As the physical embodiment of modernity, and accepting for now Marx’s materialist conception of history, the urban landscape has always been the stage on which this dialogue has taken place; and, according to Seigfried Kracauer, cinema has a special affinity for depicting this physical reality (Carroll 111-31). Photographic film ably captures the chastening grandeur of the cityscape, but cinematic film extends upon this to express the transient quality of modern organisation that completes its disorienting effect. As such, modernist cinema -- which expressly attends to this effect -- has proven exemplary at representing various perceptions of the world and one’s place within it.
Mindful of the political dualism that, according to Berman, "identified the capitalist economy and the liberal state with 'individualism,' and equated radical aims with a 'collectivism' that negated individuality" over the first half of the twentieth century ("Politics of Authenticity" viii), this essay will trace trends in this spectrum of worldly perception and representation by examining four films -- Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927); Dziga Vertov's The Man With The Movie Camera (1929); Merian C. Cooper's King Kong (1933); and King Vidor's The Fountainhead (1949) -- terminating just prior to the cultural explosion that redefined politics and modernity.
The foremost of these films is centred about a material aesthetic that attempts to grapple with Berman's problem of modernity. Ruttman's focus on materiality is immediately apparent in Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, which presents its audience with several minutes' worth of deserted rural and urban landscapes before the first living inhabitants are meekly introduced. This emphasis may give weight to other documentarians' suggestions that Ruttmann has no deliberate intention of conveying political subtext, but the overarching harmony of the cityscape and its tenants’ relations to it cannot help but reveal a world poised for a dramatic plunge into collectivism.
Filmed during the so-called 'golden era' of the Weimar Republic, Ruttmann's Germany had overcome its currency crisis and joined the League of Nations, affirming its status as a member of an open international market principled on rational self-interest. The film's introductory sequence, riding on newly-unified railways far beyond the city limits, is emblematic of this new cosmopolitanism. Frenzied editing shocks the audience with the pace of modernity, alternating shots of locomotive and communicative transmission providing a precursory suggestion of Berlin as a mere node in an interconnected marketplace. This is complemented by the smooth transition between rural and urban landscapes that reveal a spatial contiguity rather than a distinct edge to the city, fulfilling Kracauer’s condition that modernist cinema must "[yield] the impression that what it represents is part of a larger, 'endless,' spatiotemporal continuum" (Carroll 118).
Within the town proper, Ruttmann continues the railroad motif where possible, but more frequently surrogates it with the tram, demonstrating a new interest in metro- rather than cosmopolitan infrastructure. This permits a greater exploration of a more distinctly 'modern' world by examining only the urban landscape and ignoring its rural co-dependent. Architecture and transit become a chief focus, their utilitarian importance expatiated by a barrage of shots of citizens entering and exiting buildings and navigating the streets between them. Consistent with the Bauhaus architecture that was flourishing at this time, Ruttmann de-emphasises ornamentality relative to utilitarianism by way of omission (the artistic equivalent of destruction), with even monuments as quintessential to Berlin's character as the Brandenburg Gate being conspicuously absent throughout the entirety of the film. In lieu of these old gods, Ruttmann decorates his film with monuments to modernity and the glory of industry, such as the totemic depiction of smoke stacks that closes the first act; this supplementation being seen as necessary to the completion of Enlightenment-Modern severance and the perpetuation of an individualistic capitalist economy. As Pam Meecham and Julie Sheldon note,
Modernism had as its lead player the 'rootless cosmopolitan’, who was often literally stateless or committed to internationalism and a rejection of national boundaries. The fixed monument that bore a relation to the architecture and squares of the city and its national culture no longer seemed the appropriate form for the artist to work with (42).
