs from the book that covers Hauser’s entire America journey, starting in Germany on a train between Bremen and Bremerhaven on the way to the port. Once arrived in the United States, Hauser describes his trip in an old Ford car from New York to New Orleans and all the way up the Mississippi, his arrival and time in Chicago. The book ends with impressions of New York and his last thoughts on board back to Europe. 25 In contrast to Chicago, New York City was not really American for Hauser as he experienced and described it rather as a part of Europe. Hauser, Feldwege nach Chicago, 256. 26 Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 393–4. 27 As he describes in his book, Hauser passes the Mark Twain city Hannibal on his way to Chicago and underscores that everything there is named after Twain and characters from his novels. Hauser, Feldwege nach Chicago, 128. 28 Hauser, Feldwege nach Chicago, 152. 29 Ehmann, “Heinrich Hauser,” 467. 30 Hans Taussig, “Weltstadt in Flegeljahren,” Reichsfilmblatt (3 October 1931). Reprinted in Goergen, Weltstadt in Flegeljahren, 12. 31 Goergen, Weltstadt in Flegeljahren, 8.

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tom gunning Shot in Chicago around 1934, at the height of the Great Depression, Halsted Street belongs to the underappreciated genre of the amateur film.1 The film’s opening credits link it to the Chicago Film and Photo League, a popular front leftist organization.2 The credits attribute the film to “Conrad,” who has been identified as Conrad Friberg (who also used the pseudonym Conrad O. Nelson). In spite of its relative obscurity, I believe Halsted Street offers one of the most original approaches to the urban documentary in the era before World War II. Friberg had almost certainly seen Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927) and Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), and possibly some other city symphonies. The genre’s style of montage based on associations and contrasts shaped the shot-to-shot relations of Halsted Street and the direct street cinematography of Mikhail Kauffman and Karl Freund (the cameramen of Vertov’s and Ruttmann’s film respectively) inspired Conrad (even if his 16mm shooting lacks some of the technical elegance demonstrated by the more experienced and better equipped 35mm cameramen). Halsted Street offers a unique approach to urban geography by following the course of Halsted Street, a major western Chicago thoroughfare from

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“the City Limits At the Southern End to Lake Michigan On the North,” as one of the film’s opening subtitles explains. Halsted Street shares the specificity of a single street with Hoogstraat (Andor von Barsy, 1930), but there is more to the Chicago film precisely due to the length and variety of this extensive street. A subtitle in the film announces “This Film Presents a Cross Section of Chicago As Seen On Halsted Street” immediately relating it to the Querschnittfilms, or “cross-section” films of the Weimar era. In other words, this is not simply a film of a specific Chicago avenue but also a film of Chicago using the street to literally cut through the metropolis. Thus, in contrast to the spatial freedom of cutting in Berlin and its web-like montage of simultaneous contrasts and comparisons, Halsted Street traces a cross-section of urban space and thereby preserves its spatial order. The film follows the structure of the city, rather than dissolving it. Specificity of location organizes Halsted Street, so that the viewer always knows precisely where one is along the route, as the film moves from the southern beginning of the street in the country to its northern limit in Chicago’s North Side. After opening with a street sign proclaiming “S. Halsted St,” the film’s second shot shows a farmer and his horses plowing a field. Showing how a city’s limit abuts on the country, tracing a furrow also introduces the theme of a linear pathway as well as the importance of a progressive trajectory in the film. While many city symphonies immerse the viewer in a dizzying sense that they could be anywhere within the city, Halsted Street charts a steady course in which the progress along the grid of urban streets always marks an exact position. Instead of a swirl of echoing and contrasting gestures, Halsted Street delivers a cartographic orientation, marking the film’s journey through a plethora of written signs. Like a foot-weary urban pedestrian, the film continually notes the succession of street signs: Vermont Ave.; 127 St.; 95th St.; 67th St.; 63rd St.; 59th St.; 35th St.; Maxwell St.; Taylor St.; Monroe St.; Madison St.; Randolph St.; Chicago Ave.; Fullerton St.; Broadway; Clarendon Ave.; Buena Ave. Anyone who knows Chicago can follow this (at points almost block by block) journey northward, cutting through the city, but also channeled by the logic of the grid—less an ambient flâneur than a surveyor of the city’s structure, cutting, not freely, but along the dotted line. Halsted Street shows the metropolis as a determined space in which variety abounds, but is always submitted to a predictable structure of control and circulation, a layout of streets and directions, of routes—and not simply a proliferation of intersections and possibilities. While the succession of street signs establishes the locations, Conrad’s film shows a fascination with written signs of all sorts. Halsted Street could be seen as a montage of the written aspects of the urban environment as much as Berlin intercuts gestures and actions. This fascination with the city as a space of textural inscription appears as an element in several city symphonies, but in Halsted Street it constitutes a major thread. This fascination with a city of words and surfaces of writing anticipates one of the major reinventions of the city symphony in the

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Figure 12.1  Street Signs in Halsted Street (Conrad Friberg, 1934)

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1970s, Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma (1970), composed primarily of images of signs in New York City arranged in the most abstract of tabular orders: alphabetically. But if Frampton’s film portrays the city as a space of linguistic order and abstraction, the writing in Halsted Street remains anchored to the vectoral logic it traces through urban neighborhoods. Since the structure of Halsted Street respects the order of the street, the trajectory of the film partly traces a succession of ethnic neighborhoods, marked especially by shop and restaurant signs. Chicago in the early 1930s

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remained the American city with the largest proportion of foreign-born inhabitants—Jane Hull’s famous immigrant settlement house was at Taylor and Halsted Street, an intersection, which appears in the film. While similarities of faces and gestures may mark people as simply belonging to the Family of Man, signs demarcate different languages and cultural communities. Thus, signs reading “Swedish Restaurant” and “Swedish Records” identify the Chicago Swedish neighborhood around 95th St and its culinary and linguistic identity, while a few minutes later in the film “Lithuanian Gospel Mission” and “Vilnius Printing” indicate the Lithuanian neighborhood located around the stockyards (the major locale of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel of social protest The Jungle). As the film continues its trek northward, it passes through several distinct ethnic neighborhoods marked by their signage: “Genuine Italian Sausage,” “Italian Medicines” is followed by “Tienda Mexicana todo a precios bajos” and” Café Mexicana;” a succession of signs in Greek mark Chicago’s Greektown; and towards the end of the film, as Halsted crosses Fullerton St., a series of German and Finnish signs appear. The street-determined structure of Halsted Street allows the film’s crosssection not only to show the variety of Chicago neighborhoods, but to unfold them successively; we simultaneously sense their separation and their proximity. Not only does the film establish ethnicity through signs, it also shows the diverse sort of neighborhoods defined by their role in the urban economy. Conrad takes us through the stockyards; the street market with its crowds, pushcarts, and diverse commodities around Maxwell Street; the entertainment section in midtown with its movie theaters and burlesque shows; or the city park with horseback riding for the rich at the northern end of the route. Lest my linear description be misleading, Halsted Street remains very much a montage film, in which cutting between shots carries a heavy freight of comment. A grid of montage interacting with the linear progression of the street constitutes the weft and woof of this closely-woven film. Conrad clearly learned from Soviet filmmakers the rhetorical force of a cut. But unlike many of his European mentors, he does not seek to abstract the meaning from its spatial context. For instance, Conrad ends his brief stockyards sequence by cutting from cattle being herded to the slaughterhouse to pedestrians being directed onto a bus by a cop. This comparison of cattle and workers had become by this time almost a cliché, with similar comparisons appearing in Eisenstein’s 1924 Strike, René Clair’s 1931 À nous la liberté, and, after Conrad’s film is finished, Chaplin’s 1936 Modern Times. A very similar cut occurs in Berlin, intercutting the legs of pedestrians on their way to work, the legs of cattle, and soldiers marching. Berlin’s montage is more seamless in tempo and composition than Conrad’s, but this very elegance blunts its comparison. Is the common link between pedestrians, factory workers, cattle, and soldiers docility or simply leg movement? More crucially, one wonders from where the cattle in

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Berlin come. There is no spatial logic in which to place them, other than the tabular space of similarity/contrast. In Halsted Street, however, we are located at the stockyard, a defining element of the Chicago economy and of its relation to the national economy (midway between the raw products of the West and the consumer markets of the East).3 Late silent cinema’s tendency to disavow the intertitle and valorize visual communication certainly marks Berlin, which is basically a titleless film. Although a silent film for economic reasons, Halsted Street was made after the coming of sound and bears no such prejudice against the written word, which it both records as part of the urban texture and manipulates ironically in its editing. Written signs identify neighborhoods or locations, but Conrad’s editing also creates a sense of disparity between their literal and figural messages, verbal proclamation, and social reality. An early shot of a vegetable market, for instance, shows a large price sign stuck in a barrel of potatoes setting up commerce and prices as a major motif in the film. The following shot of a large billboard in what looks like an empty lot in this rather rural section of the city proclaims less a spatial than a historical context for the film. The billboard proclaims optimistically “They’re Raising a Family of Girls and Boys and Thumbing their Noses at the Depression Noise.” As a sort of epigram for the film, the ironic presentation of this blithe commercial message of denial of a dire economic reality underscores the film’s attitude of critique, generating a suspicion of all surface messages and calling attention to images of suffering and deprivation. Almost magically the shot cuts to an identically framed shot advertising “Little Farms” for purchase on the installment plan, the selling point for the come-on of the previous billboard. This is followed by shots of other commercial billboards: “First National Bank of Chicago” beside an ad for the Community Fund charity showing a crippled child; an amazingly ironic proclamation for Chicago: “Enjoy Winter!” as a slogan for Gas Heat; and, most tellingly, a poster that self-reflectively proclaims “Watch the Posters,” which cues viewers into Conrad’s own dialectical use of the written message. While Conrad’s film never veers from its one-way journey northward this does not exhaust its structure. An alternative route through this space lies precisely in the possibility of reading, or rather re-reading its signs. Just as Berlin works on both the macro-level which shapes a coherence from the figure of the daily cycle and the city limits, and a micro-level of shot-to-shot correspondences and discords, Halsted Street balances the coherence of its street-bound structure with its shot-to-shot comments. Perhaps the strongest use of Eisensteinian montage concepts in Halsted Street comes with the collision between images and words that yield new meanings or ironic commentaries. A sign saying “Sausages” is followed by a shot of cattle in the stockyard holding pens; a marquee showing the title of a Barbara Stanwyck movie, A Lost Lady (Alfred E. Green, 1934), is cut with a shot of an indigent lady beggar sitting on the sidewalk. But as legible as these juxtapositions seem, they involve more than simply applying labels to

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Figure 12.2  Halsted Street (Conrad Friberg, 1934)

images. The cows must be slaughtered and processed to make sausages (setting up the more political metaphor a few shots later comparing workers and cattle), and the abject nature of the homeless street lady contrasts with the romantic connotations of the Hollywood movie title. Reading in this film takes on a critical function and triggers a transformation in meaning. Conrad’s montage follows the Soviet aspiration of not only analyzing the world but also of reaching conclusions, and his montage of written signs participates in this dual process. The message “Jesus Saves” appears four separate times in the film, always as part of the urban environment, and usually as a sign on a church or mission for the indigent. In two cases it is followed immediately by images that seem to undercut the supernatural aid the sign promises (cutting to an amputee propelling himself on a cart of the sidewalk in one case, and to a drunk collapsed on the street curb in another). The other montages are a bit more oblique, if potentially more interesting; the first “Jesus Saves” sign is followed by a sign in a meat market advertising “free souvenirs,” and the third “Jesus Saves” sign cuts first to men walking on the sidewalk and then to a billboard with a running cartoon baby proclaiming: “I got Live Power!” The promise of eternal salvation is rendered absurd through this juxtaposition to a commercial claim of super power. This recurring rerouting or undermining of written messages sets up the film’s major counter-current to the order of the depressionera city. Early in the film Conrad makes it clear that there are forces of political opposition and conflict within this city. Halsted Street shows a picket walking with a sign proclaiming “Kroger unfair to its workers.” Not only

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are written messages in this film to be read ironically and critically, they contend with each other. Thus, the film activates a conflict over meaning and even over the control of urban space. But the most central visualization of this energy of conflict comes with the film’s major overarching trope which redefines the film’s most obvious structure of the one-way street: the figure I will call “the determined pedestrian.” About a third of the way into the film, and just after the billboard of the speedy baby with “Live Power,” a figure of a young man in an overcoat appears, walking with a determined pace that sets him apart from the other pedestrians in the film. He also stands out because the camera tracks along with him in his consistent right-to-left motion, sharing his sense of direction. As he recurs through the film, appearing in 13 separate shots in the various neighborhoods, he functions as a thread that links the diverse topographies. These regularly occurring tracking shots of his determined strides punctuate the otherwise unmoving shots of the film, setting up a dominant rhythm of moving and static shots. While one tends to align him with the film’s structure, with Halsted Street itself, I think that with repetition and acceleration the relation becomes more complex. Halsted Street structures this urban space; it links, but also keeps apart, the neighborhoods. This figure overcomes the distance of the street; he uses the street to get somewhere and as the film progresses, his pace actually increases, until he is running in his final appearances. This running figure brings the film to a climax in which the relentless trip up the street melds with the man’s final burst of speed to give a sense of destination. The theme of written signs also reaches a resolution here. We see the man running towards the camera, which films him straight on, abandoning the pattern of tracking alongside him. A street sign for Randolph St. announces the location (close to the middle of the city), and Conrad cuts to a shot of a worker swinging a traffic barrier into place that bears the words “stop” and “danger.” The running man comes to a stop on a street corner and waves as he looks off. With a cut on his sight line, we see the goal of his determined progress up Halsted Street: a marching street demonstration. Conrad cuts back to the man, who gives a raised fist gesture of solidarity and runs out of frame. Signs carried by the demonstrators appear cut together: “Death to the Lynchers”; “They Shall Not Die” (with a sign in the background mentioning the Scottsboro Boys, a notorious, racially charged case of miscarriage of justice that led to “right to a fair trial” legislation). In a wider shot demonstrators move through the frame with banners and signs: “We protest discrimination against Negro workers” and “Cash Relief.” A closer shot shows women and children marching carrying signs, such as “I Need Shoes.” Then a shot centers on a placard reading: “Long live the Solidarity of the Working Class.” A shot of men’s legs walking through the frame is followed by a shot of a traffic light with a globe on top of it saying: “End of System.”

conrad’s halsted street

Figure 12.3  Halsted Street (Conrad Friberg, 1934)

This political demonstration brings to an end the thread of the determined pedestrian and thereby provides one of the purposes of Conrad’s film. As opposed to the double meaning evoked from the signs along the route, the signs carried in the demonstration seem to express messages endorsed by the filmmaker. Yet they remain elements belonging to the urban environment, albeit unique ones, since they are carried by people rather than attached to edifices. They move through space, and they announce direct political statements rather than advertising commodities or places of business. But they remain placed and embodied, not abstract statements appearing, say, in intertitles. The final shot of the series present perhaps Conrad’s wittiest recontexturaliztion of an urban sign. The globe reading “end of system” contrasts sharply with the picket signs. I believe it marked the end (i.e., the terminus) of one of the lines of transportation, perhaps the end of the streetcar system that converges around this midtown location. But Conrad’s editing converts it from practical directional information to a statement, even a call to action, to end the Capitalist system. Although the street structure running uptown and the determined pedestrian share a common direction, Conrad’s film keeps them separate. The man does not appear again after the protest demonstration and its cluster of signs. But the street continues northward and the film follows it across the Chicago River past the indigent “lost lady” and an empty church with a “for sale” sign, to the clean swept streets and fancy mansions of the northern Lake Shore neighborhood where well-dressed folk promenade the sidewalk. The film ends with scenes within the artificial nature of

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Lincoln Park as people on horseback ride by. This ending does more than simply follow the street to its end. It brings the film full circle, with the rural-seeming park recalling the country of the opening. Further, the coda coming after the demonstration shows that in spite of the desire of the workers and the pun of the filmmaker, the system still continues and the contrast in neighborhoods remains resonant as we end in a neighborhood of wealth and comfort. The final shot of well-to-do riders is followed by the hand (Conrad’s?), glimpsed in the opening credits in negative, tracing the words “The End.” Conrad’s neglected masterpiece lacks some technical expertise, evident in its occasional over-exposures and the visual obscurity due to the smaller gauge of 16mm. Certainly the film would not have existed if the filmmaker had not seen the pioneering examples of Vertov and Ruttmann and others, as well as paid attention to the montage lessons Eisenstein provided. But this amateur film shows a grasp of film form and structure I find often more compelling as a mode of dealing with urban space than many of its more famous rivals. It reveals how fertile the conjunction of leftist politics and the concept of an alternative cinema was in the 1930s. I also find that Halsted Street anticipated aspects of the US avant-garde cinema of the 1970s in allowing a single structure—the forward trajectory of the street—to dominate over the more molecular logic of montage relations between shots. The street in Halsted Street cuts a cross-section that reveals the actual spatial relations between neighborhoods and classes as it moves through the city, revealing not simply its diversity, but the way those diverse areas are managed, and opening the possibility of protest and revolt—a process the film itself participates in.

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1 I want to thank my friends Fred Camper and Judy Hoffman for bringing this film to my attention. It was preserved by the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Almost nothing is known of “Conrad.” A more elaborate version of this chapter has been published previously as “One-Way Street: Urban Chronotopes in Ruttman’s ‘Berlin: Symphony of a Great City’ and Conrad’s ‘Halsted Street’,” in Synne Bull and Marit Paasche (eds.), Urban Images: Unruly Desires in Film and Architecture (Berlin: Sternberg, 2011), 62–79. On amateur cinema, see Charles Tepperman, Communicating a New Form of Knowledge: Tracing the Amateur Cinema League and Its Films (1926–1954) (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 2007). 2 On the Film and Photo League, see Russell Campell, “Introduction: Film and Photo League, Radical Cinema in the 30’s,” Jump Cut 14 (1977): 23–5, and William Alexander, Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). 3 For a discussion of Chicago’s role in the US economy and how it shaped the city see William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1991).

leyda’s a bronx morning

thirteen

jan-christopher horak Jay Leyda was a central figure of the first American film avant-garde. A film critic, poet, and filmmaker, Jay Leyda’s first film, A Bronx Morning (1931), which he directed and shot, gave the impression of a few hours in the life of the New York borough. A celebratory, even humanistic view of the city and its working class inhabitants, A Bronx Morning was conceptualized as Leyda’s tribute to one of his favorite photographers, Eugène Atget.1 In its focus on the urban environment of New York, and Leyda’s interest in straight photography, one can also see the influence of American photographers such as Paul Strand, Walker Evans, and Berenice Abbott. It is a lyrical look at his Bronx neighborhood in the early morning hours before traffic and pedestrians crowd the streets. For decades the film was undervalued, because like many American Avant-garde works from the period, it was considered an imitation of similar European city films by Walter Ruttmann, René Clair, Alberto Cavalcanti, and others. Film historian David Curtis’ assessment was typical, noting that American city films by

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Herman Weinberg, Leyda, et al, “added little technically or aesthetically to the European originals,” but that “they served to popularize the idea that the raw materials of art are everywhere.”2 Like other historians invested in demonstrating that the “real” American film avant-garde began with Maya Deren and the post-World War II “new American cinema” around Jonas Mekas and his cohorts, Curtis discovers formal similarities between Leyda’s film and those of the European avant-garde, in order to deny the former its originality. This would not change until the advent of the new film history in the 1980s. For example, rethinking some of the points made in his dissertation on the city film, William Uricchio’s article, “The City Viewed: The Films of Leyda, Browning and Weinberg,” theorizes that late 1920s American city films straddle the differing though not necessarily conflicting representational strategies of avant-garde and documentary works, as understood in contemporary discourse.3 In Lovers of Cinema, I theorize that American avant-garde films from the 1920s and 30s, unlike their European counterparts, are not unequivocally modernist, but rather mix modernist formal film design with romantic notions of (wo)man’s alienation from nature in the modern world. Such traces of nature are even visible in a film like A Bronx Morning with its focus on cityscapes. A major element of the American avant-garde’s vernacular was based on the notion that their films were “amateur” productions that could experiment with film form the way professional and, in particular, Hollywood films, could not. Jay Leyda, Herman Weinberg, Ralph Steiner, Theodore Huff, and many others proudly proclaimed themselves to be film amateurs. The amateur was concerned with the cause of film art, not the production of profit. These high art aspirations for cinema were in fact imbedded in a nascent amateur film movement, the avant-garde and the amateur being two alternative discourses on the fringes of the commercial mainstream, which for at least a few short years overlapped.4 As C. Adolph Glassgold in 1929 wrote programmatically in The Arts: “The artistic future of the motion picture in American rests in the hands of the amateur.”5 Leyda, himself, published a statement on amateurism in the Amateur Cinema League’s official organ, Amateur Movie Makers, noting that the amateur point of view is more personal than that of the professional: “the amateur does have the advantage of living in one place long enough to thoroughly know its hidden beauty, possibly its pathos and certainly its humor.” The article also includes what is the first published description in English of the “Kuleshov effect.” Founded in 1926, the Amateur Cinema League was made up of over 103 amateur cinema clubs in the United States and abroad with over 2,300 members, all of who were producing amateur films.6 Many

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photographers and artists who had ambitions to make films, including Jay Leyda, were involved in the ACL, either as budding filmmakers looking for audiences or as participants in ACL screenings. While Jay Leyda’s film, A Bronx Morning, was not in the ACL’s distribution catalog, Leyda did contribute articles to the ACL’s magazine.7 The League also began to organize a lending library as early as 1927. The Amateur Cinema League’s distribution catalogue included Fall of the House of Usher (James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber, 1928), The Tell-Tale Heart (Charles Klein, 1928), H20 (Ralph Steiner, 1929), as well as Portrait of a Young Man (Henwar Rodakiewicz, 1930), Lot in Sodom (Watson and Webber, 1932,), Mr. Motorboat’s Last Stand (Theodore Huff and John Florey, 1933), and Another Day (Leslie P. Thatcher, 1934), all of which were screened extensively throughout the United States. Amateur Movie Makers, on the other hand, not only published articles by Jay Leyda, but also by Theodore Huff, Henwar Rodakiewicz, and Herman Weinberg, and all of these texts encouraged amateurs to experiment with film form. It was not until the mid-1930s that the Cinema League organization became aesthetically more conservative, its members increasingly preferring polished travelogues and Hollywood’s professional discourse to formal experimentation. Given this self-image, the agenda of the first American film avant-garde was much broader than simply to produce film experiments: they sought to improve the quality of all films, whether personal or professional, to create structures for distribution and exhibition, and to further its reception through publications. These cineastes moved freely between avantgarde film and other endeavors: documentary, industrials, experimental narrative, film criticism, film exhibition, painting, and photography. Like many early European avant-gardists, many of them were primarily painters or photographers who only “dabbled” in film. Jay Leyda personifies the amateur film avant-gardist. Leyda produced A Bronx Morning independently with some material support from the New York Film and Photo League, after moving to New York. Leyda had bought a camera and funded the film, after selling of a wooden figurine of Henry Ward Beecher, which Leyda had originally found in a Dayton junk shop, to a representative of Abby Rockefeller. Leyda functioned as his own cameraman, writer, director, and editor, shooting 35mm negative and then editing the footage together. Despite its year of production, coming after the introduction of sound, A Bronx Morning was shown without a soundtrack, although Leyda may have had incidental live music play at early screenings. Unfortunately, the film’s original negative was destroyed in a fire, so that for decades the only available prints for screening were 16mm reduction prints from the MOMA catalog. In 2004, A Bronx Morning was selected for preservation in the United States National Film

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Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” Born in Detroit, Michigan on 12 February 1910, Jay Leyda received training in photography by Photo-Secessionist, Jane Reece in Dayton, OH, where he had graduated from high school a year earlier. After answering an advertisement for an apprentice, Leyda became the assistant to Ralph Steiner on both photographic and film work, and possibly worked as a camera assistant on Steiner’s H20 (1929). After a year, Steiner gave Leyda money for the fare home to Dayton, but the young artist decided to stay in New York and take a job at the Bronx Playhouse, an art cinema theater, as a sound recordist, where he viewed numerous Soviet and foreign silent films, including Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (1929) and Eisenstein’s Oktbr (1927), which he claimed to have seen no less than 15 times. In other words, A Bronx Morning was the product of a cineaste, who has imbibed the language of the late silent European cinema, even if Leyda claimed not to have seen Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927) and Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926) before he made his film. He also joined the Film and Photo League, a left wing workers film group organized by the American Communist Party. After completing A Bronx Morning in 1931, Leyda exhibited the film at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, where his own documentary and street photographs were also on display in 1932. At the Gallery he also met Walker Evans and other like-minded filmmakers and photographers. Levy specialized in screening avant-garde films and also sought to “display them on request.”8 Lynn Riggs’s A Day in Santa Fe (1931), Henwar Rodakiewicz’s Portrait of a Young Man (1931), and Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936) all premiered in the space. Rodakiewicz’s and Leyda’s films were also shown at Alfred Stieglitz’s An American Place, another occasional showcase for American avant-garde films. And the film was screened in London at the London Film Society.9 At Steiner’s behest, Leyda taught the famous photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White how to operate a 16mm camera before she went to Russia in 1930. A Bronx Morning also got Leyda accepted into Sergei Eisenstein’s film course. After travelling to the Soviet Union, Leyda interned in the Summer of 1934 at Mezhrapbom-Russ, where Dziga Vertov has been reduced to making a travelogue about Leningrad after the official condemnation of Three Songs of Lenin (1934); Leyda assisted on that film and he also helped out Joris Ivens on another project at the same time. In 1934–5 he was an assistant on Eisenstein’s aborted Bezhin Meadow project. Returning to the United States in 1936, after helping Alfred Barr and Iris Barry secure films in the Soviet Union for MOMA, Leyda joined the staff of MOMA as an assistant to Barry. Working with Ralph Steiner again as cameraman, Leyda co-directed

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the short documentary, The People of the Cumberland (1937) for Frontier Films. He was fired by Iris Barry in 1940, after the Museum trustees came under political pressure for having hired “known” Communists and after the Rockefeller Foundation, which was paying Leyda’s salary, failed to support him.10 After a brief stint in Hollywood, where he became a technical advisor on the Warner Brothers pro-Russian, anti-Nazi film, Mission to Moscow (Michael Curtiz, 1943), and the film adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Rowland V. Lee, 1944), Leyda continued translating Eisenstein’s writings into English, publishing Film Sense in 1942 and Film Form: Essays in Film Theory in 1949. In the 1950s, Leyda turned to literary studies of Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson. As a roving film archivist, Leyda worked as a consultant for the Cinémathèque française in Paris, and from 1959 to 1964 at China Film Archive in Beijing, as well as at the British Film Institute in London and the Staatliches Filmarchiv der DDR in East Berlin. The year 1960 saw the publication of his first magnum opus: Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, which has remained a standard work ever since.11 His Beijing years produced his second major contribution to film historiography, Dianying—Electric Shadows: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China (1972).12 Finally, Leyda taught at Yale and York University, before taking the Pinewood Chair of Cinema Studies at New York University in 1973, where he remained until his death on 15 February 1988. At NYU he would teach a whole generation of scholars, who with his encouragement would found the field of early cinema studies. Indeed Leyda’s interest in so-called “primitives,” had been kindled decades earlier. As early as the late 1940s, Leyda suggested to Frank Stauffacher that he do a program of early cinema in his “Art in Film” series.13 A Bronx Morning opens with moving camera shots, taken from the elevated train, cars, and other moving vehicles, a continuous left and right horizontal camera movement. These images hark back to the opening of Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927), but also to Henri Chomette’s Jeux de reflets et de la vitesse (1923), with its rapid motion shots from Paris’s elevated Metro which appear as cinema pur abstractions. A close-up of a barbershop pole brings the ceaseless movement to a dead stop. The following images of store fronts, mannequins, and signs, and other objects in the still deserted streets are the most direct quotations of Atget’s surrealistic photographs of Paris, in particular some shots of mannequins in shop windows. Not until three minutes into the film do we see a long shot. Leyda then cuts between long shots of Bronx cityscapes, to medium and close-ups of shops, and, especially, signage. Four minutes into the film, we get a montage of architecture which emphasizes geometric structures and shadows moving with the sun.

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Figure 13.1  A Bronx Morning (Jay Leyda, 1931)

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Given the angle of sunlight on a Bronx morning, shadows are in fact a major thematic trope, but composed in such a way that they reveal parts rather than wholes. The capturing of shadows are both a formal device of composition and a metonym for morning light, which because of the position of the sun, of necessity creates those elongated, diagonal shadows. Leyda’s morning shadows are also constantly in motion (following moving objects or the camera’s movement), often composed as diagonal cut-outs, attached to fragments of bodies, and sometimes completely detached from their relationship to physical bodies, as when we see fleeting shadows of legs racing over the sidewalk. Shadows thus reveal, but also simultaneously obscure, scenes of urban life, just as light and/or its absence is essential to celluloid filmmaking, exposing photochemical material to various gradations of light and its absence. Shadows thus inherently call attention to the filmmaker and the project of filmmaking, so that related to Leyda’s depiction of shadows is his use of shutters and mattes (crudely implemented by sliding a piece of black cardboard across the lens, in order to sculpt light patterns). Such mattes are of course a highly self-reflexive method of focusing the viewer’s attention on specific details within the camera’s field of vision, but also aestheticize the image, transforming glimpses of camera reality into a personal, subjective vision. Interestingly, the second third of the film moves to the street to portray the borough’s inhabitants: children playing, hanging wash, mothers with prams, shop windows and their merchants. All the cultural signifiers,

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including dress, shoes, hairstyles, point to a working class and lower middle class neighborhood of recent immigrants. There are no signs of obvious wealth, such as fancy cars, merely public modes of transportation and pedestrians. Surprisingly, there are almost no images of men working, unlike earlier city portraits which usually incorporated scenes of labor, just as there are no shots of organized leisure time activities. Both labor and leisure are absent because of the film’s geographic and temporal parameters as communicated in the film’s title, A Bronx Morning. The lack of working males and the depiction of women who are seemingly responsible for mothering children, cooking, and shopping for groceries, indicates that during the morning hours the streets of the Bronx are essentially feminine spaces and the camera is presenting a mostly female universe. Interestingly, Leyda often films these scenes from above, so that one seldom actually sees the faces of individuals. A single medium shot of an elderly woman on an apartment building stoop reveals her working class physiognomy. All

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Figure 13.2  A Bronx Morning (Jay Leyda, 1931)

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other faces are obscured by shadows or excluded from the frame in torso shots, except a few of the babies seen in the many baby carriages that populate the film. The women and children depicted are thereby not individualized, but rather abstracted, presented as representatives of their class and station in the Bronx environment; Leyda here seems to be paying homage to the Soviet filmmakers who influenced him most at this point in his career. Indeed, similar to the Soviet model of valorizing parts rather than wholes through the use of montage, one can define the film as a symphony of body parts, disembodied hands, legs and feet without torsos, bodies in motion. This was certainly a conscious aesthetic strategy, but in the American context it might have also been a method to circumvent personality rights issues, since Leyda’s impressionistic method of street filmmaking would have precluded the issuing of clearances. Leyda’s chosen motifs of children playing, and family life on the street continues in the film’s final third with shots of pets and pigeons as Leyda again switches to a roof-top perspective. Again, long shots of street views and cityscapes, some abstractly composed, e.g., an image taken with a telephoto lens of buildings with fire escapes, are intercut with closer views of street life. Here Leyda seems to be interested in the architecture of urban spaces, more specifically in the architecture of tenements, where large numbers of persons are living together, captured through the use of a camera lens that obliterates actual spatial dimensions in favor of creating impressions of no space between buildings and individuals. However, Leyda’s intention is not to expose over-crowding in a politically activist sense, since there are no images of the interior of buildings, nor any of darkened, backside courtyards. Again, Leyda’s purpose seems to be aesthetic, creating visually arresting views of his neighborhood. The film ends with a kind of visual count-down, as Leyda intercuts moving camera shots of pigeons in flight with the slow progression of a newspaper fluttering from the roof to the street, the film ending on the shot when the paper hits the pavement. The pigeons in flight can be understood as the remnants of nature in an environment that has for the most part rigorously eliminated the natural environment, replacing it with civilization’s concrete and asphalt. The fluttering newspaper, on the other hand, apparently tossed from a tenement roof (possibly, we can speculate, by the hand of a retired urban pigeon keeper who has finished reading it), is both a product of a highly developed civilization and its detritus, its use value almost instantaneously obsolete. As noted above, this juxtaposition of nature and civilization reveals a romantic trope, a nostalgia for the loss of a connection to nature, that is common to almost all of the American avant-garde films from this period. Thus, Jay Leyda in his independently produced short, A Bronx Morning, seems to be interested in the way public city spaces become private family spaces in a place like the Bronx. He is fascinated by the to and fro of the city’s

leyda’s a bronx morning

inhabitants in their own neighborhood on their own streets, but eschews the actual depiction of private spaces. Furthermore, he is not interested in portraying the mostly female subjects and their children as individuals, but rather as types, specific to the environment depicted. And given that he has focused on a specific time of day when the male members of the household are working in other places, his Bronx morning is exclusively populated with mothers, children, and shopkeepers whose customers are almost exclusively local women. The mothers talk to their neighbors and shop for groceries, the children play, and the vegetable and fruit vendors peddle their wares from shop carts on the street. Meanwhile, Leyda’s editing, is strongly influenced by the formal and rhythmic patterns of the city films, cutting on form and movement, composing shots abstractly, contrasting light and shadow. The film creates a lyrical, impressionistic image of the city which remains generalized by presenting individuals as types by not showing faces or only in long shot, as if a flâneur has recorded his subjective views of the city. There are stunningly beautiful compositions, like an overhead shot of a parked car, a baby carriage and a shadow in a geometric design worthy of Moholy-Nagy, or the third to last image of the film, showing an overhead shot of street car tracks, a trolley rolling into the frame and two bicycle riders racing over the tracks diagonally through the frame. Certain images also imply a degree of social critique, e.g., images of trash or of children playing on unsafe streets. However, unlike many of the European city films which were more interested in an objective view of the city, Leyda’s film is much more consciously subjective, yet without the intense romanticism of a film like Weinberg’s Autumn Fire (1931).

notes 1 Jay Leyda, “A Note on a Bronx Morning,” Travelling 56, 2 (Fall 1979). 2 David Curtis, Experimental Cinema (New York, NY: Universe Books, 1971), 42. 3 William Uricchio, “The City Viewed: The Films of Leyda, Browning, and Weinberg,” in Jan-Christopher Horak (ed.), Lovers of Cinema: the First American avant-garde, 1919–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 287–314. See also William Uricchio, Ruttmann’s “Berlin” and the City Film to 1930 (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1982). 4 See Patricia Zimmermann, “The Amateur, the Avant-Garde, and Ideologies of Art,” Journal of Film and Video 38, 3–4 (Summer‑Fall 1986). 5 C. Adolph Glassgold: “THE FILMS: Amateur or Professional?” The Arts 15, 1 (January 1929): 56. 6 See letter from Arthur Gale (Amateur Cinema League consultant) to Marion Gleason, 21 November 1928, Gleason file, Film Dept., George Eastman Museum. 7 Jay Leyda, “Tips on Topicals,” Amateur Movie Makers 6, 1 (13–14 January, 1931): 39. 8 Lincoln Kirstein, “Films: Experimental Films,” Arts Weekly 1, 3 (March 1932): 52.

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9 See also Elena Pinto Simon and David Stirk, “Jay Leyda: A Chronology,” published in memoriam of Leyda by the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, December 1987. 10 See Seymour Stern, “Letter to the Editor,” The New York Times (13 January 1935): sec. 9, p. 4; Seymour Stern, “Film Library Notes Build CP Liberators’ Myth,” The New Leader (23 March 1940), quoted in Peter Decherney, Hollywood and the Culture of the Elite (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). See also Annette Michelson, “Jay Leyda: 1910–1988,” Cinema Journal 28, 1 (Fall 1988): 12–16. 11 Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960). 12 Jay Leyda, Dianying/Electric Shadows: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1972). 13 Letter Jay Leyda to Frank Stauffacher (31 August 1946), “Art in Cinema” papers, Pacific Film Archives.

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são paulo fourteen

sinfonia da metrópole

cristina meneguello In 1929, a Paramount advertisement proudly announced São Paulo: Sinfonia da Metrópole in several local newspapers: Paramount will shortly present the film São Paulo: The Symphony of the Metropolis . . . dazzling rhythm of progress, city brain of Brazil, splendid dream of the exploring expeditions that materialized one day in molds of iron and steel pitched into the air, in challenge; in giant turbines moving mountains; in boilers exploding in horsepower; in powerful machines making a thousand industries emerge—all the feverish activity of the Paulista metropolis unfolding before our astonished eyes, as a fantastic and fascinating vision. In short, this is a splendid movie, pillar of glory of the national cinema, in which we all cooperate, without knowing it.

The image accompanying this exalted discourse, shaped in a deliberate aesthetic of the sublime, left no room for doubt: a giant, who brandishes in

cristina meneguello

his hand nothing less than a movie camera, makes room between steel viaducts, skyscrapers, and watch towers; above him, just an airplane and a zeppelin. The image summarizes all the desires present in this film portraying the city of São Paulo as a thriving metropolis in line with the latest technological innovations, the cinema among them. The film shows all the forces of progress, which, for a long time, would feed the self-image of São Paulo that experienced a spurt of growth and industrialization at that time. The directors and screenwriters of the film, Adalberto Kemeny and Rodolpho Rex Lustig, both Hungarian immigrants, introduced a new cinematic language in São Paulo, based on montage, unexpected camera movements, and the use of people in the streets as protagonists. They succeeded in overcoming the then current technical limitations, obtaining the necessary resources, finding film stock and equipment for filming and lighting to compete with the cinematic models of the day.1 In the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo the synopsis of the film was presented as follows: Are you proud of being a “Paulista”? São Paulo: Sinfonia da Metrópole is the soul of the city that you built with your work, singing along the marvelous rhythm of the most formidable progress! The romance of the city! The daily toil of the great anonymous masses caught during precious moments by a camera lens, always cleverly hidden from the eyes of the general public. It is an almost fantastic vision that unfolds before our eyes like a dream, sometimes joyful, sometimes sad, but always enjoyable because it shows the city that we build for our pride and glory and as an example of the new Brazil.2

são paulo: the city

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During the 1920s and 1930s, major Brazilian cities underwent an accelerated process of urbanization. The wealth brought by coffee export had a definitive impact on São Paulo, which was transformed by the construction of new neighborhoods and avenues, an expansion of its electricity system, and the development of an urban transportation network. In the 1920s, inhabitants of remote neighborhoods could for the first time reach the city center by means of tram and omnibus. Venues of recreation and conviviality multiplied, with cafés, restaurants, and cinemas as tokens of a new way of life and new patterns of consumption. These innovations had a permanent impact on the perception of the inhabitants, which was also affected by several newly constructed iconic landmarks such as the iron Santa Efigênia viaduct, which was imported from Belgium in its entirety, and the 1929 Martinelli building, the city’s first skyscraper. Originated as a village

Figure 14.1  São Paulo, A Symphonia da Metrópole (Adalberto Kemeny and Rudolpho Rex Lustig, 1929), Promotion Ad and Poster

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founded in 1554 by Jesuit priests and remaining a small fortified town up to the late nineteenth century, São Paulo developed into a metropolis with 550,000 inhabitants in 1920. In 1929, when the film was made, it counted just over one million. Moreover,in 1920, statistics recorded 1,875 new constructions that evolved to 3,922 in 1930. Construction was at the rate of one dwelling per hour. The press enthusiastically stated that “São Paulo was the fastest growing city in the world.”3 Technical innovations and the euphoria of the years after World War I contributed to the perception of a growing city. The word “modern” was amply used in newspaper chronicles and “advertisements and signs scattered throughout various media” spread the news “about subjects ranging from sports activities to medical advances. Everything should be modern to be well rated.”4 According to historian Nicolau Sevcenko, The New World, represented by São Paulo, where the first white man mixed with an Indian, whose descendants in their turn crossed with black people, and where new generations now consort with the refugees from a troubled and convulsed Europe, is the new promised land where they will raise the solid towers of a new architecture of a future society, an inverted Babel, a Babel which unites.5

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Since the last decades of the nineteenth century, the new metropolis that measured itself with Buenos Aires as well as Rio de Janeiro, was the destination of several immigration waves, including Italian, Spanish, German, and later Japanese, Syrian-Lebanese, and Eastern-European immigrants. A gulf of national optimism conquered the country that presented itself to European immigrants as an exotic land, chaotic but full of possibilities for achievement and enrichment. At the same time, artists and wealthy families in Brazil discovered Europe. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Brazil received more than one million immigrants and an economy based on coffee monoculture turned São Paulo into an international center. The state of São Paulo attracted farm hands (Italians, Japanese), but the city itself was the focus of a great wave of immigrants who came to work in the factories and in newly emerging urban professions, among which those related to industrial image making such as photography, photo editing, and photo journalism. Photo clubs and ciné-clubs emerged. In this context, cinema became a language capable of communicating these changes and cinema theaters became important places to meet and socialize. In 1929, the city had about sixty film theaters.6 Although Hollywood had secured its share in the national cinemas, the audience was also interested in the European avant-garde.

são paulo: the film

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São Paulo: Sinfonia da Metrópole was released on 6 September 1929 at the Paramount theater in São Paulo, where it was screened until 8 September. Then it toured to several other local theaters, such as the Cine São Bento, Marconi, Cambuci, Coliseu, Santa Helena, Paraíso, Espéria, São Pedro, Central, Olímpia, and Moderno. In the beginning of 1930, the film was shown in Curitiba, in the south of the country, and one year after its release it was screened in Manaus, in the far north state of Amazonas. On the opening night, the orchestra of the Paramount theater, then considered the best in town, performed a score composed for the film “in the fashion of the synchronizations of the large American orchestras,” as the newspaper A Folha de Manhã announced.7 Paramount made a series of agreements to show Brazilian films together with films in English, thus overcoming the initial resistance of the Brazilian public to movies spoken in English. In the early 1930s, the film, retitled São Paulo 24 horas, was re-released with a soundtrack comprising music by Gaó Gurgel and a sonography by Lamartine Fagundes. Apparently, some parts were shot again for this new version. Although Kemeny and Lustig shared directional credits, it is generally assumed that Rodolpho Rex Lustig (1901–70) directed the film while Adalberto Kemeny (1901–69) acted as scriptwriter and cameraman. The intertitles were designed by João Quadros. Little is known about the directors. Born in Budapest, Adalberto Kemeny started his professional life as a laboratory technician in the Hungarian branch of Pathé in the late 1910s. He and his fellow countryman Lustig became professional partners, producing small advertising films. In 1920, they moved to Berlin, where they reportedly worked for UFA. In 1922, at the invitation of director Armando Pamplona of the Independência-Omnia-Film company, Kemeny came to Brazil for the centenary celebrations of the country’s independence. Four years later, Lustig joined him, and in 1928 they were in the position to buy Independência-Omnia, transforming it into Rex Filme.8 After 1929’s São Paulo City Symphony, Kemeny realized six more films and participated in other companies such as Rossi-Rex Film and even in the creation of the Vera Cruz Cinematographic Company, which would become the most important film studio of São Paulo in the early 1950s. In an interview, Kemeny flatly denied he was inspired by Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927).9 How much truth this statement holds cannot be verified. Although the phenomenon of the city symphony was a widespread one, it is striking that no similar films of any other large city in Latin America is known. As Eduardo Morettin has noted, in the first decades of the twentieth century, so-called “national documentaries” had developed in Brazil, which were dedicated to civic events and monumental spaces as well as carnival celebrations in the streets.10 In addition, since the

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beginning of the century, Brazilian cinema had documented remote places in the jungle and their indigenous populations such as the films made from 1912 onwards by the Photographic and Cinematographic Service of the Rondon Commission.11 Other documentaries had tried to describe everyday life in certain cities, including Walfredo Rodrigues’s 1926 film on the carnival of Pernambuco and Paraíba (O Carnaval paraibano e pernambucano) and the film Sob o céu nordestino on the landscapes and people of the state of Paraíba. Sponsored by the state government, Italian immigrant Igino Bonfiglioli produced the feature-length film Minas Antiga (1927–8) in Minas Gerais. In the Amazon region, feature films and documentaries focused on the production of rubber and the Amazon River. In the far-south state of Rio Grande do Sul, several documentaries dealt with German traditions cultivated among immigrants and their descendants. In the late 1920s, however, these regional cycles were replaced by films focusing on the axis connecting Rio de Janeiro with São Paulo. Given this perspective, the São Paulo city symphony had some predecessors, such as 50 Anos da Cidade de Cataguases (1927) and Sinfonia de Cataguases (1928) by leading filmmaker Humberto Mauro, and Carnaval pernambucano (1926) by Edson Chagas. In 1929, João Batista Groff made in Curitiba the films Cidade de Morretes and Cidade de Paranaguá while José Julianelli, an Italian who had settled in Santa Catarina, directed O progresso de Blumenau (1926).12 Moreover, as Rubens Machado Junior has demonstrated, the evocation of a metropolis in the manner of New York or Berlin was also present in fiction films set in São Paulo, such as Exemplo Regenerador (1919) and Fragmentos da Vida (1929), both directed by José Medina.13 Released a month before Kemeny and Lustig’s São Paulo city symphony, Fragmentos da Vida tells the story of a dying father who asks his son to be honest and hardworking—a plea he does not answer, living a licentious life in the big city and ending in a penitentiary. Likewise, Antônio Tibiriçá’s Vício e Beleza (1926) contrasts the life of a medical student and amateur swimmer and athlete with that of another young man living in bars and cabarets. Of moralizing content, the film warns against drug use and sexually transmitted diseases, emphasizing the dangers of the metropolis. Even with all these antecedents, São Paulo: Sinfonia da Metrópole stands out for its originality, capturing the frenzy of the metropolis and its inhabitants and evoking the excitement of modern and industrial life. The film unfolds with a plot that sometimes returns on its steps, or repeats itself. In general, it seeks to describe urban life in the span of a single day. The film opens with the silence of dawn, some scenes showing the city still asleep. Then, the city awakens, indicated by a shifting tram and a passerby in the background. The pace gradually begins to increase, showing the distribution of newspapers, a greengrocer passing, and men heading for work.

