Figure 9.1 Stills from De Maasbruggen (Paul Schuitema, 1937)
Dutch designer Paul Schuitema (1897–1973), pioneer of New Typography, started making films in the 1930s.1 Elaborating on Joris Ivens’s The Bridge (1928), he made De Maasbruggen (1937), which was shot at the same location: the bridges across the river Maas in Rotterdam, artery of the city, its port, trade, and industry. This 14-minute film shows Rotterdam as a busy city, through the microcosm of the traffic crossing its main bridges. When ships have to pass, the bridges open and the traffic has to wait. When the bridges close again, the bicycles, cars, trams, and trains continue. By focusing on patterns and close-ups of people, vehicles, and constructions, and by a deliberate use of cuts to create juxtapositions, including sonic counterpoints, the film provides an analysis of human movement in interaction with engineering works and of individuals forming a crowd and swarm in response to the built environment.2 The film has most of the features of the city symphony, as defined by Alexander Graf:3 urban congestion, traffic flows, movement, expressive montage and compositions; it has no story or explanatory titles, but it shows the experience of the city and of individuals moving in crowds. It does not follow, however, the dawn till dusk format, but by not using such a conceptual structure, it actually amplifies the sense of movement and rhythm.
De Maasbruggen can be seen as a condensed example of the city symphony, as an expression of the experience of modernity, in which the aesthetics of cinema converge with the rhythms of the modern city. However, such a reading obscures the purposes and conditions of the film, and hides the relationship between representation, production, and exhibition.4 While the film may seem to be a typical exponent of the city symphony as a genre, a closer look at it raises several important questions.
First, while Schuitema had established his name as a designer, what motivated him to engage with film? This implies an examination of cross-disciplinary connections and visions. Second, why did he choose a subject that was so similar to that of Ivens? This concerns the film’s aim and touches upon what might be called its existential ontology.5 Third, since Schuitema had a reputation for being an innovator, and if De Maasbruggen is regarded as a city symphony, why was the film released so late, years after the heyday of the city symphony? This is a question of periodization. Through these questions, I will develop my overall argument that film, like the city, should primarily be seen as a process. It requires a methodology that pays attention to the connections between text and conditions, while taking into account its aims, which implies a network-based approach.
After initially studying to be a painter, Schuitema became a graphic designer.6 Among his earliest works is a poster from 1923, for the influential modernist design and architecture association Opbouw in Rotterdam. Opbouw flourished in this city dedicated to shipping and industry, with a strong labor movement, and propagating progress. Within this hotbed, and node of the international network of the avant-garde, Schuitema began to apply new forms and techniques. Inspired by Moholy-Nagy’s idea of the “Typophoto,” he started to use photographs in his designs, and he subsequently made photographs himself. Historian of photography Flip Bool points to Schuitema’s famous Turning gramophone record (1929), with its suggestion of movement, as a work that points toward Schuitema’s transition from graphic design to film.7 This explanation, however, is based on formal considerations. Instead, I will deliver two different arguments. The first foregrounds a cross-disciplinary network, and the second articulates Schuitema’s social agenda.
In 1927, the Filmliga was founded in Amsterdam as an association dedicated to screening avant-garde films, and it rapidly established branches across the Netherlands. Many architects and designers associated with Opbouw became actively involved. Schuitema was not among the first, but as the secretary of Opbouw,8 he was well informed. Later he became active in the Filmliga too (1931–4). While Rien que les heures and Berlin: Sinfonie der Großstadt were screened in Rotterdam in regular theaters in 1927, the Filmliga showed many other city films.9 In April 1928, it screened Kaufman’s Moscow, under the Dutch title Moskou: de stad als organisme—The City as Organism, a term that Schuitema would borrow afterwards. Next came The Bridge, which Ivens made with the help of Sybold van Ravesteyn, a Filmliga member and an architect for the Dutch railways. In November 1928, the Filmliga also showed Andor von Barsy’s The City that Never Rests (1928), a film about Rotterdam and its port (see Chapter Ten). Many more would follow, but these must have informed Schuitema when he began to consider making a city film of his own.
