pantagrowl

From the film review topic on the boards, here is a paper from my sophomore year architecture theory course. I swear I'm not a critical theory nut, really.

"Vertov, Lang, and the Critique of Modernist Urbanism"

As expressions of the early modern city, Metropolis and The Man with the Movie Camera, by Fritz Lang and Dziga Vertov respectively, present a fantastic juxtaposition. Each film presents urban life as an experience which expands beyond the scope of any single view, but they express their visions in nearly polar cinematic languages. Vertov utilizes sequential and simultaneous montage without narrative to produce a vision of the modern city as a kaleidoscopic form, streaming so quickly that all views of it must constantly shift and blend, inevitably turning recursively to include the very process of documentation. Essentially, Vertovs film encodes within its language the simultaneous nature of modern life irreducible to a single view or structure. Lang treats film in a traditionally theatrical context, creating a narrative that critiques the impulses of modernity to treat the city as a finite entity that can be managed from a single and definitive vantage point. Thus, each director grapples thematically with problems inherent in conceiving of the city as a distinct thing; single views inevitably prove inadequate or destructive, for the city is too vast to be analyzed from an inertial reference frame.
One must first understand the distinctions inherent in the format with which each director has chosen to present the city. Lang uses the mediation of the camera to create a world whose artifice is ironically hidden. Walter Benjamins comparison of theater to film clarifies this paradox by emphasizing that, unlike a stage that uses real people in a created context, all aspects of a film are filtered through the lens and screen. Benjamin claims that because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment the film can offer a reality which is free of all equipment (234). Thus, the miniature model cityscape of Metropolis shares the same mediated reality as the actors, creating a world free of the obvious distinction between wooden facades and living people. Lang uses this believable sense of reality to create a literary narrative. The viewer must synthesize his shots into a story for them to make sense. As a result, his shots tend to elapse over long periods, for a specific sequence of events requires contextual space that is broken when the view changes. Also, Lang utilizes figurative language rather than visceral devices, which would create a more immediate relationship between the world of the spectator and that of the filmed narrative. A perfect example is the ten-digit clock whose numbers correspond directly to the ten hour work shift that Metropoliss laborers endure. A clocks image by itself is neutral in meaning, but Lang uses it to suggest the primacy of time and the structuring of life around the cycles of labor in Metropolis; however, this understanding depends on the synthesis of separate temporal events as opposed to views. One must interpret the statement that the actor, operating in the fiction as a laborer, is undergoing a ten hour shift, all the while recalling the ten hour clock shown several scenes prior, to understand the trope contained within the clock-like work stations of the machine. This synthesis into narrative drives Langs critique of the modern city more than the specific film language, which attempts transparence so that the viewer is absorbed into the reality that Lang has created.
Conversely, Vertov eliminates literary narrative, relying on a visceral and iconic language to convey his vision. He will, for instance, rapidly juxtapose repeated shots of blinds opening and closing with the blinking of an eye and the closing of the spiral camera shutter. One should not here imagine some specific hypothetical situation which these three actions would define. Rather, the absence of narrative forces the viewer to synthesize the rapidly sequential or simultaneous images in a much more immediate fashion, instead of having to first place them within the structure of a feasible sequence of events. The scene abstractly juxtaposes various forms of eyes or apertures to express the idea of vision rather than to weave a story involving an eye, a camera, and blinds. In addition, the filming of a camera reminds the viewer that, unlike Lang, Vertov emphasizes the artifice and process of film as film, and not as a window. When he does describe a specific event, his cinematic language poses views that disallow the viewer to establish a stable interaction with the screen as stage, a relation which reinforces a sense of theatrical narrative. Examples of this occur when Vertov poses simultaneous shots, such as a pair of hands on a typewriter superimposed onto a face looking downwards. Here, the two images do create a certain event, namely a person typing at a typewriter, but the superimposed image expresses the simultaneity of the event by presenting a view naturally impossible to the human eye, which cannot focus across two perpendicular axes. In both cases, Vertovs cinematography captures the multiplicity of events in the city by using visual language particular to film, defying the logic of human vision to curb the same believability that Lang cultivates.
