The bodies around their souls, the cities wrapped around those.

There is a kind of film interested in the way the character of a city determines the characters that inhabit it. It is the kind of film which leads you to the realization that a building can look awfully similar to an old man’s face or makes you feel that the people issuing out of doors and into streets are less like residents and more like offspring of the architecture they populate.

“I always believed it was the things you don't choose that makes you who you are. Your city, your neighborhood, your family. People here take pride in these things, like it was something they'd accomplished.” This is the opening sentiment for Ben Affleck’s 2007 film Gone Baby Gone. It is the voice of Patrick Kenzie, a private eye who ‘finds people who started in the cracks and fell through.’ A montage of these ‘people’ framed within the city determining their collective fates accompanies his voiceover. We are to believe these people and the narrative they endure are products of the city of Boston. They will always be victims of the place before they are victims of each other.

Then there is Woody Allen’s 1979 film Manhattan. The opening monologue is delivered to us in the same way that its partnering dialogue suggests the city exists for the character speaking; "a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin." The way the dialogue is spoken says as much as its actual content. It identifies both the character and the images as quintessential New York. The city is spoken of as if it were a lover to be possessed; “New York was his town, and always would be.” As the monologue unfolds we learn that to merely ‘adore’ the city is not an accurate enough response. Artistic satisfaction is finally found upon the revelation that he was the city he loved; “Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat.” Was there ever a greater description of New York?

Films like Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera and Ruttman’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City are some of the first to explore the ‘personalities’ of cities. They showcase the technological and industrial triumphs of people in the architecture and machinery they have created. It is the birth of the city and the ‘city film’ that is on display. The films pre-date the moment cities seemingly broke free of their human masters and developed personalities and intentions of their own. In these films the humans are depicted affecting the objects rather than falling prey to them and yet it is actually a handing over of power from man to machine that is unwittingly accomplished. There is a dramatic irony inherent in the nature of both films. It is identified through arrogant acts of self-worship, permeating the films’ gazes, and conjuring Old Testament images of Babel and the consequent promise of harsh judgment and cursed futures.

Maybe that’s too far?

I can imagine however that it would be quite the rollercoaster ride to embark upon a double feature comprising of Berlin: Symphony of a Great City and Germany Year Zero. Rossellini’s magnificent film made in 1948 follows a boy with extraordinary struggles through a bombed out Berlin, which has greater similarities to a moonscape than the city in Ruttman’s film made 20 years earlier. Year Zero depicts a boy who is the product of the place he lives. He is victim of the city he inhabits. There is no dialogue in the film as to what has happened or who is to blame. The city has decided their fates, it simply is as it is, a film about the people who started in the cracks and fell through. 

Panoramic Paedo-Perceptions

I was twelve years old when I made my first movie. I had the idea for it during my family’s annual ritual of driving 6 hours south to my nanna’s holiday house. I sat with my nose-pressed against the glass and was descending into the deep throes of boredom when I had the subversive idea that what I was looking at; the trees flashing by, the landscapes unfolding and relapsing, the mounds and poles and passing cars and rivers, were not merely there to be endured by the bored passengers of family cars. They were in fact the ingredients for the most elaborate tracking shot ever imagined; shot by my eye, framed by my window and starring me.

It went like this…

Outside the car and only metres off the road ran a magnificent black horse at break-neck speeds uncannily reflecting the speed limit and traffic fluctuations of the road it ran beside. I sat astride it, willing it to run further and jump higher, I was mighty and brave negotiating safe passages through the violent terrain that would come hurling unrelentingly into frame. With her arms clasped tightly around me, my primary-school crush Melinda sat pressed against my back and behind us swarmed a monstrous horde of possible suitors (including her jerk-off boyfriend of the time) intent on having her for themselves. It was epic. After the success of the debut I got in the habit of making at least two films every year; one on the way there and one on the way back. With each movie comprised of one shot and each shot lasting about 4 hours it made Russian Ark look like child’s play. Melinda made a few returns as leading lady (or femme fatale as she would later reveal herself to be) yet the mode of transport on which the protagonist would travel was always changing with special mention going to a little intertextual mastery on my part a few years later which saw the once black stallion successfully transformed into a Return of The Jedi-era anti-gravity hover bike.

Then one year I forgot to make the next installment. Mum had invested in a portable DVD player and before I realized what had happened I had missed the time allocated to me by the powers that be to make my movie. After that year I stopped going on family holidays. Too cool for them I guess…

It wasn’t until University, my first degree in Visual Communication, that I was reminded of my directorial purple patch. I was amidst the weekly ritual of an hour lecture in Visual Analysis with my nose pressed against the page and descending into the deep throes of boredom when the dull buzz growing in my temples was interrupted by a ‘heaps relevant’ early naughties dance track. I looked up and in so doing peered back in time to the remembered masterpieces of my prodigious youth. The landscape flashing before me was not populated by horses, hover bikes or Melinda and yet it was clear to me that its invention came from the same place of origin. It was the music video for The Chemical Brothers’ Star Guitar directed by Michel Gondry, a video where the landscape imitates the rhythms, melodies and textures of the song to a final effect similar to that of a terrain-based Guitar Hero.

My film materialized when I looked out the window with a girl on my mind. Maybe Michel had headphones in his ears when he thought of his? When I left the lecture theatre I didn’t think much more of it.

The reason I bring this up is because of something I saw just before Uni started this year. I found myself on a train returning from my parent’s house in the Blue Mountains to where I now live in Redfern. Being a victim of the iPhone age, I had my head in my phone like the majority of passengers on the train. I just happened to be exploring the upcoming subjects I had this semester at Uni when I found the unit outline for Cinematic Modernism and, curious to see what was in store for me, YouTubed Berlin: Symphony of a Great City.

As the flashing and oscillating abstract images of the opening minute gave way to the aggressive rhythmic montage of a steam engine thundering through the outskirts of Berlin I raised my gaze from the frame of my phone to the frame of the window beside me where something extraordinary was happening…  

Flying dangerously low to the sprawling suburbia of the outer-west was a bright yellow bi-plane, narrowly missing telegraph wires, lightly scraping rooftops and expertly piloted by a very familiar looking twelve-year-old boy…

Even a filmed landscape does not lend itself to pure aesthetic contemplation. One is fully aware of the machine which mediates the view, the camera pivoting on its tripod. The most common form of landscape panorama- films shot from the front or back of trains- doubled this effect, invoking not only the motion picture machine but the locomotive which pulls the seated viewer through space. These train films provide an even more technologically mediated example of what Wolfgang Schivelbusch, in his description of the transformation of perception occasioned by the railway journey, calls panoramic perception.

– Tom Gunning, An Aesthetic of Astonishment.