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Figure 14.2  São Paulo, A Symphonia da Metrópole (Adalberto Kemeny and Rudolpho Rex Lustig, 1929)

The following scenes show workers punching the clock at the entry of “factories, foundries, and a thousand industries,” as an intertitle announces, as well as machines that start to work, the awakening in distant neighborhoods, and children going to school. From the moment the city is awake and the trade in the streets and business in the banks come to life, the camera embarks on daring movements by showing people from above. In addition, the film highlights the coffee trade (also known as “the green gold”), considered the driving force of the city’s wealth. When means of communication (telephone, telegraph) enter the scene, Kemeny and Lustig start using juxtapositions of images, through montage, split screens, and multiple-exposure shots, attempting to express the simultaneity of events. This strategy is repeated in several other moments, particularly in the scenes depicting movements of cars, evoking the multitude, speed, and simultaneity of motions and the cacophony of the city. São Paulo: Sinfonia da Metrópole is surely a documentary with scenes shot on the streets dominating the narrative, but it re-designs its raw footage in a completely subjective way. It is marked by a “poetic mode,” taking its cue from the modernist avant-garde, often replacing classical continuity editing by an assembly of free associations of temporal rhythms and spatial juxtapositions.14 Moreover, the film is somewhat heterogeneous and also includes sequences of a different type of nature. First, there are the “staged” scenes (small anecdotes) that add a more personal touch to the film, but which

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disappear from the middle onwards. These scenes are, however, part of a narrative that suggests that they were recorded at random: a child reproaching another child for throwing fruit on the ground, two women chatting at the window, filmed from inside the house of one of them, et cetera. The second deviation from the main narrative consists of educational sequences, in which the poetic mode is exchanged for an expository tone. These sequences show the Butantam Institute, where snake and spider antitoxins are developed, and a rehabilitation program in the state prison. The third insert diverging from the main film, finally, is the reenactment of the Proclamation of the Independence of Brazil, an event that occurred on 7 September 1822 on the banks of the Ipiranga river by the Prince Regent, D. Pedro Alcântara e Bragança, who eventually became Emperor Pedro I. The filmmakers recreate the past in period costume, narrating this founding event of São Paulo’s pride, which should be related to the date the film was released, exactly one day before the celebrations of Independence Day in 1929. After this staged leap into history, the film returns to contemporary life, showing us the “sweaty Cyclops building the city” (the construction workers), lotteries and gambling, charity through the giving of alms (a special effect shows a giant hand wandering through the city and distributing coins), and individual and collective sports, such as horse racing and fun in the swimming pools. Although a silent film, there is a part entirely dedicated to noise, to the urban sounds that mark the “vertiginous” growth of the metropolis. Lunch time is described as a musical syncope, as a moment of rest for the nerves and brains. The symphony does not turn into silence, but is marked by a slower rhythm before becoming erratic again with footage of printing presses, schools, and illustrious persons visiting the city. The outcome is as expected: night falls over the city. It gets dark in a tumultuous brawl, evoked by its shadows stretching out over the pavement. The city, however, does not go to sleep. By means of a scale model and an assembly of the most unlikely pictures, the final scene shows “São Paulo, formidable and Cyclopic metropolis” topped by aircrafts and zeppelins across the nocturnal sky. Kemeny and Lustig, clearly, did not hesitate to use devices ignored by most other films in this period such as travellings, lateral framing, diagonals and daring montages.15 In general, São Paulo: Sinfonia da Metrópole is a flow of images. Its dramatic effects are determined by the rhythmic curve provided by the orchestrated movements of dawn, of men in the streets, factories, and urban activities.16 The film frees itself from any commitment to theatrical representation whereas the very gestures of everyday life become the essence of this urban drama. In addition, the city is defined by continuous flows that indicate the proliferation of means of transport (people walking everywhere, horse and carriages, cars, trams, et cetera) while the urban scenery itself is often arranged in the straight lines of skyscrapers, architecture, streets, and tram tracks. Crowds and factories glorify the industry and the machine whereas

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the workers appear as the gears of the new metropolis in its unstoppable growth. The metropolis is also presented as a verbiage: the city appears as literate, and texts are not only present in the intertitles but are also physically present in urban space by means of newspapers, street signs, advertisements, and propaganda.17 Strikingly, São Paulo: Sinfonia da Metrópole avoids any representation of the rusty outskirts of the city—and when it moves to the city’s surroundings, it is only to show elegant suburbs. In addition, the film refuses to represent nature, which appears only in its domesticated form, like in the pleasant gardens where a romantic couple takes a stroll. São Paulo: Sinfonia da Metrópole presents the metropolis first and foremost as a site of accelerated growth, movements of people in the streets, facilities for sports, means of transport, and urban trade. In so doing, Kemeny and Lustig focus on phenomena as acceleration, fragmentation, intensity, which the medium of cinema was able to capture. This image of São Paulo as a bustling metropolis was also cherished by poet Blaise Cendrars, when he stayed there in 1926. “Here, no tradition, no prejudice ancient nor modern,” Cendrars wrote. “The only thing that counts is that furious appetite, this absolute confidence, and audacious optimism.”18 Furthermore, many of these topics materialized in cinematic narratives of São Paulo from the 1930s onwards, when the notion of a city that never stops, changing and rejuvenating forever, settled in the imagination of the inhabitants of São Paulo. When anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss lived in Brazil (between 1935 and 1939), he confirmed that São Paulo was a city of rapid cycles, perpetually young and therefore never completely sane. It was then that he called it “a wild city, as are all American cities.”19 Kemeny and Lustig represent this São Paulo, voraciously aspiring to become modern, powerful and cyclopean.

notes 1 Cf. Eduardo Victorio Morettin, “Dimensões históricas do documentário brasileiro no período silencioso,” Revista Brasileira de História 25, 49 (January‑ June 2005): 125–52. 2 Anonymous. “O Estado de São Paulo (1929),” in Jean-Claude Bernardet (ed.), Filmografia do cinema brasileiro, 1900–1935, jornal O Estado de São Paulo (São Paulo: Comissão Estadual de Cinema, 1979). N.B. The “Paulista” are the inhabitants of São Paulo. 3 Maria Cecília Naclério Homem, “O prédio Martinelli: A ascensão do imigrante e a verticalização de São Paulo,” São Paulo: Projeto Editores (1984): 45; and Nadia Somekh, “Sinfonia de uma metrópole: a internacionalização urbana de São Paulo 1920–1939,” Anais dos Encontros Nacionais da ANPUR 7 (1997). 4 Sabrina Studart Fontenele Costa, “Visões da modernidade: análise de algumas representações artísticas sobre as transformações de São Paulo no início do século XX,” Risco: Revista de pesquisa em arquitetura e urbanismo (2009): 18.

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5 Nicolau Sevcenko, Orfeu extático na metrópole: São Paulo, sociedade e cultura nos frementes anos 20 (São Paulo: Cia das Letras, 1992), 38. 6 João Miguel Valencise, A chegada do som nos cinemas de São Paulo segundo a Folha da Manhã (1928–1933) (Doctoral thesis, Universidade de São Carlos, 2012). See also the Inventário dos espaços de sociabilidade cinematográfica na cidade de São Paulo: 1895–1929, produced by the Arquivo Histórico de São Paulo, retrieved from www.arquiamigos.org.br/bases/cine.htm 7 Valencise, A chegada, 107. 8 Fernão Ramos and Luiz Felipe Miranda (eds.), Enciclopédia do Cinema Brasileiro (São Paulo: SENAC, 2000), 309. 9 Alberto Kemeny in an Interview by Maria Rita Eliezer Galvão, Crônica do Cinema Paulistano (São Paulo: Ática, 1975), 333. 10 Morettin, “Dimensões históricas.” 11 Francisco Elinaldo Teixeira, Documentário no Brasil: tradição e transformação (São Paulo: Humus, 2004). 12 Ramos and Miranda, Enciclopédia do Cinema Brasileiro, 179–80. 13 Rubens Machado Junior, “Plano em grande angular de uma São Paulo fugidia,” Comunicação & Informação 11, 2 (July‑December 2008): 193. See also Rubens Machado Junior, São Paulo em Movimento: a representação cinematográfica da metrópole nos anos 20 (Ph.D. Thesis USP, São Paulo, 1989); and Márcia Juliana Santos, “Entre a cavação e o ato de documentar: os limites da produção de filmes em São Paulo nos anos 20 e 30,” ´Rebeca - Revista Brasileira de Estudos de Cinema e Audiovisual 3, 2, 2014. 14 Caue Fernandes Nunes, Documentário, falso e ciência: ancoragens e decolagens (Doctoral thesis, Unicamp, 2012), 20. 15 Índia Mara Martins, “Documentário animado: tecnologia e experimentação,” DOC On-line: Revista Digital de Cinema Documentário 4 (2008): 68. 16 Silvio Da-Rin, Espelho partido—tradição e transformação do documentário (Rio de Janeiro: Azougue Editorial, 2004), 80. 17 Martins, “Documentário animado,” 75–6. 18 Blaise Cendrars, “Saint Paul,” in Poésies complètes (Paris: Denoël, 1947), n.p. 19 Claude Levi-Strauss, “Cidade selvagem, como o são todas as cidades americanas,” in Depoimentos de Moradores e visitants, 1553–1958 (São Paulo: Prefeitura do Município de São Paulo, Secretaria Municipal de Cultura, Departamento de Patrimônio Histórico, 1981).

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anthony kinik pioneer Virtually unknown outside of Canada, and little-known within, Gordon Sparling’s Rhapsody in Two Languages (1934) nevertheless occupies a very unique position in the history of Canadian cinema, as does its creator. Sparling was active in filmmaking from the 1920s until the 1960s, but he is best known for his contributions to Canadian cinema in the 1930s. At a time when Canadian cinema was largely stagnant, its screens and production facilities colonized by outside interests, Sparling founded a series of short films that was dedicated to getting Canadian content produced by Canadian talent projected on Canadian screens.1 The series was called Canadian Cameos and Sparling made its support conditional to his joining the production team at Associated Screen News (ASN) in 1931.2 This Montreal-based film studio had been founded in 1920, but Sparling’s intervention greatly raised its profile, and ASN remained his home for the better part of the next 20 years, until 1954.3 Sparling was a pioneer, a filmmaker who recognized that Canadian feature filmmaking was a risky proposition and that short films provided a safer

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way of establishing “a foot in the door of theatrical production for Canada.”4 He was also a nationalist who had pressed the management at ASN to expand into the production of theatrical shorts in response to Fox Movietone’s expansion into Canada.5 ASN’s series of “featurettes” proved to be a huge success: Sparling eventually produced over 80 Canadian Cameos and they were screened widely in commercial theaters across Canada and beyond. As such, this series was of crucial importance to Canadian cinema. Film historian Peter Morris would later note that the Canadian Cameos series represented “Canada’s only continuing creative film effort in the Thirties, and, through international theatrical release, almost the full measure of Canada’s image on its own and the world’s screens.”6 Sparling’s commitment to theatrical shorts was not only pragmatic, however, it was also aesthetic. He was convinced that short films offered a unique opportunity “for experimentation in technique [and] ingenuity in presentation.”7 Without question, the film that did the most to fully realize this vision was Rhapsody in Two Languages.

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In April 1934 ASN unveiled the latest release in its ground-breaking Canadian Cameos series, and the film that would establish Sparling’s reputation: Rhapsody in Two Languages, an ode to Montreal and modernity. The timing was appropriate, for Montreal had grown dramatically over the last 50 years: Its population alone had increased more than fivefold between 1881–1931, reaching nearly one million inhabitants, and the city had consolidated its power as Canada’s leading shipping, transportation, and financial hub.8 Depicting one hectic and animated day in the life of Montreal, Rhapsody was an 11-minute “talking picture” featuring an original score that presented the city as a bustling metropolis defined by its sharp contrasts. The “city of contrasts” trope had been a defining aspect of the city symphonies films right from the start, and it was crucial to many of the most famous of these films (e.g., Berlin, Symphony of a City, Man with a Movie Camera, and À propos de Nice), but it also figured prominently in two New York films that were released in 1931, right around the time that Sparling was leaving New York and relocating to Montreal. One was photographer Irving Browning’s City of Contrasts, an independently produced film that emerged from New York’s Film and Photo League set; but the other was a film that had been produced by Fox Movietone, ASN’s competitor. In its opening moments, Bonney Powell’s Manhattan Medley bills itself as “a camera conception of the city of inconceivable contrasts—a symphony of paradox,” and, sure enough, the images that follow play up New York’s stark contrasts: new vs. old, day vs. night, rich vs. poor, white vs. black, Occident vs. Orient, and so on. It’s a film that features many of the hallmarks of the city symphony—in terms of structure, content, and technique—but the film is unusual in that it features much more of a tourist’s vision of the city than one typically finds in these films.

Despite Sparling’s commitment to documentary representation, Rhapsody opens with an odd bit of fabulation, an arrival into the city by way of a fictitious train along an imaginary railway line on the recently opened Harbour Bridge. The audience is greeted by an actor (Corey Thomson, who doubles as the film’s narrator) playing an unconvincing, if enthusiastic conductor who sets the scene for the vision of Montreal to come: sparling’s canadian city symphonies

Step right this way, ladies and gentlemen! Step aboard for a day in Montreal. Montreal, the metropolis of Canada, the city of contrasts. It’s modern! It’s old! It’s gay! It’s pensive! Feel the pulse of its million people! It’s French! It’s English! It’s Montreal!

This conceit might be perplexing, but the important thing, perhaps, is that Sparling’s film has set up a tourist’s arrival into the city, not the commuter’s arrival or the traveler’s arrival that we find in so many

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Figure 15.1  Rhapsody in Two Languages (Gordon Sparling, 1934)

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other city symphonies. What follows this prelude is a lively treatment of this city of contrasts from dawn to dawn, one that pays special attention to old vs. new, traditional vs. modern, young vs. old, religious vs. secular, and French vs. English, and that builds to a rhythmic and aesthetic crescendo during its lively nightclub sequences, which feature a flurry of optical effects, including multiple exposures and negative imagery. Rhapsody can be broken down into five acts or movements, plus a prelude (the one just described), and a conclusion: Prelude: opening credits + an arrival by train into Montreal. 1. The morning routine—“Come on, get up! It’s a new day!”— awakening, getting dressed, having breakfast, etc. 2. The morning commute and the realm of business, industry, and finance—“Hurry, hurry, hurry! Don’t be late!”—white-collar and blue-collar labor, men and women in the workplace, business, industry, and an extended sequence on banking and finance. 3. “City of contrasts!”—young and old, modern and traditional, religious and secular, French and English, center and suburbs, etc. 4. “City of comings and goings!”—a train station, the harbour, shipping and passenger liners, the work day comes to an end, the evening commute. 5. “The day is over, but the night is young!”—Montreal’s nightlife— the nighttime skyline, electrical advertising along St. Catherine Street, nightclubs and nightclubbers, hot jazz and exotic dancers. Conclusion: “And it’s another day!”—it’s dawn again and the daily routine begins to repeat itself + end credits.

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We can get a sense of what aspects of Montreal’s city life the film places its emphasis on by analyzing the shot composition and duration of each portion of the film. By far and away its most elaborate section, and the one that involves the greatest number of shots, the briskest editing, and the most extensive use of optical effects, is its nightlife segment. This distinguishes Rhapsody from other city symphonies that share an interest in the nocturnal city, such as Ruttmann’s Berlin and Manhattan Medley, but it also speaks to the identity Montreal had developed during the years of Prohibition in the United States as the “Paris of the North,” as well as a “wideopen” town and notorious “sin city.”9 The United States had repealed the 18th Amendment by the time Rhapsody was released in 1934, but it had still been very much in effect at the time that the film was conceived and principal shooting commenced, so although Montreal’s wild nightlife was no longer the draw for American tourists that it had been, Sparling evidently felt it was still vital to its identity.

it’s modern!

sparling’s canadian city symphonies

Some film scholars would later claim that Sparling had created Rhapsody completely unaware of the city symphonies created by his European counterparts, but comparing the film with Ruttmann’s Berlin alone would suggest otherwise.10 Both films share the following sequences: an arrival by train into the city at dawn; streetcars and commuters; clocks announcing the time of day at key moments; cats, milkmen, and milk deliveries; tipsy revelers in formal wear; workers climbing steps; office workers furiously doing their work; factory scenes; tracking shots through nighttime streets; jazz bands; cocktail shakers; chorus lines; ballroom dancers; and exotic dancers. They also share a few more unusual sequences: multiple exposure sequences of city traffic, typists typing, and electrical advertisements. Some sequences in Rhapsody also bear a striking resemblance to ones found in Manhattan Medley, including a few that Berlin, Rhapsody, and Manhattan Medley all share in common (like the sequences involving stray cats, milkmen, and milk deliveries), while others are highly reminiscent of Man With a Movie Camera (especially the woman putting on her stockings in the morning routine section). One of the most telling aspects of the Rhapsody project, however, may be the promotional poster that Sparling himself created for the film. This poster was a photomontage composition that consisted mostly of images taken directly from his film,11 including an electrical sign reading “MONTREAL LIFE” that helped to tie the disparate images the modern city together, but that arranged them using the

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Figure 15.2  Rhapsody in Two Languages (Gordon Sparling, 1934), Lobby Card

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bold diagonals typical of modernist photomontages of the 1920s and 1930s. In this regard, as well, we see a powerful connection between Rhapsody and Berlin, for Ruttmann’s film had also been publicized with modernist photomontages—compositions that Ruttmann had assembled himself. One should not be too surprised by these resonances—Sparling had long been a dedicated cinephile, one who had regularly take trips to New York to binge on films in the 1920s. Even more significantly, Sparling’s formation as a filmmaker occurred when he apprenticed at Paramount’s Astoria Studios from 1929 to 1931.12 This facility was known for its European sophistication at the time, and it was the very same milieu out of which Robert Florey produced his Skyscraper Symphony (1929).13 In other words, there’s no reason to assume that Sparling was an innocent when it came to film art. Sparling did not have the background in abstract painting and experimental cinema that Ruttmann had, but he did have a past as an amateur photographer, and aspects of Rhapsody—most notably its harbor sequences—not only call to mind similar scenes in Manhatta and TwentyFour Dollar Island (as well as a brief sequence in Manhattan Medley), they were consistent with a line of modernist art practice in Montreal that began with the Machine Age Americanism of the short-lived art journal Le Nigog (1918–19) and extended through the paintings of its alumnus Adrien Hébert, who became known as the “poet” of the port of Montreal.14 This aesthetic was certainly not the most audacious example of modernism, but it remained a highly controversial one in Montreal in the 1930s as Quebec’s politics took a sharp turn to the right. That city symphonies such as Ruttmann’s Berlin got caught up in the culture wars of the Weimar period is well-known. But a film like Rhapsody was released into a similar cultural climate. We wouldn’t want to push this comparison too far, but both films were produced in places where debates over modernism vs. regionalism, city vs. country, and decadence vs. purity raged, places where a sharp conservative turn was asso­ciated with nationalism, corporatism, anti-communism, anti-Semitism, and a cult of the land.15 In fact, Rhapsody was released just one year after Maurice Duplessis became leader of Quebec’s newly revived Conservative Party, the beginning of a dramatic rise to power that would culminate in his becoming Premier of Quebec in 1936, and would lead to 20 years of deeply reactionary politics in Quebec, a period that came to be known as The Great Darkness.16 Montreal was already notorious for its “Regulations Governing Theaters, Play-houses, and Other Places of Amusement” ordinance of 1932, which prohibited double meanings, “bare-legged females,” profanity, and “bolshevist” and “communistic” material, but now the entire province was under the sway of a crackdown on metropolitanism.17 Given this climate, it is perhaps no wonder that ASN had greater difficulties getting Rhapsody screened in Montreal than it did in other parts of Canada, even though its “bare-legged females” were performing on stage just down the street, as Sparling liked to point out.

sensation

sparling’s canadian city symphonies

In any case, Rhapsody was an ambitious and sensational Canadian film that was reviewed rather extensively for a theatrical short, and that received considerable praise for its artfulness. The film also received enthusiastic testimonials from all across Canada and from as far afield as London, England. Quite single-handedly, Rhapsody was credited with having boosted the profile of the fledgling Canadian Cameos series, as well as ASN in general. And Rhapsody remained one of the highlights of ASN’s catalogue for the next twenty years. As late as 1953, Rhapsody was still getting star billing in ASN’s promotional materials, but by then the writing was on the wall for this pioneering studio. Within a few years ASN had folded—the victim of the advent of television and of a New Order in entertainment, according to Sparling—and the veteran filmmaker moved on to the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), where he finished his career.18 Strangely, at around the same time that Sparling’s career was ending, Rhapsody began to experience an unexpected afterlife. Instead of fading into obscurity, Sparling’s film was rediscovered and shown at a National Film Society of Canada screening in Ottawa in 1964 and a Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society screening in New York in 1965, and on both occasions it was compared to the work of Ruttmann and other modernist filmmakers and favorably received. This led to Rhapsody’s inclusion as part of a influential retrospective of Canadian cinema on the occasion of the nation’s centennial in 1967, one which established Sparling as a crucial link to the early history of Canadian cinema in the years to follow, and Rhapsody as an integral part of the emerging canon of Canadian cinema.19

out of the shadows While this attention brought Sparling and Rhapsody much-deserved acclaim, the spotlight on this particular film cast long shadows over many other key aspects of Sparling’s work, including the fact that Rhapsody was actually just one part of a series of four city symphonies that Sparling directed for ASN in the years 1934–6, and that these films form a subset of a larger group of films that he produced between 1931 and 1943, all of which shared an interest in modernization and industrialization, as well as in modernist cinematic techniques.20 The success of Rhapsody allowed Sparling to complete a series of city films, each of which took him and his crew further west: The Westminster of the West (1934) was a portrait of Ottawa that focused almost exclusively on the architecture and activities of Parliament Hill; City of Towers (1935) depicted Toronto as a city defined by its tallest structures; and Vancouver Vignette (1936) was an ode to the rapid growth of city it called a “modern, sophisticated metropolis.”21

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Figure 15.3  City of Towers (Gordon Sparling, 1935)

Of these, the most interesting of the extant films22 is City of Towers. Here, Sparling borrows the same “city of contrasts” form he had used in Rhapsody in Two Languages, but maps out Toronto’s contrasts geographically instead of putting the emphasis on diurnal rhythms, so that some districts are presented to the viewer as sedate and thoughtful, while others are presented as being business-oriented and highly kinetic. The one thing that unites the city, the audience is told, are its many towers—thus, the film is broken down into six sections with self-explanatory titles like Towers of State, Towers of Learning, and Towers of Worship. Most of these sections are fairly conventionally touristic, with only the occasional sharp-angled or abstractly patterned shot thrown in to indicate a modernist sensibility. The major exception to this, however, is the film’s Towers of Commerce section, which focuses on the city’s bustling central business district, and whose narration becomes positively rhapsodic as the streets begin to throb with activity: columns of stone, columns of steel, columns of brick, columns of hard, impersonal matter assuming a personality . . . imposing that personality upon 800,000 human beings . . . absorbing the heartbeats, the heartaches, the joys, and the sorrows . . . proclaiming the glory, shouting the ecstasy, bearing the grief, forming the backbone . . . thwarting nature’s terrors, bespeaking nature’s grandeur. . . . Truly, the City of Towers!

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As the narration reaches a climax, so, too, does the film’s montage—a sequence that began with impressive extreme low- and high-angle shots, and panoramic views from atop some of Toronto’s tallest buildings, reaches a frenzy as we’re presented with street-level views of the busiest intersections in the entire Dominion. The editing here might not display the sophistication of the third act of Ruttmann’s Berlin, but it does share its fascination with crowds, traffic, and congestion, as well as its belief that cinema is the ideal medium for capturing this energy. Strikingly, the

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impression that City of Towers leaves its audience with is less of “Toronto the Good” than of “Toronto the Economic Juggernaut”—a vision that would prove prescient, as Toronto was already well on its way to displacing Montreal as “Canada’s Metropolis.” Gordon Sparling stands as a pioneer of Canadian cinema in the years before the founding of the NFB and the impact of John Grierson, and Rhapsody, his modernist ode to 1930s Montreal stands as his most famous film. When we move beyond Rhapsody and take into account a somewhat larger survey of Sparling’s 1930s work for ASN, we get a better sense of his sensibility and the patterning that defined his work, but there’s more at stake here than just producing a more fully rounded account of a single significant, but now obscure filmmaker. For one thing, Sparling’s four city symphonies rank him as one of the most prolific filmmakers to have contributed to this phenomenon, and this output alone means that Canada’s cities are surprisingly well represented within this body of work. For another, we get a better sense of the times and of the culture Sparling was a part of, as well as a larger transformation that was occurring in the realms of visual arts and design. The life cycle of the classical city symphonies is very much a story of how avant-garde and modernist aesthetics were developed, disseminated, assimilated, adapted, and manipulated in the period between the wars. Through this process an aesthetic became a widely recognized style, so that compositions and techniques that had been at the very vanguard of film art just a few years earlier were now the stuff of commercial theatrical shorts like Powell’s Manhattan Medley or Sparling’s Canadian Cameos. They may have only been a series of urban “featurettes,” but these films provide us with a glimpse of how Canadian cities were positioning themselves as the Great Depression wore on, how social, economic, and cultural currents coursed through these films, and how a young, ambitious filmmaker seized upon this material in order to launch his career and kick-start a struggling film industry.

notes 1 Peter Morris, Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema, 1895–1939 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978), 175–82, 228–30. See also Gerald Pratley, Torn Sprockets: The Uncertain Projection of the Canadian Film (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1987), 39. 2 Anonymous, “With Associated Screen—Gordon Sparling to Direct and Edit Commercial Films,” Montreal Gazette (24 July 1931), Sparling Papers, University of Toronto. 3 Morris, Embattled Shadows, 222–3, 228–30. 4 Gordon Sparling, “The Short Way to Canadian Entertainment,” in André Pâquet (ed.), How to Make or Not to Make a Canadian Film (Montreal: la Cinémathèque Canadienne, 1967). 5 Sparling interviews, Dreamland project, ca. 1974, audio recordings, Sparling Papers, University of Toronto.

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6 Morris, Embattled Shadows, 229. 7 Sparling, “The Short Way.” 8 Anthony Sutcliffe, “Montreal Metropolis,” in Isabelle Gurney and France Vanlaetham (eds.), Montreal Metropolis: 1880–1930 (Toronto and Montreal: Stoddart Publishing and Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1998), 21–2. 9 See Nancy Marrelli, Stepping out: The Golden Age of Montreal Night Clubs, 1925– 1955 (Montreal: Vehicle Press, 2004). 10 Morris, Embattled Shadows, 230. Michie Mitchell, “Canadian Film Pioneer: A Retrospective,” National Film Archive, Sparling Papers, Box 4, University of Toronto (1980). 11 Some notable exceptions include a photograph of countless automobiles covering a vast parking lot and a low-angle view of the Harbour Bridge. 12 Gordon Sparling, “Conversations,” in Canadian Film Reader (Toronto: Peter Martin Associates, 1977), 22. 13 Brian Taves, “Robert Florey and the Hollywood Avant-Garde,” in Jan-Christopher Horak (ed.), Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film AvantGarde, 1919–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 110. 14 Henri Girard, “Adrien Hébert,” La Revue Moderne 2 (December 1933): 5. 15 See Susan Mann, The Dream of Nation: A Social and Intellectual History of Quebec (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 218–46. 16 John Dickinson and Brian Young, A Short History of Quebec (Montreal and Kingston, London, and Ithaca, NY: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 292–3. 17 Molly Pulver Ungar, The Last Ulysseans: Culture and Modernism in Montreal, 1930– 1939 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Dissertation Services, 2005), 117. 18 Sparling, “The Short Way.” 19 André Pâquet (ed.), How to Make or Not to Make a Canadian Film (Montreal: la Cinémathèque Canadienne, 1967). See also Seth Feldman and Joyce Nelson’s Canadian Film Reader, Peter Morris’s Embattled Shadows, and Donald Brittain’s Dreamland. 20 Sparling’s first experiment with the symphonie industrielle form appeared in a General Motors-sponsored film called Forward Canada! (1931). His last great experiment with what he called “the rhapsodic technique” was The Thousand Days (1942), a World War II propaganda film. Other notable films in this regard include Bridge Chat, a film about engineering marvels, and Precision, a film that deals in part with the precisionism of the Machine Age. 21 ASN promotional booklet, 1936–1937. Sparling Papers, Box 2, File 66, University of Toronto. 22 Sadly, Vancouver Vignette remains a lost film at this point in time.

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the city sixteen

anthony kinik If Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta is the film that launched the city symphonies phenomenon in the period between 1919 and 1921, it is perhaps fitting that it was another New York film that brought an end to the cycle in 1939–40: Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke’s The City. Of course, strictly speaking, The City is not a city symphony. For one thing, its concerns are greater than simply the modern metropolis, beginning with an earnest portrayal of the traditional New England village that formed such an essential part of early American democracy, and ending with a highly polemical sequence on carefully planned model cities built according to the principles of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City movement, a far cry from the highly industrialized metropolises that were the principal focus of the vast majority of the city symphony films. For another, its dominant mode of representation is not the poetic, as is generally the case with the city symphonies, but, instead, the film is quite emphatically an expository documentary, driven by the use of persuasive voiceover narration. Erik Barnouw’s account of The City and

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how it came into being is instructive in this regard. According to Barnouw, The City should be understood as a project whose lineage began with the formation of the New York chapter of the Workers Film and Photo League in 1930, and that the film was closely tied to a group of photographers whose aesthetics bridged the realms of modernism and social realism, including Margaret Bourke-White, Berenice Abbott, Strand, and, indeed, Steiner and Van Dyke. Barnouw also stressed the fact that the film was an outgrowth of the work that Pare Lorentz produced in tandem with the Resettlement Administration and other New Deal agencies, and that it was a direct offshoot of the politically radical Frontier Films group. He noted, “The City was full of experiments, some highly successful,” but, in the end, Barnouw framed the film quite specifically as a social documentary—as “an exposition of the urban crisis”—not an experimental film, and the impression he gave was that the project had been generated by the filmmakers themselves, even if it had been sponsored “by the American Institute of City Planners.”1 Only in passing did Barnouw mention that The City “was produced for use at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.”2 But Steiner and Van Dyke’s film contains a city symphony, a filmwithin-a-film that focuses on New York City quite specifically, one that adheres very closely to many elements—both semantic and syntactic— of the city symphonies tradition. And this treatment of the metropolis was a key part of an intervention on the part of an increasingly powerful urban planning lobby that was intended to take the largely unplanned and unregulated megalopolis of New York to task in a very public manner. In Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, Rem Koolhaas argues that between 1890 and 1940 Manhattan had been unconsciously chosen to be a “laboratory” for the Machine Age, one where, “the invention and testing of a metropolitan lifestyle and its attendant architecture,” had been vigorously pursued. Koolhaas called the principles on which this movement was based “Manhattanism,” and for him it was quite clear that Manhattan was the ultimate emblem of twentieth-century modernity.3 Ironically, it was the New York World’s Fair of 1939–40 that brought an end to this experiment. Though it had been planned within the headquarters of the Board of Design on the top floor of the Empire State Building—one of the crowning achievements of Manhattanism—the fair was “conceived as an anti-Manhattan,” Koolhaas argued, and its central exhibits, its iconic Trylon and Perisphere, were actually monuments to Manhattanism’s demise.4 Koolhaas makes no mention of Steiner and Van Dyke’s The City, which was screened daily in the Little Theatre inside the Science and Education building, but he does write at some length about two other exhibits dealing with urbanism: Democracity, the ultra-planned, ultra-rational Corbusian city of the future that was featured inside the Perisphere, as well

because only dullards are unaware of the fact that we are living on the brink of a civilization which will either have to learn to plan itself, plan its industry, plan its environment, and plan its cities, or which will be before we know it in the midst of chaos and death.10

By 1937, discussions of a “talking film” on urban life in America had gained considerable momentum, spearheaded by the American City

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as the quasi-cinematic “City of Light” exhibition mounted in the Consolidated Edison pavilion, which compressed a full 24-hour day-in-the-life-ofManhattan into a 24-minute spectacle.5 When Strand and Sheeler’s Manhatta initiated the city symphonies cycle in 1921, it did so by drawing from and participating in the discourse of Manhattanism, with its “shameless” Verticalism and its “Culture of Congestion.”6 Manhatta is by no means a naive celebration of Manhattanism, but for the most part it is a film that seems awestruck by the forces that had created (and were creating) the unprecedented landscape of Lower Manhattan. By contrast, Steiner and Van Dyke’s The City is the film which brings the cycle to an end because of its savage critique of the modern metropolis and because of the significant role it played at the “anti-Manhattan” that was the New York World’s Fair of 1939–40. Adding to the attractiveness of this pair of bookends is the fact that it was in 1922, one year after the release of Manhatta and just as Manhattanism was hitting full stride, that the Regional Plan for New York was announced, a document that simultaneously placed Manhattan at the center of a metropolitan agglomeration that encompassed large portions of Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey, and initiated the process of radically decentralizing New York City.7 Roughly ten years later, a committee of the American City Planning Institute began to lobby in favor of the production of a film that would address the topic of “Rebuilding the American City,” an effort that was endorsed by the Regional Plan Association of New York.8 One of the instigators behind this project was Catherine Bauer, whose Modern Housing (1934) had been inspired by Lewis Mumford and financed in part by the Carnegie Corporation, and whose vision of planned, non-speculative community housing that would provide residents with air, light, space, good views, and easy access to recreation and play was a major contribution to the American planning movement.9 Another was Mumford himself, who, in a 1935 address on the topic of the proposed 1939 World’s Fair, cautioned against allowing the fair to become the product of the same kind of unregulated and aggressively speculative impulses that had created the modern megalopolises of America,

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Planning Institute and the Regional Plan Association of New York, along with Robert D. Kohn, the Fair’s Chairman of the Committee on Theme.11 In fact, by September 1937, this committee had reviewed and effectively approved a proposal by Steiner for this “city planning movie.”12 Over the course of the next year, with a $50,000 budget having been secured from the Carnegie Corporation, Steiner’s production moved into high gear, eventually involving a veritable who’s who of artistic and intellectual talents, including Van Dyke, the noted photographer and cinematographer who would become Steiner’s co-director; Henwar Rodakiewicz, the brilliant experimental filmmaker whose singular Portrait of a Young Man (1931) was widely discussed within experimental and amateur film circles; Lorentz, who had quickly become the single most important figure in American documentary filmmaking of the New Deal era, and who contributed the scenario for the film; Aaron Copland, the famed composer, who created a memorable score for the project, despite the orchestral limitations he faced;13 and Mumford, who contributed a historical and theoretical framework that paralleled key aspects of his latest opus, The Culture of Cities (1938). Plans for the proposed “city planning movie” underwent a number of different iterations even before Lorentz became involved with the project, all of them associated with different proponents of the urban planning lobby. Thus, Clarence Stein of The American City, who was an integral part of the preparations behind the film, and would become the founder of Civic Films, Inc., The City’s production company, submitted an outline for his vision of the film in August 1937.14 The script that was prepared by Lorentz maintained key aspects of Stein’s original—a scathing portrayal of the urban-industrial sphere, a sense of history, a triumphant final chapter—but he expanded the original three-part structure into a five-part one.15 Here, in this new version, the film began with a portrait of life in a pre-industrial New England village—Shirley, Massachusetts—a segment that provided a glimpse of “urban life as it was in the beginning,” as well of the foundations of American democracy. It then shifted to a depiction of the industrial town, in this case focusing on steel mill towns in western Pennsylvania. The film’s middle act was a study of the modern metropolis, one whose lens was firmly placed on New York City in particular. The fourth section amounted to a brief interlude, one that looked at car culture and the spread of urban malaise in the region surrounding New York. Finally, the longest segment, the one that was meant to indicate the future of urbanism in America, was a study of highly rationalized “Green Cities,” ambitious planning projects that sought to reestablish manageability, livability, and communitarianism within urban America. The message was clear: something had gone terribly wrong between the earliest years of the

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nation and America’s industrialization; America’s cities had become mechanized, polluted, and dangerous, an affront to community and to the human spirit; and this crisis was existential in nature, threatening the future of America unless bold steps were taken and urban planning was fully embraced. This pronounced fear of impending crisis was clearly modelled on Mumford’s The Culture of Cities, which features an account of the lifespan of urban groupings that begins with village communities and peaks with the metropolis, before describing three stages that capture the decline and fall of great cities: Megalopolis, Tyrannopolis, and, lastly, Nekropolis.16 Though The City as a whole is not a city symphony, its creators borrowed liberally from the style and conventions of the genre at numerous points in the film, and in the case of Chapter 3—“Men Into Steel”—the audience is presented with what amounts to a ten-minute city symphony, one that captures the frenetic activity of the modern metropolis, while simultaneously emphasizing its tensions and conflicts. It is this attempt to take the city symphony form and turn it against the city, as it were, that makes The City so significant. Though this tactic is seen most extensively in Chapter 3, the first signs of the city symphony style come at the very beginning of Chapter 2, “City of Smoke,” a section dedicated to the Industrial City that was shot in the region surrounding Pittsburgh. Here, strikingly framed shots of monstrous and infernal steel factories, and of smokestacks of all kinds belching smoke into already heavily polluted skies, recall similar sequences from films like Manhatta, Twenty-Four Dollar Island, Berlin, Man with a Movie Camera, and others, as well as an entire history of modernist photography stretching from Alfred Stieglitz and A.L. Coburn, to Bauhaus, Constructivism, the New Objectivity, the New Vision, and Precisionism. What’s radically different about The City is the way it highlights environmental destruction, including air pollution and white-hot waste being dumped down hillsides. Whereas the narration was quiet and contemplative during the film’s opening chapter, here it is exclamatory and ecstatic— theatrically so, ironically so. And as this critical take on the symphonie industrielle comes to a close, the film makes another dramatic break from the city symphonies tradition—it adopts an elegiac tone and shifts to the topic of the abysmal housing conditions in industrial towns: shabby, hastily constructed, crowded, polluted, disease-ridden, and dehumanizing. Instead of a celebration of modern industry, the film suddenly becomes a powerful social documentary, one that has more in common with Arthur Elton and Edgar Anstey’s Housing Problems (1935), and one that is consistent with the style of photography and films sponsored by the Resettlement Administration in the 1930s and early 1940s, including the documentaries of Lorentz.

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Figure 16.1  The City (Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke, 1939)

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“Men Into Steel” begins with an extreme low-angle shot of a Manhattan skyscraper, shot through the lattice work of an elevated subway line, before proceeding to a sequence that highlights the skyscraperlined “canyons” of New York, and emphasizes the way these monstrosities have utterly diminished mankind. Here, the narration begins almost immediately, and once again it adopts an exaggerated tone, one that’s meant to be understood ironically, and one that characterizes the modern metropolis as a site of shameless greed and materialism, reckless and unchecked growth, fashion and novelty, and automation and alienation. What ensues is a nine-and-a-half-minute study of life in a modern metropolis, one that features many of the icons and tactics that one associates with the city symphony genre. Extreme low-angle shots of skyscrapers are captured in stark chiaroscuro; slow downward pans emphasize the sheer height of Manhattan’s skyscrapers and how they

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Figure 16.2  The City (Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke, 1939)

loom over the city streets; and extreme high-angle shots provide a bird’seye view of the frantic movements of pedestrians on the sidewalks below. Commuters scurry out of ferries, up and down stairs, along sidewalks, and across streets, dodging traffic and making their way to work. Typewriters, typists, and massive, highly-regimented office spaces housed in gigantic skyscrapers, as well as a cacophony of voices expressing the thousands of business letters being produced, create a powerful sense of the modern business environment as a hive of activity. Elevated subway cars, fire trucks, police cars, ambulances, and taxi cabs, along with thousands of other assorted cars and trucks convey what modern transportation in a major metropolis entails, while pedestrians attempt to navigate their way across busy city streets against all odds, while traffic cops try valiantly to manage this bedlam. Throughout, there is an interest in portraying the modern metropolis as a “city of contrasts,” as an urban

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space defined by its sharp juxtapositions: old and new, rich and poor, fast and slow, young and old, et cetera. Virtually all of these sequences, all of these concerns, can be found in Ruttmann’s Berlin and Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera, and many of them appear repeatedly in so many of the other films that make up the city symphonies phenomenon. What sets The City apart from the vast majority of the city symphonies of the 1920s and 1930s is its dark, foreboding tone, and the way these iconic sequences are framed within a discourse that attempts to turn them against metropolitan modernity. Where others saw dynamism and energy, The City presents its audience with the impression of dysfunction and entropy. Whereas other films reveled in the Culture of Congestion, here the emphasis was placed on chaos and arterial sclerosis—not only was New York’s traffic threatening lives, but it had reached such extremes that the city’s famous grid was now defined by gridlock. According to this vision, New York was a city that was very much in decline: driven by servitude to the market; characterized by a rat-race existence that was chaotic, anxiety-inducing, and absurd; emblematic of mankind’s hubristic attempts to subdue and conquer nature; fundamentally anti-human and completely unsuitable for children or for childhood; and defined by negative reinforcement, by the presence of danger at every turn, and by a death drive that seemed to point to the ultimate fate of Megalopolis as Nekropolis.

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Figure 16.3  The City (Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke, 1939)

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One might have thought that The City’s preceding three chapters would have created the ultimate set-up for its fifth and final chapter— “The Green City”—the long-awaited culmination to its thesis. A certain harmony in American culture was lost when industrialization accelerated and factory cities appeared across the land, the film argues. In the age of the Megalopolis, the nation is at a critical juncture. It can continue on its present course, unplanned and unregulated, recklessly into the future, tempting fate, or it can embrace the direction that had already been put into action by the American planning movement in such model communities as Greenbelt, MD, a New Deal project that is heavily featured in this final section of The City. Children figure prominently in this final section—the film reminds its audience time and time again that these children are the future, and that the audience should prioritize their future above all else. Late in the film, a boy is seen in a classroom, working on a painting of an idyllic planned community like the one he inhabits, as seen from a bird’s eye view. Three attractive houses are spaced apart properly along a road lined with grass and flowers, they are served by a post office and a community center of some kind, and the scene is dominated by tall, leafy trees. The camera pans to the right to reveal another painting— this time of a cramped, crowded, and polluted tenement district in an industrial city. This initiates a contrapuntal montage where shots of dilapidated factory towns are juxtaposed with shots of the sunshine, openness, and greenery of modern planned cities. As Copland’s score underlines the starkness of the juxtaposition, the narrator tells the audience, You take your choice—each one is real, each one is possible. Shall we sink deeper, sink deeper in old grooves, paying for blight with human misery? Or have we vision, have we courage? Shall we build and rebuild our cities, clean again, close to the earth, open to the sky?

Doubtless, there was great validity to this juxtaposition. Many did live in misery in crowded, polluted, debilitating towns and cities. Unregulated and unplanned market-driven development had created abominable conditions for millions of Americans. There’s no question that The City’s overall argument resonated deeply with some audiences. The film was a very popular and well-received attraction at the New York World’s Fair,17 and when the fair closed its doors in October 1940 the film remained a sought-after rental that was screened widely, especially in non-theatrical venues.18 Clearly, many viewers were sympathetic to The City’s loosely

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historical critique of urbanization, and its vision of a vast network of carefully planned Green Cities held appeal to many who had just experienced the desperation of the Great Depression. But there were many others who saw The City differently, responding negatively to its manipulative images of children, and schools, and playgrounds, to the utter lack of diversity captured in the film’s depiction of suburbia, and to the flatness of its concluding chapter. Ironically, for some, it was Steiner and Van Dyke’s New York City chapter that stood out as the most compelling chapter in The City, because it was here that the collaboration between the filmmakers and Copland reached the greatest heights of artistry. In many ways, this issue is consistent with other Lorentz-related projects from the period, which also featured a problem-solution structure to them, but tended to convey the problems in a more compelling manner than the solutions.19 Even though Lorentz was only involved in devising the original script for The City and the key aspects of the production were in the hands of Steiner and Van Dyke, and a few close associates, like Rodakiewicz, the film’s solution struck many viewers as unconvincing. Thus, although John Grierson was highly ambivalent about the city symphonies phenomenon in general, he seemed to have been impressed by The City’s “Men Into Steel” section, and he came away from the film feeling that it was this section that revealed the true sympathies of its directors, not the film’s triumphant conclusion. To Grierson, it was clear that the filmmakers were actually “metropolitans,” like himself, that they preferred making the portions of the film set in the modern metropolis, even if they’d been hired to excoriate the city, and that, consequently, when they filmed such material, “their cameras [had gotten] an edge on and [defeated] their theories.”20 It is precisely these tensions—between Steiner and Van Dyke’s modernism and The City’s homespun wisdom, between their metropolitanism and the film’s critique of Megalopolis, between their fluency with the city symphonies style and the film’s promotion of suburbia (no matter how carefully planned)—that continue to make The City such a fascinating cultural artifact and an emphatic conclusion to the city symphonies phenomenon of the interwar years.