But the very genre of the city symphony is contradictory to this end. Despite Ruttmann's precursory nod towards internationalism in the opening sequence, his film quickly becomes focused on closed, domestic relations. Kracauer's 'endlessness' criterion is abandoned as the city becomes a unified, nuclear entity, more concerned with the intraconnectivity of a closed metropolis. Social organisation is a primary theme, with crowds portrayed as organic creatures -- moving as though in possession of a collective consciousness -- rather than self-nullifying swarms. This is epitomised in the opening of the middle act, which films the streets from higher angles to reveal citizens acting with systemic co-operation rather than egoistic self-interest; however on numerous occasions we see crowds herded by traffic wardens and the hand of authority. In this regard, people become a part of the urban landscape, guided by its contours as rivers are by the surrounding natural landscape. The resulting denigration of individual vitality that this perspective of the world entails is evinced by the first panning shot of the film, which artificially animates mannequins to objectify their subject, prefacing humans as mere cogs in a machine before they even appear. As such, the cityscape might be best viewed in biological rather than physical terms, as in Allen James Thomas' assessment:
For all of the juxtapositions of rich and poor and their respective lifestyles we find in Berlin, the ultimate effect is not to oppose the two in a dialectic of class struggle, but to suggest their ultimate unity as differentiated parts unified by their common membership of the same organic whole, that is to say, Berlin itself.
Nevertheless, acts of violence and conflict between individuals remain present in the film. The scuffle between two men in the third act seems consistent with the increasing Futurist sentiment of the period, the surrounding images of lovers and mannequins -- sexualised, victimised, and once again elevated to the status of the living -- tying action to artifice to suggest that malevolence is as inherent to modern life as romance. Such displays of violence are, however, seldom enough to be inferred as exceptional. Those few individuals who act incongruously to the collectivist landscape that Ruttmann portrays may be alienated from physical reality by the modern fragmentation of it. The masses arguably make a couple of meagre attempts to reclaim authenticity by returning to pre-modern rural landscape, but these are brief and recreational. It is only one woman in the fourth act who is so dizzied by the reeling urban landscape -- accentuated at this point by a return to frenzied editing -- that she attempts suicide by plunging into the Spree, escaping the urban landscape through immersion in the calm waters that it conquered in the film's opening sequence. This exclusive dichotomy between being a subject of the landscape and an object of it demonstrates the prevalence of Berman's modernity problem for individualists in a collectivist world.
Vertov announces a Soviet conquest of this problem in The Man With The Movie Camera by depicting a world in which individualism and collectivism exist in productive harmony. His portrayal of the world seems to fulfil what Berman calls "the politics of authenticity", which imagines "an ideal community in which individuality will not be subsumed and sacrificed, but fully developed and expressed" ("Politics of Authenticity" vii). Kracauer contends that modernist cinema can achieve this end by "function[ing] as an antidote to contemporary alienation from physical reality" (Carroll 125). In line with this reasoning, Vertov's film shares Ruttmann's notion that modern men and women are an extension of automata, but argues that this fact enables individuality rather than destroying it. This is apparent in Vertov's conception of the camera-wielding flaneur, which possesses far more personal agency than Ruttmann's.
While Ruttmann hesitates between modern and premodern states, Vertov more sternly elides pastoral landscapes, visiting them only as necessary freeways between the more important industrial spaces of Moscow, Kiev and Odessa. This portrays individuals as eschewing, like Marx, the pursuit of rural authenticity, preferring the sensibility of modern world that "has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life" (Marx and Engels 12). Instead it is the material, urban landscape that permits citizens to get a handle on the modern world by becoming voluntary components of a social organism without compromising their individual agency.
Paradoxically, Vertov’s Soviet crowds are chaotic yet sensible, appearing as anarchic swarms of individuals whose movements are guided by self-interest and yet are not egregious to one another. This pluralism is often delineated by split-screen shots showing two perspectives of the same thing, such as an intersection seen from both its axes simultaneously, exposing the fallacious linearity of street-level vision. A similar technique is used elsewhere to depict parallel rather than perpendicular perspectives, with opposing Dutch tilts cancelling one another's disorienting effect. As the average shot length of these two shots is almost triple that of the entire film (2.3 seconds) (Ebert), we may infer that it is not Vertov’s intention to dazzle us with plurality as it is Ruttmann’s, but to comfort us with totalised truths by displaying what Kracauer describes as "shots not yet stripped of their multiple meanings" (qtd. Carroll 114). Vertov’s kinochestvo aesthetic empowers shots such as this by synonymising the artificial camera lens with the human eye (a technique that Vertov explicates several times by superimposing the two images), thus revealing the multitudinous perceptions of urban populations while condensing them into a coherent whole.
