Page 193 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

flattens together all the elements of Total Theatre into the continuous, smooth surface of film, and, on account of its story- less structure, may be regarded as a circular work: a scale model in motion. The machines in the movie – crudely presented as humankind’s vanguard – are both actors and scenery. They become subjects not simply because they act, but also because they rule over and lead the working masses to action. This aimlessness and lack of humanist narrative in Ruttmann’s work was precisely what inspired Sigfried Kracauer’s negative review in the Frankfurter Zeitung. As Stéphane Füzesséry points out, for Kracauer the film’s neutrality and lack of engagement with the issue of poverty and squalor in the city betrayed Ruttman’s formalistic approach.26 The latter’s fascination with the domination of machinic production over human life shows through in the film’s editing, which mimetically replicates the droning whirl of turbines, wheels, and pistons. Ruttman’s Symphony is an attempt at rhythmic and mimetic indoctrination into the new order, as well sensory acclimatization into the frantic reality of the metropolis – an effort to picture its logic, rather than its physical extension. Abstraction in human relationships and behavior is matched by increased mimeticism in non-human items, and the outsourcing of affect onto work’s mechanical, disembodied elements. With hindsight, it may be said that Kracauer’s criticism turned out to be prophetic: after a two-year collaboration with Piscator in the documentary Melodie der Welt, Ruttman joined the Nazi party. Kracauer wrote his own account of urban life in Die Angestellten (1930), a study on how the dullness of machinic work overspills beyond proletarian life into all of the rhythms of waged society. It’s the monotony of work that fuels – like the engine of a timeless projection – the workers’ dream of utopia, a dream that industrial society allows to flourish only in seclusion and privacy.27
Towards the Outskirts (Hinterland)
Despite the (dampened and half-forgotten) impact of WWII and the decades that separate us from Piscator and Kracauer, the perception of the city as autotelic stage and productive subject has not vanished in our times. Baudelaire’s clichéd forêt de symboles hasn’t stopped growing ever thicker, to such a point that signs already outstrip the city,28 whose parts we can see engaged in language-like permutations all around us. Nothing
26 Stéphane Füzesséry, “Le choc des métropoles,” in Architecture et cinéma, Paris: École nationales supérieure d’architecture de Paris-Malaquais, 2015, p. 427.
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27 See Siegfried Kracauer, (1930) The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany, Eng. trans. by Q. Hoare, London: Verso, 1998, pp. 92-93.
28 Under cognitive capitalism, signs beget machines, and not the other way round.