One might argue that this believability makes Langs nearly-transparent cinematography less engaging than Vertovs, but this transparence allows a wider base for direct critique through narrative. Details such as the ten-hour clock remind the viewer that Metropolis is a complete fiction, meaning that Lang speaks not only through narrative events but also through the very structure of the created context that supports them. Operating within the artifice of a fictional location, Lang critiques the experience of modernist urbanism through the design of his fictional city. Metropolis recalls the grand Utopian designs of early Modernism, particularly architect Le Corbusiers Plan Voisin, which included wide highways against the urban grid of monolithic office complexes, exposing the inhabitants to the dynamism of the citys speed. Lang presents an amazing shot of such an experience toward the end of the film: John Frederson, the master of the city, sits inside the main tower of metropolis as shards of light trace paths across his face and the room. In this scene, however, the narrative context of the workers wreaking havoc below creates a feeling more of chaos and sensory overload than futuristic brilliance. Once again, Langs use of narrative is effective in commenting upon the experience of Metropolis, and ostensibly the modern city. The stiff contemplation of Fredersons face contrasted with the ephemera of the city echoes Georg Simmels assertion that the urban self, being subjected to swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli retreats within a cerebral existence and reacts with his head instead of his heart (48). Lang uses this same trope when he likens the organization of the city to a head seeking to govern the entire body without the mediation of the heart; John Frederson, the brain of the city, represents the crisis between the mental individual and the physical world. Even in maintaining the visual fiction of the city, truly a miniature wooden model, Lang indirectly presents this disjunction. The illusion of vast scale impedes him from including actual people within the more expansive urban views. As a result, Metropolis always carries a dystopian and inhuman feeling in its most dynamic panoramas, no matter how busy. It is a city seemingly built for its own grandeur rather than for its inhabitants, who always seem to be toiling for its maintenance, whether at vast machines or before flashing screens of data, seldom interacting with the actual infrastructure. This mood or presentation of Metropolis remains fairly consistent throughout the film, with every shot of the large urban landscape full of cars and searchlights unclear in function but adding even more movement to distract the eye. The city is an inhuman system, operating on its own logic and dissociated from the patterns of human life.
Vertov, on the other hand, shows a city that cycles like a living organism, awakening slowly from quiet into bustling activity. The filmakers begin their journey during the morning, and many of the initial scenes of the film involve shots of the deserted landscape or empty interiors punctuated by repeated frames of certain objects. One example, the illustrated poster featuring two figures with fingers over mouths in a shhh motion, presents a striking example of Vertovs use of iconic, rather than symbolic, shots to establish a particular ambience for each segment without using a true narrative. The poster does not have to exist within the space of the morning city views to transfer its self-evident meaning, quietness, to the ambience of the other views. This same section also includes sequential scenes of a woman awaking and getting ready; this sequence structurally parallels the more large-scale scenes of the city awakening; the use of this sensory model of getting ready serves to locate the city temporally and to illustrate a condition dislocated from a single space or site. It is this use that makes Vertovs cinematic language synecdochical as opposed to symbolic; the womans actions do not symbolize the city so much as the montage of gradually growing urban crowds and a morning routine locate and describe a larger experience impossible to frame within a single shot or view. Vertovs exclusion of narrative in favor of his universal language of pure film is thus able to provide a more subtle and comprehensive view of the city.