It is the kino-eye, however, that ultimately undoes Vertov’s rendering of a politics of authenticity. Although the mechanisation of the human eye may seem the conclusive form of Kracauer’s appeal to "record and reveal physical reality", it produces a collectivist sentiment that nullifies any possibility for individual agency. The central sequence in The Man With The Movie Camera -- in which the camera operators, film editors, and projectionists are imbued with the power to pause and animate their content -- concludes that lives are propagated by being witnessed by others. The citizen's purported dependence on society robs it of any innate, self-contained motivation. In the final scene, the cinema-going community, witnessing the individual’s material rebirth on film, is ascribed this animating power; thus it resides in the space between egos rather than in any one person. More than that, Vertov's agreement with Marx's materialist conception of the world pins the motivating force of individuals to the physical, urban landscape, as evinced by cuts comparing the camera motor to other rotational devices: car axles; beer taps; and especially train wheels, which are almost as important to the organisation of this film as they are to Berlin. But this assessment is carried to its conclusion by a depiction of a child being born that is interspersed with skyward split-screen shots of buildings, Dutch tilts arranging the architecture into a 'V' to submit that it is a child born of the urban landscape. Such material-oriented collectivism undermines individuals as self-governing entities.
This attitude may find its diametric opposite in King Kong, which exaggerates the potency of the individual to a scale comparable to the urban landscape. Kong’s size marks him as a biologic competitor to any of New York's concrete monoliths, affording him a chance to redeem the subjugating power of the landscape that Vertov describes. Cooper remarked during the conceptual phase of production, "You know, I've always believed that over-civilization destroys people" (qtd. Haver 76). The eponymous character of his picture might therefore be considered a romanticised manifestation of man’s ancient innate grandeur that has been emasculated by the dynamic force of modern society -- which had at this time recently undergone a major shift towards a collectivist mentality, owing to the Great Depression, the New Deal, and increased trade unionism. Kong's elegiac overture mourns this loss of the primal aurally as images of girders declare the modern as its successor.
Individualism, then, is rationally sought by a retreat to the past; expressed here as a both a spatial and temporal journey to Skull Island, a place that Cooper thought "had to have a dawn-of-creation feeling" (qtd. Haver 84) As Meecham and Sheldon note,
Although the city was central to modernism it had as its 'other' the countryside; and, for many artists, it prompted extended explorations in 'exotic' and 'primitive' locations. It is one of the ironies of modernism that, although an urban phenomenon, it had a symbiotic relationship with nature. Its 'offer' of authenticity […], while deeply romantic in concept, could propose an alternative to the modern urban world (32).
Cooper ties this exotic landscape to those imagined by the Classical aesthetics that modernism strove to purge, recalling his instruction to his artists to take inspiration from Gustáve Doré’s steel engravings for Paradise Lost (itself a text glorifying individual might and anti-authoritarianism): "The lighting, the jungle, the foliage we stole direct from Doré" (qtd. Haver 84). The primitive world of Skull Island is, however, anything but Edenic, describing a more scientific concept of the primordial that is ruled by terrifying dinosaurs, and the humans that venture there (on the S.S. Venture, no less) are quickly seduced by the remembered comfort of the urban environment. Since the purpose of their trip is not to escape the urban world but to gift it with the capture of Kong, the extant god of individualism, we can see that this film does not dream of escaping from modernity but improving upon it. To quote Meecham and Sheldon once more:
The image of the artist venturing out (or inwards), risking their senses (and sometimes their sanity) in order to experience the limits of the imaginations is very much part of the rhetoric of modern art. It is often attended by the notion that a physical retreat (usually from the urban environment) permits a psychic 'rebirth' of the artist (62).
Just as one must stand outside a building in order to view its entirety, such journeys can be likened to attempts to view the urban landscape from a more productive vantage point. However, the fruits of such endeavours will not usually have consequences quite as violent as King Kong's. Inserted into the urban landscape, Kong responds aggressively to a world populated by structural affronts to his might, much like the biological ones on Skull Island. Kong therefore attacks a train -- which we have already established as an organising feature of the cityscape – and proceeds to conquer the Empire State Building -- its grandest and most sublime feature. Hence, the urban landscape runs contrary to Kong’s self-governing individuality, much as Terry Eagleton describes the sublime as a "chastening, humiliating power, which decentres the subject into an awesome awareness of its finitude, its own petty position in the universe" (90).