In December 1928, Schuitema gave a lecture called “Yesterday and Today: To Propagate Has Always Been the Basis of Art.”10 He argued that art should not be autonomous to transcend everyday life or to achieve a higher aim, but that it should elevate everyday life, by being part of it. “Rather than to escape routine, it should change it, while changing the perception and organization of the conditions.” Film, he said, is the best medium to accomplish this endeavor. This remark is of particular importance, as this statement was made before Schuitema was actively involved with film himself, and it can be considered something of a foundation for his later work. To explain his thoughts, Schuitema gave the example of the traffic policeman, who is, and this seems to be no coincidence, a common figure in city symphonies.11 According to Schuitema, this figure is “necessary to minimize the chaos as a result of growing traffic.” However, “this policeman is only a provisional measure. When the urban organism will have changed and adapted to the pressure of the conditions, a traffic policeman will become superfluous.” The new form that will come instead, according to Schuitema, emerges out of the requirements of the time, and that applies to all circumstances of modern life.
In 1931 Schuitema bought a camera and travelled to the Soviet Union, where he made a short travel report, Rusland, which he presented in May 1932.12 Together with his footage of a demonstration in The Hague—the seat of the national government—against budget cuts (Betogingen, 1932),13 it emphasizes Schuitema’s interest in the social potential of film. Social issues became all the more urgent as the Great Depression made itself felt, and the social aspirations of the avant-garde were put to the test.
In a 1985 study of De Maasbruggen, Arij de Boode and Pieter van Oudheusden wondered why Schuitema chose almost the same subject as Ivens.14 They find the choice unoriginal, even objectionable, since they consider The Bridge an excellent film that could not be surpassed, having handled its subject matter with mastery. In comparison, they find Schuitema’s film too chaotic, composed of too many conflicting movements. Instead of a comparison that regards Ivens’s film as necessarily superior, it is my intention to understand Schuitema’s film on its own terms. I will therefore elaborate on the aim stated by Schuitema himself: “While Ivens has elaborated on the movement of objects, I have made an attempt to study the movement of people.”15
The Bridge has been recognized as a profound study of a single object, the newly built railway elevator bridge that soon became an icon of Rotterdam’s modernity. Ivens showed this construction in motion, together with the motion of the trains crossing it, through a montage of close-ups and different perspectives. Comparing The Bridge to the architectural theories of Siegfried Giedion, Tom Gunning has argued that Ivens approached the architectural ideal of visual simultaneity, in which different parts are seen together.16 In the late 1920s, Gunning explains, both film and architecture were considered as modes of perception. The railway bridge was effectively dissolved into pure vision in Ivens’s film. In so doing, Ivens was essentially elaborating on the concept of the absolute film, to which he explicitly refers at the end, with an animated black square. While “the absolute film” was first applied in reference to the abstract animations by Ruttmann, by that time Ruttmann himself had renounced absolute film as l’art pour l’art. With Berlin, according to Anton Kaes, Ruttmann called for social responsibility beyond formal experiments.17 This call was reinforced by the Great Crash of 1929, and picked up by many filmmakers, among them Moholy-Nagy and Ivens, who started to make politically motivated films around this time.
For Schuitema, the crossing over the Maas was a place where modernity fully exercised its forces. It had become a bottleneck in the circulation of the city, as the system was outpaced due to rapid urban growth—a fact widely discussed by architects and planners since the late 1920s.18 This condition was not addressed by Ivens, who focused on a new construction and mechanical movement. Schuitema was interested in technology, vision, and movement too, but in connection to people—particularly striking are the movements of cyclists—as a part of modern urban life. Schuitema therefore used film to explore film’s own characteristics—movement and photographic realism, montage and composition—while simultaneously investigating how the city could move forward. He sought a synthesis between form and representation, not only to acknowledge reality, but to engage with it as well.
