László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) is one of the key figures in the history of the city symphony. After his screenplay Dynamik der Gross-Stadt (1922), which can be seen as a “city symphony on paper,” he made Impressionen vom alten Marseiller Hafen (Vieux Port) (1929) in France, as well as two films focusing on Berlin and its inhabitants. The first of these two is Berliner Stilleben (shot in 1926, 1931, or 1932, according to different sources), the other being Grossstadt-Zigeuner (1932).
Berliner Stilleben opens with shots of the Charlottenburg area evoking the urban bustle typical of city symphonies: busy streets and traffic intersections, tramways, street vendors, men delivering coal, street an construction laborers at work, playing children, et cetera. Moholy-Nagy’s film style answers to the characteristics of the so-called New Vision that also marks his photographs. High-angle shots, oblique framings, the use of reflections, and close-ups create a certain degree of abstraction and a highly dynamic spatial realm. The camera is also put on moving cars and trams, which bring us to the outskirts of the city with its huge gas containers and popular neighborhoods.
About two-thirds of the film is shot in the slums of the Wedding working class district, particularly in and around the five courtyards of the Meyers Hof tenement complex. In this part of the film, Moholy-Nagy’s uses a highly mobile, handheld camera, which scans the surfaces of the stark tenement walls. The buildings are worn-out and dilapidated and dirt is prominently present but we do not see the extreme poverty and piles of garbage that feature in Moholy-Nagy‘s 1929 Marseille film. A scene with furniture on the street suggests that an old woman has been evicted from her house. As earlier commentators such as Horak and Sahli have noticed, the images are reminiscent of other leftist films of the era such as Mutter Krause fahrt ins Glück (Paul Jutzi, 1929) or Zeitprobleme: Wie der Arbeiter wohnt (Slatan Dudow, 1930). In addition, they also prefigure later films such Housing Problems (Edgar Anstey and Arthur Elton, 1935) and Les Maisons de la misère (Henri Storck, 1937), which focus on the miserable dwelling conditions of the working class. In line with Moholy-Nagy’s preoccupations as photographer, painter, and sculptor, light plays an important role in this film, which juxtaposes the sunlit streets to the darkness of the Meyers Hof. Nonetheless, the slums are presented as a lively place with cats and dogs, and, first and foremost, the ubiquitous children, who prefigure the humanist photography of the following decades and films such as Helen Levitt, James Agee, and Janice Loeb’s In the Street (1948).
Steven Jacobs
further reading
Horak, Jan-Christopher, Making Images Move: Photographers and Avant-Garde Cinema (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 109–36.
Sahli, Jan, Filmische Sinneserweiterung: László Moholy-Nagys Filmwerk und Theorie (Berlin: Schüren, 2006), 164–8.
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