Bezúčelná Procházka

(Aimless Walk)

Alexandr Hackenschmied

Czechoslovakia, 1930

In 1930, Czech avant-garde photographer and critic Alexandr Hackenschmied (1907–2004), who would change his name to Hammid when he emigrated to the United States, borrowed a Kinamo camera and made a truly independent film. Aimless Walk can be considered a city symphony about Prague with a centrifugal effect. Whereas other city symphonies open with the arrival in the city by train, boat, or other modern means of transportation, Hackenschmied’s film takes us in the opposite direction, showing a tram ride that starts in the city center and takes us to the outskirts of Prague, to the half-industrial, half-rural landscape of Libenˇ, with its factory chimneys, fallow fields, trees, and reflecting water surfaces. In fact, the film’s working title was Na okraji or On the Outskirts. Stylistically, the tram ride recalls the train sequence of Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927), as Hackenschmied combines shots of, on, and from the tram in a rapid and rhythmic montage, displaying and merging multiple perspectives into a kaleidoscopic whole, which evokes the experience of travelling fast in the modern city.

This experience becomes personal and personified, since, unusually for city symphony films, this one has a protagonist—a man with a hat, played by Hackenschmied’s friend, non-professional actor Bedřich Votýpka, who takes the tram, goes for a walk on the Libenˇ peninsula along the shores of the Vltava river, sits smoking in the grass, and finally returns to the city. What’s more, one half of him returns to the city center of Prague, while his doppelganger stays on the outskirts. He is an urban wanderer, though not quite a flâneur observing and diving into the urban crowds, but one that goes for a walk to explore the city’s semi-industrial suburbs.

The film premiered in a program Hackenschmied himself organized in Prague between November 1930 and February 1931, comprising other city symphonies such as Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926), Vigo’s À propos de Nice (1930), and Kaufman’s In Spring (1929). After his first film Aimless Walk, Hackenschmied made another city symphony, Prague Castle (1931). Later he made documentaries and advertising films in addition to experimental films, such as Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), made with his then-wife Maya Deren.

Eva Hielscher

further reading

Drubek, Natascha, “ ‘Bezúčelná Procházka/Aimless Walk’ (1930): Alexander Hackenschmied’s ‘Film Study’ of a Tram Ride to the Outskirts of Prague—Libenˇ,” Bohemia 52, 1 (2012): 76–107.

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