The notion of montage, and the effect of its use should here be clarified. Eisenstein claims that the central effect of montage is to create a true image that emerges only according to the sequential combination of the individually dumb pieces (Eisenstein 128). Essentially, the juxtaposition of two separate frames in connection adds a certain experience or concept irreducible simply to the individual components. For instance, one of Vertovs more daring shots involves a long sequence of wagons and trolleys traveling down a street seen from below, literally on street level so that the wheels pass over to the sides the frame. Immediately, the film cuts to a shot of a trolley passing over a man who proceeds to stand and gather his film equipment. Whether or not this was the man who had just filmed the trolleys, the reality of the film as edited leads us to believe that we have witnessed the very act of the filming. As a result, one questions the temporal presentation of the images and consciously experiences the film through the immediacy of its own medium as subject. Indeed, the main constancy of the film is Vertovs insistence on self-documentation; the film is not a dislocated eye that progresses along a constant temporal trajectory, but rather a series of shots originating from different and perhaps simultaneous angles that come together to produce a sequence that interiorizes its own creation. For Vertov, the city is a system so multifaceted that one cannot find a definitive vantage point or level of focus, and montage captures this logic by presenting realities composed of many interwoven images. The city is a confluence of individuals and entities that moves too quickly for a static frame to document. Each vantage point presented to the viewer becomes understood as its own location within the unknown form of Vertovs city, whose clear structure finds illustration only in the mental space between the succession of related images, not in a single image or view itself. The photographer is not an observer separate from the action, but rather occupies a non-inertial reference frame that follows the logic and patterns of the city.
In this respect, Vertovs film language contrasts with Langs created world, for Metropolis is intensely hierarchical, and its leaders possess, or attempt to possess, the definitive view and control over the city. In this respect it presents itself most strongly as a critique of the Modernist tradition of ideal city plans including both Haussmans enacted restructuring of Paris and, perhaps more applicably, Le Corbusiers unrealized series of Utopias, such as the Plan Voisin. Truly, John Fredersons control over Metropolis is a lordship akin to Corbusiers conception of the planner, who stands regally above the specificity of place within the city to lay down an ideal and cohesive plan. Corbusier confessed an inner horror at visiting the offices of planners whose concerns with the multitude of factors and interests contingent upon individual Parisian streets seemed to him a myopia giving free reign to anarchic individualism in the inhabitants and leaving too little scope for planning (Fishman 163). For him, the modern city should spring into conception wholly, a complete and comprehensive vision of the planner that would control the form of the city. Fishman says that, for Corbusier, the city that emerged slowly as the result of many individual decisions was a thing of the past (190). Despite Fredersons will to order the city so singlehandedly, Lang presents a city of various systems in conflict because they do not integrate as Vertovs city does. His metaphor of the tyrannical mind illustrates this conflict through the stratified plan of the city. Metropolis is sectioned into a top layer of commerce and wealthy homes, a mid-level of industry, and a lower level of working-class living. Thus, when Freder, an aristocrat, is filmed beside machines, or the foreman is filmed in the boardroom, the viewer knows that, in the narrative world, the character has transgressed the order of Metropolis. Unlike Vertovs city, which seems a unified but decentered entity in which commerce and industry blend through montage into each other, Langs city is broken into distinct spheres that are dislocated. This dislocation featured heavily into modern ideas of the city; Plan Voisin, for instance, kept its working class members in satellite communities which Corbusier insisted would overcome the dehumanizing effects of industrial labor by providing more leisure time and less commuting (Fishman 201). Lang disagrees, commenting on the irony and incompatibility of centrally planned cities that carve the urban fabric into fragmented zones ordered by class.
For both filmakers, the modern city is a fleeting and whirling conglomeration of vehicles, lights, and grand machines. Nevertheless, Vertovs city is a body of harmonious cycles and beautiful flashes of motion; the grind of modern labor, with its massive gears and foundries, subsides into repose and amusement. Langs city, on the other hand, is one of constant class conflict whose discord and chaos sharply contrasts with its strictly regulated patterns and times; the workers lives are ones of constant and grueling labor, and the far-luckier elite classes are subject to ruthless competition and constant fear. It is a world in which order dissolves within the hands of those who rage to maintain it. In either case, it is an entity destined to subsume within it the models and images which attempt to conceive of its form, always presenting facets exterior to them or displaying details too small to read.