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notes 1 Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-fiction Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 111–23. 2 Barnouw, Documentary, 122. 3 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York, NY: Monacelli Press, 1994), 9–10. 4 Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 275. 5 Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 277–85. 6 Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 9–11.

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7 Robert A.M. Stern, Robert, Gregory Gilmartin, and Thomas Mellins, New York 1930: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Two World Wars (New York, NY: Rizzoli, 1987), 42–3. 8 Harold S. Buttenheim, Letter to Robert D. Kohn (unpublished letter, New York, 23 March 1937), New York World’s Fair Incorporated Records, New York Public Library, New York (C1.0112, Box 145). 9 See Carl Feiss, Letter to Catherine Bauer (unpublished letter, New York, 20 March 1937), New York World’s Fair Incorporated Records, New York Public Library, New York: 1–2; and Kohn, Robert. Memorandum to Mr. Fordyce (unpublished memorandum, New York, 6 July 1937), New York World’s Fair Incorporated Records, New York Public Library, New York: 1. See also, Catherine Bauer Wurster, Modern Housing (New York: Arno Press, 1974). 10 Lewis Mumford, Address to Progressives in the Arts (unpublished address, City Club of New York, New York, 11 December 1935), New York World’s Fair Incorporated Records, New York Public Library, New York (PR1.41, Box 918). 11 See Lawrence M. Orton, “Outline for a Talking Film on Urban Life— Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow” (unpublished outline, New York, 21 July 1937) New York World’s Fair Incorporated Records, New York Public Library, New York: 1–4. Orton was the General Director of the Regional Planning Association of New York. 12 Clarence S. Stein, “American City Planning Film for the World’s Fair” (unpublished memo, New York, 20 September 1937) New York World’s Fair Incorporated Records, New York Public Library, New York: 1. Stein was a leading figure at The American City magazine. 13 Aaron Copland, “Film Talk—Metropolitan Museum” (unpublished manuscript, New York, 2 March 1971), Aaron Copland Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, retrieved from www.loc.gov/item/copland. writ0013 14 Clarence S. Stein, “The Green City and the Gray” (unpublished proposal, New York, 6 August 1937), New York World’s Fair Incorporated Records, New York Public Library, New York: 1–4. 15 Edward Serlin, Production notes on The City (unpublished production notes, New York, ca. 1939), New York World’s Fair Incorporated Records, New York Public Library, New York: 1–5. 16 Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1970). 17 Roughly 600–1,000 patrons saw The City daily, and it generally received a “very good” approval rating from audiences who saw it, according to The Little Theatre’s management. See, for instance, O’Connell, “Film Schedule—The Little Theatre—Saturday—October 28, 1939” (unpublished memo, New York, 31 October 1939), New York World’s Fair Incorporated Records, New York Public Library, New York. 18 For the film’s immediate afterlife, see Charles Wolfe, “The City,” in Ian Aitken (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), 229. 19 Robert L. Snyder, Pare Lorentz and the Documentary Film (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 191. 20 Quoted in Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A. McLane, A New History of the Documentary Film (New York, NY: Continuum Books, 2005), 96.

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part three

survey of city symphonies 1920–40

eva hielscher, steven jacobs, and anthony kinik

Manhatta (a.k.a. Mannahatta, a.k.a. New York the Magnificent) Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand United States, 1921

manhatta

35mm, 10’00, b/w, silent, English intertitles Archives: BFI National Archive, MoMA, Library of Congress, EYE Filmmuseum, et al. Director: Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand Camera: Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand Scenario: Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand based on poems by Walt Whitman Production: Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand Premiere: 24 July 1921 (Rialto Theater, New York)

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In 1921, the painter and photographer Charles Sheeler (1883–1965) and the photographer Paul Strand (1890–1976), who had been introduced by Alfred Stieglitz and were part of his circle, released a ten-minute short entitled Manhatta. The project had been conceived as an extension of the artists’ shared interest in “cityscape architecture and its application to visual design,” and it came together soon after Sheeler purchased a 35mm Debrie L’Interview Type E in 1919, a camera that was relatively lightweight and mobile and was a favorite of newsreel cameramen and those shooting on location. Manhatta was shot in the spring and summer of 1920 in Lower Manhattan and edited soon afterwards. By October 1920 Sheeler and Strand were in a position to screen the film privately to friends. Manhatta’s premiere was at the Rialto Theater on Broadway on 24 July 1921, where it played for only one week as part of an eight-act variety bill and was advertised as New York the Magnificent. Two years later, however, Manhatta’s fascinating afterlife began, when the film was brought to Paris by Marcel Duchamp and others to appear as part of Tristan Tzara’s notorious Dada festival, “La Soirée du Coeur à Barbe,” where it played alongside the music of Erik Satie and the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire. There, the film was retitled Les Fumées de New York after one of its signature motifs: steam and smoke. The film was re-released in New York in 1926, playing at the Cameo Theater and the Film Guild, and it was now billed under its actual title, Manhatta, for the very first time. The following year, it travelled back across the Atlantic to appear in the 18th London Film Society annual, and soon afterwards it went missing for over two decades, only to turn up in the British Film Archives in 1949. As Jan-Christopher Horak and others have pointed out, the film unwittingly initiated a number of motifs that would become staples of the city symphony film later in the 1920s, including: a dawn-to-dusk structure; a fascination with modern architecture (especially Lower Manhattan’s dense concentration of skyscrapers), modern construction, modern

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industry, modern transportation, New York’s “culture of congestion,” and a profound interest in using unusual vantage points and disorienting compositions in order to capture this material. The one feature that seems most at odds with what would come to be known as the city symphony style is Manhatta’s heavy reliance on intertitles, but it is important to note that they are not used in an expository manner, but in a poetic one, and that, in fact, they were drawn from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The fact that the Manhatta project was launched in 1919, the centennial of Whitman’s birth, helps to explain the nature of this homage, as well as the film’s odd Whitmanesque title. Anthony Kinik

further reading Horak, Jan-Christopher, “Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s ‘Manhatta’,” in Jan-Christopher Horak (ed.), Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film AvantGarde, 1919–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 267–87. Lucic, Karen, Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Stange, Maren (ed.), Paul Strand: Essays on His Life (New York: Aperture, 1990).

Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse (Play with Reflections and Speed) Henri Chomette France, 1925 35mm, 8’00”, b/w, silent, no intertitles Archives: Cinémathèque française, Centre Georges Pompidou Director: Henri Chomette Scenario: Henri Chomette Production: Henri Chomette Premiere: 1925

In the 1920s, young filmmakers of the French avant-garde experimented with abstraction, as they also became interested in documentary material and the city. Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse by Henri Chomette (1896–1941), René Clair’s brother, is a variation on the city symphony format that predates Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927). Similar to his Cinq minutes de cinéma pur (1926), the short starts and ends as a purely abstract film with kaleidoscopic shots, optically distorted forms, spinning objects, and the play of movement,

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light, and shadow. In so doing, Chomette sets the tone for his playful exploration of the urban structures and cityscape of Paris in the main portion of the film. Indeed, in this experiment in cinéma pur, Chomette treats the French capital according to the rules of abstract film. The viewer becomes immersed in a fast, rollercoaster-like métro ride through tunnels and across viaducts, constantly alternating between darkness and light, between electric lights dancing on the walls in the dark tunnels and architectural structures, telephone poles, and trees along the rails in daylight. The trip continues by boat on the river, revealing views of Paris and the Seine, including famous sights such as Notre-Dame Cathedral in addition to industrial landmarks and factory chimneys. Chomette makes extensive use of experimental techniques such as acceleration and multiple exposures. Finally, the subway trains, the Seine, and the Eiffel Tower start to rotate, recalling the dizzying effect of a rapidly moving merry-go-round ride and evoking the experience of the overwhelming multiplicity of sensations in the modern metropolis. As Chomette situates his abstract study in the urban environment of Paris, reality becomes absorbed in the play of light and movement, forms and speed. Eva Hielscher

further reading Ghali, Noureddine, L’Avant-garde cinématographique en France dans les années vingt: idées, conceptions, theories (Paris: Éditions Paris expérimental, 1995). Hillairet, Prosper, Lebrat, Christian and Rollet, Patrice (eds.), Paris vu par le cinéma d’avant-garde 1923–1983 (Paris: Paris Expérimental, 1985).

Rien que les heures (Nothing But Time) Alberto Cavalcanti France, 1926

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35mm, 47’, b/w, silent, French intertitles Archives: Cinémathèque française, EYE Filmmuseum, Georges Eastman Museum, et al. Director: Alberto Cavalcanti Camera: James E. Rogers Production: Néo Films Producer: Pierre Braunberger Distribution: Les Films du Panthéon

Actors: Philippe Hériat (pimp), Blanche Bernis (prostitute), Nina Chousvalowa (newspaper vendor), Clifford McLaglen (sailor) Premiere: Fall 1926 (Studio des Ursulines, Paris)

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Rien que les heures by Brazilian filmmaker and art director Alberto Cavalcanti (1897–1982) is a landmark film that played an important part in the development of the city symphony genre. Unmistakably a narrative film and not a documentary, its story involves the characters of a streetwalker, a woman who sells newspapers, a sailor, a landlady, an old woman, a shop keeper, and another man. Several narrative threads run through the film, though each serves to interrupt the other. An intertitle even states, “This film doesn’t tell a story. It is only a sequence of impressions of time passing and does not claim to synthesize any city.” Referring to Rien que les heures, John Grierson famously stated, “For the first time the word ‘symphony’ was used, rather than story,” but he didn’t specify by who. Perhaps it was because of its careful attention to its urban locations Rien que les heures that commentators like Grierson and Paul Rotha considered the film a documentary. In any case, it has been connected to the city symphony phenomenon ever since. The film attempts to show the life of Paris over the course of one day in roughly 45 minutes. As the clock moves, people arrive for work, shops and restaurants open, and all kinds of activities take place. After work, it is time for relaxation. This temporal structure, which charts the times of day along with their characteristic activities, is the form that Ruttmann would adopt and expand upon for his Berlin the following year. However, in contrast to Ruttmann, Cavalcanti breaks temporal continuities, showing clock-faces that display incoherent time. Any attempt to understand the city according to the natural cycle of the day is subverted, as is any attempt to map the urban space in a coherent way. Furthermore, Rien que les heures lacks the encyclopedic impulse of Ruttmann’s Berlin and Cavalcanti is more interested in people as individuals than in the urban crowds that are featured in Ruttmann’s film. Another striking difference with Ruttmann’s film is that, apart from some kaleidoscopic superimpositions of traffic at the end of the film, Cavalcanti avoids the grands boulevards with their traffic and crowded sidewalks. He focuses on the old Paris and its social conditions, creating a film about the “daily life of the humble, the déclassés,” as an intertitle states. Rien que les heures’s representation of urban modernity also invokes comparisons to painting and photography, in addition to cinema. Indeed, the film opens with a series of shots showing depictions of Paris by notable painters, but it also shows its audience the Paris captured in mass-produced postcard views and kitschy souvenirs. Thus, the myth of Paris and its monuments is subverted from the start. Instead, the film focuses the spectator’s attention on a series of unforgettable images, such as a doll in the gutter and rats eating leftovers, a dead cat lying in the street with a homeless man,

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and a man cleaning a rag. Sharply contrasting motifs and striking montage effects disorient the viewer, such as in a sequence in which a man is eating a steak and suddenly we are shown images of a slaughterhouse on the plate. With its use of soft focus, close-ups, dissolves, and superimpositions, Rien que les heures became a hit in the ciné-clubs of Paris in 1926, and the film has stood as a landmark of avant-garde film ever since. moskva

Steven Jacobs

further reading Monegal, Emir Rodriguez, “Alberto Cavalcanti,” The Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television 9, 4 (Summer 1955): 341–58. Werth, Margaret, “Heterogeneity, the City, and Cinema in Alberto Cavalcanti’s ‘Rien que les heures’,” Art History 36, 5 (November 2013): 1018–41.

Moskva (Moscow) Mikhail Kaufman and Ilya Kopalin USSR, 1926 35mm, 60’00”, b/w, silent, Russian intertitles Archives: RGAKFD Russian State Film and Photo Archive Director: Mikhail Kaufman and Ilya Kopalin Scenario: Mikhail Kaufman Production: Sovkino Distribution: Sovkino Premiere: 1926

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Mikhail Kaufman (1897–1980) was Dziga Vertov’s brother, his longtime cameraman, and a key member of both the Kinoks and the Council of Three, and he’s best known to film scholars, cinephiles, and students as the cameraman who shot Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera, as well as the one who appears in it as the “man with a movie camera.” Famously, Vertov was both fascinated and “pained” by René Clair’s Paris qui dort when he saw it in Brussels in April 1926, because he felt that someone abroad had made a film whose “technical design” was the exact match for one he had devised two years earlier. When Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Great City was released the following year, in 1927, Vertov was even more upset, because he was convinced that a German competitor had not only beaten him to the punch, but had brazenly used many of the Kino-Eye movement’s own techniques. Vertov didn’t express it at the time, because they were both officially key members of the Kinoks group, but it must

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have also bothered him that his own brother, together with Ilya Kopalin (1900–76), who was also a Kinok, had released yet another city film, Moscow, a year earlier in 1926, because we know there were tensions between the two brothers that would eventually flare up into a total rupture in 1929. For its first two-thirds, Moscow features a rudimentary “day-in-the-life-ofa-city” structure, one that features many of the regular semantic elements of the city symphony style, including shots of street cleaning, factories, construction projects, a zoo, an amusement park, athletics, and so on, as well as a fascination with modern industry, modern communications, modern commerce, modern transportation, and modern congestion. What really distinguishes it as a city symphony, however, is its inventive approach to cinematography and editing, including extreme high- and low-angle shots, daring travelling shots, and rapid, disorienting panning shots, as well as the use of stop-motion, split-screen, and multiple-exposure sequences. Scholars of Vertov and of the Kino-Eye movement will note to what extent Kaufman cannibalized his own cinematography from Kino-Eye (1924), borrowing part of the earlier film’s famous special effects-laden study of diving, as well as how Vertov, in turn, would cannibalize Moscow in the production of Man with a Movie Camera, borrowing shots of the Bolshoi Theatre and adjacent Theatre Square and Revolution Square, and a taxidermic wolf (that he also used in A Sixth Part of the World, 1926), among others. Its final third is primarily a study of the “official Moscow and the workings of government,” as Malcolm Turvey states elsewhere in this collection, and accordingly the film shifts its tone and its approach, becoming much more conventional and much more strictly expository. Some of Vertov’s strongest critics expressed enthusiasm for Kaufman and Kopalin’s film, including Sergei Eisenstein, who called Moscow “brilliant,” and argued that it provided a much better model for the path the Kino-Eye movement should take than Vertov’s films, and Lev Kuleshov who declared the film “amazing” and praised it alongside Esfir Shub’s The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927) as being among the greatest triumphs of Soviet cinema. Anthony Kinik

further reading Kaufman, Mikhail, “An Interview with Mikhail Kaufman,” October 11 (1979): 54–76. Tsivian, Yuri (ed.), Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties (Sacile and Pordenone: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004).

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Berlin. Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt (a.k.a. Berlin. Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, a.k.a. Berlin—Symphonie einer Großstadt) (Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, a.k.a. Berlin, Symphony of a City) Walter Ruttmann berlin. die sinfonie der grosstadt

Germany, 1927 35mm, 1466 m., 64’00”, b/w, silent, no intertitles Archives: Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Filmmuseum München, Deutsche Kinemathek, Deutsches Filminstitut, Library of Congress, et al. Director: Walter Ruttmann Script/concept: Karl Freund, Walter Ruttmann (after an idea by Carl Mayer) Camera: Reimar Kuntze, Robert Baberske, László Schäffer Camera supervisor: Karl Freund Montage: Walter Ruttmann Music: Edmund Meisel (original score) Production: Karl Freund for Fox-Europa-Film Distribution: Deutsche Vereinsfilm AG, Berlin Premiere: 23 September 1927 (Tauentzien-Palast, Berlin)

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Having studied architecture and painting, Walter Ruttmann (1887–1941) worked as a graphic designer and made abstract films, including his Opus series, in the early 1920s before creating Berlin. Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt, which is unquestionably the most famous city symphony, providing the movement with its nickname and engendering the production of many similar films in the years to follow. In 1926, a year after Adolf Trotz had completed Die Stadt der Millionen: Ein Lebensbild Berlins, which is considered the first German feature-length city portrait, and at the same time that Alberto Cavalcanti was working on Rien que les heures in Paris, Ruttmann started his project of a film symphony about Berlin. The story goes that scriptwriter Carl Mayer (1894–1944), who had worked on films such as Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919), Die Strasse (Karl Grune, 1923), and Der letzte Mann (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1924), conceived the idea of a city symphony while standing in front of the Ufa Palast am Zoo one night, surrounded by hectic traffic, bustling city life, neon lights blinking in the streets, and trains ratting in the distance. Later, he withdrew from the project as his conception apparently differed from Ruttmann’s ideas. Together with producer/cinematographer Karl Freund (1890–1969), famous for his camera work for Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927), Der letzte Mann (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1924), and Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (Paul Wegener, 1920), Ruttmann collected footage from all over Berlin for more

Eva Hielscher

further reading Bollerey, Franziska, “Annotationen zu ‘Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt’,” Eselsohren 2, 1+2 (2014): 41–69. Cowan, Michael, Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity: Avant-Garde— Advertising—Modernity (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014).

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than a year, which he arranged in a card catalogue system and eventually put into a rhythmic and dynamic montage based on musical structures. Using associative and symbolic editing, multiple exposures, animated shots, and other experimental techniques as well as the deliberate avoidance of intertitles, Ruttmann presents the city of Berlin as the protagonist of the film. In addition, he also evokes the visual experience of the modern city in its fragmented and dynamic nature. Consisting of five acts comparable to the movements of a musical symphony, Berlin presents a cross-section of everyday life in the city from early in the morning till late at night. A prototype for numerous other films, Berlin contains a panoply of city symphony motifs, including the arrival by train into the city, deserted streets in the wee hours, morning routines like commuting, the opening of shops, and street cleaning, labor in factories, offices, and construction sites, a lunch break, a policeman managing hectic motorized traffic, shop windows and mannequins, the contrast between poor and rich, a rain shower in the afternoon, and the entertainment industry at night. Being composed almost completely of documentary material, partly shot with hidden cameras and highly sensitive film stock that cameraman Reimar Kuntze developed specifically for the interior shots and nocturnal scenes, Berlin also includes a number of staged scenes, most notably, the suicide of a young woman jumping from a bridge. Austrian composer Edmund Meisel (1894–1930), who was also known for his music for Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), composed a score for a 75-piece orchestra for Berlin, which premiered on 23 September 1927 at the Tauentzien-Palast, where it was accompanied by a historical program entitled “Kintopp vor 20 Jahren” (Cinema 20 Years Ago), which consisted of films from 1905–10. A quota production for Fox Europe, the film became a national and international success and was screened widely in commercial cinemas, unlike many other city symphonies which only saw limited release in ciné-clubs, film societies, and other specialized venues. Despite its success, the film also received some sharp criticism, including the famous complaints by Siegfried Kracauer, Paul Rotha, John Grierson, and others about its surface approach and a formalism that refuses any social insights and critical standpoint. However, these authors also underlined and valued the importance of Ruttmann’s film in relation to the New Objectivity movement, the documentary form, the cross-section film, and, of course, the city film.

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Goergen, Jeanpaul (ed.), Walter Ruttmann: Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1989). Kolaja, Jiri and Foster, Arnold W., “ ‘Berlin, the Symphony of a City’ as a Theme of Visual Rhythm,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 23, 3 (1965): 353–8. Kracauer, Siegfried, “Montage,” in Siegfried Kracauer (ed.), From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), 181–9. Prümm, Karl, “Symphonie contra Rhythmus: Wiedersprüche und Ambivalenzen in Walter Ruttmanns Berlin-Film,” in Klaus Kreimeier, Antje Ehmann, and Jeanpaul Goergen (eds.), Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland: Band 2: Weimarer Republik. 1918–1933 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005), 411–34. Schweinitz, Jörg, “Maschinen, Rhythmen und Texturen: ‘Berlin—Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt‘ von Walter Ruttmann: Die filmische Imagination einer Metropole,” in Ute Schneider und Martina Stercken (eds.), Urbanität: Formen der Inszenierung in Texten, Karten, Bildern (Köln: Böhlau, 2016), 157–70. Uricchio, William Charles, Ruttmann’s “Berlin” and the City Film to 1930 (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York: New York University, 1982).

Twenty-four Dollar Island Robert Flaherty United States, 1927 35mm, 13’00, b/w, silent, English intertitles Archives: Academy Film Archive, EYE Filmmuseum, Gosfilmofond Director: Robert Flaherty Scenario: Robert Flaherty Production: Pictorial Films, Inc. Distribution: Pathé Premiere: 4 December 1927 (New York)

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In 1927, Robert Flaherty (1884–1951), the father of the modern documentary film, and a director first and foremost associated with traditional cultures and their struggles with nature, released a “camera impression” of New York City, the ultimate icon of urban modernity. Although there is no direct indication that Flaherty had seen Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1921), Twenty-four Dollar Island bears a very strong resemblance to this earlier film, especially in its fascination with skyscrapers, tugboats, construction and industry, and smokestacks. But Flaherty’s film differs from that of Sheeler and Strand in two fundamental ways. First, it includes a short historical introduction, which uses maps and prints to illustrate the apocryphal tale of Manhattan’s purchase for the bargain price of “24 dollars.” This conceit underlines the status of the “Island Manhattes” as a piece of property first and foremost, and it sets up an astounding dissolve from a map of New Amsterdam circa 1656, to an aerial view of New York c.

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1926, now covered in skyscrapers, stretching as far as the eye can see, and with a population of 8,000,000. Second, the film displays Flaherty’s newfound interest in the use of telephoto lenses, and especially in their ability to compress space when shooting across the harbor towards the Lower Manhattan skyline, or down into the city’s vast “canyons” from atop its growing number of skyscrapers. The effect achieved was one of taking New York’s “culture of congestion” and making it feel even more congested, more oppressive, more claustrophobic. As Flaherty himself explained, Twenty-four Dollar Island was “not a film of human beings, but of skyscrapers which they had erected, completely dwarfing humanity itself.” In other words, the film was intended to be a critique of modernity, a goal that on some level it shared with Nanook (1922), but its subject matter and form could not have been more different. Critics were split on Twenty-four Dollar Island, with many expressing great admiration for the film and commenting on its “interesting and unusual shots” and its “well nigh perfect” direction, and one commentator going so far as to exclaim, “This [film] was the most thrilling, fascinating and generally beautiful picture that I have ever been privileged to witness.” Others, however, were highly critical, chastising the film for its lack of story, its lack of titles, its repetitiveness, its two-reel length, and its claustrophobia. In fact, one viewer described the experience of Twenty-four Dollar Island this way: “Not an open space—one feels breathless and overpowered—crushed by the machine age.” Interestingly, of those critics who were impressed by the film, many compared it favorably to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), which had had its New York premiere earlier that same year, on 6 March. Twenty-four Dollar Island suffered an ignominious fate after a poor run at New York’s massive Roxy Theatre. As Lewis Jacobs later reported, “After cutting down Twenty-four Dollar Island from two reels to one, the Roxy directors used the picture as a background projection for one of their lavishly staged dance routines called The Sidewalks of New York.” Anthony Kinik

further reading Horak, Jan-Christopher, “The First American Film Avant-Garde,” in JanChristopher Horak (ed.), Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 16–66. Jacobs, Lewis, The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History (New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 1939 [1967]). Rotha, Paul, Robert J. Flaherty: A Biography. Ed. Jay Ruby (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983).

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Études des mouvements à Paris (Movement Studies in Paris) Original Dutch Title: Bewegingsstudie van verkeer te Parijs Joris Ivens France, 1927

études des mouvements à paris

35 mm, 4’18”, silent, b/w, silent, no intertitles Archives: Cinémathèque française, Centre Georges Pompidou, EYE Filmmuseum Director: Joris Ivens Camera: Joris Ivens Montage: Joris Ivens

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After his involvement in the foundation of the Dutch Filmliga (Film League), Joris Ivens (1898–1989) made De Brug (The Bridge, 1928) and Regen (Rain, 1929), two important contributions to the city symphony genre. After the Second World War, Ivens continued making poetic documentaries on cities, including La Seine a rencontré Paris (1957), À Valparaiso (1963), and Rotterdam Europoort (1966). In the late 1920s, Ivens had praised Ruttmann’s Berlin, Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures, and several “other city films”—some of which were screened at the Filmliga. It comes as no surprise, then, that Ivens started his film career with several city film projects, both realized and unrealized. One of these experiments was Études des mouvements à Paris, made during the summer of 1927 upon visiting photographer Germaine Krull in the French capital. Not coincidentally, the film shows similarities with Krull’s photographs—many of them included in her 1929 book 100 x Paris. An opening panning shot of rooftops is followed by a high-angle shot of a traffic intersection, emphasizing the graphic patterns of the street layout and the tram tracks. Suddenly, Ivens switches to street level, showing a series of shots of bustling traffic and street life. Switching between the Place de la Concorde, the Tuileries, and the environs of the Opéra, Ivens demonstrates that Haussmann’s boulevards have turned Paris into a city of rapid circulation, as well as traffic jams. However, Études des mouvements does not only deal with the movements of speeding traffic, it is an exercise in camera motion and montage rhythms as well. The film can be seen as almost a literal illustration of an article Ivens published in the first issue of Filmliga on the sequencing of film images. In contrast to the more observational The Bridge and Rain, Études des mouvements is first and foremost conceived in terms of the notion of cinéma pur. As in Henri Chomette’s Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse (1925), the urban environment evaporates into a pure optical spectacle. Shots of vehicles shifting behind one another are reminiscent of similar footage in Ruttmann’s Berlin and Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. In the Rue de Rivoli, the camera catches a

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car driving from left to right until it spots a vehicle approaching from the other side of the frame and follows it in opposite direction. Ivens’s Paris film presents itself as a cinematic equivalent of the mobile and restless gaze of the flâneur. Top shots of speeding cars alternate with extreme low-angles showing feet of pedestrians. Constantly panning and tilting, Ivens’s small handheld Kinamo camera is turned into a participant in the traffic, showing the city from the viewpoint of a moving car. In contrast to The Bridge and Rain, hardly any information on the first screenings and the reception of this film is available. It is also hard to tell if Ivens himself considered it finished or not, saw it as an independent work, or whether he only saw it as a preparatory sketch for films to come. Its status is probably best indicated by its title, which has, like the term “symphony,” musical connotations. Particularly used by nineteenth-century composers, such as Chopin, Liszt, and Debussy, an Étude is an autonomous instrumental composition usually designed to provide practice material for perfecting a particular skill. While Ruttmann’s Berlin might be considered a symphony for a large orchestra, Ivens’s film on the streets of Paris is a modest étude for the solo instrument of the camera. Steven Jacobs

further reading Bakker, Kees (ed.), Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999). Ivens, Joris, The Camera and I (Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers, 1969). Ivens, Joris, “Filmtechniek: Enige notities over de opvolging van de beelden in de film,” Filmliga 1 (September 1927): 40–1. Ivens, Joris and Destanque, Robert, Aan welke kant en in welk heelal: De geschiedenis van een leven (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1983).

De Brug (The Bridge) Joris Ivens The Netherlands, 1928 35mm, 352 m. (original length), 12’00” (24 fps), b/w, silent, no intertitles Archives: EYE Filmmuseum, Royal Belgian Film Archive, MoMA, et al. Director: Joris Ivens Camera: Joris Ivens Montage: Joris Ivens Camera assistant: Van Es

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Montage assistant: John Fernhout Production: Joris Ivens/CAPI Premiere: 5 May 1928 (Centraal Theater, Filmliga, Amsterdam)

de brug

De Brug is a short silent film about the Koningshavenbrug in Rotterdam, a railroad lift bridge built between 1925 and 1927 that was also known as De Hef (The Lift). An icon of the Dutch avant-garde, it consolidated the international fame of Ivens (1898–1989). A lyrical and abstract study, the film presents the bridge as a machine and as a masterpiece of modern engineering, and it highlights the motion of, on, and around the steel construction. Focusing on a single monument and location in the city, not unlike René Clair’s La Tour (1928) and Horacio Coppola’s Así Nació el Obelisco (1936), Ivens’s film emphasizes essential city symphony features, such as a focus on machines, a fascination with movement, the introduction to the city via an abstract composition (in this case a sketch turning into a shot of the bridge), and a fast-moving train approaching the city. Yet, instead of the dusk-todawn structure of urban life used in so many other city symphonies, Ivens’s narrative focuses on a train that has to stop when the bridge lifts up, allowing ships to pass underneath along the river Maas. Within this mini-narrative, he explores De Hef from multiple perspectives, using extreme high and low angles, thus emphasizing a modern perception of fragmentation and re-composition. In a self-reflexive mode, Ivens integrates images of his 35mm Kinamo camera and himself at the beginning of the film. While the focus lies on the bridge and its operations, Ivens explores vertically and horizontally the bustling city of Rotterdam, which is visible in the background, including its busy streets, quays and bridges, pedestrians, cyclists, traffic, industrial areas, the skyscraper Het witte Huis (The White House), the towers of the Wilhelmina Church, and, of course, the harbor. Ivens’ film celebrates an urban-industrial Machine Age aesthetic through the encounter of two pieces of modern technology in the city of Rotterdam: De Hef and the motion picture camera. Eva Hielscher

further reading

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Gunning, Tom, “Joris Ivens: Filmmaker of the Twentieth Century, of the Netherlands and the World,” in André Stufkens (ed.), Cinema without Borders: The Catalog of the Joris Ivens North American Tour 2002 (Nijmegen: European Foundation Joris Ivens, 2002), 18–27. Ivens, Joris, The Camera and I (Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers, 1969). Paalman, Floris, Cinematic Rotterdam: The Times and Tides of a Modern City (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011). Stufkens, André, “The Song of Movement: Joris Ivens’s First Films and the Cycle of the Avant-Garde,” in Kees Bakker (ed.), Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), 46–71. Waugh, Thomas, Joris Ivens and the Evolution of the Radical Documentary 1926–1946 (Ph.D. Dissertation, New York: Columbia University, 1981).

De stad die nooit rust (a.k.a. Van Visschersdorp tot Wereldhavenstad) (The City That Never Rests, a.k.a. From Fishing Village to World Port City) Friedrich von Maydell and Andor von Barsy The Netherlands, 1928

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35mm, 1536 m. (originally 1772 m.), 56’00” (originally 65’00”) (24 fps), b/w, silent, Dutch intertitles Archives: EYE Filmmuseum, Stadsarchief Rotterdam Director: Friedrich von Maydell Camera: Andor von Barsy Production: Transfilma Distribution: Transfilma Premiere: 15 August 1928 (Groote Doelenzaal, Rotterdam)

De stad die nooit rust or The City That Never Rests is a film about Rotterdam and its port. Alternating between promotional film, documentary, and city symphony, it portrays a vibrant city with busy streets, bridges, canals, and markets, before moving gradually from the smaller inner harbors to the enormous outer seaport. With its descriptive intertitles and animated maps, which emphasize spatial orientation and architectural and geographical specificity, the film shows Rotterdam as a unique and particular urban place, as opposed to the abstract evocations of urban modernity found in some other city symphonies. A unique picture of pre-World War II Rotterdam, The City That Never Rests portrays a city that was almost completely destroyed 12 years later. The film was made by the German baron Friedrich von Maydell (1899– 1938), who in 1927 established the Rotterdam-based film production company Transfilma, and Hungarian photographer and cameraman Andor von Barsy (1899–1964), who later worked with Leni Riefenstahl on Olympia (1938) and was awarded prizes for best cinematography at the film festivals of Venice and Berlin. In 1929, Von Barsy made Hoogstraat, an avant-garde short about Rotterdam’s main shopping street. Although Von Maydell was officially credited as director of The City That Never Rests, the film can be attributed to Von Barsy and his outstanding cinematography. Before shooting this feature-length city film, he and Transfilma had already made several other films for Rotterdam companies and the municipality. In fact, The City That Never Rests turned into a commissioned work as well, as, during production, Transfilma approached the municipality for sponsorship. An early working title was Rotterdam: Symphonie van den Arbeid or Rotterdam: Symphony of Labor, which according to contemporaneous reviews underlined Transfilma’s ambitious plan to make “a dignified equivalent” to Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927). Dutch newspapers also wrote that Ruttmann’s film had inspired

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Von Maydell and Von Barsy to compose “a little sister” of the Berlin portrait, a “Rotterdamsche filmsymphonie.” During its production, Van Maydell stated that no shot was to be longer than five meters, thus exceeding the already brisk tempo of Ruttmann’s Berlin. In the end, however, The City That Never Rests displays a dynamic editing style, but one that is much more calm, even, and flowing than Van Maydell had originally intended. The film premiered as From Fishing Village to World Port City, a title later replaced by The City That Never Rests. Immediately after, the film underwent numerous changes, resulting in various shortened release versions, often no longer than half the length of the original version, cutting out the sequences of the city center. English, German, and French versions were made, and international screenings have been documented in Germany, Belgium, and the Dutch colonies. Due to the film’s multiple versions, the original version became completely inaccessible for decades. In 2010–11, EYE, in cooperation with the Rotterdam City Archives, restored the original version of this city symphony, which had remained unseen for over 80 years. Eva Hielscher

further reading Hielscher, Eva, “Symphonic Rotterdam or the Flowing City: Von Barsy’s and Von Maydell’s ‘The City That Never Rests’,” Eselsohren 2, 1+2 (2014): 159–282. Hogenkamp, Bert, De Nederlandse documentaire film, 1920–1940 (Amsterdam: Van Gennep and Stichting Film en Wetenschap, 1988). Paalman, Floris, Cinematic Rotterdam: The Times and Tides of a Modern City (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011).

Praha v zárˇi sveˇtel (Prague by Night, a.k.a. Prague Shining in Lights) Svatopluk Innemann Czechoslovakia, 1928

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35mm, 22’00”, b/w, silent, no intertitles Archives: Národni filmový archiv, Praha Director: Svatopluk Innemann Camera: Václav Vích, Jaroslav Blažek, Max Jonák, Karel Koprˇiva Scenario: František Horký Production: Elektrajournal for the Electrical Works of Prague Premiere: 1928

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Reversing the conventional dawn-to-dusk structure, the Prague city symphony by Svatopluk Innemann (1896–1945) starts with the last of the daylight in the evening and ends with the first sunbeams at dawn. At night, the children may be put to bed, but, otherwise, Prague is a restless city. Thanks to the advent of modern electrical lighting, the city continues to throb at night. In fact, the city seems to show its fully energized and awakened face only after the sun has set. There is the never-ending flow of traffic and city dwellers in the streets, attracted and bedazzled by blinking neon lights. After dusk, work goes on in factories, telegraph offices, train stations, hotels, newspaper offices, and fire departments. The traffic policeman, a veritable icon of the city symphony, here, too, does his best to manage and control the rainy streets at night. This portrait of vibrant city nightlife with its manifold activities is completed by shots of famous sights and architectural highlights, such as the Týn Church, the medieval Prague Astronomical Clock, the Petrˇín Lookout Tower, and Prague Castle—all illuminated by electric light. Prague by Night also displays a striking use of spotlights and the headlights and taillights of cars and trams to illuminate parts of the streetscape for the camera. The reasons for this become clear when one takes into account the film’s production history: Prague by Night was commissioned by a local electric company. After midnight, the city finally comes to rest. But there is still work to be done: tram rails are repaired and policemen are on patrol. In the early morning hours, on their way home, the last night owls meet Prague’s early birds such, as newspaper boys and market vendors, who are already up and about, facing a new work day. Eva Hielscher

further reading Block, Marcelline (ed.), World Cinema Locations: Prague (Chicago, IL: Intellect Books, University of Chicago Press, 2013). Hames, Peter, Czech and Slovak Cinema: Theme and Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009).

Shankhaiskii Dokument (Shanghai Document) Yakov Bliokh USSR, 1928 35mm, 46’00, b/w, silent, Russian intertitles Archives: The Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive, Krasnogorsk

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Director: Yakov Bliokh Scenario: Yakov Bliokh and V.L. Stepanov Production: Sovkino Distribution: Sovkino Premiere: 1 May 1928

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Yakov Bliokh’s Shanghai Document (1928), which, according to an early intertitle, resulted from “a Sovkino expedition to Shanghai in 1927,” is a most unusual document. Although Bliokh (1895–1957) was credited as the film’s director and co-scenarist, he apparently never strayed beyond Moscow in order to do so. Instead, it was V.L. Stepanov, Bliokh’s co-scenarist, who led the “expedition” to Shanghai at a time when the Soviets were backing an uprising that sought to unseat the Beijing government, and Sovkino thought a nonfiction film about Shanghai would help. At the time, the Soviets were hoping that a full-fledged revolution would transform China into a sprawling, friendly Socialist ally in Asia, but the uprising was the product of an uneasy alliance between the Nationalists and the communists. Instead of being there to document a triumphant socialist revolution, as they had hoped, Stepanov and his fellow filmmakers ended up playing witness to the bloody Shanghai Massacre of 12 April 1927, the event that crushed the communists, and signaled the ascendance of Chiang KaiShek. By June 1928, a little over a year later, the Nationalists were in control of mainland China, the beginning of a reign that would last 21 years. Bliokh’s film is not a city symphony in the strict sense, it is primarily a combination of a travelogue and an ethnographic film, but as the film progresses, its political analysis comes to the fore and becomes increasingly sharp, leading to some withering ironies reminiscent of Esfir Shub’s Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927). This analysis is made possible, in part, through the extensive use of descriptive and fact-based intertitles. In other words, the film is primarily an expository work of nonfiction, and not a poetic one, and therefore highly atypical of the city symphony genre, although Mikhail Kaufman’s Moscow (1926) stands as an exception to this rule, and may well have been an influence on Bliokh. Though the film is first and foremost a work of political propaganda, one that was intended to critique the colonial presence of British and the Western powers controlling Shanghai’s industrial and financial sectors, as well as the city’s highly hierarchical and exploitative class system and the complacency and obsequiousness of the Chinese bourgeoisie, Shanghai Document does contain a number of passages that are consistent with the concerns and the techniques of the city symphony movement. These include a long sequence having to do with street performers that calls to mind Vertov’s fascination with Chinese magicians in Kino-Eye (1924) and Man with a Movie Camera (1929), a striking series of travelling shots capturing automobiles and rickshaws hurtling at top speed which recalls the automobile and horse and buggy

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scenes in Man with a Movie Camera, and a series of extreme high-angle shots of busy streets and long shadows in Shanghai’s modern Western sector that are reminiscent of similar sequences in Kino-Eye and Man with a Movie Camera, as well as the avant-garde photographs of László Moholy-Nagy, Alexander Rodchenko, and Otto Umbehr (a.k.a. Umbo). That said, the film is most notable for its scathing socio-political critique, and its gruesome footage of some of the assassinations that took place during the Shanghai Massacre, as well as the corpses that littered the city streets in its aftermath. Anthony Kinik

further reading Cull, Nicholas and Waldron, Arthur, “Shanghai Document—‘Shankhaiskii Dokument’ (1928): Soviet Film Propaganda and the Shanghai Rising of 1927,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 16, 3 (1996): 309–31.

Sinfonia de Cataguases (Symphony of Cataguases) Humberto Mauro Brazil, 1928 35mm, 12’, b/w, silent Archives: lost film Director: Humberto Mauro Producer: Phebo Brasil Filme, Prefeitura Municipal de Cataguases

In August 1928, while working on his feature film Sangue mineiro (1930), leading Brazilian filmmaker Humberto Mauro (1897–1983) made a short film on Cataguases, located in the southeastern part of the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil. In the 1920s, the city became rich and it also developed into a center of Brazilian modernism as the site of the short-lived but influential art journal Revista Verde. In addition, the city became closely associated with Mauro, as he made several fiction films there. In a letter, Mauro wrote that he was going to make a Cataguases movie in two parts in the manner of the Symphony of Berlin. . . . I’ll just follow that style to show Cataguases inside: its communication lines, factories, constructions, waterworks, services of light, telephone and telegraph, schools, sports, et cetera, et cetera.

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Initially, Mauro intended to call it Foxtrot of a City. However, this title was considered frivolous by mayor Lobo Filho, and it was replaced by Symphony of Cataguases, making the reference to Ruttmann’s Berlin more explicit. Steven Jacobs

further reading visages de paris

Schvarzman, Sheila, Humberto Mauro e as imagens do Brasil (São Paulo: Editora da Unesp, 2004).

Visages de Paris (Faces of Paris) René Moreau France, 1928

35mm, 661 m./801 m., b/w, silent, French intertitles Archives: Les Archives françaises du film du CNC Director: René Moreau Production: Films René Moreau

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During the 1920s, René Moreau made numerous actualités on places such as New York, Venice, Tyrol, Mont Blanc, Lake Como, and various sites in French North Africa. He also dedicated several films to Paris such as Le Bois de Boulogne sous la neige and La Seine sous le ciel de Paris, both released in 1928. Of particular interest is Ciels de Paris (1925), which shows Paris neighborhoods and monuments against changing skies. Later, Moreau combined Ciels de Paris with La Seine sous le ciel de Paris into a single film titled Visages de Paris (1929), which, in the words of Guy Gauthier, “oscillates between an impressionist description and a tenderness marked by nostalgia.” As Myriam Juan noticed, the film follows a route combining a spatial and thematic logic, first crossing the city from east to west, then exploring the center and the Notre-Dame area. Moreau also takes us to the Latin Quarter, les Invalides, the Parc Monceau, and Montmartre. The second part of Visages de Paris follows the course of the Seine, from the Notre-Dame to the Pont Alexandre III. The connections are clear, the shots are mostly static. The filmmaker operates like a photo-journalist, visualizing a succession of environments geographically separated from one another, without attempting to create an illusion of a continuity between them. Nonetheless, the careful framings and the impressionist sensibility for atmospheric effects transcend the traditional scenic, giving Moreau’s Paris film a highly poetic dimension. Steven Jacobs

further reading Gauthier, Guy, Un siècle de cinéma français: Des tourneurs de manivelle aux voltigeurs du multimedia (Paris: Armand Collin, 2004). Juan, Myriam, “Le cinéma documentaire dans la rue parisienne,” Sociétés & Représentations 17, 1 (2004): 291–314.

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Paris Express ou Souvenirs de Paris (Paris Express or Memories of Paris) Marcel Duhamel and Pierre Prévert France, 1928 35mm, 47’, b/w, silent, French intertitles Archives: lost film Director: Marcel Duhamel and Pierre Prevert Camera: J. Grignon, Man Ray, Jean-Jacques Boiffard Production: Argos

Screenwriter Marcel Duhamel (1900–77) and filmmaker Pierre Prévert (1906–88), who both would play an important part in French Poetic Realism during the 1930s, collaborated in the late 1920s on the production of Paris Express or Souvenirs of Paris. This travelogue takes the viewer on a journey starting at the Champs-Élysées and its well-to-do neighborhoods. Then the filmmakers take us to Les Halles and take a promenade on the fortifications on the Northern edge of the city between Montmartre and Clichy, followed by a stroll on the Grands Boulevards. The film continues with a visit to the Luna Park (near Porte Maillot), some views of the Seine and the XIIIe arrondissement. Subsequently, the film explores the canals (with shots similar to the ones in André Sauvage’s 1928 Études sur Paris), Place Maubert, Montparnasse, and some public gardens, concluding with some shots taken from the terrace of a building. Tilted angles and camera movements evoke the hectic rhythms of the modern city, which is first and foremost explored from the viewpoint of the flâneur. Travelling shots accompany the metropolitan strollers, emphasizing their swiftness, speed, and spontaneity. Their movements are sometimes halted in front of a shop window or at a café terrace. This interest in flânerie reflects the filmmakers’ links to Surrealism, a connection that also helps to explain a number of other elements in the film, including the presence of Fantômas and Kiki de Montparnasse, the theme of the fortuitous encounter with the Woman, or the shots of the suicide bridge at Buttes-Chaumont. Steven Jacobs

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further reading Juan, Myriam, “Le cinéma documentaire dans la rue parisienne,” Sociétés & Représentations 17, 1 (2004): 291–314.

