The Oxford History of World Cinema (38 page)

Nanook is a highly contradictory film: it exhibits strong elements of participatory film-

making that has been celebrated by innovative and progressive film-makers of the present

day. In many respects it was an inter-cultural collaboration, but a collaboration between

two men for whom the daily life of women is of marginal interest. The desperate search

for food, synonymous with male hunting activities, provides the most elaborate scenes,

which are woven throughout the film. Confining the film-maker's voice to the intertitles

and keeping him behind the camera made the film appear more 'objective' than earlier

practices, even though the film-maker had, in fact, become more assertive in shaping his

materials. In many respects Nanook appropriated the techniques of Hollywood fiction

film-making, operating on the borderline between fiction and documentary, and turning

ethnographic observations into a narrativized romance. Flaherty constructs an idealized

Inuit family and gives us a star (Allakariallak both 'plays' and 'is' Nanook -- an attractive

personality the equal of Douglas Fairbanks) and a drama (man versus nature). Despite this

evident fictionalization, however, its long-take style was subsequently applauded by

André Bazin for the respect Flaherty gave to his subject and phenomenological reality.

The transformation of the adventure-travel film is inscribed within Grass ( 1925), made

by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. The documentary starts out by focusing

on the film-makers, but then shifts its attention to the Bakhtiari people as they struggled

to cross the rugged mountains and Karun River of south-western Persia ( Iran) during

their annual migration. Despite the shift that Nanook and Grass represented, conventional

travel films, with the white men as protagonists, continued to be made throughout the

1920s.

For his second feature-length documentary, Moana ( 1926, shot on the South Sea island of

Samoa), Robert Flaherty kept his small American crew behind the camera. To provide the

necessary drama in a land where survival was easy, Flaherty induced the local inhabitants

to revive the ritual of tattooing-a male puberty rite. Less participatory and more

opportunistic as film-making than Nanook of the North, Moana also lacked a comparable

success at the box-office.

Cooper and Schoedsack followed Grass with Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness ( 1927),

a story of a farmer and his family's struggle to survive at the end of a jungle in Siam

( Thailand). Here the documentary impulse gave way to Hollywood story-telling, pointing

towards the filmmakers' later success King Kong ( 1933).

THE CITY SYMPHONY FILM

The shift in cultural outlook associated with documentary is also evident in the cycle of

city symphony films, which, beginning with Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand's
Manhatta
(

1921), took a modernist look at metropolitan life. Manhatta rejected the assumptions of

social reform photography and cinematography as well as the touristic vision that had

previously dominated depictions of the city. The film focuses on the business district of

Lower Manhattan, ignoring city landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty and Grant's

Tomb. Human bodies are dwarfed by the area's skyscrapers, and many scenes were shot

from the tops of buildings, emphasizing the sense of abstract patterning produced by

modern architecture. Manhatta conveys the sense of scale and impersonality experienced

by city dwellers. The film loosely follows the course of a single day (starting with

commuters leaving the Staten Island Ferry for work and ending with a sunset), a structural

form that became characteristic of the city film. The film enjoyed little attention in the

United States but was more widely shown in Europe, where it may have encouraged

Alberto Cavalcanti to make
Rien que les heures
('Only the hours', 1926) and Walter

Ruttmann to undertake Berlin: Symphony of a City.

Rien que les heures
focuses on cosmopolitan Paris, often contrasting rich and poor even

as it combines non-fiction sequences with short staged or fictional vignettes. Berlin, shot

by Karl Freund, expresses a profound ambivalence toward the city that is consistent with

the ideas articulated by the influential Berlin sociologist Georg Simmel ( 1858-1918), in

such writings as 'The Metropolis and Mental Life' ( 1902). From the film's opening

sequence, in which a train races through the quiet countryside into the metropolitan

centre, city life produces an intensification of nervous stimuli. The film depicts a suicide:

a woman is overwhelmed (her desperation depicted in the film's only close-up) and jumps

off a bridge into the water. Yet no one in the crowd of casual spectators tries to rescue her.

Urban life is shown to require exactness and minute precision, evident in the depiction of

certain production processes as well as the way work halts abruptly at noon. As the

absence of close-ups emphasizes, all this coalesces 'into a structure of the highest

impersonality'.

Walking advertisements for stomach salts in Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a City ( 1927)

Berlin: Symphony of a City refuses either to humanize the city or to respect its

geographic integrity. Yet Ruttmann's organization of shots and abstract images also

emphasizes a heightened subjectivity made possible by urban culture. This tension is

evident in the film's English title: ' Berlin' -a concrete, impersonal designation -- and

'Symphony of a City', which asks the spectator to view the film abstractly and

metaphorically. As with Simmel, Ruttmann's dialectics underscore the contradictions of

city life. The city allows unprecedented freedom and this freedom 'allows the noble

substance common to all to come to the fore', but the city also requires a specialization,

which means 'death to the personality of the individual'. On one hand there is the mass --

suggested by shots of feet and the intercutting of soldiers and cattle. On the other there are

the people who try to assert their individuality by dressing in highly eccentric clothing. As

the film's almost relentless cataloguing of urban activities suggests, the personality of the

individual cannot readily maintain itself under the assault of city life. The city is where

money reigns and money is the leveller, expressing qualitative differences in the term

'how much?' The film thus does not emphasize class distinctions; if they are sometimes

apparent, it is only to suggest how eating and drinking (the oldest and intellectually most

negligible activity) can form a bond among heterogeneous people.

