Photography and Cinema

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Whether critical or celebratory, representation of the city would have to

emerge less from definitive images than the marshalling of pieces. Thus

modernist photography and film sought to cut out and then cut together

pre-selected parts. The implied point of view was compound, like a fly.

Ideally, the agility of the photographer or filmmaker as they shot in

the street would be matched by the juggling of the pieces in the edit.

The collage by Umbo for the cover of Egon Irwin Kisch’sZurivy Reporter

(The Frantic Reporter, 1929 ) is a heightened expression of this. The reporter

is a man-machine observing, recording and interpreting all at once, just

like the figure described by Isherwood. Straddling the city, he has a car

and an aeroplane for feet, pens for arms, a typewriter for a chest and,

of course, a camera-eye. The time lag necessary for critical reflection on

the world has gone. Immersion and immediacy are all, anticipating the

myth of instantaneous assessment typical of our 24 -hour news television.

Despite all this, in reality life in the 1920 s and ’ 30 s was not actually

particularly fast for most urban dwellers. The new speed was certainly

felt to some extent, but it was anticipated much more. Speed was as

much a seductive and utopian promise as a fact of life, particularly for

the avant-garde.

What finally broke that first bond between photographers and film-

makers was the arrival of sound in 1929. It disrupted film’s photographic

idea of the ‘shot’ and for a long while it confined film production to the

controlled sound studio. Vertov’s silentMan with a Movie Camera( 1929 )

was the pinnacle of roving film, completed just before the paralysis.

Taking the familiar structure of a ‘day in the life of a city’, it cuts together

documentary footage of urban life and combines it with a highly reflexive

account of the film’s own making. We see the athletic cameraman at work

and the sights he records intercut with images of Vertov’s editor at her

table seemingly putting together the very film we are watching. That level

of immersion in the city was surpassed only decades later with the com-

ing of portable video. Even so, the lure of footloose city filmmaking never

went away. European Neo-realist cinema of the 1940 s and ’ 50 s strived

for the freedom and mobility of the documentary photographer, as did

the French New Wave. In 1959 Jean-Luc Godard made much ofBreathless

on the streets of Paris. His cinematographer Raoul Coutard had a light