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(Studies of Paris) André Sauvage France, 1928 35mm, 80’00”, b/w, silent, French intertitles Archives: Les Archives françaises du film du CNC Director: André Sauvage Camera: Jean de Miéville, André Sauvage Production: André Sauvage for André Sauvage et Cie Editing: André Sauvage Premiere: Released in separate parts in the first months of 1929 in various Paris cinemas: Paris-Port (18 January, Cameo); Îles de Paris (15 February, Studio Diamant); Petite ceinture (14 March, Vieux Colombier); and Nord-Sud (5 April, Vieux Colombier)

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After having made his La traversée du Grépon (The Crossing of the Grépon, 1924) and Portrait de la Grèce (Portrait of Greece, 1927), writer, painter, photographer, filmmaker, producer, and passionate traveler André Sauvage (1891–1975) made a feature-length portrait of Paris. His ambitions are panoramic and encyclopedic, enumerating almost all aspects of the city, although it should be noted that the film was released in separate parts and that some parts have been screened independently—the Paris-Port sequence, for instance, was shown at the landmark 1929 Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart. Sauvage starts on the city’s outskirts, exploring a landscape gradually getting more industrialized and urbanized before approaching its core. Sauvage’s mode of transport is the slowly moving barge, floating through the northern suburbs, before arriving at the Seine and drifting through Montparnasse and St Germain, out to Montmartre and the city’s edges before wandering back to the center. The film contains footage of the famous Paris monuments, but, first and foremost, it focuses on the everyday spaces and the anonymous urbanites. An elaborate expository travelogue (with intertitles indicating the various locations), the film constantly shifts to a poetic mode marked by an Impressionist predilection for water and smoke and for shifting fragments—reflections of light, parts of statues, legs of pedestrians, hectic traffic, playing children looking directly into the camera, a stray cat, an noticeably staged encounter between lovers, et

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cetera. Sauvage’s use of tilted angles, reverse motion, fast motion, and superimpositions rarely evokes the kineticism of the metropolis, as in the films by Ruttmann and Vertov, instead, his special effects turn Paris into a place of estrangement and a site of Surreal encounters. Many of Sauvage’s shots are reminiscent of the photographs of Eugène Atget, whom Sauvage considered a “grand metteur en scène.” Close to Robert Desnos, Jean Cocteau, and the Prévert brothers, Sauvage evokes a surreal landscape marked by signs and huge billboards and populated by clochards and mannequins in shop windows. Praised by Jacques-Bernard Brunius, Henri Chomette, and Jean-Georges Auriol as a “documentaire vraiment poétique,” the film celebrates the beauty of Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower, but also that of the banlieues and the subterranean Canal St Martin. Steven Jacobs

further reading Breton, Emile, “Découvrir le Paris des années 1920,” l’Humanité (17 October 2012), English translation in Cinema Ritrovato (Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2013), 150–1. Le Roy, Eric (ed.), André Sauvage, poète insoumis: Textes sous la direction de Eric Le Roy (Paris: CNC, 2012) (DVD booklet).

La Zone: Au pays des chiffonniers (The Zone: In the Land of the Rag-Pickers) Georges Lacombe France, 1928 35mm, 818 m., 30’ (24 fps), b/w, silent, French intertitles Archives: Les Archives françaises du film du CNC, BFI National Archive Director: Georges Lacombe Camera: Georges Périnal Production: Charles Dullin Distribution: R. J. de Venloo

In 1928, Georges Lacombe (1902–90), René Clair’s former assistant, made a film about the outskirts of Paris and its inhabitants. More precisely, he portrays the daily life of rag-pickers living in the periphery. Lacombe follows the dawn-to-dusk structure that became so typical for city symphonies. Early in the morning at 5:00 a.m., rag-pickers leave their homes with carts to collect anything useful and reusable thrown away in the city center and

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more wealthy districts of Paris in order to resell it. Back in the “Zone,” their work continues as they sort and recycle the collected goods: paper is stamped and bundled, scrap iron is pressed and sent to the factory for further metal processing, and recovered items are sold at the flea market at Porte de Clignancourt. The film also includes a scene involving a lunch break, which we find with frequency in the city symphony films. By 7:00 p.m., with dinner having taken place, the day in the Zone has already ended, and the rag-pickers retreat to their shelters so they can resume their daily activities at the break of dawn the next morning. Lacombe’s debut as a director focuses on the poor and their miserable living conditions in the Zone, but there is a spirit to the film and to the lives depicted, as when we see children dancing to the music that a street performer makes with water-filled glasses. A number of characters or types are highlighted, such as this musician, a photographer, a gypsy, and the aged La Goulue, formerly the high-kicking, can-can-dancing star of the Moulin Rouge. La Zone is a socio-critical avant-garde documentary about the Parisian periphery, the shadowy existence of rag-pickers, and suburban poverty. However, it can also be read as a document dealing with the modern problem of garbage in the great cities and the environmentalist idea of waste separation and recycling. In the Zone, though, this developed purely out of the inhabitants’ necessity for survival. Film historian and documentary filmmaker Lewis Jacobs recognized in Lacombe’s film the influence of Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s 1921 city symphony Manhatta, which made a great impression on European and French avant-garde documentary filmmakers of the 1920s, but it also displays strong resonances with some of the photographs of Eugène Atget, who shot extensively in the Zone. Eva Hielscher

further reading

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Canon, James, The Paris Zone: A Cultural History, 1840–1944 (London: Routledge, 2015). Flinn, Margaret C., “Documenting Limits and the Limits of Documentary: Georges Lacombe’s ‘La Zone’ and the‘Documentaire Romancé’,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 13, 4 (September 2009): 405–13. Jacobs, Lewis, “Precursors and Prototypes (1894–1922),” in Lewis Jacobs (ed.), The Documentary Tradition: From Nanook to Woodstock (New York, NY: Hopkinson and Blake, 1971), 2–9.

Les Halles (a.k.a. Les Halles) Boris Kaufman and André Galitzine France, 1927 or 1929 35mm, 23’00”, b/w, silent, no intertitles (French opening credits) Archives: Les Archives françaises du film du CNC, Forum des Images

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Director: Boris Kaufman, André Galitzine Scenario: Boris Kaufman, André Galitzine Production: A. R. Lindt Distribution: A. R. Lindt

Boris Kaufman and André Galitzine’s city symphonietta focuses on the quartier around “Les Halles,” Paris’s legendary central market, over the course of one busy day. The film depicts the food market area and the famous glass and iron buildings designed by Victor Baltard before, during, and after the market, starting in the early morning hours before dawn with the arrival of horse-drawn carts, the unloading of a freight train, and the preparation of the merchandise. A roving camera-eye registers vivid market life, intercut with impressions of the market-hall’s architecture as well as shots of crowded streets. The dismantling of the market and cleaning of the streets brings the day to a close. Made by Boris Kaufman (1906–80), the younger brother of Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman, who later worked with Jean Vigo on À propos de Nice (1930), the film shares similarities with Wilfried Basse’s 1929 city symphony Markt in Berlin. Les Halles is generally considered to have been made in 1927, but film historian Myriam Juan claims that it was made in 1929, the same year as Markt in Berlin. In 1934, Paul Schuitema also dedicated a film to the same site, entitled Les Halles de Paris. Eva Hielscher

further reading Albéra, François, “Les Halles vues par les avant-gardes cinématographiques,” in Jean-Louis Robert and Myriam Tsikounas (eds.), Les Halles: Images d’un quartier (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2004), 159–68. Juan, Myriam, “Le Cinéma documentaire dans la rue parisienne,” Société & representation 1, 17 (2004): 291–314. Robert, Jean-Louis and Tsikounas, Myriam, Les Halles: images d’un quartier (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2004).

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Harmonies de Paris (Harmonies of Paris) Lucie Derain France, 1929

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35mm, 578 m., 25’16” (20 fps), b/w, silent, French intertitles Archives: Cinémathèque française, Les Archives françaises du film du CNC, Forum des Images Director: Lucie Derain Camera: Nicolas Rudakov Production: Films Albatros Distribution: Films Armor Premiere: 5 December 1928 (Vieux Colombier, Paris)

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Writer, journalist, and film critic Lucie Derain (1902–67) is the only woman city symphony filmmaker from the interwar period we know of today. In 1927 she made Harmonies de Paris together with Albatros studio cameraman Nicolas Rudakov, who collaborated also with Jean Epstein, René Clair, and Abel Gance. Her film is a poetic documentary about Paris, which loosely follows the day-in-the-life-of-a-city structure and combines a picture postcard view on the French capital with typical city symphony elements. After arriving in the city by airplane, Derain shows many of the famous sights, such as Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Dôme des Invalides, but she also depicts a subway ride and busy street scenes with pedestrians, stop-and-go traffic, and the emblematic city symphony figure of the traffic policeman. In addition to those scenes of modern city life, the film also depicts the old and narrow streets of Montmartre, which recall Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926). Derain contrasts such images with shots of Montparnasse, with its sidewalk cafés, art galleries, and antiquarian bookshops, thereby presenting Paris’s more chic side as well. The film includes some experimental sequences, such as double exposures or a shot showing a highly distorted street scene, one that has the appearance one gets from a funhouse mirror. A recurring element in Harmonies de Paris is a shot of sparkling waters, presenting the Seine as part of the city of Paris. Only shortly before a clock shows 6:10 p.m., Derain introduces the theme of labor by presenting wires, poles, factories, chimneys, workers, shovels, cranes, basketwork, as well as a meat market and the Bouquinistes. Urban nightlife with neon lights, a merry-go-round, and shots of the Moulin Rouge follow before Derain concludes with intertitles that read “the sweetness of life” and “harmony,” and that are coupled with images

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of parks, trees, nature, rowboats, a statue, and a man with a bottle of red wine sitting on the banks of the Seine and looking up at the Paris skyline. And at the end of the film, we are also presented with a shot of a woman in close-up—the filmmaker herself. The film was released in May 1929 after its premiere had taken place at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier in December 1928. In 1930, Derain, who wrote for Cinémagazine and other avant-garde cinema journals, also collaborated with Jean Tarride on a science fiction/comedy montage film entitled Désordres, which played together with Jean Vigo’s À propos de Nice (1930) at the Studio des Ursulines. Furthermore, Derain co-founded the Ciné-Club de la Femme, which was very active in the early 1930s, and she was involved in the establishment of the Cinémathèque française, as she helped Henri Langlois to program silent films in the early sound film era. Eva Hielscher

further reading Juan, Myriam, “Le Cinéma documentaire dans la rue parisienne,” Sociétés & Réprésentations 17, 1 (2004): 291–314. Païni, Dominique (ed.), La Persistance des images: tirages, sauvegardes et restaurations dans la collection films de la cinémathèque française (Paris: Cinémathèque Française and Hazan, 1995). Vichi, Laura, “Lucie Derain,” in Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta (eds.), Women Film Pioneers Project (New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2013), retrieved from https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/ pioneer/lucie-derain/, 17 March 2017.

Vingt-quatre heures en trente minutes (a.k.a. Aujourd’hui) (Twenty-Four Hours in Thirty Minutes, a.k.a. Today) Jean Lods and Boris Kaufman France, 1929 35mm, 30’00, b/w, silent Archives: lost film Director: Jean Lods and Boris Kaufman Camera: Boris Kaufman Premiere: 1929 (Vieux-Colombier, Paris)

Together with his brother in law Léon Moussinac, Jean Lods (1903–74) participated in 1928 in the foundation of the ciné-club les Amis de Spartacus, which screened several films of the Soviet avant-garde. One of the notorious

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members of Les Amis de Spartacus was the Vicomte de Noailles, who would finance films by Man Ray, Buñuel, and Cocteau in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In that same period, the viscount was to join with Étienne de Beaumont in financing the first films by Jean Lods, too, particularly Vingt-quatre heures en trente minutes (1929) and Champs-Élysées (1929), which are both dedicated to Paris. The embankments of Paris also feature in La Vie d’un fleuve: la Seine (1931), which follows the course of the river from its source up to the sea. Made in close collaboration with Boris Kaufman (1906–80), who acted as cameraman and/or co-director, and would go on to shoot Jean Vigo’s À propos de Nice (1930) and L’Atalante (1934), these three films were described as “avant-garde films that walked the line between impressionism and documentary.” As its title indicates, Vingt-quatre heures en trente minutes compresses a day’s life in the city of Paris into half an hour of film. In the wake of Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures and Ruttmann’s Berlin, representing life in a city within the time span of a single day became a recurrent formula in city symphonies. Lods and Kaufman made this the very principle of their film, which was initially released as Aujourd’hui (Today) in the spring of 1929. On 15 May 1929, Cinéa reported, “Lods and Kaufman are finishing their film Aujourd’hui,” which consists of 600 meter of film representing the essential and succeeding stages of a single day in a week. . . . Their aim is to reconstruct the day, by showing the elements of life, their intensity, and to assemble the 24 hours in a thirty-minutes projection.

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In the same week, in La Semaine à Paris, Claude Fayard praised the film he had seen at a private screening as “a revelation” and a perfect film in both its “format and realization.” “Everything is logical, measured, wanted in this succession of images. And the search for certain techniques, the curiosity of certain camera angles insures its logic.” He describes the film as “a poem on the monotony of labor days that resemble each other.” Fayard further argues, “The only flaw of this film is its imprecise title.” Perhaps taking their cue from such remarks, Lods and Kaufman rereleased the film (altered or unaltered) with its new title, Vingt-quatre heures en trente minutes, which was welcomed by the French press in October 1929, when it was playing at Vieux-Colombier. In Le Correspondant, Jean Morienval called the filmmakers “ingenious” and he stated that their film adds to the conquests of cinema as it makes us to see everyday things in a new perspective when they are shown on the screen. Vingt-quatre heures en trente minutes was also praised by Léon Moussinac, calling the film “the first scientific essay realized in France apart from some fragments in the works by Gance.” Moussinac particularly appreciated that

the filmmakers have limited their ambitions. They have not tried to reveal ‘the spirit of the metropolis’ as Walter Ruttmann attempted to do, but only that which is maybe tragic in the banality of everyday gestures in the mundane labor of the masses.

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Moussinac further praised the rawness of the film and the filmmakers’ discipline in both their shots and montage. However, not everybody was enthusiastic about the film. Attacking Moussinac directly, Robert Desnos (in Documents in December 1929) dismissed Vingt-quatre heures en trente minutes as a form of pseudo-avant-garde and as “a pitiful imitation of the original films of Sauvage and Cavalcanti.” Steven Jacobs

further reading Desnos, Robert, “Avant-Garde Cinema” (1929), in Richard Abel (ed.), French Film Theory and Criticism 1907–1939: A History/Anthology, Vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 429–32. Fayard, Claude, “Une révélation: ‘Aujourd’hui’ de Lods et Kaufman,” La semaine à Paris (17 May 1929): 37–8. Moussinac, Léon, “Sur trois films dits ‘d’avant-garde’,” L’Humanité (6 October 1929): 4.

Champs-Élysées Jean Lods France, 1929 35mm, b/w, silent Archives: lost film Director: Jean Lods Camera: Boris Kaufman

Apart from Vingt-quatre heures en trente minutes (1929), Lods also made Champs-Élysées (1929). Like the former Paris film, Champs-Élysées was also sponsored by the aristocratic cinephiles Vicomte de Noailles and Étienne de Beaumont. In 1935, Grierson praised Lods (together with Ivens and Ruttmann) as a “master of camera” and a “master of montage” while Harry Potamkin, in an article on “The Montage Film” in the February 1930 issue of Movie Makers, was rather critical of the films by Lods and Kaufman. Probably referring to Champs-Élysées, Potamkin reproached the filmmakers for attempting to include too much in their films. “The work of Lods and Kaufman,” he

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wrote, “defeats its expert photography and rhythmic reiterations by going in for too many sequences. The final caption of the film, ‘Etc,’ nearly characterizes its interminable succession of scenes.” Champs-Élysées was screened at the second Congrès International du Cinéma Indépendant (CICI 2) in Brussels in 1930, its program also including Vigo’s À propos de Nice (1930). In Les Beaux-Arts, André Cauvin compared the two films that shared Kaufman’s camerawork: “A film on Nice by Vigo and Kaufman. It enables us to link it with Champs-Élysées by Lods and Kaufman. Some discoveries but a uniform style. Always the same rhythm.” Another anonymous critic wrote in Beaux-Arts, Jean Lods and Boris Kaufman skillfully use things we have seen too much. The perspective of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, which we are familiar with from the beginning of so many films accompanied by the intertitle ‘In Paris,’ serves now as a background for their study on a public park astound by the heat. Steven Jacobs

further reading Anon., “Le IIe Congrès International du Cinéma Indépendant: Présentation de films inédits,” Les Beaux-Arts 8 (1930): 6. Cauvin, André, “Le IIe Congrès International du Cinéma Indépendant,” Les Beaux-Arts 9 (1930): 6. Potamkin, Harry, “The Montage Film,” Movie Makers (February 1930).

Les Nuits électriques (Electric Nights) Eugène Deslaw France, 1929

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35mm, 265 m., 13’ (24 fps), silent, no intertitles Archive: Les Archives françaises du film du CNC Direction: Eugène Deslaw Production: Eugène Deslaw

Eugène Deslaw (1898–1966) was born in Ukraine (as Yevhen Slavchenko) and moved to France in 1922. His Nuits électriques is an abstract film that shares characteristics with city symphonies. Whereas Ruttmann’s Berlin, Cavalcanti’s Rien

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que les heures, or Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera take the city at night as only one element among many of urban life, Les Nuits électriques focuses exclusively on this aspect of urban modernity. Combining images of the nocturnal Paris and Berlin, Deslaw composes a little symphony of streetlights, electric signs, and illuminated façades—creating a “dream of light” evoking evenings in big cities with mysterious movements, invisible forces, machines, and various visual effects. Based on the contrast between dark, often completely black surroundings and moving lights, the filmic image often turns into a flat surface; transforming the city into an abstract background for the filmmaker’s play with light, geometric forms, lines, dots, and movement. But Les Nuits électriques is also a film about the textual city—the signs, words, and slogans visible in the city at night. It is also a film about cinema itself, the light in the dark creating visual impressions—indeed, we see the signs of an Ufa cinema in passing. What’s more, it is a film about the manipulating forces and potentialities of cinema. The façade of a building appears illuminated with lines of lights, which transform the house into a negative of itself, a sort of skeleton or X-ray version. In fact, Deslaw intercuts his nocturnal images with negative shots of telephone poles and a factory chimney, transforming, with cinematic and photochemical means, actual daytime images into night as well. Georges Sadoul called Les Nuits électriques, together with Deslaw’s Montparnasse (1930), “Parisian reportages.” After Les Nuits électriques, Deslaw made his famous La Marche des machines (1929), which also displays some parallels with the city symphony approach. Eva Hielscher

further reading Deslaw, Eugène, Ombre blanche, lumière noire. Introduction by Lubomir Hosejko (Paris: Éditions Paris expérimental, 2004). Ghali, Noureddine, L’Avant-garde cinématographique en France dans les années vingt: idées, conceptions, theories (Paris: Éditions Paris expérimental, 1995). Sadoul, Georges, Histoire générale du cinéma: 5. L’art muet 1919–1929, première volume: L’Après guerre en Europe (Paris: Denoël, 1975), 370.

Nogent: El Dorado du Dimanche (Nogent: Sunday El Dorado) Marcel Carné France, 1929 35mm, 17’00”, b/w, silent, no intertitles Archives: Les Archives françaises du film du CNC, EYE Filmmuseum, Georges Eastman Museum

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Director: Marcel Carné Collaborator: Michel Sanvoisin Premiere: 17 December 1929 (Studio des Ursulines, Paris)

nogent: el dorado du dimanche

Before becoming a major director of some of the masterpieces of French Poetic Realism in the late 1930s and 1940s, Marcel Carné (1906–96) began his career as a film critic. In his writings of the late 1920s and early 1930s, he strongly opposed the “filmed theater” of the early French sound films, and he advocated the use of the expressive possibilities of the mobile camera, which he called a “character of the drama.” In his aversion to “filmed theater,” he also famously argued for a cinema that would “go down into the streets,” focusing on the lives of ordinary people. These issues are precisely at stake in Carné’s first film, which is a short documentary about Parisian workers spending their Sunday—their only day off—in the semi-rural suburb of Nogent-sur-Marne, which was known for its Guinguettes, the popular drinking establishments that also served as restaurants and dance venues. The film starts with images of trains, buses, and railway tracks, which are juxtaposed to shots of deserted Paris streets, empty factories, and typewriters packed in slipcovers. This sequence immediately makes clear that the once pastoral setting of Nogent is part of an industrialized and urbanized landscape—exactly the kind of landscape that had been celebrated time and time again in Impressionist painting. It is a natural landscape organized by industrial infrastructure and populated by the urban crowds who are swimming, rowing, canoeing, sailing, fishing, or biking. Children are playing, people are sitting or sleeping on the river banks, they are dancing, having a drink, or enjoying various forms of spectacle: street musicians, trapeze artists. Magazines and postcards are sold, a photographer makes portraits. The film’s rhythmic editing evokes the joy and freedom of the escape to the countryside. Although the film does not contain the long takes found in Carné’s later films (his camera could take only six seconds of film at a time), it is marked by a mobile camera put on moving trains and boats. Striking point of view shots from a helter-skelter and unusual angles (such as the images of men diving) give the film a highly avant-garde touch in line with city symphonies and their evocations of the chaos of the great metropolitan centers.

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further reading Carné, Marcel, “La Caméra, personnage du drame,” Cinémagazine 28 (12 July 1929), also included in Philippe Morisson (ed.), Marcel Carné: CinéReporter (1929–34) (Grandvilliers: La Tour verte, 2016), 57–61. Carné, Marcel, “Quand le cinéma descend dans les rues de Paris,” Cinémonde 85 (5 June 1930), also included in Philippe Morisson (ed.), Marcel Carné: CinéReporter (1929–34) (Grandvilliers: La Tour verte, 2016), 88–95.

Carné, Marcel, “Quand le cinéma descendra-t-il dans la rue?” Cinémagazine 11 (November 1933), also included in Philippe Morisson (ed.), Marcel Carné: Ciné-Reporter (1929–34) (Grandvilliers: La Tour verte, 2016), 95–101. Translated into English as “When Will the Cinema go down into the Street?” in Richard Abel (ed.), French Film Theory and Criticism 1907–1939 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), Vol. II, 127–9. Driskell, Jonathan, Marcel Carné (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012).

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Impressionen vom alten Marseiller Hafen (Vieux Port) (Impressions of the Old Harbor of Marseille) László Moholy-Nagy Germany, 1929 35mm, 250 m, 8’50”, b/w, silent, no intertitles Archives: Filmmuseum München, Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Deutsches Filminstitut, Centre Georges Pompidou, George Eastman Museum, MoMA Director: László Moholy-Nagy Camera: László Moholy-Nagy Montage: László Moholy-Nagy Premiere: 4 March 1932 (Kamera Cinema, Berlin)

In a 1933 lecture, Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) said of his Marseille film that he had a limited amount of material (300 meters) and thought it useless to try to present such a huge city in so few meters of film. So I consciously chose a small section of this huge city, in particular a part that was unknown, because of its sad social conditions, its poverty, and its dangerous streets, the Vieux port.

Indeed, Moholy-Nagy’s first film strikes us with its harsh imagery of poverty in the slums of Marseille: a drooling clochard, people urinating in the streets, stray cats and loose dogs, dirt, open sewers, et cetera. However, the film also includes footage of the lively boulevards filled with pedestrians, street vendors, cars, and tramways. Shots of shop windows, bars, restaurants, workshops, playing children, a one-legged man walking, gypsies, and Africans evoke a lively and diverse quartier of the Mediterranean city. An entire sequence of the film is dedicated to the famous 1905 steel Pont transbordeur—according to Moholy-Nagy “truly a wonder of technical

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precision and beauty,” which has been visualized by prominent modernist photographers such as Man Ray, Herbert Bayer, Florence Henri, Germaine Krull, Marcel Bovis, and, last but not least, Moholy-Nagy himself. Several shots in the film are almost identical with Moholy’s photographs of the bridge, but also with those that he took of the Eiffel Tower and the Berlin Radio Tower. As in these photographs, Moholy-Nagy’s Marseille film is marked by extreme high- and low-angle shots, evoking the logics of the new architecture, which is characterized by dynamic spatial relations. Perfectly visualized by tracking shots through a maze of girders and cables, the moving parts of the bridge enable Moholy-Nagy to create space through movement, not unlike his Ein Lichtspiel: Schwarz-weiss-grau (1930). As in this abstract cinematic study of kinetic sculpture, the Marseille film also focuses on light, which Moholy-Nagy had famously labeled “a medium of plastic expression.” In his Marseille film, Moholy-Nagy emphasizes the transparency of the bridge and plays on the contrasts between the sunlit squares and shadowy alleys, between dark interiors and sunny streets. Opening with an image of a Marseille street map in which the Vieux port part is cut out by a pair of scissors, Moholy-Nagy’s Marseille film—an example of “semi-social reportage,” as he put it—is the perfect synthesis of constructivism and social realism. In so doing, it is a key film marking the documentary turn of the Constructivist avant-garde in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Steven Jacobs

further reading Horak, Jan-Christopher, Making Images Move: Photographers and Avant-Garde Cinema (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1997), 109–35. Moholy-Nagy, László, “Marseille,” German manuscript (1929) published in Krisztina Passuth, Moholy-Nagy (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 403. Moholy-Nagy, László, “New Film Experiments,” originally published in Korunk 3 (1933), included in Krisztina Passuth, Moholy-Nagy (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 319–23. Sahli, Jan, Filmische Sinnes-Erweiterung: László Moholy-Nagys Filmwerk und Theorie (Marburg: Schüren Verlag, 2006), 159–64.

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Markt in Berlin (a.k.a. Wochenmarkt auf dem Wittenbergplatz) (Street Market in Berlin, a.k.a. Weekly Market at the Wittenberg Square) Wilfried Basse Germany, 1929 35mm, 478 m./ 895 m., 23’00”/ 43 ’00” (18 fps), b/w, silent, no intertiles (German opening titles)

Archives: Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Deutsches Filminstitut, Filmmuseum München, Bundesarchiv Filmarchiv, EYE Filmmuseum, Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, Filmoteca de la UNAM Mexico, et al.

In 1929, Wilfried Basse (1899–1946) made a film about a day on the market on the Wittenbergplatz in Berlin—from the construction of the market stalls early in the morning, to their dismantling and cleaning of the streets in the afternoon (a motif often used as part of morning rituals in other city symphonies). Basse combines images of commodities, market vendors, and customers with people passing by and traffic and bustling city life in the background. A title card at the beginning explains that the big city does not only consist of speed and traffic, but that idyllic small-town life survives even in the core of the metropolis. In fact, an establishing shot introduces the position of the Wittenbergplatz in the city center—with the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church visible in the background. Subsequently, a panning shot moves from the recognizable cruciform U-Bahn station Wittenbergplatz to the open space right behind the building: the position where the market stalls are about to be erected. It was this sequence of the market’s construction in particular that received attention by various eminent critics. Rudolf Arnheim was the first to underscore the supernatural effect of the scene, in which Basse makes the market appear within a minute by using accelerated motion and by editing shots taken every 30 minutes. Arnheim later also claimed that he played a drunken man in Markt in Berlin, but there is no visual evidence of this. Béla Balázs described Basse’s film as a masterpiece, though contrary to Arnheim’s emphasis on the film’s pure and sober objectivity, he applauded the film for its unstaged reality. Siefgried Kracauer, finally, relates Markt in Berlin directly to Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927) as he described it as one of the two cross-section films made in the style of Berlin (Menschen am Sonntag being the other) that deserve greater interest. Basse made two versions of his market film. The shorter, original version with the title Markt in Berlin premiered in November 1929 at the Capital Theater in Berlin as part of an avant-garde film program, which also included Joris Ivens’s De Brug (1928) and which aimed to be a contribution to the famous Film und Foto (FiFo) exhibition held in Stuttgart that year. This original version does not include intertitles, except for the title card mentioned above. In December 1929, Basse made a second, longer version entitled Wochenmarkt auf dem Wittenbergplatz, including 22 intertitles. Basse changed

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Director: Wilfried Basse Camera: Wilfried Basse Montage: Wilfried Basse Production: Basse-Film GmbH, Berlin Premiere: 10 November 1929 (Capital, Berlin)

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his film according to the Kulturfilm standards, so that the censors would accept it as an educational film and that it could benefit from tax deductions and be screened in regular theaters. Eva Hielscher

further reading mit der pferdedroschke durch berlin

Arnheim, Rudolf, Film as Art (London: Faber and Farber, 1958). Balázs, Béla, “The Spirit of Film” (1930), in Erica Carter (ed.), Béla Balázs: Early Film Theroy: Visible Man and the Spirit of Film (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2010). Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947). Kreimeier, Klaus, “Der Schatzsucher: Wilfried Basses Erkundungen der ungestellten Wirklichkeit,” in Klaus Kreimeier, Antje Ehmann, and Jeanpaul Goergen (eds.), Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland: Band 2: Weimarer Republik: 1918–1933 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005), 435–62.

Mit der Pferdedroschke durch Berlin (With the Horse-Drawn Carriage through Berlin) Carl Froelich Germany, 1929 35mm, 13’00”, b/w, silent Archives: lost film Director: Carl Froelich

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According to Helmut Weihsmann, Carl Froelich made a short city film entitled Mit der Pferdedroschke durch Berlin in 1929, which he summarizes as “a sentimental observation, no more, no less.” The film’s identity cannot entirely be retraced, as little information is available about this title. Apart from Weihsmann, a brochure by the Netherlands Filmmuseum and the Goethe Institut mentions the film, which apparently was screened together with Phil Jutzi’s Berlin—Alexanderplatz (1931) in a program about Dutch-German interrelations in the interwar period in Amsterdam and The Hague in 1982. It is described as a film by and with Carl Froelich, edited together from historical shots. A horse-drawn carriage passes the Berlin Palace, Cathedral, museums, restaurants, and parks on its way to the Brandenburg Gate. Carl Froelich (1875–1953), sometimes also spelled Carl Fröhlich, started in the early 1900s his film career at the company of film pioneer Oskar Messter. He established his own production company in 1920 and made numerous films together with actress Henny Porten, including Zuflucht (1928), a drama set and shot in the working class quarters of Berlin. He also

made Die Nacht gehört uns (1929), one of the earliest German sound films, and in the 1930s, he collaborated with famous actors, such as Emil Jannings (Traumulus, 1935) and Zarah Leander (Heimat, 1938). As Froelich’s city film about Berlin explores the German capital from the perspective of a horse-drawn carriage, it shares a thematic link with Carl Boese’s fiction film Die letzte Drosche von Berlin (1926), which deals with the family of a carriage driver who has been forced into unemployment by modern taxis. survey of city symphonies

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further reading Berlijn—Amsterdam 1920–1940: Duits-Nederlandse wisselwerkingen: Film (Amsterdam: Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1982). Weihsmann, Helmut, “The City in Twilight: Charting the Genre of the ‘City Film’ 1900–1930,” in François Penz and Maureen Thomas (eds.), Cinema and Architecture: Méliès, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia (London: BFI, 1997), 8–27.

Impressionen der Großstadt (a.k.a. Berlin von unten) (Impressions of the Metropolis, a.k.a. Berlin from below) Alex Strasser Germany, 1929 35mm, 123 m., 6’00”, b/w, silent Archives: lost film Director: Alex Strasser Production: Alex Strasser, Berlin

Austrian filmmaker and cameraman Alex Strasser (1898–1974) started his film career in the 1920s in Berlin before he left Nazi-Germany in the mid1930s and made government sponsored instructional and documentary films in Great Britain. In 1929, he made the avant-garde short Impressionen der Großstadt (now lost), which is also known as Berlin von unten. Helmut Weihsmann describes the film as an impressionistic approach to the city symphony genre, a neat and uncritical pictorial reportage that presents unusual low-angle shots of hurrying feed, car tires, and traffic movement in the bustling streets of the German capital. The film passed censorship on 6 January 1930, and in his programmatic book Filmgegner von heute—Filmfreunde von morgen, Hans Richter mentioned Strasser’s work as an example of documentary filmmaking. Similarly, Dutch journalist, director, scriptwriter, and Filmliga member Simon Koster praised Strasser’s film and compared his documentary approach to Wilfried Basse’s city symphony Markt in Berlin (1929).

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Strasser became affiliated with the avant-garde circles of the interwar period and joined the first meeting of the International League of Independent Film in La Sarraz in September 1929. The same year, he also worked with László Moholy-Nagy on a theatrical production at the Theater am Nollendorfplatz in Berlin, providing the film material to the play Der Kaufmann von Berlin. Together with Lotte Reiniger, he also collaborated on the animation film Grotesken im Schnee (Grotesques in the Snow, 1928), which followed a year after he independently made his animation short Die Landpartie (The Trip in the Country, 1927). Eva Hielscher

further reading “Impressionen der Großstadt—Verschollene Arbeiten von Alex Strasser,” Tagesspiegel 13, 353 (28 August 1989). Goergen, Jeanpaul, “Die Avantgarde und das Dokumentarische,” in Klaus Kreimeier, Antje Ehmann, and Jeanpaul Goergen (eds.), Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland: Band 2: Weimarer Republik. 1918–1933 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005), 493–526. Roepke, Martina, “Crafting Life into Film: Analyzing Family Fiction Films from the 1930s,” in Ryan Shand and Ian Craven (eds.), Small-Gauge Storytelling: Discovering the Amateur Fiction Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 83–101. Weihsmann, Helmut, “The City in Twilight: Charting the Genre of the ‘City Film’ 1900–1930,” in François Penz and Maureen Thomas (eds.), Cinema and Architecture: Méliès, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia (London: BFI, 1997), 8–27.

Prater Friedrich Kuplent Austria, 1929 9.5mm, 14’, b/w and tinted, silent, German intertitles Archives: Österreichisches Filmmuseum Director: Friedrich Kuplent Production: Frikup Film

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The experimental short Prater by Friedrich Kuplent (1905–85) can be considered a pioneering work of Austrian avant-garde film and a city symphony. It was made within the context of the Klub der Kinoamateure Österreichs (the Austrian Film Amateurs Club), of which Kuplent, an employee at the Vienna gasworks, was a co-founder. His film portrays Vienna through a day at the city’s famous Prater fairground. An intertitle describes it as a film from the margins of everyday life. Inherent parts of city life and the modern urban experience,

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amusement parks were a typical motif in city symphonies in the inter-war period. Kuplent, however, places this motif at the very heart of his film. His ambitious short begins with street impressions of Vienna, before focusing on the Prater, which is presented as a city within the city. Images of visitors are intercut with show-men and women, amusement-park attractions and architecture. Multiple exposures, unusual camera perspectives, abstract shots, and rapid editing imitate rides on rollercoasters, log flumes, and swing carousels. Kuplent deploys filmic tricks and experimental film techniques, including kaleidoscopic views, to give us an impression of the fairground’s experiences and multitude of simultaneous thrills, translating them into the language of cinema. The film also includes a visual exploration of the Wiener Riesenrad, the Vienna Ferris wheel, which Kuplent depicts as a fragmentation of steel parts, not unlike Joris Ivens did a year before in De Brug. Finally, Kuplent also hints at social contrasts, before a thunderstorm brings an end to the Prater’s commotion. With its split-screen kaleidoscophic images, the film’s climax shares some aesthetic similarities with the final sequence of Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. Eva Hielscher

further reading Öhner, Vrääth, “Spezialisierte Fragmentierung: Zu den technischen Bedingungen des Einbildungskraft im frühen Amateurfilm,” Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften, Vorstellungskraft 2 (2014): 51–8.

Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera) Dziga Vertov USSR, 1929 35mm, 1889 m., 68’, b/w, silent, no intertitles (Russian opening titles) Archives: RGAKFD Russian State Film and Photo Archive, Gosfilmofond, EYE Filmmuseum, Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Georges Eastman Museum, et al. Director: Dziga Vertov Scenario: Dziga Vertov Cinematography: Mikhail Kaufman Montage: Elizaveta Svilova Production: VUFKU (All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration) Premiere: 8 January 1929 (Kiev), 9 April 1929 (Moscow)

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Together with Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927), Man with a Movie Camera is undoubtedly the most famous (and perhaps the most radical) city symphony. Made by Dziga Vertov (1896–1956, pseudonym for Denis Kaufman), the film was shot in Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa, and it evokes the optimism of the post-revolutionary Soviet society by depicting key aspects of modern metropolitan life on a single day. Focusing on the icons of urban modernity (industry, motorized traffic, anonymous crowds, shop windows, mass entertainment), the film evokes the rhythms of metropolitan life by means of experimental techniques such as fast editing, split screens, fast motion, jump cuts, freeze frames, multiple exposures, and stop-motion animation. In addition, Vertov did not hesitate to include several scenes featuring obvious stagings such as the scene in which a woman is getting out of bed and is getting dressed. Much more explicit than in many other city symphonies, Vertov introduces an element of avant-garde self-reflection, since the film also includes images of its own making. First and foremost, we look at the omnipresent man with the camera (Mikhail Kaufman) shooting the film, who, on the one hand, acts as a kind of abstract, almost disembodied protagonist. On the other, he is also presented as a heroic figure, who climbs factory chimneys, rides cars and motorcycles, and hangs onto trains to make the most impressive shots. Apart from the titular cameraman, the film also features the woman (Elizaveta Svilova) editing it, the film operator screening it, and spectators watching it. Taking the pulse of the city and quite literally translating it into the rhythm of cinema, Vertov’s meta-film makes explicit the connection between film spectatorship and the stimulus-response mechanisms said to be produced by metropolitan modernity, with its dizzying kaleidoscopic atmosphere and sensory overload. When it was released, Man with a Movie Camera was often criticized for putting form before content, both in the Soviet Union and in the West. Eisenstein famously described the film as “pointless camera hooliganism” while Paul Rotha said that in Britain, the film was regarded as a joke or mere trickery that couldn’t be taken seriously. Over the last few decades, however, the film has often been regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, and it is considered a landmark in both documentary and avantgarde cinema. In fact, when the British Film Institute/Sight and Sound list of the Best Documentaries of All Time was released in 2014, Man with a Movie Camera occupied the #1 position. Steven Jacobs

further reading Graf, Alexander, “Berlin—Moscow: On the Montage Aesthetic in the City Symphony Films of the 1920s,” in Alexander Graf and Dietrich Scheunemann (eds.), Avant-Garde Film (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 77–92.

Tsivian, Yuri, Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties (Pordenone: Il Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2004). Turvey, Malcolm, “City Symphony and ‘Man with a Movie Camera’,” in The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 135–62.

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Vesnoy (In Spring) Mikhail Kaufman USSR, 1929 35mm, 47’00, b/w, silent, Russian intertitles (original Ukrainian intertitles were replaced in the 1930s by Russian title cards) Archives: Gosfilmofond, Österreichisches Filmmuseum, EYE Filmmusuem, Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique Director: Mikhail Kaufman Scenario: Mikhail Kaufman Production: VUFKU Distribution: VUFKU Premiere: 1929

Frustrated over the form that Man with a Movie Camera had taken, and stung by the fact that he had been excluded from its editorial process, Mikhail Kaufman (1897–1980) broke ties with his brother and longtime collaborator and released In Spring (1929). This city symphony of Kiev, produced by VUFKU, the Ukrainian film authority, was a follow-up to his earlier solo project Moscow, but Kaufman also intended it to be a direct response to Man with a Movie Camera, and a film that might serve to put the Kino-Eye movement back on track. Kaufman saw himself as more of a technician and less of a poet than his brother, and he had a preference for clarity and logic. There’s no question that In Spring is a much less self-consciously avant-garde film than Man with a Movie Camera, but it is still a showcase for cinematographic and editorial virtuosity, and it is distinguished by its frequent use of unusual and disorienting perspectives, including extreme high- and low-angle shots and canted angles, aerial shots, and trick shots, split-screen compositions, multiple exposures, time-lapse, reverse-motion, and stop-motion, as well as a conscious avoidance of intertitles. In Spring might not be as frenetic and challenging as Man with a Movie Camera, but it was still highly adventurous and demanding. As the film’s title suggests, this is not a portrait of one day in the life of Kiev, but instead is a seasonal portrait of the city, documenting its

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emergence from winter and its embrace of spring. Thus, shots depicting a typically brutal Russian winter make way for shots of the arrival of the thaw, the breaking up of the ice, and flooding, before windows begin to open, spring cleaning begins to take place, and children and young couples venture out into the sunshine. While the theme of spring persists throughout much of the film, the film simultaneously depicts the emergence of a modern, industrialized and revolutionary society, one characterized by its active factories and construction sector, its healthy and active citizenry, and its jubilant May Day celebrations. Two years later, Kaufman published his most important theoretical work, an essay entitled “Film Analysis.” Here, he described a philosophy of cinema that was very much in line with Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye theory, as well as with Kaufman’s cinematography from the time of Kino-Eye (1924) onward, but he used examples from In Spring to illustrate his essay. Anthony Kinik

further reading Kaufman, Mikhail, “An Interview with Mikhail Kaufman,” October 11 (1979): 54–76. Tsivian, Yuri (ed.), Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties (Gemona and Udine: Le Giornate del cinema muto, 2004).

Regen (Rain) Joris Ivens and Mannus Franken The Netherlands, 1929 35mm, 335 m. (original length), 12’00” (24 fps), b/w, silent Archives: EYE Filmmuseum, Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, MoMA, Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, et al.

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Director: Joris Ivens and Mannus Franken Camera: Joris Ivens Scenario: Mannus Franken Montage: Joris Ivens Production: Joris Ivens/CAPI Distribution: Centraal Bureau voor Ligafilms Amsterdam Premiere: 14 December 1929 (De Uitkijk, Filmliga Amsterdam)

Regen is a short film by Joris Ivens (1898–1989) about life in Amsterdam on a rainy day that was made in collaboration with Mannus Franken (1899–1953), who had made a short on Paris’s Jardin du Luxembourg (1927).

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A masterpiece of Dutch avant-garde cinema, Regen is an impressionist and lyrical example of a city symphony. Moreover, alongside Études des Mouvements à Paris (1927) and De Brug (1928), it stands as Ivens’s third city film. Regen shows the effects of a natural phenomenon on the modern city with its motorized traffic and crowds, and reveals the transformative and aesthetic qualities of this everyday event by depicting the city before, during, and after the rain. In a poetic play of light and shadow, reflection and refraction, the film explores urban textures and semi-transparent surfaces such as skylights, tram windows, and canals. During the rain shower, the entire city is covered with a second, semi-reflecting surface, generating a new and modern mediated vision not unlike cinematic perception. Reflected images appear on rain-soaked streets, puddles, and canals. The city becomes a screen that Ivens’s camera self-reflexively uncovers and doubles. In addition, the rain as all-covering element emphasizes simultaneity across the urban space. It took Ivens almost two years to shoot enough material for the film. He organized a system of “rain watchers” spread all over the city, who would call him in case of a rain shower. In 1932 Ivens asked Lou Lichtveld (also known as Albert Helman) to write a score for the originally silent film that Helen van Dongen partly re-edited in accordance with the music. In 1941, a second sound version was made by Hanns Eisler, who titled his composition “Fourteen Ways to Describe Rain.” Eva Hielscher

further reading Dähne, Chris, Die Stadtsinfonien der 1920er Jahre: Architektur zwischen Film, Fotografie und Literatur (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013). Ivens, Joris, The Camera and I (Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers, 1969). Nichols, Bill, “Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry 27, 4 (2001): 580–610. Waugh, Thomas, Joris Ivens and the Evolution of the Radical Documentary 1926–1946 (Ph.D. Dissertation, New York: Columbia University, 1981).

Hoogstraat (High Street) Andor von Barsy The Netherlands, 1929 35mm, 235 m., 12’ (18 fps), b/w/tinting, silent, no intertitles (Dutch and German opening titles) Archives: EYE Filmmuseum Instituut Nederland, Stadsarchief Rotterdam, Österreichisches Filmmuseum

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Director: Andor von Barsy Camera: Andor von Barsy Production: Filmfabriek A. von Barsy Premiere: 23 May 1930 (De Uitkijk, Amsterdam, Filmliga screening)

hoogstraat

Hoogstraat is an avant-garde short about Rotterdam’s main shopping street, made by Hungarian filmmaker and cameraman Andor von Barsy (1899– 1964), who lived in the Netherlands in the 1920s and 1930s. Later, he worked as a cameraman on Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938), and he was awarded prizes for best cinematography at the Venice and Berlin film festivals. Focusing on one specific location in the city, Hoogstraat can be considered as a city symphonietta, or microscopic city symphony. As an independent project, the film shows daily activities and appearances in and around a busy street, using the framing device of a puppet theater, which opens and closes the “stage” of life on the street. In a dynamic montage, Von Barsy shows street vendors and all kinds of city dwellers—from policemen and workers to women dressed in traditional costumes, window shoppers, children, an old lady who can barely walk, a postman emptying a mailbox, and a sandwich-man with an enormous shoe on his head. The film alternates between diverse camera angles, and intercuts the crowd in the street with masses of luxury goods displayed in shop windows. Von Barsy, who himself called Hoogstraat “an absolute film,” uses the semi-transparent quality of windows and mirrors to double or even triple the images. The film also depicts contrasts: for example, garbage in the street and luxury goods in the shops. The long shadows people cast on the asphalt acquire an almost abstract quality, which continues in the evening shots with electric illuminations at the end of the film. Hoogstraat was one of the first films that the newly established Nederlands Historisch Film Archief, predecessor of the Nederlands Filmmuseum (now EYE), acquired in the 1940s. Von Barsy was also involved in the production of several other films about Rotterdam during his stay in the Netherlands. These commissioned productions included the 1928 city symphony De stad die nooit rust (The City that Never Rests), which Von Barsy made with the German Friedrich von Maydell. Hoogstraat includes several recycled shots from this film.

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further reading Hogenkamp, Bert, De Nederlandse documentaire film, 1920–1940 (Amsterdam: Van Gennep and Stichting Film en Wetenschap, 1988). Paalman, Floris, Cinematic Rotterdam: The Times and Tides of a Modern City (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011).