Many short city symphony films were made in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Joris Ivens

made The Bridge (
De brug,
1928), a meticulous portrait of a Rotterdam railway bridge

that opened and closed so ships could travel the Maas River. Influenced by a machine

aesthetic, Ivens saw his subject as 'a laboratory of movements, tones, shapes, contrasts,

rhythms and the relationship between all of these'. His film Rain (
Regen,
1929) is a film

poem that traces the beginning, progress, and end of a rain shower in Amsterdam. Henri

Storck's Images d'Ostende ( 1930), Lészlo Moholy Nagy 's
Berliner Stillleben
('Berlin still

life', 1929), Jean Vigo's
À propos de Nice
(About Nice', 1930), Irving Browning's City of

Contrasts ( 1931), and Jay Leyda's A Bronx Morning ( 1931) all functioned within the

genre. In contrast to Berlin, Leyda's film begins with an
underground
train leaving (rather

than entering) the central city for one of New York's outer boroughs. Once in the Bronx,

Leyda captures an array of quotidian activities (children's street games, vegetable sellers,

and mothers with prams) that counter Ruttmann's views of the city. Mikhail Kaufman

made a city symphony film in the Soviet Union, Moscow (
Moskva,
1927), but a more

important and internationally renowned one was made by his brother Denis Kaufman,

known as Dziga. Vertov. Vertov's The Man with the Movie Camera (
Chelovek s

kinoapparatom,
1929) is a city symphony film that fuses a futurist aesthetic with

Marxism. The cameraman and his team help to create a new Soviet world. This is

literalized on the screen by the building up of an imaginary, artificial city through the

juxtaposition of sites and scenes taken in different locations. Alcoholism, capitalism (via

the New Economic Policy), and other pre-revolutionary problems are shown to persist

next to more positive developments. The cinema's role is to show these truths to the new

Soviet citizen and so bring about understanding and action. The Man with the Movie

Camera thus constantly draws attention to the processes of cinema -- film-making,

editing, exhibiting, and film-going. In this regard, Vertov's film is a manifesto for the

documentary film and a condemnation of the fiction feature film that Vertov railed against

in his various manifestos and writings.

DOCUMENTARY IN THE SOVIET UNION

Although Vertov and others often felt that non-fiction films were unfairly marginalized in

the Soviet Union, thousands of workers' clubs provided a unique and unparalleled outlet

for documentaries. Moreover, the Soviet film industry produced numerous industrials and

short documentaries for these venues, such as Steel Path on the activities of the rail

workers' union and With Iron and Blood on the construction of a factory. Soviet

documentary as a whole also provided the most radical and systematic break with

previous non-fiction screen practices.

For Vertov, The Man with the Movie Camera was the culmination of a decade of work in

non-fiction film-making. He sought to build up a group of trained film-makers, whom he

referred to as the 'kinoks'. Their films celebrated electrification, industrialization, and the

achievements of workers through hard labour, and even in the early
Kinopravda
(Cine-

Truth, 1922-5) newsreels, subject matter and treatment reveal a modernist aesthetic.

Vertov's films grew more audacious and controversial as the decade progressed. In Stride,

Soviet! ( 1926), work processes are shown in reverse and bread and other products are

taken from bourgeois consumers and repossessed by those who made them.

A radically new ethnographic impulse can be found in certain Soviet documentaries of

this period. Turksib (Victor Turin, 1929) looks at the different, potentially complementary

lives of people in Turkestan and Siberia as a way to explain the need for a railroad linking

these two parts of the Soviet Union. The film then shows the planning and building of the

railway with a final exhortation to finish it more quickly. A similar narrative is evident in

Sol Svanetii
('Salt for Svanetia', 1930), based on an outline by Sergei Tretaykov and made

by Mikhail Kalatozov in the Caucasus. The film engages in a kind of salvage

anthropology but not, as was the case for Flaherty, for purposes of romanticization.

Religion, custom, and traditional power relations are shown to be oppressive, blocking

even the simplest improvements in people's lives. Among their many problems, the

people and animals of Svanetia suffer from a lack of salt. After depicting the problem, the

film offers a solution: roads. The point was easy for relatively unsophisticated viewers to

grasp, but the increasing pressures of Stalinism are palpable in the film's hysterical

enthusiasm and its reductive solutions. Significantly, the Svanetians do not experience an

awakening of revolutionary consciousness -- it is the State that recognizes the problem

and determines the solution.

Another genre to which the Soviets made important contributions was the historical

documentary, a genre that relied heavily on the compilation of previously shot footage.

The most accomplished maker of compilation documentaries was Esfir Shub, a former

editor of fiction films. Her impressive panorama of Russian history consisted of three

feature-length productions: The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (
Padeniye dinasti

Romanovikh,
1927), which covered the period from 1912 to 1917; The Great Road

(
Veliky put,
1928), about the first ten years of the Revolution ( 191727); and The Russia of