Curtiss Short
9/22/04
Kracauer�s “Montage”

Within Kracauer’s Marxist program of approaching the artwork from the standpoint of class struggle, capitalism, and historical actuality, there lies the basic critique of what he and other theorists termed “cross section” or “montage” films: They were, as one character called them, merely “surface approaches.” For, according to the mandates of New Objectivity, expression was to be as pure as possible, untainted with the stuff of criticism. Practitioners of pure expression were working firmly against a social milieu that valued narrative and morale over experimentation or bothersome criticism. Unlike filmmakers in revolutionary Russia, German directors of these “cross section” films were interested in not so much the potential opportunities for social commentary as they were in the mere presentation of forms as objects for spectatorship and whimsy. These forms tended towards the empty gesture of mere similitude and entertainment, touching on legitimate social issues such as poverty, prostitution, and conspicuous consumption, but doing nothing beyond this superficial juxtaposing of similar motions and bodies. Thus the street-film or the market-film represented the natural limbo in an evolution of filmic content and the milieu which had influenced it: Sentimentalism (as seen in films earlier than Berlin which took as their subject matter the seeming randomness of modern urban life, and ultimately constructed a conventional narrative of redemption or love); neutrality (Berlin itself, and several others which attempted to show/show off/showcase the marvels and richness of the dynamic images of modernity); and, finally, revolution (most Russian films, which took seriously their social and historical actuality and constructed viable and provocative criticisms). Such neutrality was the inevitable result of a mindset that had taken as counterproductive the lessons of the earlier films – dreamlike, purely narrative, implicitly passive to authority (and authoritarianism) – but had not gone the route of commentary or criticism. “Berlin is the product of the paralysis itself,” a film which neither wants to go back nor hopes to go forward.

(Interestingly, Kracauer does not deal at any great length with the soundtrack. Perhaps the ultimate mere “tempo” aspect of the film does little to redeem it in terms of a potentially provocative criticism, founded between the sound and images. The implication in Kracauer’s silence might be that the sound is just another method of appeasing the bourgeoisie or sedating the proletariat. If indeed it was a soundtrack that was capable of being performed without the image, then we have to wonder just how revolutionary it could ever have been, considering that it is a more or less standard orchestral arrangement which hardly begs scrutiny.)

Carl Mayer contended that he was going to “turn from the externalization of inner processes to the rendering of externals, from freely constructed plots to plots discovered in the given material.” Such a notion was already known thanks to Eisenstein’s work with montage, which sought to elicit thoughtful response through the careful juxtaposition of contradictory or dialectical imagery. Ruttmann’s film is structured on one day in Berlin, beginning in morning, ending at night. Thus a narrative is established, one of cycles or repetition (following Kracauer, could we not say that in light of the bourgeois nature of the film, we can expect that most days are like this in Berlin?). Form drives juxtaposition, not content. I wonder, then, how a more revolutionary or critical film would have been structured with what is given? Admittedly, some of the juxtapositions (animals and humans miming each other) seem just humorous and nothing more, but others, like the images of poverty, on the one hand, and conspicuous consumption (throwing away food), on the other, would seem to offer some type of commentary, even if only latently. (Another example: If I’m not mistaken, the word “Geld” is flashed across the screen several times during the newspaper montage. Should we take this is as a technological flexing of the muscles, or as something else?) The question is then: does structural integrity preclude social commentary? It is impossible to make any type of film without recourse to some narrative convention. Likewise, montage or image selection itself is first a mental process of storytelling. I don’t see how Mayer’s move from “internal processes” would be possible unless one were willing to market a very boring film. Finally, there are the other cross-section films “show much and reveal nothing.” Some of them are mere collections of clips from other films, all of them fitting only in that they convey a generally recognized and conceded concept like love or genre like the explorer film. This goes back to our discussion last week on the unsettling nature of Metropolis’ reliance on the old orders of film and audience expectation. Had the idea of pastiche already become possible this early on in the history of an art form that was barely thirty years old? Are there any similarities?