Images d’Ostende (Images of Ostend) Dutch Original Title: Beelden van Oostende Henri Storck Belgium, 1929–30

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35 mm, 12’, silent, b/w, silent, French and Dutch intertitles Archive: Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, Centre Georges Pompidou, EYE Filmmuseum Director: Henri Storck Camera: Henri Storck Production: Henri Storck Premiere: 8 January 1930 (Club du cinéma, Ostend)

Shot with a Kinamo 35mm camera in the winter of 1929, Images d’Ostende was probably a remake of the early amateur films that Henri Storck (1907–99) had made with a Pathé Baby camera that he acquired in 1926. It depicts Storck’s native town of Ostend, which had become a fashionable Belgian seaside resort in the late nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, Ostend became an important cultural center, being the residence of a number of famous writers and painters, such as Michel de Ghelderode and James Ensor. Organized by means of purely visual associations, the film focuses on the places, objects, and natural elements that constitute Ostend and its surroundings: the port, the anchors, the foam, the dunes, and the North Sea. Instead of evoking the industrial rhythms of the modern metropolis, Storck’s gently panning and gliding camera shows how nature intervenes in the fleeting life of the urban environment. Focusing on ephemeral elements such as water and wind and the graphic patterns they create in the sand, Storck deals with the favorite motifs of an earlier generation of artists such as impressionist painters and Art Nouveau designers. Moreover, this fascination for wind and water, links Images d’Ostende to the impressionist tendencies of 1920s French avant-garde cinema as well as to À propos de Nice by Jean Vigo and Rain by Joris Ivens, who both had close contacts with Storck. When the film was screened at the second congress of independent films (CICI 2) in Brussels in 1930, the audience included Germaine Dulac, Jean Lods, Jean Painlevé, Joris Ivens, and Jean Vigo, who reportedly shouted “Que d’eau, que d’eau!”—“Water, nothing but water”—in response. In addition, Images d’Ostende is clearly marked by Surrealism. Evoking the Surrealist fascination for waste, garbage, dust, debris, wreckage, derelict spaces, and sites as the flea market or the abattoir, Storck’s images of smoking fishing boats, sordid waters, rusted chains and anchors evoke a hybrid

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realm where the urban and the natural as well as the primitive and the sophisticated intersect. This sense of unease is also the result of Storck’s fascination for an uncanny emptiness—another trope of Surrealist urban imagery. Storck’s Ostend lacks its tourists and crowds—one of the prominent emblems of urban modernity so cherished in many city symphonies. Carl Vincent called Storck’s Images d’Ostende “one of the most beautiful works of pure cinematographic poetry that silent cinema has left us.” The film premiered in January 1930 at the Club du cinéma d’Ostende, one of the most progressive ciné-clubs in Belgium, and one that had screened works by Flaherty, Clair, L’Herbier, Eisenstein as well as Ruttmann’s Berlin during the previous years. Steven Jacobs

further reading Aubenas, Jacqueline, Hommage à Henri Storck: Films 1928–1985: Catalogue analytique, édition revue et corrigée (Brussels: Commissariat général aux Relations internationales, 1995). Geens, Vincent, “Le Temps des utopies: L’ambition cinématographique d’Henri Storck, de 1907 à 1940,” Cahiers d’Histoire du Temps présent/Bijdragen tot de Eigentijdse Geschiedenis 7 (2000): 189–237.

Midi (Noon) Lucien Backman Belgium, 1929 Archives: lost film Director: Lucien Backman

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Although often mentioned as one of the key figures of Belgian experimental cinema of the 1920s and although he became one of the leading members of the Union belge des cinéastes amateurs in the early 1930s, little is known of Lucien Backman apart from the fact that he worked as a cameraman. In 1929, he made Midi, which is considered to be a lost film shot in Brussels in the style of Ruttmann. It deals with urban life as the clock strikes noon. According to press reviews, the film shows floods of office clerks leaving through doors, fully-packed trams, construction sites coming to a standstill, restaurants filling with clients, and road workers having their lunch or taking a nap, in an ironical montage orchestrating all the details typical of a city at noon—a description that brings to mind several similar sequences in other city symphonies.

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In Midi, Backmann used reverse motion effects evoking Vertov. In 1930, Backman released La Vie à l’envers (Life Upside Down), consisting entirely of reverse-motion shots, contributing to Backman’s association with Surrealism by several critics. The screening history of Midi is also remarkable. As Jeffrey Geiger noted, Backman’s city symphony was part of a film program sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art that took place at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC in March 1936. The program also included Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), Paul Rotha’s The Face of Britain (1935), Len Lye’s A Color Box (1935), an unidentified Russian short, and an excerpt of Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. Steven Jacobs

further reading Davay, Paul, Cinéma de Belgique (Gembloux: Duculot, 1973), 162. Geiger, Jeffrey, American Documentary Film: Projecting the Nation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 111. Giménez, Estrella de la Torre, “Les Essais cinématographiques de René Magritte,” Mélusine XXIV (theme issue on “Le Cinéma des Surréalistes” edited by Henri Béhar) (2004): 125. Thys, Marianne et al., Belgian Cinema/Le Cinéma belge/De Belgische film (Ghent: Ludion, 1999), 162.

Kermesse Flamande (Flemish Carnival) Dutch Title: Vlaamse kermis Carlo Queeckers Belgium, 1929 250 m. Archives: lost film Director: Carlo Queeckers Camera: Camy Cluytens and Paul Flon

257 Little is known about the two lost city films that painter Carlo Queeckers made about Brussels in 1929: Kermesse flamande and Mélodie bruxelloise. The first one, Queeckers’s debut film, depicts the popular Marolles neighborhood. La Nation belge described the film as made of shots that are not only original but that also give away a sophisticated artistic taste. Of particular interest is the tour

of the Hôtel de Ville that we only discover gradually and that literally launches its Saint Michael [statue] into the sky. We like its quarters, churches, and panoramas seen from unexpected angles. . . . This film is an excellent work, full of rhythm and movement [but] its too rapid succession of images hurts the eye.

stramilano

In the same year, Queeckers also made Mélodie bruxelloise or Brusselse Melodie (1929), which covers several quarters of the Belgian capital in a similar style. It is one of the many city films with a musical term in its title. Later, Queeckers made a documentary on the abbey of Tongerloo (1930) and Paienne (1933), which was shot in Portugal. Steven Jacobs

further reading “Un jeune cinéaste belge: Carlo Queeckers,” La Libre Belgique (30 November 1934). Thys, Marianne et al., Belgian Cinema/Le Cinéma belge/De Belgische film (Ghent: Ludion, 1999), 162.

Stramilano Corrado D’Errico Italy, 1929 35mm, 15’30”, b/w, silent, no intertitles Archives: Fondazione Cineteca Italiana, Instituto Luce Rome Director: Corrado D’Errico Scenario: Corrado D’Errico Production: Za Bum Distribution: Instituo LUCE Premiere: 1929

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The history of the city symphony is dominated by artists who identified as progressives and radicals, or in some rare cases, such as that of Walter Ruttmann, artists whose politics appear to have undergone a rather startling transformation, from a position that was at least centrist or moderate, to one that was far to the right of center. Stramilano (1929), directed by Corrado D’Errico (1902–41) and produced by the company of the Za Bum music hall by Mario Mattoli and Luciano Ramo for Instituto LUCE, was not only Italy’s first contribution to the city symphonies cycle, it was also the earliest example of such a film to emerge from a fascist nation. That said, the politics of Stramilano could only be described as subdued. Instead, D’Errico

Anthony Kinik

further reading Lista, Giovanni, Cinéma et photographie futuristes (Milan: Skira, 2008), 125–31. Paulicelli, Eugenia, Italian Style: Fashion and Film from Early Cinema to the Digital Age (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016).

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places the emphasis on capturing the modernity of Milan, on capturing those aspects of the city that have transformed it into “Stramilano,” a modern super-city. Milan, of course, was the city whose streetcars produced the “mighty noise” that inspired F.T. Marinetti and his colleagues to write the “Manifesto of Futurism” and found the Futurist movement back in 1908. And given the fact that Stramilano is sometimes cited as an example of “second wave Futurism,” it is perhaps fitting that D’Errico devotes so much attention to streetcars leaving the terminus (in a manner reminiscent of Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, which was released the same year), to streetcars and automobiles competing for space on Milan’s busy streets, and to the city’s ample amounts of traffic. Like so many other city symphonies, Stramilano has a loose dawn-to-dusk structure to it. The film begins with the city awakening, the first signs of life, street-cleaners doing their work, the market getting underway, factory floors at rest before the start of the workday, cattle in a stockyard, traffic picking up, and, finally, factories moving into full production mode. Roughly ten minutes later, the film ends with a montage sequence that juxtaposes the modern city with the traditional one, and includes scenes of electrical advertisements flashing their brands (FIAT, Magnesia S. Pellegrino, Brill, et cetera) hypnotically, the Duomo framed by busy nighttime streets in a ghostly double-exposure, electrical illumination inside the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, melancholy statuary on top of the Duomo, a split-screen sequence of trains leaving Milano Centrale, and, finally, a stately, symmetrical shot of the Duomo at night. As the above description suggests, while the film is clearly derivative, it is notable for a number of surprising avant-garde flourishes (multiple exposures, split screens, and an interest in making inanimate objects “dance,” among other things), as well as a few rather unexpected set pieces. These showcases include a visit to one of the rayon factories on the outskirts of Milan that helped make Italy a leader in the production of this “artificial silk” in the interwar years; a visit to a Milan fashion house, where a group of well-to-do women have the latest fashions (presumably rayon garments) modelled for them; a recital of modern and classical dance, as well as rhythmic gymnastics, featuring the incomparable Yia Ruskaya and her students; and a raucous performance by a hot jazz band in a nightclub.

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A Day in Liverpool (a.k.a. Liverpool: City Of Ships) Anson Dyer United Kingdom, 1929 35mm, 1990 ft., 33’09” (16 fps), b/w, silent, English intertitles Archives: BFI National Archive

a day in liverpool

Director: Anson Dyer Scenario: Matthew Anderson Production: The Liverpool Organisation

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In 1929 animation filmmaker Anson Dyer (1876–1962) made a film about Liverpool. Dyer, who for a while was even considered as the British equivalent of Walt Disney for his children’s cartoons and advertising shorts, portrays Liverpool as port city and, as the alternative title underlines, a “city of ships.” Sponsored by the Liverpool Council as a promotional film, A Day in Liverpool features the typical city symphony structure of a working day, starting with the arrival of dockworkers and office employees in the city in the morning, then showing labor until noon, lunch break, afternoon activities, and the crowds leaving after the end of the workday. The shots of the arrival and departure of the crowds by ferry, and the opening and closing of the boats’ ramps, recall Strand and Sheeler’s Manhatta (1921). However, in Dyer’s city film, the people of Liverpool continue their trip to the city center by double-decker buses and trains. In addition, landmarks, including both classical and new and modern constructions, underscore the city’s specificity. Special focus is placed upon the promotion of the port and its various activities: we see the processing, storing, and trading of goods such as cotton, tobacco, fruit, timber, and cattle as well as passenger ships. Intertitles emphasize Liverpool’s importance as a seaport, from a national and international perspective. The construction of new buildings, including Liverpool Cathedral (which would only be completed in 1978), illustrate the growth of this dynamic and vivid city. The film also had an afterlife: material from A Day in Liverpool has been reused several times for other productions, such as the British Pathé documentary This in Our Time (1957) and Terence Davies’ autobiographical documentary Of Time and the City (2008). Eva Hielscher

further reading Roberts, Les, Film, Mobility and Urban Space: A Cinematic Geography of Liverpool (Liverpool: Liverpool Universiry Press, 2012).

Skyscraper Symphony Robert Florey United States, 1929 35mm, 249.6 m, 9’00” (18 fps), b/w, silent, no intertitles Archives: George Eastman Museum, Academy Film Archive

Skyscraper Symphony (1929) by Frenchman Robert Florey (1900–79) explores the effects of modernity on the urban dweller in concert with other city symphony films. Yet unlike such early variations as Manhatta (1921) and Twentyfour Dollar Island (1927), the film overlooks the city’s traditional status as a bustling commercial seaport, focusing solely on the city’s lofty buildings often seen through radically oblique angles and destabilizing viewpoints. Like his earlier Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra (with Slavko Vorkapich, 1928) Skyscraper Symphony explores the adverse impact of urban life while incorporating a tourist’s gaze. As a “Parisian in America,” he problematizes the city symphony film, by combining excitement and humor with ambivalence, showing subjective views of looming buildings and employing extensive footage of architectural contrasts, juxtaposing traditional, often French-inspired stylistic idioms with the angular configurations of New York’s new, stepped-back Art Deco skyscrapers. Considerable attention is paid to the entrapping effects of an uptown skyscraper hospital complex devoid of urban inhabitants, which acts as a synecdoche for metropolitan life. The major cinematic precursor to Skyscraper Symphony is the lost travelogue Bonjour New York, in which Florey recorded Maurice Chevalier’s arrival in 1928. Skyscraper Symphony was shot in the early morning, after Florey was kept awake by the pounding of the riveter’s gun. He was responding to New York post-war building boom which created a virtual “skyscraper mania,” affecting both urban geography and popular imagery. Skyscraper Symphony possesses a circular temporal logic, in which its denouement serves as a beginning. Crosscutting from an excavation site to the panning of an adjacent skyscraper, the film signals that Manhattan’s tall buildings will rise interminably, linking past, present, and future time. Merrill Schleier

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Director: Robert Florey Camera: Slavko Vorkapich Production: Robert Florey Distribution: Europa-Film Premiere: August 1929 (New York)

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further reading Horak, Jan-Christopher, Lovers of Cinema: The First American Avant Garde: 1919–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). Taves, Brian, Robert Florey: The French Expressionist (London and New Jersey, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1987).

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Fukkõ Teito Shinfoni (Symphony of the Rebuilding of the Imperial Metropolis) Tokyo Institute for Municipal Research Japan, 1929 35mm, 570 m., 32’ (16 fps), b/w, silent, Japanese intertitles Archive: National Film Center of The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo Production: Tokyo Institute for Municipal Research Premiere: 19 October 1929, Hibiya City Hall, Tokyo

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Fukkõ Teito Shinfoni focuses on the rebuilding of Tokyo after the 1 September 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, which devastated Tokyo, causing an enormous fire that burned 36 square kilometers to the ground and killed 68,000 people. Following the disaster, the master commission for rebuilding the city seized the opportunity to make extensive changes in regulations affecting the cityscape, most importantly replacing traditional modes of wood construction and introducing new architectural styles and materials, such as reinforced concrete and steel. Tokyo was rebuilt, re-emerging as a modern metropolis. In October and November 1929, the Tokyo shisei chosa kai (Tokyo Institute for Municipal Research), which was established in 1922 by mayor Shinpei Goto, organized an exhibition, Teito Fukko (or Rebirth of the Imperial Capital), to show the progress achieved thus far. For this exhibition the Institute also produced the film Fukkõ Teito Shinfoni, which was screened at the city hall in Hibiya. The film follows the city symphony dawn-to-dusk structure, portraying a day in the life of the rebuilt Japanese metropolis. We see the city’s bridges over the Sumida River, modern means of transportation, streets, markets, factories, houses, offices, government buildings, work, leisure, and neon lights at night, as well as other characteristic city symphony motifs. In addition, reconstruction activities are underlined. The film also includes a return trip from Tokyo to Yokohama, showing different urban zones and the city’s spatial expansion. In its structure and content of modern urban life, Fukkõ Teito Shinfoni relates to other city symphonies of the era. Its filmmakers were most

probably familiar with Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, as it was widely screened in Japan in 1928, where it was proclaimed a great work of art, even though it was met with some ambivalence. Eva Hielscher

further reading survey of city symphonies

Dähne, Chris, “Cinematic Urbanism and Architecture of Tokyo in Times of Epochal Upheaval,” Eselsohren 2, 1+2 (2014): 199–224. Dähne, Chris, Die Stadtsinfonien der 1920er Jahre: Architektur zwischen Film, Fotografie und Literatur (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013).

São Paulo: A Symphonia da Metrópole (São Paulo: A Symphony of the Metropolis) Adalberto Kemeny and Rudolpho Rex Lustig Brazil, 1929 35mm, 1765m., 90’ (16 fps), b/w, silent, Portuguese intertitles Archive: Cinemateca Brasileira Director: Adalberto Kemeny and Rudolpho Rex Lustig Intertitles: Niraldo Ambra Production: Rex Film Distribution: Paramount Premiere: 6 September 1929 (Paramount Movie Theater, São Paulo)

A South American city symphony—yet with European roots, since its filmmakers were émigrés from Hungary—São Paulo: a Symphonia da Metrópole depicts the Brazilian metropolis as a young, vivid, modern, progressive city, underscoring that both the film and the city are not lagging behind their European counterparts. The film was released by the Brazilian branch of Paramount, their press releases describe it as depicting the “thundering rhythms of progress” of the “brain-city of Brazil.” São Paulo: a Symphonia da Metrópole is clearly inspired by Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927) and Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926). Especially in its first part, it quite literally follows European examples in its temporal structure and portrayal of the awakening of the city and the start of the workday, until its climax in urban acceleration just before noon, beautifully represented by a montage of “kaleidoscopic” shots, in which the screen is split into multiple parts, not unlike some of the emblematic shots in Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929). However, in contrast to Berlin and Man with a Movie Camera, Kemeny and Lustig use numerous intertitles, giving us information on the locales and institutions as well as on their history. In

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addition, unlike most other feature-length city symphonies that include an almost ritual arrival in the city by train or ferry, the filmmakers locate the spectator as a city dweller in urban São Paulo from the beginning. This is also emphasized in one of the first intertitles, in which they dedicate their city symphony to the inhabitants of the Brazilian metropolis. Nevertheless, in the middle of the film, after the lunch break scenes with panoramic shots taken from a loudspeaker above the city, there is an arrival by train, which marks a sudden change in style. At this point, the film becomes a traditional tourist travelogue or an educational film on the making of snake and spider antitoxins in the Butantam Institute, a short documentary about the state prison and its unique prisoners’ rehabilitation program, and a historical short about the 1822 events surrounding Brazilian independence. After this touristic intervention, the film resumes its city-symphony form, with impressions of high-rise buildings, rhythms of factory work and machines in the industrial areas, concluding with a vision of the São Paulo of the future, resembling the futurist city of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Kemeney (1901–69) and Lustig (1901–70), who began their careers at the Pathé laboratories in Budapest and at Ufa in Berlin before emigrating to Brazil in the mid-1920s, worked 14 months on their São Paulo film symphony. Besides their focus on the architecture and geography of the city and their attention to radio broadcasting, the press, trade, the city’s financial sector, the coffee business, and university faculties, the filmmakers also pay attention to social and economic inequality with a magical sequence in which a god-like hand hovers above the city panorama, giving a penny to the poor and piles of banknotes to the rich. With this highly ambivalent image, oscillating between a form of social criticism denouncing inequality and a reactionary acceptance of a divine order of things, Kemeny and Lustig at least suggest that not everybody benefited equally from São Paulo’s expansion. Eva Hielscher

further reading

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Dähne, Chris, Die Stadtsinfonien der 1920er Jahre: Architektur zwischen Film, Fotografie und Literatur (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013). Machado Jr., Rubens, “Cinema alemão e sinfonias urbanas do entreguerras,” in Jorge de Almeida and Wolfgang Bader (eds.), Pensamento Alemão no Século XX, Vol. III: Grandes protagonistas e recepção das obras no Brasil (São Paulo: Cosac Naify and Goethe Institut, 2013), 23–48. Meneguello, Cristina, “São Paulo, a Symphonia da Metropole 1929,” Eselsohren 2, 1+2 (2014): 183–98. Michael, Joachim, “Stumme Symphonien der peripheren Moderne: ‘São Paulo, A Sinfonia da Metrópole,’ Regie: Adalberto Kemeny, Rudolf Rex Lustig,” in Heinz-Peter Preußer (ed.), Späte Stummfilme: Ästhetische Innovation im Kino 1924–1930 (Marburg: Schüren, 2017), 328–44.

Lisbôa: Cronica anedótica (Lisbon: Anecdotal Chronicle) José Leitão de Barros Portugal, 1930

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35mm, c. 90’, b/w, silent, Portuguese intertitles Archives: Cinemateca Portuguesa Director: José Leitão de Barros Camera: Costa de Macedo Intertitles: Feliciano Santos Actors: Adelina Abranches, Chaby Pinheiro, Alves da Cunha, Estevão Amarante, Irene Isidro Costinha Premiere: 1930 (Cinema São Luís, Lisbon)

In his cinematic portrait of Lisbon, Portuguese playwright and film director José Leitão de Barros (1896–1967) does not focus so much on its spaces and architecture but rather on its inhabitants involved in all kinds of activities. Or, as the opening credits state, it is a film showing “how people are born, how people live, and much more in . . . LISBON”— the name of the city getting larger while we see shots of trains at the station and while the camera scans the harbor. Including nine reels, the film’s ambitions are encyclopedic, taking us to an endless string of Lisbon places and institutions such as nurseries, schools, the navy, the army, offices, shops, markets, factories, sports grounds, parks, the beach at Cascais, and tourist sites such as the Belém Tower. In the context of his exploration of Lisbon’s urban landscape, Leitão de Barros portrays all kinds of professions and colorful characters such as street vendors, traffic cops, sailors, dockworkers, tram conductors, dandy-like strollers, shop girls, musicians, knife-grinders, washerwomen, beggars, and newspaper boys among others. Several sequences are marked by an expository mode while others tend towards the poetic, and still others evoke the hustle and bustle of the city by means of a highly mobile camera, the use of multiple exposures, or remarkable viewpoints such as the high angle (or even vertical) shots from the famous Santa Justa Lift in the city center. Leitão de Barros’s favorite trick, though, is slow motion, which is used in sequences depicting children rope jumping or fighting, women carrying baskets, cavalrymen horse riding, and all kinds of sports, from fencing and tennis to athletics and soccer. First and foremost, the film’s striking characteristic is its ambivalent position between documentary and fiction. Shot on location in June 1929,

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the film, as explicitly indicated in the opening credits, includes many scenes in which professional actors interpret dramatic situations that are staged for the benefit of the camera. However, there is no character development as the film’s structure is entirely episodic, moving from one “anecdotal” situation to the other. Many of these sketches are comical in nature such as the intersecting phone calls between two lovers and two business men, men touching a mannequin doll in a shop, a traffic cop seduced by a woman driving a car, a tram halted by a horse, a boy and an old women soliciting people for money, et cetera. Steven Jacobs

further reading Baptista, Tiago, “Documentário, modernismo e revista em ‘Lisboa, Crónica Anedótica’,” Doc On-line 6 (August 2009): 109–27.

Esencia de Verbena (Essence of Verbena) Ernesto Giménez Caballero Spain, 1930 35 mm, 12’00”, b/w, silent, no intertitles (Spanish opening titles) Archives: Filmoteca Espanola Director: Ernesto Giménez Caballero Camera: S. Pérez de Pedro Premiere: Atheneum, San Sebastian, 1930

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Ernesto Giménez Caballero (1899–1988) was a Spanish writer, diplomat, and pioneer of Falangism. Together with Luis Buñuel among others, he was the founder of the first ciné-club in Spain and he also made some short documentaries. One of them is Esencia de Verbena—the Spanish word “verbena” does not only refer to a flower but also means festival or open-air dance. Subtitled as a “Poema documental de Madrid en 12 imagenes,” the film thus first and foremost visualizes several Madrid festivals (San Antonio, San Isidro, San Lorenzo, el Carmen, la Paloma), presenting the city as a space of leisure and festivities. Much attention goes to several fairground attractions such as automatons, merry-go-rounds, roller coasters, and Ferris wheels—in the process, Giménez Caballero uses these devices to select unusual camera positions and to create a film based on circular patterns and movements. The film also includes some remarkable multipleexposure shots, sometimes resulting in almost surreal juxtapositions such

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as a combination of a city gate with traffic, pigeons, and a depiction of the Virgin. Strikingly, the filmmaker also attempted to combine traditional religious imagery with modern artworks by Goya, Picasso, Picabia, and Maruja Mallo, who wrote a pamphlet entitled Verbena a few years before the film’s release. The film was screened at the second Congrès International du Cinéma Indépendant (CICI) in Brussels in November 1930, where it was praised by Jean Painlevé among others. Later, a sound version of the film was released with a soundtrack combining a descriptive voice-over commentary and fairground music. Steven Jacobs

further reading Anderson, Andrew A., Ernesto Giménez Caballero: The Vanguards Years (1921–1931) (Newark, NJ: Juan de la Cuesta, 2011). Llopis, Juan Manuel, Juan Piqueras: El “Delluc” Español (Valencia: editiones textos Filmoteca, 1988), 274. Torres Hortelano, Lorenzo J. (ed.), Directory of World Cinema: Spain (Bristol: Intellect, 2011).

À propos de Nice (On the Topic of Nice) Jean Vigo France, 1930 35mm, 2057 ft., 27’ (20 fps), b/w, silent, no intertitles Archives: BFI National Archive, Cinémathèque Royal de Belgique Director: Jean Vigo Scenario: Jean Vigo Camera: Boris Kaufman Première: 28 May 1930 (Paris, Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier)

In 1928, Jean Vigo found a job in the Nice studios of the Franco-Film production company. He cherished the city, its monuments, and its natural setting, but he only had contempt for its role as a meeting place for the rich. This ambivalent position also characterizes Vigo’s city symphony, which comprises the stereotypical images of the Mediterranean luxury resort: the sea, the beach, regattas, palm trees, upperclass strollers on the Promenade des Anglais, grand hotels, ballrooms, et cetera. However, these clichés are juxtaposed with shots of Nice’s other side, consisting of an urban landscape of poverty, slums with

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open sewers, garbage, and lepers. Moreover, the elegant parts of Nice are rendered in a grotesque way: the beau monde is not always beautiful, sunbathers (who are associated with crocodiles) are completely burned by the sun, and footage of elegant ladies is sardonically intercut with shots of their dogs and an ostrich. This fascination for the grotesque culminates in the extensive portrayal of Nice’s carnival. Vigo’s idiosyncratic masterpiece is marked by a fluid fusion of styles resonating with several trends of 1920s vanguard cinema. Evoking the love for atmospheric effects of French Impressionist cinema, Vigo focuses on the overwhelming appeal of material and sensitive phenomena such as the presence of water. The waves of the sea create a flowing rhythm that also marks other parts of the film, such as the swaying aerial shots of the city or the exploration of strollers on the Promenade who are caught by a highly mobile (and often candid) camera. The film’s grotesque elements indicate Vigo’s affinities with Surrealism, which are also expressed by the use of trick effects (such as in the opening sequence with doll tourists arriving by train, who are eventually raked in by a croupier) and the ample use of alienating juxtapositions (e.g., dancing women in slow-motion intercut with funerary statues and phallic factory chimneys). Last but not least, Vigo and cameraman Boris Kaufman evoke Soviet cinema with their use of tilted angles, unconventional camera positions, alternating camera speeds, and striking montage effects creating a poignant form of social critique. Steven Jacobs

further reading Gomes, Paulo Emilo Salles, Jean Vigo (London: Faber and Faber, 1998). Temple, Michael, Jean Vigo (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).

Montparnasse (a.k.a. Montparnasse: Poème du Café Crème) (Montparnasse, a.k.a. Montparnasse: Poem of the Café Crème)

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Eugène Deslaw France, 1930 35mm, 15’00” (24 fps), b/w, silent, no intertitles (French opening titles) Archives: Les Archives françaises du film du CNC, MoMA Director: Eugène Deslaw Camera: Eugène Deslaw Production: Les Films Jean Sefert

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Together with Kaufman and Galitzine’s Les Halles (1927), Eugène Deslaw’s 1930 film portrait of Montparnasse belongs to a handful of Parisian “outsider” city symphoniettas made by immigrant filmmakers that focus on a single neighborhood in the French capital. Eugène Deslaw arrived in Paris in 1922, after leaving his native Ukraine for Czechoslovakia. In 1928, he made Les Nuits éléctriques, followed a year later by his famous La Marche des Machines, both of which show parallels with the city symphony concept. In Montparnasse, Deslaw depicts the famous quarter of artists and the avant-garde (among the celebrated residents we recognize Luis Buñuel, Tsuguharu Foujita, and Futurist artists such as Marinetti, Russolo, and Prampolini). But the filmmaker also shows the district’s everyday life, showing people working and playing. In an experimental montage, Deslaw plays with urban structures and details, rotates street scenes, and films the busy neighborhood from different and unusual perspectives. Montparnasse comprises footage of modern architecture, sculptures, and paintings, as well as sandwich-men, street artists, market women, ordinary people, and even a herd of goats. In contrast with his other silent films primarily concerned with architecture and machines, Montparnasse focuses instead on people, inspiring the camera to take on more of a handheld, personal quality. The film was originally silent; in 1931 it was rereleased with a musical soundtrack. Eva Hielscher

further reading Deslaw, Eugène, Ombre blanche, lumière noire. Introduction by Lubomir Hosejko (Paris: Éditions Paris expérimental, 2004). Juan, Myriam, “Le Cinéma documentaire dans la rue parisienne,” Sociétés & Représentations 17, 1 (2004): 291–314.

Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer Germany, 1930 35mm, 1.839 m (restored version), 74’, b/w, silent, German intertitles Archives: Filmmuseum München, Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, EYE Filmmuseum, Fondazione Cineteca Italiana, Danske Filminstitutet, Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, Cinémathèque Suisse, MoMA, et al.

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Director: Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer Screenplay: Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, Curt Siodmak Camera: Eugen Schüfftan and Fred Zinnemann Production: Moritz Seeler for Filmstudio 1929 Actors: Erwin Splettstößer, Brigitte Borchert, Wolfgang von Waltershausen, Christl Ehlers, and Annie Schreyer Premiere: 4 February 1930 (UFA Theater Kurfürstendamm, Berlin)

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Menschen am Sonntag is the result of the collaborative effort of some individuals a number of filmmakers who would go on to play important roles in Hollywood cinema: Robert Siodmak (1900–73) and Edgar G. Ulmer (1904– 72) directed the film based on a screenplay written by Robert Siodmak in collaboration with Billy Wilder (1906–2002) and Curt Siodmak (1902–2000), while Eugen Schüfftan (1893–1977) and Fred Zinnemann (1907–97) were responsible for the cinematography. The film follows the lives of a group of young people in Berlin: Edwin, a taxi driver, who lives with Annie, a model; Wolfgang, a wine merchant, and his new girlfriend Christl, a film extra; and a record shop sales girl Brigitte, who is Christl’s best friend. As Lutz Koepnick noted, their professions and identities are inherently connected to urban modernity—to the notion of social upward mobility, the rise of the culture industries, and the circulation of commodities. During the weekend, they leave their jobs and apartments for one of the lakes and woods near Berlin to walk, bathe, picnic, go for a boat ride, play hide and seek, and listen to gramophone music. While they are relaxing, swimming, sunbathing, or playing games, the film draws attention to their flirtations, rivalries, and jealousies. Juxtaposing the excitement of the city to the leisure of a country-side lake, the film touches upon the fact that, in the late 1920s, leisure and holidays became in reach of the working classes and lower middle-classes for the first time—the institutionalization of leisure is, of course, closely connected to urban modernity and its reliance on the mechanization of time and Taylorization. A low-budget production, the film is a remarkable blend of documentary and feature film using characters impersonated by non-professional actors who actually worked at the jobs depicted in the film. Since they all had weekday jobs, the film was shot over a number of Sundays in the summer and fall of 1929. Showing authentic scenes with ordinary people, the film is marked by a documentary tone as the vague plot does not imply any character development or highlights in the drama. With a sketchy storyline emerging from the interplay of accidental circumstances and unforeseen encounters, the film privileges atmospheric detail over narrative progression. At the end, life seems to go back to where it started as the closing intertitle states: “And then on Monday . . . it is back to work . . . back to the

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everyday . . . back to the daily grind. . . . Four . . . million . . . wait for . . . the next Sunday.” This loosely-knit narration tallies perfectly with the film’s camerawork. With many unstable hand-held camera shots, Schüfftan and Zinnemann explore the textures of metropolitan life, creating a patchwork of fleeting sights, shifting angles and perspectives. Evoking the gaze of a roaming flâneur, Menschen am Sonntag often gives the impression that the camera is actively scanning the cityscape in search of something worth our attention. Steven Jacobs

further reading Bellour, Raymond, Les Hommes, le dimanche, de Robert Siodmak et Edgar G. Ulmer (Yellow Now, 2009). Koepnick, Lutz, “The Bearable Lightness of Being: ‘People on Sunday’ (1930),” in Noah Isenberg (ed.), Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2009), 237–54.

A City Symphony Herman Weinberg United States, 1930 35mm, b/w, silent Archives: lost film Director: Herman Weinberg Scenario: Herman Weinberg Production: Herman Weinberg Distribution: Herman Weinberg Premiere: 1930

Herman G. Weinberg (1908–83) would become known as one of the greatest American film critics of his generation, but in the early 1930s he was also an aspiring filmmaker, and his debut film was the now lost film called A City Symphony, which Weinberg repurposed for his 1933 film Autumn Fire. Anthony Kinik

further reading Uricchio, William, “The City Viewed: The Films of Leyda, Browning, and Weinberg,” in Jan-Christopher Horak (ed.), Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film AvantGarde, 1919–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 287–314.

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Bezúcˇelná Procházka (Aimless Walk) Alexandr Hackenschmied Czechoslovakia, 1930

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35mm, 219 m., 7’40” (24 fps), b/w, silent, no intertitles Archives: Národni filmový archiv, Praha, BFI National Archive Director: Alexandr Hackenschmied Scenario: Alexandr Hackenschmied Production: Alexandr Hackenschmied Cast: Bedrˇich Votýpka (man with hat) Premiere: 21 November 1930 (Kotva cinema, Prague)

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In 1930, Czech avant-garde photographer and critic Alexandr Hackenschmied (1907–2004), who would change his name to Hammid when he emigrated to the United States, borrowed a Kinamo camera and made a truly independent film. Aimless Walk can be considered a city symphony about Prague with a centrifugal effect. Whereas other city symphonies open with the arrival in the city by train, boat, or other modern means of transportation, Hackenschmied’s film takes us in the opposite direction, showing a tram ride that starts in the city center and takes us to the outskirts of Prague, to the half-industrial, half-rural landscape of Libenˇ, with its factory chimneys, fallow fields, trees, and reflecting water surfaces. In fact, the film’s working title was Na okraji or On the Outskirts. Stylistically, the tram ride recalls the train sequence of Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927), as Hackenschmied combines shots of, on, and from the tram in a rapid and rhythmic montage, displaying and merging multiple perspectives into a kaleidoscopic whole, which evokes the experience of travelling fast in the modern city. This experience becomes personal and personified, since, unusually for city symphony films, this one has a protagonist—a man with a hat, played by Hackenschmied’s friend, non-professional actor Bedrˇich Votýpka, who takes the tram, goes for a walk on the Libenˇ peninsula along the shores of the Vltava river, sits smoking in the grass, and finally returns to the city. What’s more, one half of him returns to the city center of Prague, while his doppelganger stays on the outskirts. He is an urban wanderer, though not quite a flâneur observing and diving into the urban crowds, but one that goes for a walk to explore the city’s semi-industrial suburbs. The film premiered in a program Hackenschmied himself organized in Prague between November 1930 and February 1931, comprising other city symphonies such as Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926), Vigo’s À propos de Nice (1930), and Kaufman’s In Spring (1929). After his first film Aimless Walk,

Hackenschmied made another city symphony, Prague Castle (1931). Later he made documentaries and advertising films in addition to experimental films, such as Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), made with his then-wife Maya Deren. Eva Hielscher

further reading survey of city symphonies

Drubek, Natascha, “ ‘Bezúcˇelná Procházka/Aimless Walk’ (1930): Alexander Hackenschmied’s ‘Film Study’ of a Tram Ride to the Outskirts of Prague— Libenˇ,” Bohemia 52, 1 (2012): 76–107.

Douro, Faina Fluvial (Labor on the Douro River) Manoel de Oliveira Portugal, 1931 35mm, 18’00”, b/w, silent, Portuguese opening titles Archives: Cinemateca Portuguesa, BFI National Archive, Cinémathèque française, Les Archives françaises du film du CNC Director: Manoel de Oliveira Camera: António Mendes Production: Manoel de Oliveira Premiere: September 1931 (International Congress of Film Critics, Lisbon)

Douro: faina fluvial is the first film by Manoel de Oliveira (1908–2015). It was greatly admired by leading critics and artists such as Luigi Pirandello and Émile Vuillermoz. Inspired by Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927), which he described as his “most useful lesson in film technique,” Oliveira borrowed the money to buy a 35mm camera and film stock to make a film dedicated to his hometown of Porto. He himself served as producer, scenarist, and editor, while his friend António Mendes was the cameraman. Between the remarkable opening and closing images of a lighthouse, Douro: faina fluvial consists of a rhythmic montage of shots of the sea, boats on the river, the famous metal Dom Luís I Bridge, and the colorful life on the quays filled with street vendors and their merchandise, longshoremen, fishermen, and dozens of men and women carrying heavy loads on their backs and heads. Panoramic shots of the city are intercut with close-ups of people and animals. Ruttmann’s New Objectivist aesthetic marks several sequences of Oliveira’s film, such as the part dedicated to the metal bridge, which is explored from various angles, or the rhythmic montage of shots

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of trains, cars, airplanes, and oxcarts, and various other passages combining the human and mechanical. However, Oliveira’s poetic documentary is also marked by a more impressionist approach, as can be seen in the use of shots going slowly out of focus or the omnipresence of water. Like Ivens and Franken’s Regen (1929), Storck’s Images d’Ostende (1929), and Vigo’s À propos de Nice (1930), Oliveira’s film plays on the mesmerizing aspects of moving water surfaces, while also evoking the ways natural elements determine the urban environment. First and foremost, Douro: faina fluvial deals with people, particularly the urban poor and their everyday activities. In so doing, Oliveira’s city symphony is also a gritty documentary on the harsh social circumstances of the laborers on the Douro riverbanks. The film’s focus on poverty and deprivation outraged Portuguese officials when it was screened in Lisbon in September 1931. In 1934, Oliveira re-edited and re-released the film with a soundtrack. Steven Jacobs

further reading Johnson, Randal, Manoel de Oliveira (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007). Peña, Richard, “Interview with Manoel de Oliveira,” Journal of the University Film and Video Association 35, 3 (1983): 7–14.

Weltstadt in Flegeljahren: Ein Bericht über Chicago (World City in Its Teens: A Report on Chicago, a.k.a. Chicago: A World City Stretches Its Wings) Heinrich Hauser Germany, 1931 35mm, 1687 m., 74’00” (20 fps), b/w, silent, German intertitles Archives: Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, EYE Filmmuseum Director: Heinrich Hauser

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Camera: Heinrich Hauser Production: Heinrich Hauser Distribution: Naturfilm Hubert Schonger Premiere: 4 October 1931 (Alhambra, Berlin)

In the spring and summer of 1931, German writer, traveler, photographer, and filmmaker Heinrich Hauser (1901–55) made a trip by car through the American Midwest, with Chicago as his main destination.

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This voyage resulted in a book, Feldwege nach Chicago or Dirt Tracks to Chicago, and a silent “city” film, Weltstadt in Flegeljahren. Whereas the book covers his entire journey, Hauser’s film concentrates on Chicago, with its skyline, skyscrapers, motorized traffic, local industries, labor, mechanized production, and places for leisure. The film begins on the Mississippi River before entering the city, gradually changing the natural landscape into an urbanized environment and traditional forms of manual labor into mechanized industry. Hauser creates a cross-section of Chicago, using an additive montage style, and by observing, recording, and showing the numerous facets and details he encounters. This portrait includes not only geographic-architectural aspects specific to Chicago, but also concerns different social and ethnic groups—in fact, the film presents a vivid cross-section of Chicago’s city dwellers, powerfully contrasting its rich and poor. Though Hauser considered Chicago to be “the most beautiful city in the world,” his city symphony is notable for its critique of the modern American city, and of the United States in general. Particularly in the film’s fourth section, Hauser shows the negative sides of the metropolis and the effects of mechanized production and rationalized labor: unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, and crime. His Chicago city symphony alternates between fascination and fear, curiosity and critique, enthusiasm and reservation. Weltstadt in Flegeljahren received positive reviews at its release, and it was praised for its documentary quality and social responsibility. Hauser was celebrated as an outsider of the film industry, who had managed to surpass the professionals with this silent film. Weltstadt in Flegeljahren was considered lost until the 1980s, when it was donated as part of a large collection to the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv in Koblenz. Hauser’s Chicago film has also survived in an original Dutch nitrate print, conserved at the Nederlands Filmmuseum (now the EYE Filmmuseum) since the 1940s; this was restored in the 1990s. Despite these restorations, Weltstadt in Flegeljahren remains largely unknown today. Eva Hielscher

further reading Ehmann, Antje, “Heinrich Hauser: Der Mann und die Medien,” in Klaus Kreimeier, Antje Ehmann, and Jeanpaul Goergen (eds.), Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland: Band 2: Weimarer Republik: 1918–1933 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005), 463–73. Goergen, Jeanpaul, Weltstadt in Fegeljahren: Ein Bericht über Chicago (Deutschland 1931), Aufgenommen von Heinrich Hauser: Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Edition Goergen, 1995). Svenshon, Helge, “Chicago: ‘Weltstadt in Flegeljahren’: Heinrich Hausers Filmbericht über Chicago,” Eselsohren 2, 1+2 (2014): 71–86.

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Manhattan Medley Bonney Powell United States, 1931

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35mm, 10’00, b/w, sound, no intertitles (English opening title) Archives: Academy Film Archive (Lobster Film/Film Preservation Associates collection), Light Cone Director: Bonney Powell Scenario: Bonney Powell Production: Fox-Movietone Distribution: Fox-Movietone Premiere: 1931

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In its opening moments, Bonney Powell’s Manhattan Medley bills itself in an intertitle as “a camera conception of the city of inconceivable contrasts—a symphony of paradox.” In doing so, Powell’s Fox-Movietone production invokes the city symphonies phenomenon in general, as well as Irving Browning’s City of Contrasts, which was released the same year, and Robert Flaherty’s Twenty-four Dollar Island (1926), which had called itself “a camera impression of New York,” in its opening intertitle. Sure enough, the images that follow play up New York’s stark contrasts: new vs. old; day vs. night; rich vs. poor; white vs. black; Occident vs. Orient; and so on. It’s a film that features many of the hallmarks of the city symphony—in terms of structure (morning-to-midnight form), content (stray cats and milk deliveries, commuters and mass transit, typists and traffic cops, skyscrapers and steam shovels, et cetera), and technique (oblique angles and unusual perspectives)—but the film is atypical in that it features much more of a tourist’s vision of the city than one typically finds in these films. Thus, as opposed to so many other city symphonies which avoid major attractions, frequently focusing on the “unknown city” instead, Manhattan Medley prominently features such tourist sites as Times Square, Central Park, and The Roxy theatre, and it also takes its viewers on a virtual tour of three of the city’s most famously colorful neighborhoods: the Lower East Side, Chinatown, and Harlem. Manhattan Medley is also an example of a city symphony that, along with Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927) and Sparling’s Rhapsody in Two Languages (1934), devotes a considerable amount of attention to metropolitan nightlife, including electrical illumination, musical theatre, wrestling, ballroom dancing, a couple of animated jitterbuggers, and a Prohibition-era cocktail bar where a bartender is vigorously preparing a rum drink. Among other things, Powell’s Manhattan Medley stands as a clear example of a shift in the city symphonies phenomenon away from films that were very closely tied to the artistic and political avant-garde, and that arose out of an art, film, photography, and design nexus that was a product of these

overlapping scenes, and films that originated in more of a commercial context and were either keenly aware of what was happening in the modern art world or were merely under the influence of the latest trends in the realm of film art. Here, the city symphonies style has become a kind of shorthand for the dynamics of the modern metropolis, one that was evidently considered particularly well suited to capturing New York City’s “symphony of paradox.” survey of city symphonies

Anthony Kinik

further reading Posner, Bruce (ed.), Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-garde Film 1893–1941 (New York, NY: Black Thistle Press and Anthology Film Archives, 2001).

City of Contrasts Irving Browning United States, 1931 16mm, 28’00, b/w, silent/sound Archives: MoMA Director: Irving Browning Scenario: Ben Witzler Production: Irving Browning/Sol Lesser Distribution: Principal Distributing Corporation Premiere: 1931

After an early career in motion pictures, where he worked with the Vitagraph Company, Browning (1895–1961) opened a photography studio with his brother in the early 1920s, and it was as a professional photographer that he made his living. Browning shot prolifically in the 1920s and 1930s, and his work ranged from artfully composed street views taken in the “straight” style, to social documentary photographs (especially after the onset of the Great Depression), to commissioned commercial work for clients like Vanity Fair and photomontage compositions for the likes of Cosmopolitan. Like a number of his New York contemporaries featured elsewhere in this collection, Browning had ties to the New York Film and Photo League, and his work was exhibited alongside that of Berenice Abbott, Margaret BourkeWhite, and Ralph Steiner. During this period, where Browning appeared to be at his most socially committed, he also produced a city symphony of New York that was released under the title City of Contrasts and that proved to be fairly influential.

