A Film Canon

Despite its superficial similarities to Man With A Movie Camera, this is primarily an analytical, rather than phenomenological, approach to the modernist metropolis. That said, there are some spectacular formal innovations, such as the application of the 'phantom ride' motif to a roller coaster, and the near exclusive use of low-angle shots in the first act, which imbue the city architecture with a sublime austerity. But these tend to be contained within a more practical investigation into such forms of connective tissue as electricity grids, traffic signals, telephone exchanges and, above all, the railway lines, which effectively constitute the syntax of the film. This contributes to a quite different conception of that paradigmatic urban space - the intersection - than occurs in Vertov, replacing its vertiginous disorientations with a prescience for its structural implications, as if it were a mere macrocosm of the finely-oiled gears that predominate the factory sequences, and suggesting that Ruttman's ultimate desire is to transform the city into a comprehensible abstraction, be it drawn from innovations in cubism or, as the plane sequences might suggest, aerial cartography. The concomitant abstraction of the human takes the form of a nascent sociological sensibility; or, alternatively, the first cinematic atttempt to describe a demographic that I have seen to date, explaining the recurrence of mannequins and dolls.