March 20, 2005
Ruttmann and Vertov
I signed up for a Netflix account to begin rectifying the fact that I know very little about film, and this morning watched two early documentaries. Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) are a natural pair: both explore urban life in late-‘20s metropolises, focusing largely on locomotion; both are non-narrative and accompanied by a musical score prepared especially for the film; both run about an hour. But Vertov’s work is in almost every way the superior film. Ruttmann’s film is hampered by its modest goal—to “present a more or less realistic picture of big city life from early morning to late at night,” according to Walter Laqueur—and has been critiqued frequently (and to my mind, somewhat rightly) for its uncommitted stance during what was an incredibly complex moment in modern Germany’s history. It need not have expressed the correct politics, of course, but any politics would have sufficed. Instead it is merely a pretty film, showing what we could have experienced had we been there, then. Vertov, on the other hand, starts out with a hubristic manifesto—Man with a Movie Camera is his expression of an “absolute language of cinema…based on its total separation from the language of literature and theater”—and follows through with what is, formally, a truly radical work. He consistently inserts images of cameramen and editors making the film we are watching; plays with shadows, split-screens, extreme angles (note the similarity between some of his shots and avant-garde photography produced in Paris around the same time), and the film’s speed; and is deliberately pointed in his juxtaposition of image of the upper class and the destitute. It is a near-dizzying whirlwind of imagery.
Can anyone recommend other films that might follow naturally from these two? (Here's looking at you, Greg.) Back on March 6th, at Ocularis, I watched Antonioni’s Nettezza Urbana (1948), a beautiful chiaroscuro portrait of Roman street sweepers, and Bambini in Citta (1946), a moving “testament to the innate joy, adaptability, and optimism of children” (to quote Sophie Fenwick, who put them on the same program). I would appreciate any recommendations of urban documentaries from the first half of the last century.