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The film appears to have been released in two versions—a silent version, and a sound version featuring a score, non-synchronous sound effects, and some acerbic narration by Kelvin Keech—and the disparities between the two make for very different viewing experiences. This is most starkly evident during a sequence where Browning documents the grim conditions within one of New York’s “Hooverville” shanty towns with empathy, just as he had in his still photography. But in the sound version the narrator’s mocking tone is in full effect, referring to the desperation on view as a desirable example of “pioneer living,” and one that actually embodies the American Dream, for “each own their own home.” As its title suggests, the film is principally interested in capturing New York City as the vast site of powerful and compelling contrasts such as night vs. day, rich vs. poor, downtown vs. uptown, high vs. low, Occident vs. Orient, and so on. But as William Uricchio has pointed out, close inspection indicates that Browning was a savvy filmmaker, and his interest in contrast extended beyond mere theme to include composition and editing. Browning’s film appears to have been a direct influence on two later city symphonies: Manhattan Medley (1931), which is attributed to Bonney Powell, and Rhapsody in Two Languages (1934) by Gordon Sparling. Both films seem to have borrowed scenes directly from City of Contrasts: a touristic interest in Chinatown and the Lower East Side in the case of Manhattan Medley, and a virtuosic presentation of the city’s vibrant nightlife in the case of Rhapsody in Two Languages. Without the narration, Browning’s bravura camerawork and his eye for visual ironies (especially during sequences having to do with doormen and sandwich-board men in one case, and rooftop scenes in another) is more clearly evident, and at times Browning’s film even calls to mind Vigo’s À propos de Nice, most notably during a scene that documents the carnivalesque surrealism of Coney Island. Anthony Kinik

further reading Uricchio, William, “The City Viewed: The Films of Leyda, Browning, and Weinberg,” in Jan-Christopher Horak (ed.), Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 287–314.

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A Bronx Morning Jay Leyda United States, 1931 35mm, 325 m., 11’50” (24 fps)/ 14’12” (20 fps), b/w, silent, English intertitles Archives: BFI National Archive, MoMA, Österreichisches Filmmuseum

Jay Leyda’s (1910–88) contribution to the city symphony phenomenon presents a stark temporal and spatial alternative to the day-in-the-life-ofa-city structure that one finds so frequently in these films. As its title suggests, A Bronx Morning is an ode to morning activities in the South Bronx neighborhood that Leyda lived in at the time. It is composed of just three simple intertitles—which together form the sentence, “The Bronx does business and the Bronx lives on the street.”—along with an impressive array of street-level and street-focused shots that show a keen eye for the color and texture of everyday life. Robert Haller has commented that Leyda’s film amounts to “a city symphony on an intimate scale,” and, sure enough, the film begins with a standard city symphony motif—the arrival into the city—but instead of a ferryboat (as in Manhatta) or a speeding locomotive (as in Berlin), Leyda ushers us into the Bronx via elevated railway. Then, instead of the monumentalism typical of the New York city symphonies, the film provides us with a study of the patterns—both physical and social—of the Bronx’s street life. Leyda’s vision of his neighborhood was directly inspired by the Parisian photographer Eugène Atget, whose work had only recently been introduced to the world through the admiration of the Surrealists, and the film contains clear homages to Atget—most notably in the form of its treatment of shop windows and mannequins. But the film also shows the influence of Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott—both of whom had just recently returned to New York from Paris, both of whom were also devotees of Atget, and both of whom were part of the same New York Film and Photo League set as Leyda—as well as Paul Strand’s 1915–17 New York series, and its exuberant treatment of children’s street games anticipates Helen Levitt’s work by a number of years. Leyda’s A Bronx Morning is a very personal and impressionistic depiction of an Outer Borough neighborhood, and, as such, it stands as a particularly anti-iconic North American city film. It is not a film about the new

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Director: Jay Leyda Camera: Jay Leyda Montage: Jay Leyda Production: Jay Leyda Premiere: 1932 (Julien Levy Gallery, New York)

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New York, either—it features no skyscrapers, no construction sites—if anything, its focus has more to do with the persistence of the humanscale, the horizontal, and the traditional (as emblematized by its fixation on Hebrew signage) in the face of sweeping change. And herein lies the film’s retrospective poignancy, for Leyda’s neighborhood was one of many in the South Bronx that was destroyed beginning in the 1950s to make way for Robert Moses’s “Expressway World,” a tragedy that was captured all too eloquently by Marshall Berman in the pages of All That is Solid Melts Into Air. Leyda moved to New York City from Dayton, Ohio in 1929 to work as Ralph Steiner’s assistant. By 1932 he had become interested in becoming a political filmmaker and he enrolled in the cinematography course at Moscow’s State Film School and brought a copy of his film with him. He managed to show A Bronx Morning to Eisenstein, and, on the basis of this screening, he was admitted into the directing course. When he returned to New York, Leyda became an assistant film curator at the Museum of Modern Art. He would go on to translate Eisenstein’s writings into English, and his 1960 book Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film became a standard work of film history. Anthony Kinik and Eva Hielscher

further reading Uricchio, William, “The City Viewed: The Films of Leyda, Browning, and Weinberg,” in Jan-Christopher Horak (ed.), Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 287–314.

A Day in Santa Fe Lynn Riggs and James Hughes US, 1931 16mm, 29’, b/w, silent, English intertitles Archives: New Mexico State Records Center and Archives

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Directors: Lynn Riggs and James Hughes Camera: James Hughes Premiere: 6 January 1932 (La Fonda Hotel, Santa Fe)

In the early 1920s, Cherokee dramatist and poet Lynn Riggs (1899–1954) lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, while recovering from tuberculosis. At that time, Santa Fe was in the process of developing from a small village

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to a little town that attracted many progressive artists who came to paint the landscape and the indigenous people. They were joined by several social reformers and patrons of the arts, turning Santa Fe into a “Greenwich Village of the West.” Riggs embraced this dynamic mix of Pueblo art and modernism that would soon gain widespread recognition through works such as Ansel Adams and Mary Hunter Austin’s Taos Pueblo (1930) and Georgia O’Keefe’s Ranchos Church, New Mexico (1930–1), and it informs his 1931 film, which he made in collaboration with the cameraman James Hughes. As the title suggests, the film portrays life in Santa Fe during the course of a single day, a format structuring many city symphonies. Riggs and Hughes evoke daily life in Santa Fe by a series of street views showing the silhouette of a church, pedestrians, cars, an orchestra playing at the Plaza, an artist working in his studio, and so forth. Using poetic intertitles, Riggs and Hughes also develop a poetic mode in their imagery as most of the shots are primarily close-ups that create a high level of abstraction: a hand placing milk bottles in front of doors early in the morning, hands opening doors, a sprinkler on a lawn, machine parts that start to work, a blowing steam whistle, wheels of a speeding car, feet of people walking, a hand plastering a wall, another hand sharpening pencils, et cetera. Riggs and Hughes repeatedly link the small-town setting to the surrounding landscape and the natural elements: shots of a walking donkey, shifting clouds, blossoms, or a little bell moving in the wind indicate that nature rather than industrial modernity determines the place. A ritual rain dance is followed by a rain shower, suggesting an interest in animism, while bringing to mind the fascination for ephemeral effects that one finds in French impressionist cinema. Santa Fe is first and foremost presented as a place of leisure, however, with sequences showing people swimming, having cocktails in a garden, or taking a siesta. Together with frequent shots of people looking directly into the lens, these images of a carefree environment evoke the conventions of a home movie, whereas other shots are reminiscent of modernist photographers such as Ansel Adams or Edward Weston, both of whom worked extensively in the Southwest. Steven Jacobs

further reading Cox, James H., “The Cross and the Harvest Dance: Lynn Riggs’ and James Hughes’ A Day in Santa Fe,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 32, 4 (2015): 384–98.

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Gamla Stan (Old Town, a.k.a. Symphony of the Streets) Stig Almqvist, Erik Asklund, Eyvind Johnson, and Artur Lundkvist Sweden, 1931

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35mm, 497 m., 18’00”, b/w, sound Archives: Svenska Filminstitutet Director: Stig Almqvist, Erik Asklund, Eyvind Johnson, Artur Lundkvist Scenario: Eyvind Johnson Camera: Elner Åkesson Montage: Erik Asklund, Artur Lundkvist Music: Erik Bengtson Production: AB Svensk Filmindustri Distribution: AB Svensk Filmindustri Cast: Erik Asklund (poem reader), Josef Kjellgren (wanderer), Inga Lena Larsson (the girl), unemployed sailor (the boy) Premiere: 23 November 1931 (Skandia, Stockholm), also screened in May 1932 at the cinema Sture together with Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928)

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With a title referring to the old city center of Stockholm, Gamla Stan is an avant-garde sound city symphony about the Swedish capital entering into the modern era. Made by a group of young intellectuals in the summer of 1931, it starts with a poem by Artur Lundkvist and Erik Asklund, the latter reciting the verses in front of the camera. The poem, which was also published in a Stockholm newspaper at the time, addresses the Old Town of Stockholm as a woman in different guises, and it expresses the young intellectuals’affirmation of modernity and the coming of a new era for Gamla Stan. The film follows a dawn-to-dusk structure and shows the small and narrow alleys of the medieval city center together with modern streets with traffic policemen, motorized traffic, and busy pedestrians. There are high-angle shots and numerous atmospheric images of water, including puddles and wet pavements during a rain shower in the afternoon. Clearly, the film was inspired by Ruttmann’s Berlin and Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. Moreover, in its rudimentary story of a young couple and the depiction of narrow and deserted streets, Gamla Stan also recalls Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures: A girl comes home in the wee hours to sleep through the day while a sailor wanders the streets of Stockholm until they meet by chance at night at the end of the film. Erik Asklund (1908–80), Artur Lundkvist (1906–91), and Josef Kjellgren (1907–48), who apparently appears in the film as an urban wanderer,

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belonged to the literary group “Fem unga” (Five Young Men), which was founded in 1929 and played a key role in introducing modernist literature into Sweden. In 1931, together with film critic Stig Almqvist (1904–67) and author Eyvind Johnson (1900–76), they approached Svensk Filmindustri with their idea of making a short film. The original idea of the film included a more elaborate love story between the girl and the sailor, which was almost completely cut out because of the nervousness of the amateur actors. In the final version, only a few indications of their story remain. Gamla Stan received mixed reviews at the time of its release. It was considered an interesting failure and criticized for its oblique camera angles and its Soviet-style of montage. Eva Hielscher

further reading Andersson, Lars Gustaf, “Interwar Film Culture in Sweden: Avant-Garde Transactions in the Emergent Welfare State,” in Malte Hagener (ed.), The Emergence of Film Culture: Knowledge Production, Institution Building and the Fate of the Avant-Garde in Europe, 1919–1945 (New York, NY and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014), 227–48. Askander, Mikael, “Gamla stan. Reflektioner kring ett modernistiskt filmförsök,” HumaNetten 8 (2001), retrieved from www.vxu.se/hum/publ/ humanetten/nummer8/art0103.html, 4 September 2017. Askander, Mikael, Modernitet och intermedialitet i Erik Asklunds tidiga romankonst (Växjö: Växjö University Press, 2003).

Pierement (Barrel Organ) Jan Teunissen The Netherlands, 1931 35mm, 311 m., 11’20” (24 fps), b/w, silent, no intertitles (Dutch opening titles) Archives: EYE Filmmuseum Director: Jan Teunissen Assistant: Jo Spier Distribution: Centraal Bureau voor Ligafilms, Amsterdam Premiere: November 1931 (Corso Cinema, Amsterdam)

In 1931, Filmliga board member and treasurer Jan Teunissen (1898–1975) made a lyrical short sound film about the working-class neighborhood Jordaan in the city center of Amsterdam. The film starts and ends with

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images of houses mirrored in the water of canals, not unlike the imagery Joris Ivens and Mannus Franken introduced in Regen (1929). Constituting a mini-narrative, the film is further framed by the arrival and leaving of a barrel organ in the Jordaan. Teunissen shows the effects the presence of the organ and its music has on the district. People look out of their windows, children surround the organ, and finally the inhabitants of the neighborhood start dancing in the street. The film also includes atmospheric images such as close-ups of a butcher’s shop window, a funeral parlor, and the decaying façades of the Egelantiersgacht. Teunissen’s camera focuses on details of the quarter, its inhabitants, and the organ—both an instrument and a machine. In two rapidly edited sequences, the filmmaker applies the technique of film rhyme and associative montage. Pierement could not premiere at the Filmliga’s own cinema De Uitkijk in Amsterdam in 1931, since the theater was not yet equipped for sound. However, a handful of theaters in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague showed the film in their supporting program. Teunissen, who was also a home-movie enthusiast and had shot films about modern architecture in the late 1920s, made a second film about another Amsterdam neighborhood in 1932: Sjabos (also known as Vrijdagavond), about the Jewish quarter on a Friday evening. A year later he directed the first Dutch sound fiction film, Willem van Oranje, which, in contrast with his city shorts, was a disaster both at the box office and in reviews. Eva Hielscher

further reading Hogenkamp, Bert, De Nederlandse documentaire film, 1920–1940 (Amsterdam: Van Gennep and Stichting Film en Wetenschap, 1988). Visscher, Wim, Amsterdam in de Film: Een filmografie van 1896 tot 1940 (Amsterdam: Gemeentearchief Amsterdam, 1995).

De Steeg (The Alley)

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Jan Koelinga The Netherlands, 1932 35mm, 350 m./373 m., 12’00” (24 fps), b/w, silent, no intertitles Archives: EYE Filmmuseum Director: Jan Koelinga Scenario: Jan Koelinga

Production: Jan Koelinga Distribution: Centraal Bureau voor Ligafilms, Amsterdam Premiere: 3 December 1932 (De Uitkijk, Amsterdam)

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Jan Koelinga’s debut film De Steeg portrays daily life in a poor neighborhood in the center of inter-war Rotterdam. It opens with shots of buildings representing the modern city—modernist housing, the luxury department store De Bijenkorf—and a rapid montage of fast-paced city life with motorized traffic and hurrying people, before entering an alley—the Schoorsteenvegerssteeg. Here, the rhythm of urban life is much slower-paced; the houses are old and narrow, windows are broken, and the street is dirty. Life takes place outdoors, with children playing in the street, mothers nursing their babies, people meeting for a chat and doing their laundry. Koelinga shows the bad conditions in this poor quarter, but also portrays a humane atmosphere and sense of community, which particularly becomes explicit in a scene of a young man playing his accordion, thereby creating a collective experience. The film’s humanistic style is also underscored by the use of numerous close-ups, presenting the inhabitants as individuals, standing out from the anonymous urban crowds. Because of this focus on slums, on some level, De Steeg can be seen as a counterpart to Von Barsy’s Hoogstraat (1929). Yet throughout the film, Koelinga’s city symphonietta continues alternating the poor life in the slums with the rapid, modern, and rich city life that lies beyond the end of the alley. With its social realism, De Steeg also recalls László Moholy-Nagy’s city films Impressionen vom alten Marseiller Hafen (Vieux Port) (1929) and Großstadt-Zigeuner (1932). The film premiered as a silent in 1932 at the cinema De Uitkijk in Amsterdam. In 1933 the Centraal Bureau voor Ligafilms—the distribution agency of the Dutch film society Filmliga—added a score to this cinépoem, composed by Arthur Bauer. Koelinga (1906–92), a photographer, filmmaker, and member of the Filmliga, was later strongly criticized for his collaboration on a number of German propaganda films for Ufa under the Nazi regime. Among others, he shot material that was used in Der ewige Jude (Fritz Hippler, 1941). Eva Hielscher

further reading Hogenkamp, Bert, De Nederlandse documentaire film, 1920–1940 (Amsterdam: Van Gennep and Stichting Film en Wetenschap, 1988). Paalman, Floris, Cinematic Rotterdam: The Times and Tides of a Modern City (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011).

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Visions de Lourdes (Visions of Lourdes) Charles Dekeukeleire Belgium, 1932

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35mm, 479 m., 17’00” (24 fps), b/w, silent, French intertitles Archives: Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, Österreichisches Filmmuseum Director: Charles Dekeukeleire Camera: Charles Dekeukeleire Production: Productions Dekeukeleire Premiere: 1932

Having close contacts with the avant-garde group and journal 7 Arts, which propagated the theories of Constructivism, Belgian director Charles Dekeukeleire (1905–71) made several experimental films in the 1920s. His 1932 Visions de Lourdes marks his shift to documentary cinema. A critical Catholic, Dekeukeleire made this documentary during a pilgrimage to Lourdes of the Jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne (Young Christian Workers) movement. Using a sober and straightforward style, Dekeukeleire shows us trains carrying diseased and disabled pilgrims, priests, nuns, monks, churches, crosses, statues, pilgrims, and endless processions. Dekeukeleire’s city poem focuses on the sensuality of natural elements, such as clouds, mountains, snow, and particularly the water at the shrine, which is supposed to have healing qualities. Although the film testifies to the filmmaker’s faith and respect, it is also marked by his lucidity and his critical approach. Lourdes is also presented as a site of superstition and as a place of pilgrimage organized as an industrial machine producing commodities. Juxtaposing the magical and the industrial, the divine and the commercial, Dekeukeleire’s film comes close to Surrealism in its fascination for the irrational and the grotesque. Steven Jacobs

further reading 286

Dubois, Philippe, “Petite suite en mineur à propos des premiers films de Charles Dekeukeleire,” Travelling 56–7 (1980): 90–5. Thompson, Kristin, “(Re)discovering Charles Dekeukeleire,” Millennium Film Journal 7–9 (1980–1): 115–29.

Berliner Stilleben (Berlin Still Life) László Moholy-Nagy Germany, 1932

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35mm, 230,7 m., 8’50”, b/w, silent, no intertitles Archives: George Eastman Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou Director: László Moholy-Nagy Collaborator: Sibylle Pietzsch (later Sibyl Moholy-Nagy)

László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) is one of the key figures in the history of the city symphony. After his screenplay Dynamik der Gross-Stadt (1922), which can be seen as a “city symphony on paper,” he made Impressionen vom alten Marseiller Hafen (Vieux Port) (1929) in France, as well as two films focusing on Berlin and its inhabitants. The first of these two is Berliner Stilleben (shot in 1926, 1931, or 1932, according to different sources), the other being Grossstadt-Zigeuner (1932). Berliner Stilleben opens with shots of the Charlottenburg area evoking the urban bustle typical of city symphonies: busy streets and traffic intersections, tramways, street vendors, men delivering coal, street an construction laborers at work, playing children, et cetera. Moholy-Nagy’s film style answers to the characteristics of the so-called New Vision that also marks his photographs. High-angle shots, oblique framings, the use of reflections, and close-ups create a certain degree of abstraction and a highly dynamic spatial realm. The camera is also put on moving cars and trams, which bring us to the outskirts of the city with its huge gas containers and popular neighborhoods. About two-thirds of the film is shot in the slums of the Wedding working class district, particularly in and around the five courtyards of the Meyers Hof tenement complex. In this part of the film, Moholy-Nagy’s uses a highly mobile, handheld camera, which scans the surfaces of the stark tenement walls. The buildings are worn-out and dilapidated and dirt is prominently present but we do not see the extreme poverty and piles of garbage that feature in Moholy-Nagy‘s 1929 Marseille film. A scene with furniture on the street suggests that an old woman has been evicted from her house. As earlier commentators such as Horak and Sahli have noticed, the images are reminiscent of other leftist films of the era such as Mutter Krause fahrt ins Glück (Paul Jutzi, 1929) or Zeitprobleme: Wie der Arbeiter wohnt (Slatan Dudow, 1930). In addition, they also prefigure later films such Housing Problems (Edgar Anstey and Arthur Elton, 1935) and Les Maisons de la misère (Henri Storck, 1937), which focus on the miserable dwelling conditions of the working class. In line with Moholy-Nagy’s preoccupations

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as photographer, painter, and sculptor, light plays an important role in this film, which juxtaposes the sunlit streets to the darkness of the Meyers Hof. Nonetheless, the slums are presented as a lively place with cats and dogs, and, first and foremost, the ubiquitous children, who prefigure the humanist photography of the following decades and films such as Helen Levitt, James Agee, and Janice Loeb’s In the Street (1948). großstadt-zigeuner

Steven Jacobs

further reading Horak, Jan-Christopher, Making Images Move: Photographers and Avant-Garde Cinema (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 109–36. Sahli, Jan, Filmische Sinneserweiterung: László Moholy-Nagys Filmwerk und Theorie (Berlin: Schüren, 2006), 164–8.

Großstadt-Zigeuner (Gypsies of the Metropolis) László Moholy-Nagy Germany, 1932 35mm, 329,6 m., 11’33”, b/w, silent, German opening title Archives: Deutsches Filminstitut, Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Filmmuseum München, George Eastman Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou Director: László Moholy-Nagy Collaborators: Sibylle Pietzsch (later Sibyl Moholy-Nagy) and Helmuth Brandis

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After his (unfilmed) screenplay Dynamik der Gross-Stadt (1922) and his 1929 film on Marseille, artist, photographer, and filmmaker László MoholyNagy (1895–1946) made two city symphonies dealing with Berlin. As large sections of Berliner Stilleben (1932), Grossstadt-Zigeuner, which was shot in April 1932, is also marked by a humanist documentary mode, now focusing on the Romani people living in the Berlin districts of Wedding and Marzahn—Moholy-Nagy’s interest in Roma was already visible in his 1929 Marseille film, which contains a brief scene with a horse-drawn wagon and a bear. Romantically associated with the pastoralism of a bygone era, the gypsies have become social outcasts now banned to the outskirts of the city. As a result, in contrast with the fascination for the hectic density of the city center in most city symphonies, the characters of Grossstadt-Zigeuner are situated in the nondescript peripheral zones where city and country interact. Only in a few of the film’s moments do we see city streets filled with pedestrians and traffic.

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In line with an age-old picturesque tradition that favors colorful outcasts and the urban poor, Moholy-Nagy depicts the gypsies, their carts, their ever-present horses, and the activities that have become an inherent part of their stereotypical representation: street vending, playing cards and dice, fights, dance, and music. However, in many instances these clichés are transcended by the filmmaker’s honest and committed interest in people. Grossstadt-Zigeuner focuses on children (a recurring trope in humanist photography but also an important topic in Moholy-Nagy’s other city films) and on the faces of individuals, many of them looking directly at the camera. As a result, the film has a spontaneous and intimate cinéma vérité like feeling, which is also underscored by the use of jump cuts, and a mobile camera that even swirls among the dancing gypsies. Furthermore, Moholy’s hand-held camera evokes the highly physical presence of the filmmaker among his subjects. Grossstadt-Zigeuner was originally made as a sound film, but, because of copyright issues, the soundtrack was declared illegal and destroyed. Steven Jacobs

further reading Horak, Jan-Christopher, Making Images Move: Photographers and Avant-Garde Cinema (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 109–36. Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality (New York, NY: Harper Brothers, 1950). Sahli, Jan, Filmische Sinneserweiterung: László Moholy-Nagys Filmwerk und Theorie (Berlin: Schüren, 2006), 168–73.

Na Pražském hradeˇ (Prague Castle) Alexandr Hackenschmied Czechoslovakia, 1932 35mm, 11’00, b/w, sound Archives: Národni filmový archiv, Prague Director: Alexandr Hackenschmied Scenario: Alexandr Hackenschmied Music: František Bartoš Premiere: 1931

Like its predecessor, Aimless Walk, the second film of Alexandr Hackenschmied (1907–2004) was another city film of Prague, and another

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important contribution to the bourgeoning Czech avant-garde. But whereas his first film was intended to create the impression of a pedestrian ramble across the Czech capital, Prague Castle is simultaneously a much more focused film, and a much more haphazard one. As its title suggests, the film is essentially a cinematic study of a single architectural complex, but, given the size of Prague Castle, its heavily sedimented history, and its range of styles, Hackenschmied’s portrait is constantly shifting and changing, constantly presenting its viewers with stark contrasts and unexpected details, and the sense of a vast city-within-a-city is created. Hackenschmied’s first film had been silent, but, here, on his follow-up, he created a sound film that eschewed narration and dialogue, but that matched his clever camerawork and unusual compositions with a suitably somber score by the Czech composer František Bartoš. In fact, Hackenschmied described the concept behind the film as a collaborative attempt to explore the connections between architecture, musical composition, and cinematic form: In collaboration with the composer, František Bartoš, I have tried . . . to find the relationship between architectonic form and music; between an image and a tone; between the movement of a picture and the movement of music; and between the space of a picture and the space of a tone.

Adding to Prague Castle’s uncanny atmosphere is the fact that the film is almost totally depopulated, with the notable exception of a brief flourish in the eighth minute where a series of shots suddenly, and fleetingly, reveal the presence of guards, an automobile, and a number of pedestrians. Otherwise, virtually all of the human forms found in the film are made up of statuary. In many ways, Prague Castle is most reminiscent of Alain Resnais’ treatment of architecture, statuary, and cinematic space in Toute la mémoire du mode (1956) and L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961), although Hackenschmied’s whiplash pans have more to do with French cinema of the 1920s than Resnais’ measured approach.

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further reading Hames, Peter, Czech and Slovak Cinema: Theme and Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). Valasek, Thomas E., “Alexander Hammid: A Survey of His Film-Making Career,” Film Culture 67–8–9 (1979): 250–322.

Beograd Prestonica Kraljevine Jugoslavije (a.k.a. Na razmedji istoka zapada) (Belgrade: Capital of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, a.k.a. At the Crossroads between East and West) Vojin Djordjevic´ Yugoslavia, 1932

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35mm, 1568 m., 56’00” b/w, silent, Serbian intertitles Archives: Jugoslovenska Kinoteka, Belgrade Director: Vojin Djordjevic´ Camera: Josip Novak, Anton-Harry Smeh Production: Jugoslovenski prosvetni film Premiere: March 1932 (Uranija, Belgrade)

In the 1930s, production company Yugoslav Educational Film produced numerous tourist and travelogue films about Yugoslavia. One of these was Vojin Djordjevic´’s city film, Beograd Prestonica Kraljevine Jugoslavije (Belgrade: Capital of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, 1932), whose gala premiere took place in mid-March 1932, at a sold-out screening at the cinema Uranija, two months after its press premiere in January 1932. A well-known journalist, photographer, and film historian, Djordjevic´ (1897–1985) originally worked in publishing. In 1927–8, he published the journal Film i moda (Film and Fashion), and in the 1930s he edited the Yugoslav Film Almanac as well as Strip, the first Serbian publication in which comics predominated. In 1932, he made a second film, the short Filmski Bal U Beogradu (Film Ball in Belgrade), in collaboration with Vladeta Dragutinovic´, Vojislav Ilic´-Mlad¯i, Josip Novak, and Anton-Harry Smeh. He also became the first secretary of the National Film Centre in Belgrade, and, from 1935 to 1939, he was involved in the fascist political party, Yugoslav Radical Union. Djordjevic´’s film about Belgrade is considered to have been inspired by Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927). The director had started a short documentary about Belgrade in the late 1920s but had to abandon the project due to lack of funds. With the financial support of Jugoslovenski prosvetni film, he could resume his project in 1931. Belgrade: Capital of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia combines historical views of an ancient town with impressions of the modern city. The film presents typical city symphony motifs, such as the arrival by train and boat into the city, street life, morning routines, and leisure activities, while also promoting Belgrade as the threshold between East and West. The development of the city is displayed in pictures and expansion maps, not unlike in The City that Never Rests (1928). Attention is

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also paid to the harbor, the modernization of streets by cobblestone paving, and the military cemeteries and memorials of WWI. According to several sources, Belgrade: Capital of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was a particularly successful film at the time of its release. However, critics generally thought that it was too long and incoherent. The film fell into oblivion, and only a workprint has survived. In 2016, the Jugoslovenska Kinoteka made a digital restoration. In 1941, Maks Kalmic´ made another city film about Belgrade, Priˇca jednog dana: Nedovršena simfonija jednog grada (Story of the Day: Unfinished Symphony of a City), which is said to be modeled after Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926). Eva Hielscher

further reading Dakovic´, Nevena, “The Unfilmable Scenario and Neglected Theory: Yugoslav Avant-garde Film, 1920–1990,” in Dubravka Djuric´ and Miško Šuvakovic´ (eds.), Impossible Histories: Historic Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant-Gardes, and Post-AvantGardes in Yugoslavia, 1918–1991 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 466–89. Jovicˇic´, Stevan, “Kinematografija u Srbiji 1896–1941,” Südslavistik Online 2 (2010): 23–33.

Ritmi di Stazione (Railway Station Rhythms) Corrado D’Errico Italy, 1933 35mm, 9’, b/w, sound Archives: Cineteca Nazionale di Roma Director: Corrado D’Errico Production: Istituto Luce

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After his Milan city symphony Stramilano (1929), Corrado D’Errico (1902–41) made a few other films showing affinities with Futurism. It is generally assumed that D’Errico is the author of Elogio della velocità (Eulogy of Speed, 1931), which consists of a series of (often comical) contrasts visualizing speed, including the juxtaposition of a turtle and a train. Trains had already become a cultural icon of industrial modernity in the nineteenth century and, in line with the Futurist celebration of speed and the machine, trains and railways also abound in Futurist paintings by Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severeni among others. In the 1920s, the arrival in the city by train had also become a staple image in city symphonies.

Trains and stations are the main focus of D’Errico’s 1933 Impressioni di vita n.1: ritmi di stazione (Impressions of Life Nr. 1: Railway Station Rhythms), which opens with an intertitle stating,

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From the very first lights of the day, when the world of steel awakens, the life of a grand station breaths the rhythms of the metropolis, until the last lights go to sleep on the rails for a very short night.

Light is, indeed, an important motif in the film, which contains beautiful chiaroscuro shots showing light beams entering station halls as well as imagery of atmospheric effects involving smoke, steam, and reflections on glass and steel surfaces. In his visual symphony, D’Errico also alternates close-ups of manual and mechanical movements, creating a lighthearted study of the impact of mechanization on human behavior—an aspect that is emphasized by the use of music by George Gershwin and Arthur Honneger on the soundtrack. Strikingly, D’Errico also presents the station as a city within the city. With its hurrying crowds, shops, restaurants, newspaper stands, hectic traffic outside the building, advertisements, and neon signs, Ritmi di stazione is a veritable city symphony. Steven Jacobs

further reading Lista, Giovanni, Cinéma et photographie futuristes (Milan: Skira, 2008), 125–31.

Mediolanum Ubaldo Magnaghi Italy, 1933 16mm, 33’00”, b/w, silent, Italian intertitles Archives: Cineteca Italiana, Milano Director: Ubaldo Magnaghi Production: Cineguf, Milano and Agfa

Ubaldo Magnaghi (1903-79) was one of the co-founders of the Milan CineClub which merged into Cineguf (Fascist University Cine Groups). His second documentary film, Mediolanum (the ancient Roman name for Milan) was commissioned by Agfa, probably to demonstrate the superior quality of 16mm Agfa reversal film. In the film, Magnaghi’s Movex Agfa camera

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scans the facades of the Romanesque and Renaissance churches and castles of Milan, exploring their stone surfaces, gates, and sculptural reliefs. Using tilted angles, Magnaghi includes human figures in the background. Initially, modernity seems absent, only evoked by the presence of cables spanning the streets or a single car visible through an arcade in the lower part of a shot. In the second part of the film, which focuses on the Duomo, Magnaghi also includes high-angle shots of the square, showing pedestrians and motorized traffic. In addition, the last sequence of Mediolanum includes footage of Milan’s new architecture, showing the monumental classical modernism of architects such as Giovanni Muzio as well as the rationalist architecture with its preference for steel skeletons, geometric volumes, and glass surfaces. Steven Jacobs

further reading Carlo Montanaro, “Mediolanum,” in Le Giornate del cinema muto (Pordenone: Le Giornate del cinema muto, 2017), 94.

London Medley United States, 1933 35mm, 10’20”, b/w, sound, no intertitles (English opening title) Archives: William K. Everson Archive, New York; Film Preservation Associates Production: Fox-Movietone Distribution: Fox-Movietone Premiere: 1933

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London Medley is the 1933 follow-up to Bonney Powell’s 1931 Fox-Movietone Manhattan Medley. Like its predecessor, London Medley announces itself as a contribution to the “city of contrasts” discourse that was so central to the city symphonies of the 1920s and 1930s, although here the language of the film’s opening title is much less hyperbolic. In fact, the impression that’s given is much more consistent with the travelogue genre: “Intimate glimpses of life in the Old World’s greatest metropolis. Here is the seat of international finance, the home of millions, the capital of an Empire – a city of both sparkling lights and deep shadows.” Indeed, much of the film stays true to the form of the travelogue, offering a vision of London that’s much more traditionally touristical than what we typically see in the city symphonies genre. Thus, the film begins with a picturesque shot of an old salt in a sailor’s cap lighting a pipe in silhouette in the foreground, while

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the busy Thames and Tower Bridge are framed in the background. This opening shot establishes the tone and approach of London Medley, and, sure enough, its viewer is treated to a tour of many of the city’s major monuments, including the Palace of Westminster, Trafalgar Square and Nelson’s Column, and St. Paul’s. What distinguishes London Medley as a city symphony is its dawn-to-dawn structure, its interest in the rhythms and patterns of daily life in London (the morning rush, lunchtime, tea time, the evening commute, et cetera), its attention to London’s modernity (the Underground, Piccadilly Circus’s spectacular displays of electrical illumination), and its focus on the city’s vivid nightlife. As was the case in Manhattan Medley, the film ends with a flurry of scenes that capture the energy of nighttime in London, including its active theater district, its whimsical electrical advertisements, its busy restaurants, and its vibrant and exotic nightclubs, where jazz bands play, the Champagne flows, and Britain’s elite classes take in the risqué charms of the Can-Can, oddly. Thus, London Medley delivers on its promise of “sparkling lights,” but its treatment of London’s “deep shadows” is superficial, to say the least. The vision of London that’s provided is certainly not the benighted city of William Blake, William Booth, and so many others. Instead, its final shots have little to do with class and much to do with the restoration of order after another hectic day: a city worker hoses down Piccadilly Circus’s statue of Eros at 3:00 a.m.; a London bobby conducts his night watch, checking to see that nothing is amiss at Barclays; a tipsy reveler getting into a hackney cab and heading home under the paternalistic gaze of another bobby; and a cat prowls along a fence at dawn. Anthony Kinik

Autumn Fire Herman Weinberg United States, 1933 35mm, 19’00, b/w, silent, no intertitles Archives: MoMA, Library of Congress, Georges Eastman Museum, Danish Film Institute Director: Herman Weinberg Scenario: Herman Weinberg Production: Herman Weinberg Distribution: Herman Weinberg Premiere: 1933

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Determined to win the heart of a young woman named Erna Bergman, Herman Weinberg approached her about appearing in a film he planned to make. Bergman agreed, and Weinberg cast her as one of the star-crossed lovers in the romance that became Autumn Fire, a silent film that studiously avoids the use of intertitles. A sparse narrative tells the story of an estranged couple— the woman living forlornly in the countryside somewhere, the man living in a state of melancholy and ennui, apparently in New York City—who are separated by geography, as well as by the inherent tensions between the country and the city, or so it seems. The film cuts back and forth between the two characters, each apparently caught in their own surroundings without any hope of a rapprochement, the shots of the country being handled in a lyrical manner reminiscent of Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov’s Romance Sentimentale (1930), while the shots of the city highlight its modernity, focusing on its activity, its fragmentation, and its dizzying qualities. Much of this metropolitan material, with the exception of the shots of the man wandering its docks and streets, was taken from Weinberg’s own A City Symphony (1930). The stalemate is broken only when the woman writes a letter to the man, telling him that she forgives him (for what, the audience never knows) and instructing him to meet her at “Central Station” on Wednesday at 5:00 p.m. It is a train that finally brings the lovers together again, following a dramatic arrival into the city whose inventiveness is matched only by Ruttmann’s famous introduction to Berlin (1927). This sequence in particular is a showcase for Weinberg’s modern style, which features extreme high- and low-angle shots, unusual perspectives, canted angles, rapid pans, and even flourishes of negative imagery. While Weinberg’s film has generally been understood as part of the New York cycle, it actually incorporates shots of both New York and Baltimore, where Weinberg worked as a manager at the Little Theater for a period of time, and thus constitutes a rare composite city film (alongside Vertov’s 1929 Man with a Movie Camera). In any case, Weinberg’s ploy was apparently successful. Bergman became Mrs. Herman Weinberg soon after the production was completed. While Weinberg, of course, went on to become one of the leading American film critics of his time, as well as a legendary translator of foreign films. Anthony Kinik

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further reading Posner, Bruce (ed.), Unseen cinema: Early American Avant-garde Film 1893–1941 (New York, NY: Black Thistle Press and Anthology Film Archives, 2001).

Footnote to Fact Lewis Jacobs United States, 1933 16mm, 8’00”, b/w, silent, no intertitles Archives: Anthology Film Archives, Light Cone Paris

Considered lost until the 1990s when Anthology Film Archives rediscovered the original negative, Footnote to Fact was made by film critic, film historian, and filmmaker Lewis Jacobs (1906–97), who had studied painting and design. In the early 1930s, he had co-founded the periodical Experimental Cinema while working as a cutter for advertising films in New York. A member of the Workers Film and Photo League, he started his own film project entitled As I Walk, intended as a two-reel documentary about the Great Depression and social conditions in the city, consisting of four parts: Highway 66, Faces in the Street, Night Between the Rivers, and Footnote to Fact. Although he made footage for each of these parts, Jacobs never completed the entire film and only Footnote to Fact was realized. It consists of documentary shots of New York street life during the Great Depression that are intercut with images of a young woman (Lillian Jacobs), rocking back and forth in her apartment. We see market scenes, sandwich men, children, a band playing in the streets, and shop signs while the woman’s rocking gets faster and her mouth twists into a scream. The atmosphere becomes depressive as the urban shots focus more and more on social ills such as unemployment, poverty, and alcoholism. Jacobs contrasts a demonstration with a military parade and, in an associative montage, war scenes are combined with homeless men lying in the streets, possibly veterans of the Great War. As the films comes to a climax, shots follow each other in an accelerating tempo as the woman, with her eyes wide open, turns on the gas feed in her apartment and commits suicide. Visualizing the tensions between aesthetic experimentation and social realism, Jacobs originally intended to post-synchronize the film by creating a soundtrack combining snippets of jazz, natural sound, modern poetry, and inner monologues. He called Footnote to Fact a cine-poem and a city symphony. Together with Herman Weinberg’s Autumn Fire (1933) and City Symphony (1930), Irving Browning’s City of Contrasts (1931), Jay Leyda’s Bronx Morning (1931), Leslie Thatcher’s Another Day (1934), and Lynn Riggs and James Hughes’ A Day in Santa Fe (1931), it was inspired by Dziga Vertov’s theories. Eva Hielscher

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Director: Lewis Jacobs Camera: Lewis Jacobs Montage: Lewis Jacobs Cast: Lillian Jacobs

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further reading

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Horak, Jan-Christopher, “The First American Film Avant-Garde,” in JanChristopher Horak (ed.), Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 14–66. Jacobs, Lewis, “Avant-Garde Production in America,” in Roger Manvell (ed.), Experiment in the Film (London: Grey Walls Press, 1949), 113–52.

Chi sheyingji de nanren (The Man Who Has a Camera) Liu Na’ou China, 1933 9.5 mm, 46’00, b/w, silent, no intertitles Archives: Taiwan Film Institute Director: Liu Na’ou Scenario: Liu Na’ou Production: Liu Na’ou Distribution: Liu Na’ou Premiere: 1933

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Liu Na’ou (1905–40) was a Chinese polymath based in Shanghai whose pursuits included the writing of fiction, editing, publishing, translating, film criticism, film theory, screenwriting, and filmmaking. He also led a highly mobile existence, one that regularly saw him moving between Taiwan, Canton, and Japan, among other places. In 1933 he completed a film titled The Man who has a Camera, an amateur film that was shot on 9.5mm stock, and although this film is not a city symphony, strictly speaking, Liu was clearly familiar with the latest trends in avant-garde and art cinema, including the city symphonies movement. Consequently, the film does contain a number of passages that were shot and edited in a manner reminiscent of the city symphony style. In addition to the title (sometimes translated as “The Man Who Holds a Camera”), which is a clear invocation of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, Liu’s familiarity with the city symphonies phenomenon can be found in some of the critical essays he wrote in the late 1920s and early 1930s, including “On Cinematic Art” (1932) and “A Brief Discussion of Film Rhythm” (1933). Here, one finds references to such filmmakers as Vertov, Alberto Cavalcanti, and Walter Ruttmann, who Liu praised for the way he’d orchestrated “musical rhythm across the whole film through modern visual means” in Berlin.

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Liu’s film is primarily a family portrait (shot in the “home movie” style), and a travelogue (one that encompasses four distinct geographic regions: Taiwan, Canton, Manchuria, and Tokyo), and much of its cinematography is consistent with these forms. In fact, at times Liu seems to be referencing the Lumière Brothers, the originators of these two approaches to filmmaking, quite directly, most notably during a sequence depicting a train arriving in Xinying Station that is composed almost exactly like the Lumières’ iconic L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat (1896), with the exception of a panning motion that Liu adds to follow the train’s forward progress. As this example suggests, The Man Who Has a Camera is notable for a number of passages that show a profound interest in kinetic effects, including a sequence shot from a speeding train, and another one shot from the passenger seat of a bi-plane in full flight. And during the some of the film’s many city sequences, in addition to a fascination with traffic and travelling shots, and a breathtaking harbor scene complete with steamships, tugboats, and traditional junks, one finds the sudden appearance of canted angles and some particularly playful hand-held camerawork, especially when it comes to documenting the architecture of modern Tokyo, as well as its throbbing, electrically illuminated nights. Anthony Kinik

further reading Ling, Zhang, “Rhythmic Movement, the City Symphony and Transcultural Transmediality: Liu Na’ou and ‘The Man Who Has a Camera’ (1933),” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9, 1 (2015): 42–61.

Žijeme V Praze (We Live in Prague, a.k.a. Living in Prague) Otakar Vávra Czechoslovakia, 1934 35mm, 13’00”, b/w, silent, no intertitles Archives: Národni filmový archiv, Prague Director: Otokar Vávra Camera: Jaroslav Tuzr

Like the avant-garde of other countries, Czech filmmakers of the inter-war period also produced several city symphonies, such as Prague by Night (Svatopluk Innemann, 1928) and Aimless Walk (Alexandr Hackenschmied, 1930). In 1934 Otokar Vávra (1911–2011) contributed to this cycle of films with Living in Prague.

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In Vávra’s Prague portrait, the influence of Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927) and Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is almost tangible. The Czech filmmaker’s variation on the city symphony concept adapts many of the motifs and editing techniques introduced and established by Ruttmann and Vertov quite literally, including the one-day time span, the suicide scene from Berlin, or the fire department from Man with a Movie Camera, relocated in Prague. However, the film is not a simple copy of its famous predecessors. Vávra had studied architecture and the film juxtaposes, often by means of low-angle shots, the old and classical buildings of Prague to its new and modern architecture. After World War II Vávra would become one of the co-founders and teachers of the Prague Film Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts. Eva Hielscher

further reading Liehm, Antonín J., Closely Watched Films: The Czechoslovak Experience (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016).

Halsted Street Conrad Friberg United States, 1934 16mm, 405 ft., 11’00” (18 fps), b/w, silent, no intertitles (English opening intertitles) Archives: School of the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA Director: Conrad Friberg Scenario: Conrad Friberg Production: Conrad Friberg/Film and Photo League of Chicago

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A member of the Workers Film and Photo League who also used the pseudonym Conrad O. Nelson, Conrad Friberg (1896–1989) made a silent city symphony about Chicago in 1934. Three years earlier, another semi-professional filmmaker, the German writer, traveler, and photographer Heinrich Hauser, had already made another city symphony about Chicago, the feature-length Weltstadt In Flegeljahren: Ein Bericht über Chicago. Both Hauser and Friberg focused on the situation of the working classes in the Depression era. However, whereas Hauser, like Ruttmann and others, presented the city as a space of simultaneity, Friberg introduced an alternative to the cross-section idea of the life of a city. By tracing the length of Halsted Street from south to north through the entire cityscape, his short film preserves the spatial structure of urban space, and

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literally cuts through the city. Indeed, Friberg announces his course in an opening intertitle that “This Film Presents a Cross Section of Chicago As Seen On Halsted Street.” Tom Gunning has described Friberg’s film, as one of the most original urban documentaries produced before World War II, a neglected masterpiece that offers a unique approach to urban geography and an alternative to the city symphony concept. The street determines the structure of the film, a linear path determined by a progressive trajectory along the course of Halsted Street. Due to the length of the street, the film shows a variety of Chicago neighborhoods, which unfold successively on the screen; shop and restaurant signs mark the different ethnic districts, as the film also explores the city as a space of textual inscription. However, Friberg combines this specificity of location and the street-determined cross-section structure, which suggests a linear montage, with the associative and contrasting editing techniques typical of city symphonies. Eva Hielscher

further reading Gunning, Tom, “One-way Street: Urban Chronotopes in Ruttmann’s ‘Berlin: Symphony of a Great City’ and Conrad’s ‘Halsted Street’,” in Synne Bull and Marit Paasche (eds.), Urban Images: Unruly Desires in Film and Architecture (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011), 62–79.

