After his (unfilmed) screenplay Dynamik der Gross-Stadt (1922) and his 1929 film on Marseille, artist, photographer, and filmmaker László Moholy- Nagy (1895–1946) made two city symphonies dealing with Berlin.
As large sections of Berliner Stilleben (1932), Grossstadt-Zigeuner, which was shot in April 1932, is also marked by a humanist documentary mode, now focusing on the Romani people living in the Berlin districts of Wedding and Marzahn—Moholy-Nagy’s interest in Roma was already visible in his 1929 Marseille film, which contains a brief scene with a horse-drawn wagon and a bear. Romantically associated with the pastoralism of a bygone era, the gypsies have become social outcasts now banned to the outskirts of the city. As a result, in contrast with the fascination for the hectic density of the city center in most city symphonies, the characters of Grossstadt-Zigeuner are situated in the nondescript peripheral zones where city and country interact. Only in a few of the film’s moments do we see city streets filled with pedestrians and traffic.
In line with an age-old picturesque tradition that favors colorful outcasts and the urban poor, Moholy-Nagy depicts the gypsies, their carts, their ever-present horses, and the activities that have become an inherent part of their stereotypical representation: street vending, playing cards and dice, fights, dance, and music. However, in many instances these clichés are transcended by the filmmaker’s honest and committed interest in people. Grossstadt-Zigeuner focuses on children (a recurring trope in humanist photography but also an important topic in Moholy-Nagy’s other city films) and on the faces of individuals, many of them looking directly at the camera. As a result, the film has a spontaneous and intimate cinéma vérité like feeling, which is also underscored by the use of jump cuts, and a mobile camera that even swirls among the dancing gypsies. Furthermore, Moholy’s hand-held camera evokes the highly physical presence of the filmmaker among his subjects. Grossstadt-Zigeuner was originally made as a sound film, but, because of copyright issues, the soundtrack was declared illegal and destroyed.
Steven Jacobs
further reading
Horak, Jan-Christopher, Making Images Move: Photographers and Avant-Garde Cinema (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 109–36.
Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality (New York, NY: Harper Brothers, 1950).
Sahli, Jan, Filmische Sinneserweiterung: László Moholy-Nagys Filmwerk und Theorie (Berlin: Schüren, 2006), 168–73.
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