Given Eagleton's Marxist leanings -- which are more exclusively collectivist than Berman's -- he appears to approve this subordination of the individual: "In making the world over to the subject, […] humanism risks undermining the censorious Other which will hold humanity humbly in its place" (Ibid.). As an incredulous aggrandisement of primal, pre-modern man -- a biological antithesis to the material urban landscape -- Kong smacks of essentialism, an aesthetic that has an understandable attraction to the individual who feels estranged by an oppressively large collective:
The belief that a work of art is capable of overcoming its materiality to just be gave impetus to the search for ‘essences’. Although sceptics have been dismissive of essentialism, the spiritual idea that art might transcend its materiality is fueled by essentialist theories. What was attractive about the notion of ‘essences’ was that they seemed immutable when modern life often highlighted the transient and fugitive. Essences are relatively stable since, by definition, the essence of any one thing is timeless and immutable (Meecham and Sheldon 73).
Therefore, while Berlin: Symphony of a Great City and The Man With The Movie Camera attempt to address Berman’s modernity problem by acclimating to its transience, King Kong attempts to defeat its material foundation. But Kong's attempt to physically rise above the modern world’s greatest achievements leaves him exposed to the aeroplanes that destroy him, his death marking a defeat of individual essence and a resignation to the perpetual motion of modernity and technology.
The Fountainhead takes a similarly essentialist approach to Berman’s problem but announces proclaims itself victorious in doing so, just as The Man With The Movie Camera claims to produce a synthesis to the individualism-collectivism issue that Ruttmann described. The opening credits of Vidor’s film immediately declare this by comparing its source material to the fortitude of a skyscraper, later expounding on this with a slow dissolve to declare a skyscraper the reification of its creator. The urban landscape, as represented in this film, is therefore not a collectivist force for the subjugation of individuality, but an architectural dialectic that permits individual expression.
This dialectic is not an egalitarian one. Images of the Manhattan skyline in this film are taken from a high enough altitude for us to, at a glance, categorise the landscape according to height into its integral and Composite structures. However, such images do not exalt any one particular building (as they do in King Kong), but balance the more outstanding ones to evoke a spirit of competition. The result, then, is a dualistic landscape rooted in competition, echoing the economic roles of either bourgeois and proletarians (under Marx's conception) or of producers and consumers (under Smith's). Berman, of course, adheres to the former, finding this arrangement conducive to oppression and fragmentation:
Many of the city's most impressive structures were planned specifically as symbolic expressions of modernity […] The cumulative impact of this is that the New Yorker finds himself in the midst of a Baudelairean forest of symbols. The presence and profusion of these giant forms make New York a rich and strange place to live in. But they also make it a dangerous place, because its symbols and symbolisms are endlessly fighting each other for sun and light, working to kill each other off ("Experience of Modernity" 289).
This description of The Fountainhead's dynamic, individualistic competition runs contrary to the collectivist perception that we have mainly seen as responsible for the design of cities so far, but the film's Objectivist undertones to not agree with Berman's negative connotations. The endogenous, spontaneous order that this implicitly endorses as a means to social progression -- rather than the exogenous, government-made order that Vertov supports -- is therefore seen as the truest approximation of what economist F.A. Hayek calls "a state of affairs in which a multiplicity of elements […] are so related to each other that we may learn from our acquaintance with some spatial or temporal part of the whole" (234). Furthermore, The Fountainhead traces the lineage of form of social organisation to pre-historic man, arguing that this is the objective nature of the world and not merely some new, distinctly modern representation of it. Berman's modernity problem is therefore altogether dismissed by Vidor, who evidently perceives no requirement for a new practice in order to "get a grip on the modern world."
Instead, The Fountainhead argues that it is just this attitude to modernity – the attempt to handle it by sponsoring made orders – that creates fragmented perception and alienation. The protagonist, much like the suicidal in Berlin: Symphony of a Great City and the adventurers in King Kong, therefore seeks authenticity in the rural landscape when he is at his most compelled to submit to it, taking brief asylum in a granite quarry. Driven below the earth's surface, this physical lowness makes his eventual ascent to the world's material peak at the climax of the film all the more vertiginous, again evading the oppressively collectivist urban landscape by this time placing himself above it.