Rhapsody in Two Languages Gordon Sparling Canada, 1934 35mm, 11’00, b/w, sound Archives: Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, ON Director: Gordon Sparling Scenario: Gordon Sparling Production: Associated Screen News Distribution: Associated Screen News Premiere: April 1934

In April 1934, Associated Screen News (ASN) released the latest film in its ground-breaking two-year-old Canadian Cameos series: Rhapsody in Two Languages, a modernist ode to Montreal, “the metropolis of Canada.” Rhapsody was directed by Gordon Sparling, who had founded the Canadian Cameos

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in an attempt to combat Hollywood’s colonization of Canada’s screens through the production of short films. According to Sparling, these “featurettes” provided a safer way of establishing “a foot in the door of theatrical production for Canada,” while also offering a unique opportunity “for experimentation in technique [and] ingenuity in presentation.” Rhapsody was the first of the Canadian Cameos to realize this potential, depicting one hectic day in the life of Montreal, and employing a wide range of experimental special effects to do so, including canted angles, extreme high- and low-angle shots, multiple exposures, superimpositions, and rapid and rhythmic montage. The impression that was created was of a modern metropolis defined by its sharp contrasts, a fact that was emphasized by the train conductor who appeared early in the film, welcoming the audience to Montreal: Step right this way, ladies and gentlemen! Step aboard for a day in Montreal. . . . Montreal, the metropolis of Canada, the city of contrasts. . . . It’s modern! It’ s old! It’s gay! It’s pensive! Feel the pulse of its million people! It’s French! It’s English! It’s Montreal!

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What follows is a brisk treatment of this city of contrasts from dawn to dawn, one that pays special attention to old versus new, traditional versus modern, young versus old, religious versus secular, and French versus English, and that builds to a rhythmic and aesthetic crescendo during its lively nightlife sequences. Rhapsody was immediately recognized as a new benchmark for ASN, and it received a surprising amount of press for a theatrical short. Thus, while the Montreal Gazette praised Rhapsody for being “thoroughly cinematic,” an experience that appealed “to the eye rather than the ear,” the Montreal Daily Star was impressed by the film’s complexity and its ambition, noting that Sparling “must have spent months” on the film, and that the film not only successfully captured “the cosmopolitan spirit of the metropolis,” it did so “neatly.” Later that same year, The Christian Science Monitor commented that Sparling’s film had a “modern” sensibility that was very much in step with “the cinematic times,” and that, consequently, Rhapsody should, “be ranked as an art picture and not as a mere travelogue.” In all of these cases, the important thing is that Sparling’s work on Rhapsody was being recognized as film art, not commercial filler, but its artistry also did not register as pretentious or off-putting. The film appears to have been inspired by Bonney Powell’s Manhattan Medley, as there is a strong resemblance between a number of Sparling’s sequences (stray cats and milk deliveries, typists typing furiously, a bartender mixing a cocktail vigorously, et cetera) and some found in the earlier film, not to mention that Fox-Movietone had recently established

a division in Canada and ranked among ASN’s top competitors. It also appears to have been inspired by Irving Browning’s City of Contrasts (as was Manhattan Medley), most obviously in its insistence on Montreal as a “city of contrasts,” as well as during its nighttime section, which uses many of the techniques Browning did to create a similarly dizzying sense of the city’s nightlife. Anthony Kinik

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further reading Allan, Blaine, “ ‘Rhapsody in Two Languages’ and One Depression,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 27, 4 (1993): 153–68.

Another Day Leslie P. Thatcher Canada, 1934 16mm, 250 ft., 10’00”, b/w, silent, English intertitles Archives: Archives of Ontario, Toronto (Toronto Film and Video Club Collection) Director: Leslie P. Thatcher Scenario: Leslie P. Thatcher Production: Leslie P. Thatcher/Toronto Amateur Movie Club

Leslie P. Thatcher’s Another Day is an outstanding and prize-winning example of an amateur city symphony. A short experimental documentary about Thatcher’s hometown, Toronto, the film was named one of the “Ten Best” amateur films of 1934 by the editorial staff of the Amateur Cinema League’s official journal, Movie Makers. They described the film as a “cinematic interpretation of work and play on a Saturday . . . a splendid example of the relatively simple avant-garde film, so popular among European amateurs but so seldom attempted by even the advanced workers of the American continent.” The magazine praised it as “technically brilliant” for its use of experimental techniques, such as dissolves, wipes, and double exposures, which the filmmaker combines with straight photography and striking camera angles and compositions. Finally, Movie Makers summarized the film in a typical city symphony description: “Set against the background of Toronto, Another Day portrays in semi-abstract fashion the dramatic changes which overtake the life and tempo of a great city as Saturday crosses the noontime deadline from work to play.” Thatcher’s film does indeed follow daily activities on a Saturday in chronological order, but it also applies the modernist, city-symphony

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fragmentation of everyday events. Historian Lewis Jacobs explicitly presented Another Day as a city symphony inspired by Vertov, but its more immediate inspiration was fellow Torontonian Gordon Sparling’s ode to Montreal, Rhapsody in Two Languages, which was released earlier that same year. In fact, it is Rhapsody‘s closing line— “and it’s another day!”—that provided Thatcher with his title. A salesman for paper and engraving companies who was an active member and co-founder of the Toronto Amateur Movie Club, Leslie Thatcher (1901–89) also made some other shorts dealing with Toronto such as Toronto Centennial (1934) and The Royal Visit to Toronto of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (1939). In addition, he received another “Ten Best” award for his Fishers of Grande Anse (1935) and won a silver medal in the travel category for his first film Mighty Niagara (1933) in the American Cinematographer’s amateur film competition. Thatcher later founded his own film production company and made industrial and sponsored films. Eva Hielscher

further reading “Movie Makers: The Ten Best,” Movie Makers: Magazine of the Amateur Cinema League (December 1934): 513, 534. Jacobs, Lewis, “Avant-Garde Production in America,” in Roger Manvell (ed.), Experiment in the Film (London: Grey Walls Press, 1949), 113–52. Tepperman, Charles, Amateur Cinema: The Rise of North American Moviemaking, 1923– 1960 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015). Tepperman, Charles, “Uncovering Canada’s Amateur Film Tradition: Leslie Thatcher’s Films and Contexts,” in Zoë Druick and Gerda Cammaer (eds.), Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema, and New Screen Histories in Canada (Kingston and Montreal, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 39–58.

The Westminster of the West Gordon Sparling Canada, 1934

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35 mm, 10’00, b/w, sound Archives: Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, ON Director: Gordon Sparling Scenario: Gordon Sparling Production: Associated Screen News Distribution: Associated Screen News Premiere: June 1934

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The Westminster of the West is a film about Ottawa that focuses almost exclusively on the city’s status as the nation’s capital and on Parliament Hill, quite specifically, but it is the second of four city films that was directed and produced by Gordon Sparling (1900–94) as part of the Canadian Cameos series from Associated Screen News (ASN), and it, too, adheres to the city symphonies style, to a certain extent. That said, one shouldn’t be too surprised that The Westminster of the West is the dullest of Sparling’s city films, given the city in question, although ASN’s promotional team did its best to hype it along Loyalist lines: “The story of Ottawa, chosen from four sister cities by Queen Victoria to become the capital of Canada, and the proud possessor of the only Royal Court in North America, contains all the elements of a Cinderella romance.” It’s also the most conventional of Sparling’s series of city symphonies, providing a tourist’s view of the “little lumbering town” that became a “vice-regal city.” What is surprising is the extent to which the film features machines and industry, given the city’s primary identity as a white-collar government town. Its longest segment is a tour of the Royal Canadian Mint that really places an emphasis on the symphony of machinery required to produce the mint’s output of 200,000 coins per day, and whose imagery is reminiscent of those stock exchange and banking sequences that appear so frequently in other city symphonies. And when the film crew visits the famed Peace Tower, it focuses on the elaborate machine works that form the basis of its carillon. While the Montreal Star noted that the film was “interesting,” but complained that its narration, induced “in the spectator a somnolent feeling,” the Montreal Herald noted its modernist flair: “the subject is largely a series of unusual views of the Parliament Buildings, Rideau Hall, and the Mint. These have been shot from above, below and beside, with apparent influence from the angular photography of recent French films.” Anthony Kinik

further reading Morris, Peter, Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema, 1895–1939 (Montreal and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978).

City of Towers Gordon Sparling Canada, 1935 35 mm, 10’00, b/w, sound Archives: Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, ON

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Director: Gordon Sparling Scenario: Gordon Sparling Production: Associated Screen News Distribution: Associated Screen News Premiere: May 1935

city of towers

City of Towers is the third film in a series of four city symphonies directed by Gordon Sparling (1900–94) as part of the Canadian Cameos series for Associated Screen News (ASN), a Montreal-based studio. Here, the focus is “the spirit of Toronto, interpreted by her skyline,” according to ASN’s promotional team. City of Towers was conceived in 1934, during Toronto’s centennial, shot from 1934 until early 1935, and released in May 1935. Although their timing was a little off, ASN insisted that the film was still “a most timely addition to the Canadian Cameo Series, as Toronto has just celebrated its one hundredth birthday.” As the film’s title suggests, the film focuses on Toronto’s many “towers”—its tallest monuments, steeples, and skyscrapers—and claims that it is these structures that hold the key to a deeper understanding of the city. The film’s publicity material describes the project as follows: Towers reaching skyward . . . towers honoring the memory of fallen heroes. guarding the quiet haunts of university life . . . pointing slim fingers heavenward to the glory of God . . . testifying to the achievements of Big Business . . . guiding the deliberations of Ontario’s lawmakers . . . these are the skyline of Toronto, Canada’s City of Towers. And just as towers seem to dominate every phase of Toronto’s busy life, so City of Towers finds in them a striking medium for portraying the highlights of Ontario’s metropolis.

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The film’s tone and pacing varies depending on what geographic regions of Toronto were being depicted. Thus, it’s treatment of the University of Tower, Sparling’s alma mater, is suitably subdued and contemplative, while its tour de force is its section on Toronto’s central business district. Not only does the film’s narration reach rhapsodic heights during this sequence, but so does its cinematography and editing, creating the sense of a hyperkinetic metropolis-in-the-making, one fueled by business and high finance. Anthony Kinik

further reading Morris, Peter, Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema, 1895–1939 (Montreal and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978).

Vibracion De Granada (Vibrations of Granada) José Val del Omar Spain, 1935

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16mm, 21’00”, b/w (projected through a green filter), silent, no intertitles Archives: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid Director: José Val del Omar Production: Misiones Pedagogicas Premiere: 23 March 1935 (Tivoli Cinema’s GECI Film Club, Madrid)

Poet, musician, inventor, and filmmaker José Val del Omar (1904–82) described himself as a “cinemista” or cinema alchemist, who developed several audio and visual devices such as variable-angle lenses, new sound systems, and concave screens among many other experiments. He discovered his vocation in cinema after a stay in Paris in 1921. In 1925 he made En un rincón de Andalucía (In a Corner of Andalusia), a feature-length film that he subsequently destroyed, considering it an artistic failure. During the Second Spanish Republic, he became involved in the film scene and in progressive educational circles in Madrid. Between 1932 and 1936, Val del Omar was active in various branches of the Spanish Republic’s so-called Pedagogic Missions, which aimed to bring culture, and particularly cinema and photography, to rural areas. In this context, he made a large number of documentaries—more than 40, according to some sources—of which only a few have survived. One of these films is Vibracion de Granada, an idiosyncratic portrait of Granada that avoids the typical motifs of the city symphony: crowds, industrial labor, motorized traffic, et cetera. Instead, the film opens with shots of the Alhambra, a moving camera scanning its walls, sculptural reliefs, and its lush gardens with trees, flowers, water works, and fountains. Val del Omar’s cinematic fascination for water brings Joris Ivens’s Regen (1929) and Henri Storck’s Images d’Ostende (1929) to mind—both city symphonies that focus on the rhythmic and optical qualities of water surfaces as preeminent cinematic subjects. In addition, like Ivens and Storck, Val del Omar highlights natural elements within the built environment, favoring a highly sensual and tactile form of cinema. The second part of the film shows us details of the city: walls, windows, hatches, patios, roof tiles, balconies, grates, the bottom of a closing door as well as signs, graffiti, a cat, a sleeping woman, and an enigmatic shot of a burning house. Gradually, the film uses more and more longer shots, giving us a better view on the environment with shots of shop windows,

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children, blacksmiths, a loom, a woman doing needlework, and a market—through a bird cage, we can see some pedestrians. Val del Omar’s approach is dreamlike and poetic, emphasized by non-descriptive intertitles, the use of a green-colored filter, an impressionist sensibility for fleeting surfaces, and a predilection for spatial disorientation, which would mark many of his later films. budapest fürdöváros

Steven Jacobs

further reading Val del Omar: Overflow (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2011).

Budapest Fürdöváros (Budapest: City of Baths) István Somkúti Hungary, 1935 35mm, 14’00”, b/w, no intertitles, sound Archives: Hungarian National Digital Archive and Film Institute, Budapest Director: István Somkúti Scenario: István Somkúti Art Director: László Kandó

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In 1934 Budapest, whose spa heritage dates back to the Romans, became an official spa city, like Bath, Wiesbaden, or Carlsbad. Journalist, photographer, cameraman, and director István Somkúti (1895–1973) celebrated this event in his 1935 film Budapest: City of Baths. Made for the Budapest Spa and Resort Committee, the film was most probably a promotional work though it was considered a kultúrfilm, a cultural or documentary film. It portrays three facets of Budapest: the capital of Hungary, the modern city, and a health resort. Focusing on several of the more than 120 hot springs in the city, Somkúti uses experimental montage techniques and film tricks such as rotating images and kaleidoscopic effects. Somkúti started his career in the film industry at the Pathé laboratory in Budapest, like Adalberto Kemeny and Rudolpho Rex Lustig, who made São Paulo: A Symphonia da Metrópole in 1929. In fact, they weren’t the only city-symphony filmmakers from Hungary; the list also includes Andor von Barsy, who made the Dutch city symphonies De Stad die nooit rust (1928) and Hoogstraat (1929), and László Moholy-Nagy, who composed

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the typo-photo Dynamik der Gross-Stadt (1922) before he realized the films Impressionen vom alten Marseiller Hafen (Vieux Port) (1929), Berliner Stilleben (1931), and Großstadt-Zigeuner (1932). However, Somkúti, who also worked for the Hungarian Film Office, seems to be the only director who made a Hungarian city symphony about a Hungarian city. Nevertheless, two sound films, that were considerably less symphonic, were made about Budapest at the time. In 1932, the French production company Osso Film made Budapest Symphoniája (Symphony of Budapest), and in 1940, Dáloky János completed Látta-e már Budapestet télen? (Have you ever seen Budapest in Winter?). Eva Hielscher

further reading Márton, Kurutz, “Budapesti helyszíntár: Budapest a híradó- és dokumentumfilmek tükrében, a kezdetekto˝l 1945-ig,” Budapest Fo˝ város Levéltára, retrieved from http://old.bparchiv.hu/id-380-kurutz_marton_budapesti_helyszintar. html, 30 August 2017. Nagy, Zsolt, Great Expectations and Interwar Realities: Hungarian Cultural Diplomacy 1814–1941 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2017).

Odessa Jean Lods USSR, 1935 35mm, 642 m., 23’00’’, b/w, sound Archives: Budesarchiv Filmarchiv Director: Jean Lods Scenario: Isaac Babel Camera: G. Aizenberg Music: Konstantyn Dankevych Sound Technician: D. Katch Production: 1st Komsomol Odessa Film Studio

The Soviet Union played an important role in the life of French filmmaker Jean Lods (1903–74). In March 1928, Lods and Léon Moussinac founded the ciné-club Les Amis de Spartacus, its membership reaching 10,000, for the purpose of privately screening films banned by the censor, particularly Soviet masterpieces. Like several other French leftist intellectuals in the 1930s (André Gide, André Malraux, Romain Rolland, Louis Aragon, . . .), Lods travelled to the Soviet Union, staying there from 1934 to 1937. During

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this Soviet sojourn, he was charged with a study on film production in Ukraine. The French communist newspaper L’Humanité, in its 30 November 1934 issue, mentioned that Lods was in Odessa, working on a film based on Louis Aragon’s novel Les Cloches de Bâle (1934) with the support of Eisenstein, who himself was “preparing a film on Moscow.” Les Nouvelles littéraires (issue of 5 January 1935) described Eisenstein’s involvement in this project as that of an “artistic counselor.” Apparently, both the Aragon adaption as well as Eisenstein’s Moscow film were never realized, but on 2 August 1935 L’Humanité reported that Lods was finishing a film on Odessa. With this documentary on the Ukraine capital, Lods continued his series of earlier city symphonies, such as Vingt-quatre heures en trente minutes (1929) and Champs Élysées (1929), both made in collaboration with Boris Kaufman in Paris. His city symphony dedicated to Odessa (1935) was made in collaboration with writer Isaac Babel, who had published The Odessa Tales in 1926 and he would continue working on film scenarios throughout the later 1930s, for Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow (1937) and Mark Donskoy’s Gorky trilogy (1938–40) among others. Odessa opens with impressive shots of the Black Sea—a rock in the waves and partly hidden by fog is reminiscent of Dovzhenko’s lyrical imagery of nature. Next, a montage of archaeological finds illustrates Odessa’s long history while aerial views of the sea, showing ships drawing curved lines in the water surface, situate the city and its harbor geographically. A map illustrates the orthogonal grid structure of the city. Lods explores Odessa’s main sights such as the colonnade near the Vorontsov palace and the theater but his camera also cherishes blossoms in trees and children on a playground. A striking high angle shot, with a rooftop statue on the foreground, shows a street and a traffic intersection with trams and cars, evoking the metropolitan imagery of the city symphonies by Ruttmann, Vertov, and others. After a series of exhilarating traveling shots of a car drive through the city, the film takes us back to the sea where it started. Steven Jacobs

further reading

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Leyda, Jay, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 230. Mazuy, Rachel, Croire plutôt que voir? Voyages en Russie soviétique (1919–1939) (Odile Jacob, 2002), 40.

Stuttgart: die Großstadt zwischen Wald und Reben— die Stadt des Auslanddeutschtums (Stuttgart, the Big City between Forest and Vines—the City of Germans Abroad) Walter Ruttmann Germany, 1935

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35mm, 404 m., 15’00” (24 fps), b/w, sound, German spoken Archives: Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Haus des Dokumentarfilms Stuttgart Director: Walter Ruttmann Camera: Albert Kling, (Arthur Anwander) Music: Wolfgang Zeller Sound: Fred Hackland Actors: Arthur Anwander (German living abroad), Georg Ott (his brother) Production: Ufa-Werbefilm AG, production group Dr. Ulrich Westerkamp Premiere: 8 December 1935 (Kammer-Lichtspiele, Berlin)

In 1935, the same year Ruttmann (1887–1941) was working on his Düsseldorf film, he also made another commissioned city film about Stuttgart. Presented as an “Ufa-Ton-Kulturfilm” in the opening credits, Stuttgart: die Großstadt zwischen Wald und Reben combines a number of motifs and montage ideas reminiscent of his 1927 Berlin with characteristics of a more traditional form of scenics and an emphatically nationalist tone. Unlike Berlin, the Stuttgart film relies heavily on a narrative vignette, in which a Swabian man’s brother returns to Germany after 22 years in America to admire the revitalization Stuttgart has undergone under National Socialism. Ruttmann’s montage is at pains to wed modernity and tradition, for instance shots of new factories and hospitals are combined with familiar images of alpine landscapes, castles, medieval houses, and the graves of famous poets. The narrative of the brother’s return also serves as a pretext for the film to advertise Stuttgart’s newfound identity as the “City of Germans Abroad” and home of the Deutsches Auslands-Institute (German Foreign Institute), a project visible in the frequent use of maps and images of radio waves spreading into the world. Eva Hielscher and Michael Cowan

further reading Cowan, Michael, Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity: Avant-Garde, Advertising, Modernity (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 134–5. Goergen, Jeanpaul (ed.), Walther Ruttmann: Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1990).

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Kleiner Film einer großen Stadt . . . der Stadt Düsseldorf am Rhein (Small Film for a Big City: The City of Düsseldorf on the Rhine) Walter Ruttmann Germany, 1935

kleiner film einer großen stadt

35mm, 394 m., 15’00” (24 fps), b/w, sound, German spoken Archives: Filmmuseum Düsseldorf, Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv Director: Walter Ruttmann Camera: Erich Menzel, Erwin Bleeck-Wagner Script: Klär Hoffmann, Hermann Kadow, Walter Ruttmann Music: Walter Schütze Sound: Fred Hochland Production: Ufa-Werbefilm AG Premiere: 15 November 1935 (Sartorius-Haus, Düsseldorf)

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After his internationally acclaimed 1927 Berlin film, Ruttmann (1887– 1941) started working for the Ufa-Werbefilm AG, Ufa’s advertising section in 1935. In the mid-1930s, he also made three city films, of which Kleiner Film einer großen Stadt . . . der Stadt Düsseldorf am Rhein was the first. An Ufa TonKulturfilm, the film shows a day in the life of Düsseldorf, which starts with the celebrations of carnival, then focusing on famous inhabitants, various urban areas, the river Rhine, monuments, impressive buildings, local industries and labor, and ending with neon lights and the nocturnal childrens’ St. Martin’s Day procession. Apart from the temporal structure of the course of a single day, Ruttmann adds the cycle of one year as a second structuring layer. While most carnival celebrations take place in February, the official Düsseldorf carnival season begins on 11 November, when children traditionally honor St. Martin. Moreover, in the middle of the film, Ruttmann presents a scene of the annual July fair organized by the St. Sebastianus Schützenverein, adding to the temporal structure of a year. The film further includes a number of typical city symphony motifs, such as a train journey towards the city, a tram ride, shop windows, sidewalk cafés, and strollers on the Königsallee as well as a sequence of artisans’ labor, factory buildings, moving machine parts, and sparking steel works. Moreover, Ruttmann juxtaposes old and new buildings by depicting historical houses in the city center and in Kaiserswerth (the oldest part of the city), together with the neoclassical Ratinger Tor to modern architecture of industrial constructions, such as the newly finished central station and the Rheinhalle. These urban elements are further combined with idyllic parks with trees, flowers, statues, and fountains. The river Rhine is presented both

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as transportation route for ships, including the Düsseldorf harbor, and as recreation area for swimming, rowing, and other water sports. In this commissioned work for the municipality, Ruttmann combines touristic and promotional views on Düsseldorf with his earlier symphonic approach. While the editing is much slower than in Berlin, Ruttmann uses extensively a panning and travelling camera. Nonetheless, the Nazi influence becomes noticeable in this film, which presents, among others, writer and poet Karl Immermann, composer Robert Schumann, and painter Peter von Cornelius as famous inhabitants of Düsseldorf, while neglecting the city’s most famous son, Jewish poet Heinrich Heine. In addition, Ruttmann prominently depicts the memorial for Leo Albert Schlageter, a member of the German Freikorps and political activist, who was executed by the occupying French authorities in Düsseldorf in 1923 and was mythologized by the Nazis as a national hero and “the first soldier of the Third Reich.” Eva Hielscher

further reading Birdsall, Carolyn, “Resounding City Films: Vertov, Ruttmann, and Early Experiments with Documentary Sound Aesthetics,” in Holly Rogers (ed.), Music and Sound in Documentary Film (New York, NY: Routledge, 2015), 20–40. Uricchio, William, “Ruttmann nach 1933,” in Jeanpaul Goergen (ed.), Walther Ruttmann: Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1990), 59–65.

Vancouver Vignette Gordon Sparling Canada, 1936 35 mm, 10’00, b/w, sound Archives: Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, ON Director: Gordon Sparling Scenario: Gordon Sparling Production: Associated Screen News Distribution: Associated Screen News Premiere: June 1936

Vancouver Vignette was the last of the series of city symphonies Gordon Sparling (1900–94) created for Associated Screen News (ASN) between 1934 and 1936. It was film No. 34 in the Canadian Cameos series that Sparling had initiated in 1932. Unfortunately, this film remains missing.

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Like Sparling’s Rhapsody in Two Languages (1934), which was released to coincide with the 400th anniversary of Jacques Cartier’s first voyage to Quebec, and his City of Towers (1935), which was released in the immediate wake of Toronto’s centennial, Vancouver Vignette’s release was also timed to coincide with another notable event: Vancouver’s golden anniversary. The promotional materials released by ASN describe a film marked by the sort of contrasts of pace and tone that one finds in Sparling’s earlier film, City of Towers: Vancouver, born from the wilderness little less than a hundred years ago, gazes proudly from Canada’s western coast over the blue Pacific. Today, ships of every nationality drop anchor in her harbor. Cosmopolitan, bustling, the fast tempo of her commerce, her race-tracks and crowded beaches contrast with the cloistered quiet of her University. Vancouver Vignette highlights the vivid personality of Canada’s third city.

Though its write-up made the film sound reminiscent of Sparling’s earlier projects, the Montreal Star insisted that Vancouver Vignette was somehow different, that it depicted “in a pseudo-impressionistic treatment, the divers phases of life in the city which is now celebrating its golden anniversary. With a ‘voice’ new to these films, the picture is both instructive and entertaining, and a credit to the local producers.” Anthony Kinik

further reading Morris, Peter, Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema, 1895–1939 (Montreal and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978).

Así Nació El Obelisco (This Is How the Obelisk Was Born)

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Horacio Coppola Argentine, 1936 16mm, 10’00”, b/w, silent, no intertitles Archives: Filmoteca Buenos Aires Director: Horacio Coppola Camera: Horacio Coppola Production: Horacio Coppola

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Horacio Coppola’s short film deals with the construction of the Obelisco, a monument that has since become an iconic landmark of the city of Buenos Aires. His film shares aesthetic principles with the city symphony approach, as it portrays the construction of a monument in a spatial relation to the city of Buenos Aires and its inhabitants. The scaffolds on the obelisk, for instance, offers spectacular views of the urban landscape, while the obelisk itself can be seen from various places in the city. One of Argentine’s leading modernist photographers of the interwar period, Coppola (1906–2012) specialized in urban photography. In 1936 he was commissioned to photograph Buenos Aires for the city’s 400th anniversary, and took the occasion to shoot a film, Así Nació El Obelisco, on his own initiative. The resulting images, especially his still photographs, including nocturnal street scenes and snapshots of urban life in the city center and its outskirts, are a unique record of Buenos Aires at that period. In 1929, Coppola co-founded the first ciné-club in Buenos Aires, which screened avant-garde shorts, slapstick comedies, and European feature films such as Varieté (E. A. Dupont, 1925) and La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928), introducing innovative foreign films to Argentine audiences. In the early 1930s, he traveled to Europe, where he studied at the Bauhaus with photographer Walter Peterhans, developing his own avant-garde style. In Germany, he also met his wife, German photographer Grete Stern. The couple fled Germany and lived in Paris and London before leaving for Argentina in 1935. Familiar with the European avant-gardes and city-symphonies from his time at the Bauhaus, Coppola also had made some urban documentaries during his years in Europe such as Un Quai de la Seine (1934) and A Sunday in Hampstead Heath (1935). In 1933, together with Walter Auerbach, he also directed the experimental short Traum. Eva Hielscher

further reading Tell, Verónica, “Portraits of Places: Notes on Horacio Coppola’s Photography and Short Urban Films,” Special Issue on Modern Argentine Photography: Horacio Coppola and Grete Stern, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 24, 2 (2015): 153–71.

De Maasbruggen: Een filmstudie van Paul Schuitema (Bridges over the River Meuse: A Cinematic Study by Paul Schuitema) Paul Schuitema The Netherlands, 1937 35mm, 385m, 13’29”, b/w, sound, no intertitles Archives: EYE Filmmuseum, Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid

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Director: Paul Schuitema Camera: Paul Schuitema Music: Koos van de Griend Distribution: Multifilm, Haarlem

de maasbruggen

The most important film by graphic and industrial designer Paul Schuitema (1897–1973), De Maasbruggen shows traffic at the bridges across the river Meuse in Rotterdam. The film is characterized by a fast montage, a moving camera following traffic flows, opposing directions, diagonal compositions, and abstract imagery through close ups, pronounced shadows, unusual framings, and interchanging low and high camera angles. This dynamic is reinforced by the music, making use of various ambient sounds and sound effects. The film begins with the cityscape; the camera tilts down towards a junction, and moves on following traffic at the Koninginnebrug, as seen from the tall railway bridge next to it. The latter will appear in the film later on, through images similar to those of Ivens’s De Brug (1928). After the opening, there are abstract shots of water, ships passing a bridge, a train crossing it. From the ships, the camera turns to the traffic at the bridge at eye level. Pedestrians and cyclists are followed, often through close ups, showing parts of bodies, bikes, and architectural components of the bridge. The next sequence includes cars, trucks, and trams. Some images are taken from a tram and a car, which become patterns of movement. A policeman directs the traffic flows. Crowds are emphasized throughout the film, but individuals are still recognizable. Towards the end, traffic stops. The bridges open and when ships have passed the traffic continues. The film ends with an epilogue using a double exposure shot: the policeman is seen in the middle of the traffic moving in all directions. De Maasbruggen was filmed between 1932 and 1937 and in those years at least two versions were shown, one to students in The Hague around 1934, and another one to a mixed audience in Brno in 1936. The film was brought to the censors in September 1937, but it took another year before the soundtrack was made. Various newspapers wrote about the film in 1938, but there is no evidence that any screening took place in those years. The film had its premiere at the film festival in Cannes in 1946 and was shown as a short in regular theaters in the Netherlands in 1947.

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further reading Boode, Arij de and van Oudheusden, Pieter, “Een tijd van massale bewegingen,” in de Hef (ed.), Biografie van een spoorbrug (Rotterdam: De Hef, 1985), 76–88. Bool, Flip, “Paul Schuitema,” Fotolexicon 6, 12 (1989): n.p. Digitally available through Depth of Field, retrieved from http://journal.depthoffield.eu/ vol06/nr12/f03nl/en, 9 March 2016.

Hogenkamp, Bert, De Nederlandse documentaire film, 1920–1940 (Amsterdam: Van Gennep and Stichting Film en Wetenschap, 1988). Maan, Dick, Paul Schuitema: Visual Organizer (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2006). Paalman, Floris, Cinematic Rotterdam: The Times and Tides of a Modern City (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011).

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Seeing the World: Part One, A Visit to New York, N.Y Rudy Burckhardt United States, 1937 16 mm, 10’00, b/w, sound Archives: Anthology Film Archives Director: Rudy Burckhardt Scenario: Rudy Burckhardt and Edwin Denby Production: Grand Tours Inc. Distribution: Grand Tours Inc. Premiere: 1937

Rudy Burckhardt (1914–99), the Swiss-born photographer, filmmaker, and bohemian, produced Seeing the World: Part One, A Visit to New York, N.Y., an offbeat ode to his new hometown, in 1937, just two years after he’d emigrated to New York. He made it with the help of a number of high-profile friends he had made since his arrival: Virginia Welles, an actor who also happened to be married to Orson Welles; Joseph Cotten, the actor (who would become an integral part of the Welles’ ensemble and a major film star, and who is mistakenly listed as “Joseph Cotton” in the film’s credits); and Edwin Denby, the poet, all of whom were appearing in Orson Welles’ landmark production of Horse Eats Hat (1936) for the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Theatre at the time that Burckhardt began shooting. The film takes the form of a mock travelogue, featuring informal, highly colloquial narration by Donnie Brooke Alderson, which introduces its viewers to New York via a shot of the Statue of Liberty (“First to great a visitor to New York is a lady—the Statue of Liberty. Oh, ain’t she beautiful!”). What follows is an idiosyncratic tour of New York that begins with an attempt to document some of New York’s famed sites (Wall Street, Trinity Church, the Brooklyn Bridge), but soon veers away from the logic and expectations of conventional tourism, stopping off at the 42nd Street elevated railway station but refusing to represent Times Square (“42nd Street! Times Square! The heart of . . . [garbled] . . . that we skip it . . .”), before moving from the center of New York (Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue, Sixth Avenue) to its margins (Tenth Avenue, Eleventh Avenue, the riverfront). While the film is ostensibly a sound film, one that relies

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heavily on Alderson’s narration and a frequently jazzy soundtrack, in some ways the travelogue is merely an excuse to set up two silent skits that highlight New York’s stark contrasts. The first of these skits (starring Welles) has to do with a high society couple that lives on Park Avenue, providing an opportunity to lampoon the Social Registry set and their philistine attitudes toward modern art. The second takes place in a riverside dive bar and has to do with a violent showdown between two hoodlums (one of them played by Cotten). While Seeing the World’s shaky camerawork and awkward narration mark it as a minor work, the film remains notable for some strikingly modernist compositions (high-angle camerawork, abstract patterning), for an extended travelling sequence along the Third Avenue elevated railway that anticipates similar sequences in post-war city films such as D.A. Pennebaker’s Daybreak Express (1953–8) and Stan Brakhage’s Wonder Ring (1955). The film’s other highlight is its highly ironic finale, which purports to leave its viewers with a shot of the city at dawn (“And so we leave New York in the light of early morning . . .”), but does so with the use of toy versions of the Statue of Liberty, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, and Rockefeller Center, in a manner reminiscent of Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926). Anthony Kinik

further reading Lopate, Philip and Katz, Vincent, Rudy Burckhardt (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 2004). Posner, Bruce (ed.), Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-garde Film 1893–1941 (New York, NY: Black Thistle Press and Anthology Film Archives, 2001).

Weltstrasse See, Welthafen Hamburg (The Ocean as World Route, Hamburg as World Port) Walter Ruttmann Germany, 1938

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35mm, 400 m., 15’00” (24 fps), b/w, sound, German spoken Archives: Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv Director: Walter Ruttmann Camera: Hans Bastanier Scenario: Arnold Funke

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Music: Walter Winnig Sound: Fred Hackland Actors: Flita von Uhl (daughter of the ship-owner), Werner Pledath (ship-owner), Rudolf Koch-Riehl (port director), Otto Müller-Hanno (roustabout), Harloff Schild (planter from overseas) Location manager: Maria Schild Production: Universum-Film AG Distribution: Universum-Film Verleih Premiere: 7 October 1938 (Waterloo Theater, Hamburg)

A commissioned work for the Freihafen-Lagerhaus-Gesellschaft and the municipality of Hamburg, Weltstrasse See, Welthafen Hamburg is the third city film Ruttmann (1887–1941) made after Berlin (1927). While Erik Barnouw in his standard work on documentary film describes the Hamburg film together with the films on Düsseldorf and Stuttgart as later contributions by Ruttmann to the wave of city symphonies, William Uricchio states that with its sequencing of typical views and slow lateral panning shots, the film presents a remarkable return to the tradition of city films as they have been produced from 1895 up to the mid-1920s. Contemporaneous critics share these mixed opinions about the film that presents Hamburg as the biggest warehouse city of the world. While a Hamburg newspaper in October 1938 praised the cinematography of cameraman Hans Bastanier and noticed that Ruttmann succeeded in composing “a real symphony” out of these images, Albert Schneider in Licht-Bild-Bühne criticized the film as being weaker than Ruttmann’s earlier films and that particularly the character of a photo reporter was embarrassing for such a “Kulturfilm.” Indeed, Weltstrasse See, Welthafen Hamburg includes a loose narrative involving a photographer, which frames the visual trip through the harbor, highlighting its importance as a world port. Eva Hielscher and Michael Cowan

further reading Barnouw, Erik, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (1974) (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1990), 73. Goergen, Jeanpaul (ed.), Walther Ruttmann: Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1990). Uricchio, William, “Ruttmann nach 1933,” in Jeanpaul Goergen (ed.), Walther Ruttmann: Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1990), 59–65.

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Herää Helsinki! (Wake Up, Helsinki) Valentin Vaala Finland, 1939

herää helsinki!

35mm, 210 m, 8’00”, b/w, sound Archives: National Audiovisual Institute, Helsinki Director: Valentin Vaala Scenario: Turo Kartto Camera: Charles Bauer and Uno Pihlström (uncredited) Montage: Valentin Vaala Music: Sheherazade by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov Production: Suomi-Filmi Premiere: 24 February 1939, Helsinki

Director, screenwriter, and editor Valentin Valaa (1909–76) was one of the most significant figures in the history of Finnish cinema. Starting his career in the late 1920s and early 1930s, he made many feature-length films as well as some documentary shorts, including Wake Up, Helsinki! (1939) with a scenario by Turo Kartto (1910–42). In this impressionist film, Valaa depicts the awakening of the Finnish capital. Opening with footage of empty streets, a lonely pedestrian, churches, a sleeping harbor, water surfaces, trees with long shadows, the film gradually draws attention to bustling city life. Trams leave the depot and buses depart from their parking lots. Street sweepers and market vendors appear, followed by a crowd at a market near the harbor. Trains with huge steam clouds are visible in the background. The film ends with some shots of the Havis Amanda fountain near the town hall. Steven Jacobs

The City Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke

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United States, 1939 35mm, 43’40, b/w, sound Archives: George Eastman Museum, Library of Congress (Prelinger Collection), MoMA, UCLA Film and Television Archive Director: Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke Scenario: Pare Lorentz Production: Civic Films Inc.

Distribution: World Pictures Corporation Premiere: 26 May 1939

Anthony Kinik

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Among the most famous of the social documentaries of the 1930s, The City was a sponsored film produced for the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair by Civic Films Inc. in conjunction with the American Institute of Planners and with the financial assistance of the Carnegie Institute, and, as a whole, it isn’t technically a city symphony. But, like the vast majority of the films that made up this international cycle, The City is a project that had strong ties to the artistic and political avant-garde and that emerged out of the art, film, photography, and design nexus that was such an important feature of these overlapping scenes. Its fourth chapter (“Men Into Steel”) amounts to a ten-minute city symphony of New York couched within a 43-minute critique of the failure of urbanization and the absence of carefully planned urbanism in America. This film-within-a-film contains many of the semantic hallmarks of the city symphony genre, including a fascination with modern architecture and infrastructure, modern transportation and traffic, and modern labor and business, and it stands as a virtuosic example of cinematography and editing so typical of this cycle. Other parts of the film also display a fluency with the city symphonies style and a willingness to use these techniques in order to augment the film’s visual and affective impact, most notably the fourth chapter (“City of Smoke”), which deals with industrial towns. For these reasons, as well as for its release date in 1939, right on the verge of the outbreak of World War II, the conflict which brought an end to the city symphony’s classical era, and because of its attempts to turn the city symphony form against the modern metropolis, as it were, Steiner and Van Dyke’s The City stands as the film that brings the city symphonies phenomenon to a close. The team that created The City is a veritable who’s who of leading figures in the realms of documentary film, experimental cinema, modernist photography, urban planning, and contemporary music. Both Ralph Steiner (1899–1986) and Willard Van Dyke (1906–86) were accomplished photographers and cinéastes, whose cinematic work bridged the realms of experimental and documentary filmmaking and who were both closely connected with Pare Lorentz and the New Deal filmmaking efforts of the Resettlement Administration and the Works Progress Administration, and the somewhat more radical work of the Frontier Films group. Other figures directly associated with the production of The City include Pare Lorentz, who came up with the film’s outline, Henwar Rodakiewicz, a talented experimental filmmaker who elaborated upon Lorentz’s outline and was part of the cinematography team, Aaron Copland, the talented composer who contributed the film’s powerful score, and Lewis Mumford, who provided the film’s historical and theoretical grounding.

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further reading

pursuit of happiness

MacDonald, Scott, “Ralph Steiner,” in Jan-Christopher Horak (ed.), Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 205–33. Wolfe, Charles, “Straight Shots and Crooked Plots: Social Documentary and the Avant-Garde in the 1930s,” in Jan-Christopher Horak (ed.), Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 234–66.

Pursuit of Happiness Rudy Burckhardt United States, 1940 16mm, 10’00, b/w, silent, no intertitles Archives: Anthology Film Archives Director: Rudy Burckhardt Scenario: Rudy Burckhardt Production: Rudy Burckhardt Distribution: Rudy Burckhardt Premiere: 1940

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Three years after the release of his first film, Seeing the World: Part One, A Visit to New York, N.Y., Rudy Burckhard (1914–99) released a rather different follow-up, which he titled Pursuit of Happiness. Whereas Seeing the World was a sound film, featuring a jazzy soundtrack and some tongue-in-cheek voiceover narration, Pursuit of Happiness was an intentionally silent film. And while Burckhardt’s first film only fleetingly called to mind his photographic practice—primarily in its subway portraits, which are reminiscent of those of both Burckhardt and Walker Evans from the same period— Pursuit of Happiness was a direct extension of the young photographer’s still work. Burckhardt was quickly becoming one of the most notable street photographers of his time, one who first made a mark with his shots of architectural details, logos and advertisements, and store-front signage, as well as with his fascination with the choreography and the style of pedestrians striding its throbbing sidewalks and negotiating its dizzying amounts of traffic. Pursuit of Happiness was shot at the very same time that Burckhardt was producing his first important works of New York street photography, and the film shares a very similar compositional style and many of the same concerns, and, in fact, a number of his most famous still photographs are directly quoted and transformed into moving pictures.

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Strictly speaking, Pursuit of Happiness is not really a full-blown city symphony as much as it is a collection of studies of the details, the urban ephemera, and the visual motifs that were of such interest to so many of the modernist photographers and cinematographers of the period—foot traffic, modern traffic and congestion, storefront windows, advertising, and so on. It doesn’t share the scope or the desire to suggest that somehow one day in the life of a city has been captured that we see in so many other city symphonies. However, as the film progresses, its editing becomes increasingly daring, and suddenly real-time shots of pedestrians are replaced with fast-motion, slow-motion, and freeze-frame versions, frames are rotated 90°, 180°, and then 270°, split-screen compositions are created, and complicated and disorienting studies of reflections are presented. The film ends with a flurry of multiple exposures and superimpositions, all of which indicate that Burckhardt was well-versed in the techniques and formal experimentation of the most avant-garde city symphonies of the interwar years, and especially the work of Dziga Vertov and the Kino-Eye group. Finally, the film’s title serves as a clever play on words, simultaneously commenting on the American Dream, the relentless drive of New York’s pedestrians, and the commercialism of its windows, walls, and signs, as well as the pleasures of a street photographer in tune with his environment. Anthony Kinik

further reading Lopate, Philip and Katz, Vincent, Rudy Burckhardt (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 2004). Posner, Bruce (ed.), Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-garde Film 1893–1941 (New York, NY: Black Thistle Press and Anthology Film Archives, 2001).

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about the contributors and editors

Ivo Blom is Assistant Professor of Comparative Arts and Media Studies at VU University, Amsterdam. His dissertation, published as Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade (2003), dealt with film distribution and exhibition in the 1910s and was based primarily on the Desmet Collection of EYE (formerly the Netherlands Filmmuseum), which is recognized by UNESCO as World Heritage. Blom’s current research focuses on the intervisual relationships between cinema and other arts, both in the work of Luchino Visconti and in Italian silent cinema. Blom has published extensively on early and Italian cinema in Dutch and foreign journals, volumes, and encyclopedias. Christa Blümlinger teaches cinema studies at Université Paris 8 Vincennes—Saint Denis. She has published extensively on film and new media in France, Germany, and Austria (for Trafic, Parachute, Camera Austria, Texte zur Kunst). She is a board member of Forum Expanded (Section of the Berlinale Festival) and of the inter-university research group Théâtres de la Mémoire. She is the author of Kino aus zweiter Hand: Zur Ästhetik materieller Aneignung im Film und in der Medienkunst (2009).

Michael Cowan is a Professor of Film and Media History at the University of St Andrews. He has taught at universities in Canada, the US, the UK and Germany. He is the author of numerous books and articles on German film and media history, including Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity (2014). His work has won awards from the leading Film Studies scholarly associations in North America, the UK, Germany and Italy. about the contributors and editors

Tom Gunning is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Art History, Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. His published work has concentrated on early cinema as well as on the culture of modernity from which cinema arose. He has written extensively on the Avant-Garde film, both in its European pre-World War I manifestations and the American Avant-Garde film up to the present day. His publications include D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (1994) and The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (2000). Malte Hagener teaches at the Intsitut für Medienwissenshaft at the University of Marburg. His publications include Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919–1939 (2007) and The Emergence of Film Culture: Knowledge Production, Institution Building and the Fate of the Avant-Garde in Europa 1919–1945 (2014). Eva Hielscher is a film scholar, curator, and moving image archivist. She holds an MA degree in “Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image” from the University of Amsterdam, and has studied media culture and film history in Weimar and Utrecht. In 2007 she was awarded the “Kodak Fellowship in Film Preservation” by the Association of Moving Image Archivists and has worked at film archives and museums in Germany and the Netherlands. Most recently she worked as a PhD researcher at Ghent University, investigating the features and historiography of the city symphony. In 2018 she joined the research team on historical film colors at the University of Zurich. Jan-Christopher Horak is currently Director of UCLA Film and Television Archive and Professor for Critical Studies. His book publications include Film and Photo in the 1920s (1979), Helmar Leski: Pioneer of Israeli Cinema (1983), Anti-Nazi-Films Made by German Jewish Refugees in Hollywood (1985), The Dream Merchants: Making and Selling Films in Hollywood’s Golden Age (1989), Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde 1919–1945 (1995), Making Images Move: Photographers and Avant-Garde Cinema (1997), Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design (University Press of Kentucky, 2014). He is co-editor of L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (University of California Press, forthcoming). He was founding Vice-President of the Association of Moving Image Archivists

325

(AMIA), and has served on the Executive Committee of the Federation Internationale des Archivs du Film (FIAF). His bi-weekly blog can be read at: www.cinema.ucla.edu/blogs/archival-spaces

about the contributors and editors

Steven Jacobs is an art historian specialized in the relation between film and the visual arts. His other research interests focus on the visualization of architecture, cities, and landscape in film and photography. He has published in journals such as Art Journal, History of Photography, Millennium Film Journal, October, and De Witte Raaf among others. He also authored The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (2007), Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts (2011), The Dark Galleries: A Museum Guide to Painted Portraits in Film Noir (2013, with Lisa Colpaert), and Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema (2017), with Susan Felleman, Vito Adriaensens, and Lisa Colpaert). He teaches at Ghent University and the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Anthony Kinik’s work spans documentary, experimental, avant-garde, and industrial practices, and his principal focus in recent years has been on the cinematic depiction of the urban environment, including the city symphonies cycle of the interwar period and Montreal as a “cinematic city” in the 1960s. His most recent essay, “Celluloid City: Montreal and Multi-screen at Expo 67,” appeared in Janine Marchessault and Monika Kin Gagnon’s Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014). He currently teaches at the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film at Brock University. Cristina Meneguello is Associate Professor at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), São Paulo, Brazil. She holds a doctorate degree in History (Unicamp/University of Manchester, UK) and she was a researcher at the universities of Venice, Italy, and Coimbra, Portugal. She has published books on American cinema in Brazil and on studies on heritage.

