In a 1933 lecture, Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) said of his Marseille film that he
had a limited amount of material (300 meters) and thought it useless to try to present such a huge city in so few meters of film. So I consciously chose a small section of this huge city, in particular a part that was unknown, because of its sad social conditions, its poverty, and its dangerous streets, the Vieux port.
Indeed, Moholy-Nagy’s first film strikes us with its harsh imagery of poverty in the slums of Marseille: a drooling clochard, people urinating in the streets, stray cats and loose dogs, dirt, open sewers, et cetera. However, the film also includes footage of the lively boulevards filled with pedestrians, street vendors, cars, and tramways. Shots of shop windows, bars, restaurants, workshops, playing children, a one-legged man walking, gypsies, and Africans evoke a lively and diverse quartier of the Mediterranean city.
An entire sequence of the film is dedicated to the famous 1905 steel Pont transbordeur—according to Moholy-Nagy “truly a wonder of technical precision and beauty,” which has been visualized by prominent modernist photographers such as Man Ray, Herbert Bayer, Florence Henri, Germaine Krull, Marcel Bovis, and, last but not least, Moholy-Nagy himself. Several shots in the film are almost identical with Moholy’s photographs of the bridge, but also with those that he took of the Eiffel Tower and the Berlin Radio Tower. As in these photographs, Moholy-Nagy’s Marseille film is marked by extreme high- and low-angle shots, evoking the logics of the new architecture, which is characterized by dynamic spatial relations. Perfectly visualized by tracking shots through a maze of girders and cables, the moving parts of the bridge enable Moholy-Nagy to create space through movement, not unlike his Ein Lichtspiel: Schwarz-weiss-grau (1930). As in this abstract cinematic study of kinetic sculpture, the Marseille film also focuses on light, which Moholy-Nagy had famously labeled “a medium of plastic expression.” In his Marseille film, Moholy-Nagy emphasizes the transparency of the bridge and plays on the contrasts between the sunlit squares and shadowy alleys, between dark interiors and sunny streets.
Opening with an image of a Marseille street map in which the Vieux port part is cut out by a pair of scissors, Moholy-Nagy’s Marseille film—an example of “semi-social reportage,” as he put it—is the perfect synthesis of constructivism and social realism. In so doing, it is a key film marking the documentary turn of the Constructivist avant-garde in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Steven Jacobs
further reading
Horak, Jan-Christopher, Making Images Move: Photographers and Avant-Garde Cinema (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1997), 109–35.
Moholy-Nagy, László, “Marseille,” German manuscript (1929) published in Krisztina Passuth, Moholy-Nagy (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 403.
Moholy-Nagy, László, “New Film Experiments,” originally published in Korunk 3 (1933), included in Krisztina Passuth, Moholy-Nagy (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 319–23.
Sahli, Jan, Filmische Sinnes-Erweiterung: László Moholy-Nagys Filmwerk und Theorie (Marburg: Schüren Verlag, 2006), 159–64.
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