Berlin: Symphony of a Great City vs. Man with a Movie Camera

Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film, Man with a Movie Camera seems to closely follow on from Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, made two years before. Stylistically, visually and aesthetically the two films share much common ground. Generally speaking, they are also quite similar in a thematic sense; both offer the viewer a tour through a newly industrialised cityscape that is in constant movement. Both films offer us cities that are thriving, living organisms; cities that are being propelled towards an unknown yet electrified future. However, although made around the same time, and employing many of the same filmic techniques, Vertov and Ruttman offer very different readings of the condition of man in the modern world, and also of what the great machines of the industrial age signify for man’s future in years to come.

Watching Berlin, one gets the sense that Ruttman is clearly trying to avoid any political alignments or commentary in his work. True, there are fleeting shots of beggars and paupers, but these quickly blend into the scenery. We are shown a sequence of people eating at lunchtime in the city; people eat in restaurants and cafes, at home, next to street vendors and so on. Inter-cut with this are shots of animals eating in the zoo, and briefly, a shot of a starving woman and two children. Ruttman edits this in a way that you are not able to focus on the starving woman and her children for long enough to get a sense of their poverty. Almost as soon as the image registers, it is gone, replaced by people with ample sustenance. Further, Ruttman clearly made the decision to keep Berlin a predominantly aesthetic experience. The audience is positioned so that they are able to marvel at the magnificence of the modern city, its inhabitants and its machinery. As the viewer is posited to watch the film in this particular way, any emotional interaction with the images on screen are thus subdued, and dulled to a point that they become negligible, if not entirely irrelevant.

Throughout Berlin we are shown people going to work, at work and coming home from work. However, there is never a sense of the hardship of their labour. In fact, the film seems to focus on all other aspects of city life; people walk the streets, drive cars, eat, and generally are seen to enjoy themselves. Ruttman’s film shows the population as living a life that is considerably more leisurely than it is laborious – the exact opposite of Vertov’s film. In Man with a Movie Camera we are shown people constantly at work, and the films goes to painstaking detail to show the chaotic nature of modern life in scenes of telephone operators crossing wire over wire, of cigarettes being counted and packaged, of butter wrappers being made over and over again. Even the movies - a recreational activity - is named the "proletariat cinema"! For Vertov, modern life is work, for Ruttman it's everything surrounding it.

Rose Hobart

Joseph Cornell's reworking of East of Borneo from a feature length jungle picture into a 19-minute ode to the film's star was created out of an obsession formed around the actress Rose Hobart. Cornell, having bought a copy of the movie for his own viewing pleasure, became captivated by Hobart’s beauty, and subsequently cut the film up so that what remained was a series of vignettes focusing almost exclusively on the actress. In exhibiting the film to a public audience, Cornell’s film openly expressed his own private desire and fixation on a cinematic idol.

The significance of his work is that it exposes the way in which we all fixate on celebrities; Rose Hobart can be seen as the ultimate movie in this way, as it removes all the detritus surrounding the idealized fetish object – the star. In creating a focus exclusively around Rose Hobart, Cornell gives voice to the fantasy of what the celebrity represents to an audience, and to the way in which an audience interacts and projects their own desires onto film stars.

Cornell first exhibited his work in 1936, from a film that was made in 1931. Although (comparatively to our perspective) the film industry was still young at this point, significant technical and artistic mastery of the form had already been achieved. By 1936, films were well into the sound era, and the use of colour in film was already slowly seeping into the mainstream, with The Wizard Of Oz (as a famous example of (Techni)colour film) only three years away. By this point, both the film industry and its audience had a solid grasp on how films were to be made and then viewed. The focus of Hollywood, if not all traditional narrative driven films, was on the actors and actresses featured on the silver screen. Since the early days of nickelodeons, it had become noticeably apparent that people would respond to certain faces on screen, faces that they would willingly pay to see again and again. With early feature films in the silent era, the demand for certain actors had already become firmly entrenched in audience’s minds. And so, we find the beginning of a filmic tradition that has remained unchanged since: the star system.

Rose Hobart is a prime example of how we, the audience, respond to these stars. We see them as some sort of ideal, an image of perfection. The star offers us a fantasy in which we can see ourselves in their place. They provide a point that we can fixate on, and fetishize. Cornell cut up East of Borneo so that this point of fetish is all that remains; story, dialogue, action, etc. are made irrelevant in the face of the all-powerful Rose Hobart, who remains on screen as a constant focus throughout. Rose Hobart gives us exactly the opposite of what a traditional film gives us. Instead of anticipation and build up, the film is all pay off, it is all climax.

Cornell goes to further extremes to give the audience the ultimate in voyeuristic pleasure. We don’t want stars to live normal lives, and we don’t want them to exist in the real world. For stars to be stars, to give us the pleasure of fantasy and role-play, they must exist in a perfect, fantastic world – the world of film. Rose Hobart is tinted blue, is slowed down to a graceful, leisurely and elegant pace and is without dialogue. The star is unencumbered by any intrusion of reality whatsoever, and exists only as an object of our (or in this case Cornell’s) desire.