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Floris Paalman is a researcher, filmmaker, curator, and lecturer at the Department of Media Studies, Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA). He obtained his PhD from the UvA with his thesis Cinematic Rotterdam (010 Publishers, 2011). He studied cultural anthropology (UvA), film and fine arts (Rietveld Academy Amsterdam, Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam). He previously worked as a researcher in the field of architecture. John David Rhodes is university lecturer in film in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome (2007), and Meshes of the Afternoon (2011), and the co-editor of three volumes: Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image (2011), Antonioni: Centenary Essays (2011), and On Michael Haneke (2010). His essays have appeared in Screen, Film History, Modernism/modernity, Framework,

and in various other journals and edited volumes. He is a founding editor of the online journal World Picture.

about the contributors and editors

Merrill Schleier is a professor of Art and Architectural History and Film Studies at the University of the Pacific. She has been the recipient of the Graves Award and a Graham Foundation Award. Her books include: Skyscraper Cinema: Architecture and Gender in American Film (2009), The Skyscraper in American Art (1990). Her articles have appeared in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Critical Theory, Film Studies, Mosaic, Journal of Architecture, Cinema Journal, and the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. She is currently working on the chapter, “Palaces of Pleasure and Deceit Among the Clouds: the Depression-Era Cinematic Penthouse Plot” for Pamela Robertson Wojcik, ed., The Apartment Plot Reader (Duke, forthcoming 2015) and a full-length book on Frank Lloyd Wright, Taliesin and Cinema. Malcolm Turvey holds the Sol Gittleman Professorship in Film and Media Studies at Tufts University and is an editor of the journal October. He is the author of Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2008), and The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s (MIT Press, 2011), and co-editor of Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts (Routledge, 2001). He is currently finishing a book titled Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism.

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about the american film institute

The American Film Institute (AFI) is America’s promise to preserve the heritage of the motion picture, to honor the artists and their work and to educate the next generation of storytellers. AFI provides leadership in film, television and digital media and is dedicated to initiatives that engage the past, the present, and the future of the moving image arts. The AFI Film Readers Series is one of the many ways AFI supports the art of the moving image as part of our national activities. AFI preserves the legacy of America’s film heritage through the AFI Archive, comprised of rare footage from across the history of the moving image, and the AFI Catalog of Feature Films, an authoritative record of American films staring with work produced as early as 1893. Both resources are available to the public via AFI’s website at AFI.com. AFI honors moving image artists and their work through a variety of annual programs and special events, including the AFI Life Achievement Award, AFI Awards, and AFI’s 100 Years . . . 100 Movies television specials. The AFI Life Achievement Award has remained the highest honor for a career in film since its inception in 1973; AFI Awards, the Institute’s

about the american film institute

almanac for the twenty-first century, honors the most outstanding motion pictures and television programs of the year; and AFI’s 100 Years . . . 100 Movies television events and movie reference lists have introduced and reintroduced classic American movies to millions of film lovers. And as the largest nonprofit exhibitor in the United States, AFI offers film enthusiasts a variety of events throughout the year, including AFI Fest, which each fall brings together Hollywood icons, emerging artists and audiences to experience global cinema in the movie capital of the world; AFI Docs, the Institute’s annual documentary festival offering screenings and events that connect audiences, filmmakers and policy leaders in the seat of our nation’s government; and the world-class AFI Silver Theatre located in the Washington, DC metro area, AFI’s independent film hub offering both first run films and film classics 365 days of the year. AFI educates the next generation of storytellers at its world-renowned AFI Conservatory, which offers a two-year Master of Fine Arts degree in six filmmaking disciplines—Cinematography, Directing, Editing, Producing, Production Design and Screenwriting—along with its notable AFI Directing Workshop for Women, which provides an opportunity for women to direct a narrative film through workshop training. The Conservatory is continuously recognized for its quality hands-on production-based curriculum and training, and its notable alumni. Step into the spotlight and join other movie and television enthusiasts across the nation in supporting the American Film Institute’s mission to preserve, to honor and to educate by becoming a member of AFI today at AFI.com/membership. Visit us at AFI.com or connect with us on facebook.com/American­ FilmInstitute, instagram.com/AmericanFilmInstitute, twitter.com/American­ Film and youtube.com/AFI.

Robert Vaughn Librarian AFI Conservatory at the American Film Institute

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index

42nd Street 23, 34 50 Anos da Cidade de Cataguases 182 Aafjes, Cor 122 Abbott, Berenice 167, 198, 284, 285 Abranches, Adelina 270 Abric, Daniel 110 Acciaio 63, 100 Adams, Ansel 287 Agee, James 294 Aimless Walk 13, 21, 33, 277 – 8, 296, 307 Aizenberg, G. 318 Åkesson, Elner 288 Albéra, François 68 Alderson, Donnie Brooke 327 Aleksandrov, Grigori 303 Allen, Frederick Lewis 90 Almqvist, Stig 21, 288 – 9 Atlgermanische Bauernkultur 57 Altman, Rick 15

Amarante, Estevão 270 Ambra, Niraldo 268 Amsterdam 16, 108, 110, 118, 119, 120, 122, 130, 249, 252, 290, 292 Anderson, Matthew 264 Année dernière à Marienbad, L’ 297 Another Day 8, 169, 305, 311 – 12 À nous la liberté 161 Anstey, Edgar 26, 201, 294 Antwerp 110, 120 Anwander, Arthur 320 Apollinaire, Guillaume 212 Applause 34 À propos de Nice 3, 6, 11, 20, 21, 23, 25, 108, 110, 188, 237, 239, 240, 242, 254, 272 – 3, 278, 279, 284 Aragon, Louis 30, 113, 318 Architekturkongress 52 Arnheim, Rudolf 148, 248 Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat, L’ 306

Babel, Isaac 318 – 19 Baberske, Robert 218 Backman, Lucien 106 – 8, 260 – 1 Bacon, Lloyd 23, 34 Balázs, Béla 248 Ballet mécanique 93 Baltard, Victor 237 Baltimore 303 Barnouw, Erik 197 – 8, 328 Barr, Alfred 170 Barry, Iris 170, 171 Barsam, Richard 78 Bartoš, František 296 – 7 Basse, Wilfried 23, 150, 237, 247 – 8, 251 Bastanier, Hans 328 – 9 Bataille, Georges 113 Bateaux Parisiens 110 Bath 317 Battleship Potemkin 220 Baudelaire, Charles 32, 68 Bauer, Arthur 119, 292 Bauer, Catherine 199 Bauer, Charles 330 Bayer, Herbert 246 Becker, Frank 151 Beecher, Henry Ward 169 Behrens, Peter 58 Beijing 171, 229 Belgrade 298 – 9 Belgrade: Capital of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia 22, 298 – 9 Bengtson, Erik 288 Benjamin, Walter 20, 30, 32 – 3, 48, 51, 54, 67 Bergman, Erna 303 – 4 Berkeley, Busby 23, 34 Berlage, Hendrik Petrus 122 Berlin 7, 16, 17, 18, 19, 22, 27, 35, 50, 51, 57, 67, 106, 138, 140, 148, 171, 181, 182,

218 – 20, 226, 227, 243, 246, 248 – 51, 257, 269, 275 – 6, 293 – 6, 321 Berlin – Alexanderplatz 249 Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt 3, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 34, 36, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 72, 77, 86, 100, 106, 130, 131, 134, 138, 141, 143, 150, 154, 158, 159, 161 – 2, 170, 171, 181, 188, 190, 191, 192, 194, 201, 204, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218 – 20, 223, 224, 227, 231, 240, 243, 248, 253, 260, 267, 268, 278, 279, 282, 285, 289, 298, 303, 306, 307, 320, 321 – 2, 328 Berliner Stilleben 21, 22, 50, 52, 293 – 4, 295, 317 Berlin von unten 19, 250 – 1 Berman, Marshall 286 Bernis, Blanche 215 Betogingen 130 Bezhin Meadow 170, 319 Birdsall, Carolyn 58 Blakeston, Oswell 109, 110 Blažek, Jaroslav 228 Bleeck-Wagner, Erwin 321 Bliokh, Yakov 22, 26, 229 – 30 Blokkade 120 Blut und Boden: Grundlagen zum neuen Reich 34, 57 Boccioni, Umberto 300 Boese, Carl 250 Boiffard, Jacques-André 21, 28, 113, 231 Bois de Boulogne sous la neige, Le 230 Bonfiglioli, Igino 182 Bonjour New York! 89, 266 Bool, Flip 129 Borchert, Brigitte 275 Borelli, Aldo 102 Bouchot, Louis-Jules 103 Bourke-White, Margaret 170, 198, 284 Bovis, Marcel 246 Brakhage, Stan 327 Brandis, Helmuth 295 Brassaï 21, 28 Braunberger, Pierre 215 Breton, André 30, 113 Bridge of San Luis Rey, The 171 Bridges-go-round 35 Brno 133, 326 Broadway By Light 35 Bronx Morning, A. 10, 19, 22, 23, 25, 28, 167 – 75, 285 – 6, 305 Browning, Irving 20, 25, 168, 188, 282, 283 – 4, 305, 311

index

Así nació el obelisco 14, 23, 225, 324 Asklund, Erik 21, 288 – 9 Asphalt 23, 34 Atalante, L’ 240 Atget, Eugène 19, 21, 22, 28, 113, 167, 171, 235, 236, 285 Athens 52 Auerbach, Walter 324 Aujourd’hui 239, 240, 242 Aumont, Jacques 72 Auriol, Jean-Georges 235 Autumn Fire 13, 21, 175, 277, 303 – 4, 305

331

index

Brug, De 14, 16, 18, 23, 27, 29, 30, 118, 127, 130, 131, 133, 139, 223, 224 – 5, 248, 252, 253, 325 Bruger, Ernst Th. 34 Bruges 16 Brunius, Jacques 114, 235 Bruno, Giuliana 89 Brussels 10, 107 – 8, 110, 113, 217, 242, 255 – 8, 272 Budapest 181, 269, 317 Budapest: City of Baths 23, 317 Buenos Aires 180, 324 Buñuel, Luis 240, 269, 271 Burckhardt, Rudy 7, 19, 35, 326 – 7, 332 – 3 Butler, David 23

332

Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, Das 219 Cannes 133, 326 Canudo, Ricciotto 73 Carnaval paraibano e pernambucano, O. 182 Carnaval pernambucano 182 Carné, Marcel 7, 20, 26, 66, 68, 69, 73, 244 – 5 Carpenter, John Alden 90 Cartier, Jacques 323 Cascais 270 Cauvin, André 242 Cavalcanti, Alberto 5, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 15, 20, 24, 66, 73, 110, 167, 170, 215 – 16, 219, 223, 238, 240, 241, 243, 268, 278, 289, 299, 306, 328 Cendrars, Blaise 185 Chagas, Edson 182 Champs-Élysées 23, 110, 240, 241 – 2, 319 Chaplin, Charlie 161 Chevalier, Maurice 89, 266 Chiang Kai-Shek 229 Chicago 16, 18, 19, 25, 33, 45, 140, 147 – 55, 158 – 66, 280 – 1, 308 – 9 Chomette, Henri 6, 19, 26, 66, 67, 69, 171, 213 – 14, 223, 235 Chopin, Frédéric 224 Chousvalowa, Nina 215 Cidade de Morretes 182 Cidade de Paranaguá 182 Ciels de Paris 230 Cinq minutes de cinéma pur 67, 214 Citroen, Paul 28 City, The 26, 34, 150, 197 – 206, 330 – 1 City of Contrasts 20, 24, 25, 188, 282, 283 – 4, 305, 311

City of Towers 24, 25, 193 – 5, 314 – 15, 323 City Symphony, A. 27, 277, 303, 305 City that Never Rests, The 7, 18, 130, 134, 137 – 44, 226 – 7, 254, 298, 317 Clair, René 13, 161, 167, 214, 217, 225, 235, 238, 260 Clark, T.J. 99 Clarke, Shirley 35 Cluytens, Camy 108, 261 Coburn, Alvin Langdon 87, 201 Cocteau, Jean 235, 240 Cohen, Evelyne 72 Color Box, A. 261 Combat de boxe 111; Como 103 Copland, Aaron 200, 205, 206, 331 Coppola, Horacio 14, 225, 324 Corbett, Harvey Wiley 90, 92 Corbusier, Le 19, 52, 198 Cornell, Joseph 170 Costinha, Irene Isidro 270 Cotten, Joseph 327 Cowan, Michael 150 Crommelynck, Fernand 108 Crowd, The 34 Curitiba 181, 182 Cürlis, Hans 63 Curtis, David 167, 168 Curtis, Robin 51 da Cunha, Alves 270 Dankevych, Konstantyn 318 Davies, Terence 265 Daybreak Express 35, 327 Day in Liverpool, A. 7, 18, 264 – 5 Day in Santa Fe, A. 8, 170, 286 – 7, 305 Dayton 10, 169, 170, 286 de Beaumont, Étienne 240, 242 de Boode, Arij 131 Debussy, Claude 224 de Certeau, Michel 70 De Chirico, Giorgio 21 de Ghelderode, Michel 108, 255 de Graaff, Chr. 119 Dekeukeleire, Charles 21, 27, 110 – 14, 292 – 3 Deleuze, Gilles 70, 73 Delvaux, Paul 21 de Macedo, Costa 270 de Miéville, Jean 234 Denby, Edwin 326 – 7 de Noailles, Charles 240, 242

Ecclefechan 9 Edinburgh 9 Eggeling, Viking 11, 27 Ehlers, Christl 275 Ehmann, Antje 150, 154 Eisenstein, Sergei M. 26, 76, 81, 82, 141, 161, 162, 166, 170, 171, 218, 220, 253, 260, 286, 303, 318, 319 Eisler, Hanns 257 Elogio della velocità 299

Elton, Arthur 26, 201, 294 Empire 36 Ensor, James 108, 255 En un rincón de Andalucía 316 Epstein, Jean 110, 238 Esencia de Verbena 22, 110, 271 – 2 Etudes de mouvements à Paris 19, 27, 72, 222 – 3, 253 Etudes sur Paris 16, 19, 21, 22, 27, 69 – 70, 71, 231, 234 – 5 Evans, Walker 167, 170, 285, 332 ewige Jude, Der 120, 292 Ewiger Wald 62 Exemplo Regenerador 182 Face of Britain, The 261 Fagundes, Lamartine 181 Fall of the House of Usher 169 Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, The 76, 81 – 2, 218, 229 Fayard, Claude 240 Fejos, Paul 34, 120 Fernhout, John 224 Ferriss, Hugh 90, 92 Filho, Lobo 231 Fishers of Grande Anse 312 Flaherty, Robert 5, 7, 11, 13, 16, 91, 108, 148, 221 – 2, 260, 282 Flon, Paul 108, 261 Florence 16 Florey, John 169 Florey, Robert 6, 7, 8, 16, 86 – 93, 107, 110, 192, 265 – 6 Footnote to Fact 13, 304 – 5 Foujita, Tsuguharu 269 Fournel, Victor 68 Fragmentos da Vida 182 Frampton, Hollis 160 Franju, Georges 114 Franken, Mannus 3, 6, 11, 119, 252 – 3, 279, 290 Freund, Karl 158, 218, 219 Friberg, Conrad 19, 25, 33, 158 – 66, 308 – 9 Froelich, Carl 19, 249 – 50 Fukkõ Teito Shinfoni 7, 20, 27, 266 – 7 Funke, Arnold 328 Galitzine, André 14, 67 – 8, 237, 269 Gamla Stan 21, 23, 288 – 9 Gance, Abel 238, 241 Gauthier, Guy 230

index

de Oliveira, Manoel 7, 18, 19, 26, 279 Derain, Lucie 6, 18, 66, 68, 72, 238 – 9 Deren, Maya 168, 278 D’Errico, Corrado 6, 15, 18, 23, 96 – 104, 262 – 4, 299 – 300 Deslaw, Eugène 12, 18, 20, 26, 27, 66, 67, 72, 73, 243, 268 Desnos, Robert 235, 240 Désordres 239 Dessau 45 Detroit 170 Deutsche Panzer 63 Diagonal Symphony 11, 27 Dickerman, Leah 81 Dickinson, Emily 171 Dimendberg, Edward 14, 92 Disney, Walt 264 Dixmude 112 Djordjevic´, Vojin 22, 298 Döblin, Alfred 30, 46 Donskoy, Mark 319 Dos Passos, John 30, 46 Douro: Faina fluvial 18, 19, 279 – 80 Dovzhenko, Alexander 319 Downhill 34 Dragutinovic´, Vladeta 298 Dreyer, Carl Theodor 288, 324 Duchamp, Marcel 212 Dudow, Slatan 294 Duhamel, Marcel 21, 231 Dulac, Germaine 110, 255 Dullin, Charles 70, 235 Duplessis, Maurice 192 Dupont, E.A. 324 Düsseldorf 7, 16, 21, 56 – 63, 320, 321 – 2, 329 Duvivier, Julien 111 Dyer, Anson 7, 18, 264 – 5 Dynamik der Gross-Stadt 5, 11, 46 – 8, 293, 295, 317

333

index

Geiger, Jeffrey 261 Gershwin, George 88, 300 Gide, André 318 Giedion, Siegfried 18, 131 Gilbert, Cass 92 Giménez Caballero, Ernesto 22, 110, 271 Glassgold, C. Adolph 168 Gmelin, Paul 93 Go! Go! Go! 35 Gold Diggers of 1935 23, 34 Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, Der 219 Gombault, C.F.J. 122 Gorel, Michel 110 Gorky 319 Goya, Francisco 272 Grabbe, Christian Dietrich 59 Graf, Alexander 128, 141 Granada 16, 316 Green, Alfred E. 162 Grierson, John 5, 9, 11, 14, 33, 143, 195, 206, 215, 220, 242 Grignon, J. 231 Groff, João Batista 182 Gross-Stadt-Zigeuner 20, 22, 51 – 2, 292, 294, 295 – 6, 317 Grotesken im Schnee 251 Grune, Karl 23, 219 Gunning, Tom 131, 309 Günther, Lutz Philipp 60 Gurgel, Gaó 181

334

H20 169, 170 Hackenschmied, Alexandr 7, 13, 21, 23, 27, 33, 277 – 8, 296 – 7, 307 Hackland, Fred 320, 328 Hague, The 130, 132, 249, 290, 326 Halbertsma, Marlite 140 Haller, Robert A. 285 Halles centrales, Les 14, 23, 67, 68, 73, 237, 269 Halles de Paris, Les 133, 134, 237 Halsted Street 19, 23, 25, 33, 158 – 66, 308 – 9 Hamburg 7, 57, 328 – 9 Handelsbladfilm 122 Harmonies de Paris 6, 18, 27, 68, 72, 238 – 9 Hauser, Heinrich 19, 25, 147 – 55, 280 – 1, 308 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène 69, 223 Have you ever seen Budapest in Winter? 317 Heartfield, John 28 Hébert, Adrien 192 Heimat 250

Heine, Heinrich 59, 322 Helman, Albert 253 Helsinki 329 – 30 Henri, Florence 246 Hériat, Philippe 215 Hillairet, Prosper 69 Hippler, Fritz 120, 292 Histoire de détective 111 Hitchcock, Alfred 7, 34 Höch, Hannah 28 Hochland, Fred 321 Hoffmann, Klär 321 Hogenkamp, Bert 133 Hollywood Boulevard 88, 89, 93 Honneger, Athur 300 Hood, Raymond 19 Hoogstraat 23, 138, 159, 226, 257 – 8, 291, 317 Hopper, Edward 21 Horak, Jan-Christopher 14, 213, 294 Horký, František 228 Housing Problems 25, 201, 294 Howard, Ebenezer 197 Huff, Theodore 168, 169, 193 Hughes, James 8, 286 – 7 Hull, Jane 161 Hunter Austin, Mary 287 Ilic´-Mlad¯i, Vojislav 298 Images d’Ostende 6, 20, 21, 22, 108 – 10, 112, 113, 255 – 6, 279, 316 Immermann, Karl 59, 322 Impatience 111 Impressionen der Großstadt 19, 250 – 1 Impressionen vom alten Marseiller Hafen (Vieux Port) 6, 16, 18, 23, 49, 50, 53, 119, 245 – 7, 292, 293 – 4, 295, 317 Innemann, Svatopluk 7, 227 – 8, 307 Ivens, Joris 3, 6, 7, 11, 14, 18, 19, 26, 27, 29, 30, 33, 66, 72, 106, 107, 108, 110, 113, 118, 119, 120, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 139, 170, 222 – 5, 242, 248, 252, 252 – 3, 255, 279, 290, 316, 325 Ives, H. Douglas 93 Jacobs, Lewis 7, 13, 222, 236, 304 – 5, 312 Jacobs, Lillian 304 James, David E. 88 Jannings, Emil 250 János, Dáloky 317 Jardin du Luxembourg 252 Jennings, Humphrey 114

Koprˇiva, Karel 228 Korda, Alexander 53 Koster, Simon 251 Koyaanisqatsi 36 Kracauer, Siegfried 11, 14, 19, 20, 25, 26, 30, 32 – 3, 51, 147, 220, 248 Krull, Germaine 72, 73, 223, 246 Kuleshov, Lev 76, 81 – 4, 168, 218 Kuntze, Reimar 218, 220 Kuplent, Friedrich 8, 251 – 2 Kyrou, Ado 114

Kadow, Hermann 321 Kaes, Anton 131 Kalivoda, František 133 Kalmic, Maks 299 Kandó, László 317 Kartto, Turo 329 – 30 Katch, D. 318 Kaufman, Boris 7, 14, 24, 26, 66, 67 – 8, 73, 108, 110, 237, 239 – 42, 272 – 3, 269, 319 Kaufman, Mikhail 7, 13, 18, 26, 76 – 84, 130, 141, 158, 216 – 18, 229, 237, 253 – 5, 278 Kayser, Rudolf 151 Keech, Kelvin 284 Kemeny, Adalberto 16, 18, 24, 177 – 85, 268 – 9, 317 Kermesse flamande 108, 261 – 2 Kertézs, André 28, 72, 113 Kiev 23, 251, 253 Kiki de Montparnasse 231 Kiljan, Gerrit 132 – 3 Kino-Eye 26, 80, 81, 217, 230, 251 – 2 Kirsanoff, Dimitri 11 Kisch, Egon 111 Kjellgren, Josef 288 – 9 Klein, Charles 169 Klein, William 35 Kleiner Film einer großen Stadt:der Stadt Düsseldorf am Rhein 7, 16, 21, 56 – 63, 320, 321 – 2, 329 Kling, Albert 320 Klutsis, Gustav 28 Koblenz 148, 281 Koch-Riehl, Rudolf 328 Koelinga, Jan 22, 117 – 24, 291 – 2 Koepnick, Lutz 275 Kohn, Robert D. 200 Koolhaas, Rem 34, 198 Kopalin, Ilya 18, 26, 76 – 84, 141, 216 – 18

Labisse, Félix 108 Lacombe, Georges 7, 22, 26, 66, 70 – 2, 235 – 6 Landpartie, Die 251 Lang, Fritz 23, 87, 151, 219, 222, 269 Langlois, Henri 239 Larsson, Inga Lena 288 La Sarraz 10, 251 Las Vegas 35 Leander, Zarah 250 Le Bon, Gustave 21 Lee, Rowland V. 171 Lefrancq, Marcel 21 Léger, Fernand 52, 93 Leitão de Barros, José 22, 269 – 70 Lenin, Vladimir 79 Leningrad 170 Lesser, Sol 283 letzte Drosche von Berlin, Die 250 letzte Mann, Der 23, 219 letzten Segelschiffe, Die 148 Levi-Strauss, Claude 185 Levitt, Helen 35, 285, 294 Levy, Julien 170, 285 Leyda, Jay 7, 10, 19, 22, 27, 28, 167 – 75, 285 – 6, 305 L’Herbier, Marcel 260 Lichtspiel: Opus I-IV 27 Lichtspiel: Schwarz-Weiss-Grau, Ein 51, 246 Lichtveld, Lou 253 Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra 88 – 92, 266 Lisbôa: Cronica anedótica 22, 269 – 71 Lisbon 270, 280 Liszt, Franz 224 Liu Na’ou 8, 305 – 7 Liverpool 7, 18, 264 – 5 Lloyd Wright, Frank 34 Lods, Jean 16, 23, 24, 110, 239 – 42, 255, 318 – 19

index

Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse 6, 19, 26, 67, 69, 171, 213 – 14, 223 Johnny One-Eye 88 Johnson, Eyvind 21, 288 – 9 Jonák, Max 228 Jones, Robert Edmond 90 Joyce, James 30, 46, 66 Juan, Myriam 68, 72, 230, 237 Julianelli, José 182 Just Imagine 23 Jutzi, Phil 249, 294

335

index

Loeb, Janice 294 Logan, John 150 London 7, 10, 11, 24, 51, 53, 170, 171, 193, 212, 301 – 2, 324 London Medley 24, 301 – 2 Lonesome 34 Lorentz, Pare 198, 200, 201, 206, 261, 330 – 1 Los Angeles 8, 35, 36, 88 Lost Lady, A. 162 Lotar, Eli 21, 28, 73, 113, 114 Lot in Sodom 169 Lourdes 7, 21, 25, 110 – 13, 292 – 3 Loves of Zero, The 88 Lumière Brothers 306 Lundkvist, Artur 21, 288 – 9 Lustig, Rodolpho Rex 16, 18, 24, 177 – 85, 268 – 9, 317 Lye, Len 261

336

Maasbruggen, De 14, 16, 18, 21, 23, 127 – 35, 325 – 6 Maccari, Mino 97 Machado Junior, Rubens 182 McLaglen, Clifford 215 McLuhan, Marshall 48 Madrid 110, 271, 315, 316 Magnaghi, Ubaldo 16, 300 – 1 Maisons de la misère, Les 26, 294 Mallo, Maruja 272 Malraux, André 318 Mamoulian, Rouben 34 Manaus 181 Manhatta 3, 5, 6, 10, 11, 16, 18, 19, 21, 24, 25, 26, 86, 91, 93, 192, 197, 199, 201, 212 – 13, 221, 236, 264, 265, 285 Manhattan Medley 7, 19, 20, 24, 27, 188, 190, 191, 192, 195, 282 – 3, 284, 302, 310 – 11 Mann, Thomas 106 Mannesmann 62, 63 Man of Aran 148 Man Ray 113, 231, 240, 246 Man Who Has a Camera, The 8, 305 – 7 Man with a Movie Camera, The 3, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 77 – 83, 99, 141, 143, 158, 170, 188, 191, 201, 204, 217, 223, 230, 243, 251, 252 – 4, 263, 268, 289, 304, 306, 307 Marche des Machines, La 12, 18, 243, 269 Marcus, Laura 96 Marie: légende hongroise 120 Marin, John 87

Marinetti, Filippo Tomaso 66, 263, 269 Markt in Berlin 23, 25, 150, 237, 247 – 8, 251 Marseille 6, 7, 16, 18, 23, 49, 52, 53, 119, 245 – 7, 292, 294, 295, 317 Masereel, Frans 106 – 7 Mattoli, Mario 263 Mauro, Humberto 27, 182, 230 – 1 May, Joe 23, 34 Mayer, Carl 107, 218, 219 Mechanical Principles 18 Medina, José 182 Mediolanum 16, 300 – 1 Meisel, Edmund 219, 220 Mekas, Jonas 168 Mélodie bruxelloise 27, 108, 261 – 2 Melville, Herman 171 Mendelsohn, Erich 151 Mendes, António 279 Ménilmontant 11 Menken, Marie 35 Menschen am Sonntag 12 – 13, 25, 73, 248, 275 – 6 Menzel, Erich 321 Menzies, William Cameron 53 Meshes of the Afternoon 278 Messter, Oskar 249 Metall des Himmels 57, 58, 61, 63 Metropolis 23, 87, 151, 219, 222, 269 Michelson, Annette 14, 77 Midi 107 – 8, 260 – 1 Mighty Niagara 312 Milan 7, 16, 18, 96 – 104, 263, 299, 301 Miller, Perry 89 Minas Antiga 182 Misère au Borinage 110 Mission to Moscow 171 Mit der Pferdedroschke durch Berlin 19, 249 – 50 Moana 108 Modern Times 161 Moholy-Nagy, László 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 18, 20, 21, 22, 25, 27, 28, 45 – 54, 118, 119, 129, 131, 175, 230, 245 – 7, 251, 292, 293 – 6, 317 Montparnasse 12, 23, 72, 73, 243, 268 – 9 Montreal 7, 187 – 92, 195, 309 – 11, 312, 314, 323 Moreau, René 22, 231 – 2 Morettin, Eduardo 181 Morienval, Jean 240 Moritz, William 107 Morris, Peter 188

Nacht gehört uns, Die 249 Nanook of the North 13, 221 New Architecture at the London Zoo, The 53 New York 5, 7, 8, 10, 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 35, 36, 53, 86 – 93, 140, 151, 160, 167 – 75, 182, 188, 192, 193, 197 – 206, 212 – 13, 221 – 2, 230, 265 – 6, 282 – 6, 303 – 5, 326 – 8,  330 – 3 Nice 3, 6, 7, 11, 20, 21, 23, 25, 108, 110, 188, 237, 239, 240, 242, 255, 272 – 3, 278, 279, 284 Nogent: Eldorado du Dimanche 20, 21, 68, 69, 73, 244 – 5 Novak, Josip 298 Nuits électriques, Les 20, 26, 67, 243, 269 Nye, David 89 N.Y., N.Y. 35 Odessa 16, 23, 253, 318 – 19 Odessa 16, 318 – 19 O’Flaherty, Liam 148 Of Time and the City 265 O’Keefe, Georgia 287 Oktbr 170 Olimsky, Fritz 147 Olympia 138, 226, 257 Ostend 6, 7, 20, 21, 22, 108 – 10, 112, 113, 255 – 6, 279, 316 Ostende, reine des plages 113 Ott, Georg 320 Ottawa 193, 313 Paalman, Floris 118, 121, 137 Paienne 262 Païni, Dominique 69, 70

Painlevé, Jean 114, 255, 272 Pallu, Georges 111 Pamplona, Armando 181 Paris 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 27, 30, 35, 66 – 73, 108, 113, 122, 133, 134, 171, 190, 212, 214 – 16, 217, 219, 222 – 4, 231 – 42, 243, 244, 253, 269, 285, 316, 319, 324 Paris express ou Souvenirs de Paris 21, 231 Paris qui dort 13, 217 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 99 Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, La 288, 324 Pedro I 184 Pennebaker, D.A. 35, 327 Pennell, Joseph 87 People of the Cumberland, The 171 Pérez de Pedro, S. 271 Périnal, Georges 235 Permeke, Constant 108 Peterhans, Walther 324 Petho", Agnes 117 Petric, Vlada 83 Picabia, Francis 272 Picasso, Pablo 272 Pierement 20, 290 Pietzsch, Sibylle 293, 295 Pihlström, Uno 330 Pinheiro, Chaby 270 Pinkus, Karen 101 Pirandello, Luigi 279 Pittsburgh 201 Pledath, Werner 328 Plow That Broke the Plains, The 261 Podsadecki, Kazimierz 28 Poèmes de Madrid 110 Pogany, Willy 90 Porten, Henny 249 Porto 7, 279 Portrait de la Grèce 234 Portrait of a Young Man 169, 170, 200 Potamkin, Harry Alan 8, 12, 18, 242 Powell, Bonney 7, 20, 188, 195, 282 – 3, 284, 302, 310 Prague 7, 9, 16, 20, 21, 23, 33, 227 – 8, 278, 296 – 7, 307 – 8 Prague by Night 7, 20, 227 – 8, 307 Prague Castle 23, 278, 296 – 7 Prampolini, Enrico 110, 269 Prater 8, 23, 28, 251 – 2 Prévert, Pierre 21, 231, 235 progresso de Blumenau, O. 182

index

Moscow 7, 16, 18, 23, 76 – 84, 141, 216 – 18, 229, 253, 286, 318 Moscow 18, 24, 26, 76 – 84, 130, 141, 216 – 18, 229, 251 Moses, Robert 286 Moussinac, Léon 110, 240, 241, 318 Mr. Motorboat’s Last Stand 169 Müller-Hanno, Otto 328 Mumford, Lewis 90, 199, 200, 201, 331 Munich 56 Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm 23, 219 Murphy, Dudley 93 Mutter Krause fahrt ins Glück 294 Muzio, Giovanni 301 Mycroft, Walter 7

337

Pudovkin, Vsevolod 26, 141 Pursuit of Happiness 332 – 3

index

Quadros, João 181 Quai de la Seine, Un 324 Quaresima, Leonardo 100 Queeckers, Carlo 27, 106, 108, 261 – 2

338

Rajewsky, Irina 117 Ramo, Luciano 263 Reece, Jane 170 Regen 3, 6, 11, 21, 30, 106, 110, 118, 223, 252 – 3, 279, 290, 316 Reggio, Godfrey 36 Reiniger, Lotte 251 Resnais, Alain 297 Rethel, Alfred 59 Rhapsody in Two Languages 7, 20, 24, 25, 27, 187 – 95, 282, 284, 309 – 11, 312, 323 Rhythmus 27 Richter, Hans 27, 110, 250 Riefenstahl, Leni 59, 138, 226, 257, 261 Rien que les heures 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 20, 21, 24, 25, 66, 73, 110, 130, 170, 215 – 16, 219, 223, 238, 240, 243, 268, 278, 289, 299, 328 Riggs, Lynn 8, 170, 286 – 7, 305 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nicolai 330 Rio de Janeiro 180, 182 Ritmi di Stazione 23, 27, 103, 299 – 300 Roberts, Graham 78 Robertson, T. Markoe 93 Robinson, David 72 Rockefeller, Abby 169 Rodakiewicz, Henwar 169, 170, 200, 206, 331 Rodchenko, Alexander 28, 230 Rodrigues, Walfredo 182 Rogers, James E. 215 Rogers, James Gamble 91 Rolland, Romain 318 Rollet, Patrice 67 Romance Sentimentale 303 Rome 97 Rose Hobart 170 Rotha, Paul 5, 11, 14, 30, 215, 220, 254, 261 Rotterdam 7, 16, 18, 118 – 24, 127 – 35, 137 – 44, 223, 224 – 5, 226 – 7, 257 – 8, 290, 291 – 2, 325 – 6 Rotterdam Europoort 223 Royal Visit to Toronto of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, The 312

Rudakov, Nicolas 72, 238 Ruskaya, Yia 102, 264 Rusland 130 Russolo, Luigi 269 Ruttmann, Walter 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 34, 36, 46, 52, 56 – 63, 72, 77, 86, 100, 106, 107, 131, 134, 135, 138, 141, 150, 151, 154, 158, 166, 167, 170, 171, 181, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 204, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218 – 20, 223, 224, 227, 231, 235, 240, 241, 242, 243, 248, 253, 260, 263, 267, 268, 278, 279, 282, 289, 298, 303, 306, 307, 308, 319, 320 – 2, 328 – 9 Sadoul, Georges 243 St. Louis 36 Sangue mineiro 231 Santa Fe 8, 170, 286 – 7, 305 Sant’Elia, Antonio 19 Santos, Feliciano 270 Sanvoisin, Michel 244 São Paulo 7, 16, 18, 22, 177 – 85, 268 – 9 São Paulo: Sinfonia da Metrópole 16, 18, 22, 24, 27, 28, 177 – 85, 268 – 9, 317 Satie, Erik 212 Sauvage, André 16, 19, 22, 26, 27, 66, 69 – 70, 71, 73, 231, 234 – 5, 241 Schaffende Hände 62 Schaffendes Volk 62, 63 Schäffer, László 218 Schild, Harloff 328 Schild, Maria 328 Schlageter, Leo Albert 57, 59, 60, 62, 322 Schneider, Albert 329 Scholte, Henrik 119 Schonger, Hubert 148, 280 Schreyer, Annie 275 Schüfftan, Eugen 275 – 6 Schuitema, Paul 14, 18, 27, 127 – 35, 325 – 6 Schumann, Robert 59, 322 Schütze, Walter 321 Seeber, Guido 62 Seeing the World 19, 326 – 8, 332 Seeler, Moritz 275 Seine a rencontré Paris, La 223 Seine sous le ciel de Paris, La 230 Sevcenko, Nicolau 180 Severini, Gino 300 Shanghai 22, 26, 229 – 30, 306 Shanghai Document 22, 26, 229 – 30

Strand, Paul 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 16, 26, 27, 86, 91, 93, 167, 197, 198, 199, 212 – 13, 221, 236, 264, 285 Strasse, Die 23, 219 Strasser, Alex 19, 250 – 1 In the Street 35, 294 Street Scene 23 Strike 161 Stroman, Ben 132 Stuttgart 7, 10, 16, 57, 63, 234, 248, 319 – 20,  329 Stuttgart: Die Großstadt zwischen Wald und Reben 7, 57, 58, 63, 319 – 20, 329 Sucksdorff, Arne 35 Sunday in Hampstead Heath, A. 324 Sunrise 23 Svilova, Elizaveta 13, 253 Symphony of a City 35 Symphony of Budapest 317 Symphony of the Rebuilding of the Imperial Metropolis 7, 20, 27, 266 – 7 Tarride, Jean 239 Taussig, Hans 154 Taves, Brian 88, 91 Tazelaar, Marguerite 7 – 8 Tell-Tale Heart, The 169 ter Braak, Menno 119 – 21 Teunissen, Jan 20, 290 Thatcher, Leslie P. 8, 169, 305, 311 – 12 Things to Come 51, 53 This in Our Time 265 Thompson, Francis 35 Thomson, Corey 189 Three Songs of Lenin 170 Tibiriçá, Antônio 182 Tokyo 266 – 7, 306, 307 Toland, Gregg 88 Tongerloo 262 Toronto 193 – 5, 211 – 12, 311 – 12, 314 – 15,  323 Toronto Centennial 312 Tour, La 13, 225 Toute la mémoire du mode 297 Tragédie de Lourdes, La 111 Trains de Plaisir 113 Traum 324 Traumulus 250 traversée du Grépon, La 234 Treadwell, Sophie 90 Trekschuit, De 119

index

Shapins, Jesse 141 Sheeler, Charles 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 16, 26, 27, 86, 91, 93, 197, 199, 212 – 13, 221, 236, 264 Shinpei Goto 267 Shklovsky, Viktor 82, 83 Shub, Esfir 76, 81 – 2, 218, 229 Simmel, Georg 30, 31 Sinclair, Upton 161 Sinfonia de Cataguases 27, 182, 230 – 1 Siodmak, Curt 275 Siodmak, Robert 7, 12, 73, 275 Sironi, Mario 99 Sixth Part of the World, A. 26, 77, 81, 82, 83, 217 Sjabos 290 Skyscraper Symphony 6, 8, 16, 19, 27, 86 – 93, 110, 192, 265 – 6 Sloan, John 93 Smeh, Anton-Harry 298 Sob o céu nordestino 182 Sokolov, Ippolit 77 Somkúti, István 23, 317 Soubirous, Bernadette 111 Sparling, Gordon 7, 20, 24, 187 – 95, 282, 284, 309 – 11, 312, 313, 314 – 15, 322 – 3 Spier, Jo 290 Spilliaert, Léon 108 Splettstößer, Erwin 275 Spring, In 26, 254 – 5, 278 Stacchini, Ulisse 103 Stad die nooit rust, De 7, 18, 130, 134, 137 – 44, 226 – 7, 254, 298, 317 Stadt der Millionen: Ein Lebensbild Berlins, Die 219 Stanwyck, Barbara 162 Stauffacher, Frank 171 Steeg, De 22, 23, 117 – 24, 291 – 2 Stein, Clarence 200 Steiner, Ralph 7, 10, 18, 26, 27, 34, 150, 168, 169, 170, 197 – 206, 284, 286, 330 – 1 Stepanov, V.L. 229 Stern, Grete 324 Stieglitz, Alfred 87, 170, 201, 212 Stockholm 35, 288 – 9 Storck, Henri 6, 20, 22, 26, 27, 108 – 10, 112 – 14, 255 – 6, 279, 294, 316 Story of the Day: Unfinished Symphony of a City 299 Stramilano 6, 16, 18, 24, 25, 96 – 104, 262 – 4,  299

339

index

Triumph des Willens 59, 60, 261 Trotz, Adolf 219 Tsivian, Yuri 23 Turvey, Malcolm 218 Tuzr, Jaroslav 307 Twain, Mark 153 Twenty-four Dollar Island 5, 11, 13, 16, 18, 91, 192, 201, 221 – 2, 265, 282 Tzara, Tristan 212 Ulmer, Edgar 7, 12, 73, 275 – 6 Umbehr, Otto 230 Under the Brooklyn Bridge 35 Uricchio, William 14, 168, 284, 329

340

Vaala, Valentin 329 – 30 Val del Omar, José 16, 315 – 16 Valparaiso, À. 223 van Beusekom, Ansje 124 Vancouver 193, 323 Vancouver Vignette 193, 322 – 3 van de Griend, Koos 132, 325 van der Hoog, Willem 120 van Dijkhuizen, Herman 122 – 3 van Dongen, Helen 253 Van Dyke, Willard 7, 26, 27, 34, 150, 197 – 206, 330 – 1 van Melrose 124 van Neijenhoff, Otto 119 van Oudheusden, Pieter 131 van Ravesteyn, Sybold 130 van Ulzen, Patricia 140 Variété 324 Vávra, Otokar 16, 307 – 8 Venice 16, 138, 226, 230, 257 Vertov, Dziga 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 33, 34, 52, 68, 70, 73, 76 – 84, 99, 107, 108, 110, 119, 141, 151, 158, 166, 170, 204, 217, 218, 223, 230, 235, 237, 243, 252 – 4, 260, 263, 268, 289, 304, 305, 306, 307, 312, 319, 333 Verwoestingen in Rotterdam 121 Vibracion de Granada 16, 315 – 16 Vích, Václav 228 Vício e Beleza 182 Vidor, King 23, 34 Vie à l’envers, La 108, 260 Vie d’un fleuve: la Seine, La 240 Vie merveilleuse de Bernadette, La 111 Vienna 252

Vigo, Jean 3, 6, 7, 20, 21, 23, 25, 33, 108, 110, 111, 114, 237, 239, 240, 242, 255, 272 – 3, 278, 279, 284 Vincent, Carl 109, 110, 256 Vingt-quatre heures en trente minutes 24, 239 – 41, 242, 319 Visages de Paris 22, 231 – 2 Visions de Lourdes 21, 25, 110 – 14, 292 – 3 von Barsy, Andor 7, 23, 130, 137 – 44, 159, 226 – 7, 257 – 8, 291, 317 von Cornelius, Peter 59, 322 von Maydell, Friedrich 7, 137 – 44, 226 – 7,  254 von Passavant, Hans 34 von Sonjevski-Jamrowski, Rolf 34 von Uhl, Flita 328 von Waltershausen, Wolfgang 275 Voorhees, Stephen Francis 93 Vorkapich, Slavko 34, 88, 265 – 6 Votýpka, Bedrˇich 278 Vuillermoz, Émile 279 Wake Up, Helsinki 329 – 30 Warhol, Andy 35 Watson, James Sibley 169 Webber, Melville 169 Wegener, Paul 219 Weihsmann, Helmut 14, 249, 250 Weimar 45 Weinberg, Herman G. 7, 13, 26, 27, 168, 175, 277, 303 – 4, 305 We Live in Prague 16, 307 – 8 Wellem, Jan 58 Welles, Orson 327 Welles, Virginia 327 Wells, H.G. 51 Welstrasse See-Welthafen Hamburg 7, 57, 328 – 9 Weltstadt in Flegeljahren: Ein Bericht über Chicago 19, 25, 147 – 55, 280 – 1, 308 Westerkamp, Ulrich 320 Westminster of the West, The 193, 313 – 14 Weston, Edward 287 Whitman, Walt 26, 91, 212, 213 Wiene, Robert 219 Wiesbaden 317 Wilder, Billy 12, 275 Wilder, Thornton 171 Willem van Oranje 290 Winnig, Walter 328 Witte vlam 111

Witzler, Ben 283 Wonder Ring 327 Yamasaki, Minoru 36 Yokohama 267 Young, James C. 90 Zeitprobleme: Wie der Arbeiter wohnt 294 Zeller, Wolfgang 320

Zéro de conduite 110 Zimmermann, Patricia 8 Zinnemann, Fred 275 – 6 Zola, Émile 68, 111 Zone: Au pays des chiffoniers, La 22, 24, 70 – 1, 235 – 6 Zorns Lemma 160 Zuflucht 249 Zweig, Stefan 106

index

341