Cinema and the City module

CS6 European Film

Historical ContextsMetropolis - 1927

• High modernism – reaching its heights in 1920s and 30s

• Growing tension and unease with social order (Picasso, Matisse, Schoenberg (atonality), Kandinsky, Pound, Stravinsky)

• Explosion of ideas• Exhibitions, theatre, cinema, books and

buildings = the world was changing

Historical ContextsMetropolis - 1927

• Birth of a machine age - objects of modern production in daily life: electricity, the telephone, the need to work with them, repair them and live with them

• War (esp the First World War), & machine warfare became a touchstone of the ultimate reality.

• Enthusiasm for cars, air travel, telephone and other technological advances.

• Neue Sachlichkeit / Weimar Republic

Historical ContextsMan with a Movie Camera – 1929

• Early Soviet period, power becoming more centralized in the Communist Party

• Root out opposition• Paranoia abt internal rebellions and

international opposition • Rapid transformation of the economy • Bolshevik revolution of 1917

Historical ContextsMan with a Movie Camera - 1929

• Propaganda“So much of what Dziga Vertov thought and wrote about cinema was written at the time of the greatest propagandist uproar in the twentieth century—the birth of the Modern Soviet State.”- Jonathan Dawson, “Dziga Vertov”

Historical Contexts A propos de Nice – 1930

• Vigo: “in this film, we are attending the trial of a certain world[…] the film tends towards the generalisation of vulgar pleasures placed beneath the sign of the grotesque, of flesh and death, and these are the final spasms of a society which has let itself go to the point of making you sick and inspiring you to become part of a revolutionary situation.”

Historical ContextsA Propos de Nice - 1930

• Social documentary“Vigo stressed that he was interested in a particular kind of documentary – what he called the ‘social documentary’. [Quoting Vigo]: “This kind of social documentary demands that one take a position, because it dots the i’s.” • Discuss 9’53”

Historical ContextA Propos de Nice, 1930

• “It is possible to analyse the films…according to certain basic tenets of anarchism. Certainly, Vigo’s ideas about the bourgeoisie, authority, revolution, and personal freedom, as expressed in the films, reflect those tenets. A Propos de Nice is a kind of anarchist manifesto, exposing the bourgeois values of the city and calling for their overthrow.”

Themes of the city:

• Work (achievement, labour, exploitation, inequalities, class divisions, bodies, alienation)

• Government (surveillance, power, revolution) • Technology (machine, man-and-machine, the

future, the posthuman, sight)• Mass entertainment (spectacle, vaudeville,

carnival) • Commerce (business, capitalism, crime) • Space (urban, nature, buildings, transport)

Film Language

• Editing very important! • Timing, shape, rhythm, direction of movement• The city waking up• Work time to leisure time • Life in a Day?

Boris Kaufman on A Propos de Nice: “We rigorously rejected anything that was picturesque but meaningless, such as facile contrasts. The story was meant to be understood without inter-titles or commentary. So when we were shooting we relied on the evocation of ideas purely through visual associations.”

Metropolis

• Time of modernism: regularized, mechanical• Rhythm of the machines / of Maria’s dance • Opening sequence – Moloch sequence• City as meta-body – also the body itself – and Maria• Water: “Vor der strömenden, grölenden Masse her

tanzte ein Mädchen. […] Die Masse teilte sich. Ein brieter Strom goss sich brodelnd hinab in die Gänge der Tiefbahn”

• Indictment of technology (Schüfftan process) vs Use of tech? Avatar?

“We choose to go to the moon…”

A new cinematic aesthetic? A new kind of cinema to express the change and new world?

We are looking for a new audio-visual format after the exhausted death of cinema - it has to be capable of handling the breadth and depth of big ideas and it has to be more immediate than cinema ever was - and what we don't want is a digital medium that simply copies cinema. Cocteau said "Be original or astonish me". Show me something I have not seen before or show me what I have seen before but show it to me differently. Not an easy task with so much visual excitement flying around but it does happen otherwise we would not have Picasso building on Velasquez or Warhol making soup-tins philosophical, or Pollock dripping house-paint to confound the realists of figuration. You have to start somewhere - and I suggest let's find out why cinema failed, research the negatives and then start to rebuild avoiding the last set of negative traps.

- Interview with Peter Greenaway (2011)