This document provides historical context for four films - Metropolis (1927), Man with a Movie Camera (1929), A Propos de Nice (1930), and discusses themes related to depictions of cities in film. It notes the social and political contexts of the early 20th century that influenced German Expressionist filmmaking and early Soviet propaganda film. Specific sequences and visual techniques used in Metropolis and A Propos de Nice are analyzed. The importance of editing, rhythm, and non-literal storytelling in conveying ideas is highlighted. Peter Greenaway calls for developing a new audio-visual format beyond what cinema could achieve.

1. Cinema and the City module
CS6 European Film

2. Historical Contexts
Metropolis - 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

3. Historical Contexts
Metropolis - 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

4. Historical Contexts
Man 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

5. Historical Contexts
Man 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”

6. 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.”

7. Historical Contexts
A 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”

8. Historical Context
A 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.”

9. Themes of the city:
• Work
(achievement, labour, exploitation, inequalitie
s, 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)

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

11. 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.”

12. 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?

13. “We choose to go to the moon…”

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

15. 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)