Hence rational self-interest rather than social compulsion is thought necessary to allow the fruit of individual genius -- in this case that of the protagonist, Howard Roark -- to develop above the soup of collective averageness –-- engendered by Ellsworth Toohey. The former character therefore rises to the challenge laid out by architect Frank Lloyd Wright:
In this day and generation we must recognize that this transforming force whose outward sign and symbol is the thing of brass and steel we call a machine, is now grown to the point that the artist must take it up, no longer to protest. Genius must dominate the work of the contrivance it has created (26).
Indeed, Roark’s genius is what permits him to find authenticity, shaping the urban landscape to his will rather than shaping his will to the landscape. Where Kong fails to surmount the urban landscape physically, Roark succeeds intellectually (in the living, biological city that Wright goes on to describe, he is a genetic engineer practicing speciation). The Cortland Estate, a set of cluster blocks that he designs and refuses to compromise, are an attempt to extend this privilege to laypeople. Another prominent architect, Denys Lasdun, has described cluster blocks as striking a balance between community, efficiency and individuality, "an attempt to get some of the quality of life retained as distinct from being treated like a statistical pawn in a great prism" (qtd. Gold 289).
This is exemplary of the new individualism that would soon take hold after the cultural revolution of the 1960s, which Berman announces as the end of the period when modernity could be viewed through the lens of the individualism-collectivism dichotomy ("Politics of Authenticity" viii). A valid consensus, in which the collective was valued but necessarily amenable to the individual -- and not the other way around -- was reached, and urban landscapes adopted an aesthetic more fitting with this and an overwhelmingly interconnected global economy: "the individual identity of cities was replaced by an international style more suited to corporate capitalism than civic authority" (Meecham and Sheldon 45).
Of course we cannot pretend that this base approach to the urban landscape is a teleological answer to representing the modern world. Weighing the benefits of modernity against its costs, Kargon and Molella ask: "Were the benefits of the machine, automation, and the industrial city worth the degradation of work, the ravages to the natural and the human-built environment, the loss of community, and the wounds to the human spirit?" (150). Modernist cinema, as far as this essay has observed it, has attended primarily to the latter two of these concerns. Maintaining the spirit of transience, the cultural revolution has not closed these issues, but has merely shifted its fleeting attention from them as the others have come into greater significance.
Works cited
- Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. Dir. Walter Ruttman. DVD. Image Entertainment, 1999.
- Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Viking Penguin, 1988.
- Berman, Marshall. Introduction. The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society. By Marshall. London: Allen and Unwin, 1971.
- Carroll, Noel. "Kracauer’s Theory of Film". Defining Cinema. New Brunswick: Rutger's University Press, 1997. 111-131.
- Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990.
- Ebert, Roger. Man With a Movie Camera. RogerEbert.com. 15 July 2009 http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090701/REVIEWS08/907019993/-1/rss.
- The Fountainhead. Dir. King Vidor. Perf, Gary Cooper, Patricia Neal. DVD. Turner Entertainment Company, 2006.
- Gold, John R. The Practice of Modernism. London and New York: Routledge, 2007.
- Haver, Ronald. David O. Selznick’s Hollywood. New York: Bonanza Books, 1980.
- Hayek, F.A. "Made Orders and Spontaneous Orders". The Libertarian Reader. Ed. David Boaz. New York: The Free Press, 1997. 233-242.
- Kargon, Robert H. and Arthur P. Molella. Invented Edens: Techno-Cities of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2008.
- King Kong. Dir. Merian C. Cooper. Perf. Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot, Frank Reicher, Jan Hardy, Noble Johnson, Steve Clemente, James Flavin. DVD. Warner Home Video, 2005.
- Man With The Movie Camera. Dir. Dziga Vertov. DVD. Triad Productions, 2008.
- Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, c2004.
- Thomas, Allan James. "Berlin: Symphony of a City". Senses of Cinema. 10 July 2009
- Wright, Frank Lloyd. "The Art and Craft of the Machine". Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture: Selected Writings (1894-1940). Ed. Frederick Gutheim. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1941. 26-7.
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