With the production of De Maasbruggen, Schuitema embarked on an expedition into modernity. Like any experiment, it is not the result that counts most, but the attempt to elaborate on observations and ideas, which entails a promise for something to be developed out of the experiment. As such, De Maasbruggen is like a research project, or literally een filmstudie (“a film study”), as the film’s subtitle indicates. It was not only an elaboration of abstract ideas, but also an encounter with the object itself, both film and what it makes visible, the urban traffic as a symptom of the modern condition, which was also a focus of a discussion on urbanism in which Schuitema participated too. His film was therefore part of the environment that is represented in the film itself.
De Maasbruggen is generally dated 1937, the year it was brought to the censor. As a city symphony, it appeared rather late. Practical reasons have been mentioned by others.19 My claim is that the film is not late, but that it shows a different temporal logic. First of all, the film is an attempt to come to terms with the socio-economic developments of the 1930s. In the midst of the Great Depression, within a changing discourse, Schuitema emphasized once more the social function of avant-garde film, in an article published in De 8 & Opbouw in 1935.20 Instead of making explicitly political films, as Ivens started to do, or to document social circumstances, Schuitema kept to the initial impetus. He sought for a new form in its representational connection to the city, looking for ways the city could be organized. Sound became an additional factor in that search. Schuitema asked composer Koos van de Griend to make a musical soundscape that emphasized the movements in the film. This took another year, and was only finished late in 1938.
Since De Maasbruggen incorporates different discourses, it is not simply an “image” from a particular moment. That may still apply to the photographs Schuitema made around 1931, the first studies for his film, which were published as a promotional booklet for printer Chevalier with the title Foto’s van Rotterdam.21 But film creates meaning through sequences of shots made at different moments, in this case between 1932 and 1937. Different people appear one after the other, who were never together at the same time. It is rather a configuration of different situations, to highlight larger patterns.
The film was not just an image, but also a discussion piece. While Schuitema worked on the design of Ben Stroman’s novel Stad, he and his colleague Gerrit Kiljan developed a plan to make it into a film.22 They made a serious attempt, through their Filmliga network, but the plan failed and Schuitema moved on in a different direction. He showed the first version of De Maasbruggen to his students at the academy in The Hague, where he and Kiljan were teachers and had led a film group since 1934.23 As such, the film had an educational function. In January 1936, Schuitema showed another version together with Ivens’s The Bridge and other films at the Czechoslovak Society for Scientific Cinematography in Brno, where he was invited by architect František Kalivoda.24
Another way of understanding the film’s temporality has to do with the ontological interconnections between cinema and the city. In his 1928 lecture, Schuitema spoke about the traffic policeman as a functional element to coordinate collective movement, but also as a sign of a changing system, which needed another form of organization. This idea informed De Maasbruggen, in which the traffic policeman is prominently present. At the same time, traffic in Rotterdam was also discussed by architects and planners, and Schuitema was among them. Even before his film was released, the decision was made to build a tunnel under the river, the first of its kind in the Netherlands, to solve the problems of congestion—the tunnel was eventually built in 1942.
Films are usually associated with the year of release, but not in the case of De Maasbruggen. However, distribution is another factor impacting the film’s temporality. By 1938, few opportunities were left to screen avant-garde films, and when World War II started these opportunities evaporated entirely. During the war, Schuitema was part of a group preparing new plans for the Dutch film industry, which would be implemented once the war was over, including an obligatory distribution of shorts in regular theaters. Film historian Bert Hogenkamp remarks with surprise that Schuitema’s films from before the war were selected.25 However, this had been the reason for Schuitema to make the plans in the first place, as exhibition was inherent to the social purpose and the concept of his work. De Maasbruggen finally had its premiere in 1946, at the Cannes film festival. It was shown together with his other city symphony, Les Halles de Paris, which is also about movement, not in connection to technology, but to the delivery of food, for the city to live (it was recorded in 1934, during a period of four months).26 De Maasbruggen was well-received in the press, and distributed in 1947. In so doing, it actually marks the onset of the post-war Dutch School in documentary, which applied the insights of the avant-garde within the context of a social realist agenda.
As soon as we ask why a film (or a building) exists, and inquire about its actual value, we observe a process. An ontological approach, taking into account a film’s reason to exist and its place in the world, relates its formal features to the conditions of existence. Taking De Maasbruggen as a case, I have thus raised three questions: what were the reasons that Schuitema engaged with film in the first place; why did he take a subject that had already been explored quite famously by his compatriot Ivens; and why did the film appear on the scene at such a late date? I have argued that Schuitema’s engagement with film was first of all a result of a cross- disciplinary network. Besides that, it was not just because of an aesthetic interest in movement, but as part of a social concern. This led him to choose a similar subject and location as Ivens, to show a different perspective, one where cinema’s absolute features were combined with photographic realism. Moreover, Schuitema also engaged with a discussion among planners, looking for new ways the city could be developed. While the city was changing, the discourse about cinema changed too, and De Maasbruggen reflects both. There are 19 years between the conception and final distribution of this film, even though it is only a 14-minute short. Its main value is not to be found in an image of a particular moment and location, but in a configuration of different moments, perspectives, and discussions in which Schuitema participated himself. Altogether, this supports the argument that film, like the city, should primarily be seen as a process, rather than as a fixed image of a particular situation.
This case-study has shown how De Maasbruggen offers a view on the world and suggests directions for reflection. This insight could be used to study all kinds of city symphonies, not only shorts with a long lifetime like De Maasbruggen, but also long films with a short lifetime, such as The City That Never Rests. In the case of the latter, certain parts were soon cut out and reconfigured. In general, different parts of a film may have their own production histories, meanings, implications, and potentialities, which are also highlighted in different discourses at different moments, which relate to different conditions with their own temporalities.
The ontological approach presented here observes specificity, of form, subject, and location. It ranges from medium specific elements—such as the shot, cut, or musical counterpoint, presenting specific urban fragments to address a particular problem (e.g., close-ups of cyclists highlighting congestion)—to a specific subject that serves as a synecdoche for a city. The latter is not only the case in De Maasbruggen, but also, for example, in Les Halles de Paris (1939), in which the central market is a microcosm reflecting Paris in its entirety. The common denominator connecting different instances of specificity is scale; each time, specificity illuminates a larger issue, without reducing the value of the specific phenomenon, as it remains embedded in reality. Scale is a continuum, which can be further extended: specific films can similarly be related to a larger corpus.
The synecdoche in the work of Schuitema is different from the omniscient perspective in, among others, Ruttmann’s Berlin, which latter has become the touchstone for a corpus of city symphonies. However, Ruttmann’s collage is not less specific. It contains visible and hidden traces of spatio-temporal coordinates, which could be plotted as a choreography of the film as a process. Moreover, these coordinates may show a network of connections between textual elements and conditions, part of yet a larger network, connecting different actors: Ruttmann—Ivens—Schuitema and many others, among them various designers and architects. Any of their works is a network within a larger one.
When a film is thus seen in terms of a process and a network, instead of in terms of originality, intrinsic values, or generic features, it might be understood as a study or a research project motivated by social objectives, which evolves through evaluation and envisioning or anticipation, generating different temporal horizons. Such might be the implication of this study of De Maasbruggen: an ontological model to investigate the reasons of existence of both unknown and well-known films and cities, both parts and whole; their presumptions, purposes, and aims; their connections to the environment in which they came into existence and that they represent and let us perceive; their actual uses and potentialities with different temporalities; and the way these parameters have become manifest in a form that accounts for the poiesis of the process in which both films and urban projects find their value, as each other’s ontological extensions.
