The Tourists guide to Berlin: Symphony of a Great City

I’m off to Hong Kong after I finish university. I actually finish today but I’m going on the 13th of November. I only found out last week that I am going so I’m quiet unprepared. It’s for a holiday, but because I had no knowledge I was going there I have never really thought about Hong Kong before. I am now madly looking up websites trying to figure out what to do (SHOP) and what to see (NO CLUE).

I was thinking today how easy it would be if a modern film came out called Hong Kong: Symphony of a Great City. Because one of the things I appreciate about Berlin: Symphony of a Great City was how it took you to another world. The film acts like a tour guide, bringing you into the city on a train and taking you on a ride. In the beginning your shown a sort of montage of modernity. The power lines, factories and the train itself speeding ahead with the music. I felt when I was watching it like a giddy tourist not sure where I was being lead but being bombarded with a visual feast of the unknown.

The film takes you on and you watch the stores open ready for business. What is particularly different is that you experience a city that is quite in those early moments. I have been awake in Sydney at 2, 4, 5 even 8 ( in Kings Cross) and have never seen it empty. There was an eerie feeling but also a beautiful one. You got to see the city as it was without the people. When the people enter its like a sudden wave of activity. They are busy and you the tourist are in their way. Their feet trample over you as they rush to work.

The clock keeps ticking. When you are a tourist time never seems to be on your side. You have places to go and things to do but before you know your back on the plane and its home again. In Berlin, the clocks keep ticking reminding you that your stay won’t last. The whole city seems to be lead by that ticking. Its morning and finally it is night.

The city comes alive at night. The lights come on in peoples windows. Some are going home for the night. Others however are only just emerging. Ready to play in Berlin the Great City. Cars streak along a road, their lights glinting in the wet cement. Signs, lit by blazing lights, come on promising something in a language I don’t understand. Its funny how so many cities are different at night. In London, it was dark by four and you found a little pub on a corner to eat dinner in. In Thailand, the city came alive and you go to night Bazaars to watch Thai pop and buy cheap fakes. In Berlin, the dancing girls come out to play. They put their make-up on, do tricks and dance with their legs thrown high. The city becomes a sporting playground with boxing, ice hockey and cyclists to take your fancy. You place a bet at the casino and lose your money. Then you’re back on a tram or in a taxi going home for the night. Firecrackers whirl in the air as if you dreamt it all.

An Architect? No thanks!: The Fountainhead

I am a swimmer; at least I use to be. I use to swim at least nine times a week and I use to compete on weekends at carnivals. I loved to swim and I like to think my technique was very good. After all I spent much of my time perfecting it, spending at least two hours, sometimes twice a day, guided by a thick black line in my drills, kick-board and swimming sets. So when I watched movies such as ‘swim-fan’ I always became agitated. Because the swimming style was so rubbish. If any other person watched that movie, and they probably didn’t, they would have thought maybe that the swimming style was fine. Well it was not. It was shocking; just as in so many other movies that depict swimming were, to me.

When I considered the movie The Fountainhead, I wondered what an architect would think about the portrayal of the architecture profession. After all Ayn Rand spent a considerable amount of time studying architecture. Ayn Rand admits to knowing little about architecture before she wrote The Fountainhead. Schleier states, “She consulted a lengthy bibliography assembled for her by a member of the New York Public Library staff, and another obtained from the journal Architect World” (p. 2). Rand also undertook an internship of two months with Ely Jacques Khan. I have included a picture of one of her buildings. She was able to learn a lot about architecture and for many architects the book is particularly memorable. This is strange because overall the industry is portrayed as a somewhat bureaucratic, unimaginative bunch that produces mediocre buildings that are afraid to challenge the tastes of the ‘mob’.
As for Roark’s designed buildings that feature in the film Schleier states the “film's architectural set designs…. added to its lack of credibility, since one of its major themes concerned the architectural profession and the purported genius of one of its members” (p. 5). The architect George Nelson characterized several of the sets as technical impossibilities and blatant examples of plagiarism. It is believed that Rand agreed with these critics and found the sets disappointing.

The portrayal of the architect profession in The Fountainhead has also been criticized. Lamster states “the characters.. do not so much as converse as declaim one another: in this architectural universe, dialog has given way to sloganeering” ( p. 23). The Fountainhead film would have us all believe it is expectable behavior for an architect to argue with his clients, make demands and act badly instead of adhering to professional conduct. I also wonder if the film set up a trend for the portrayal of architects. The scene where Peter Keating meets in a project meeting to collaborate with the client and other architects over the low cost housing project encourages a view that a devilish and ape-like attitude prevails amongst architects. Other architects suggest adding a human touch with a few balconies and a trimming over the entrance, showing a considerable lack of appreciation for the design. The scene peaks when an architect smashes the model with some sort of black cylinder. While it could be taken as just part of the films overall, melodramatic feel, in modern films which feature the architecture profession the ‘architect tantrum’ and other types of misbehavior have also featured. In Intersection Richard Gere, who plays an architect, reinforces this idea of the architect by throwing a sort of tantrum mid-construction site because his demands are not met. In Jungle Fever the African American architect played by Wesley Snipes is denied a promotion because, he believes, of the color of his skin. He proceeds to storm through the office pointing as buildings he has developed shouting “Mine! Mine, Mine!” It would seem that the architecture field suffers from no shortage of ego thanks to the Hollywood movie. For Ayn Rand someone who so painstakingly studied the field of architecture, regardless of whether she liked architects or architecture itself, she probably would have been disappointed at the portrayal of this profession.



References:

Lamster, M. 2000, Architecture in Motion Pictures, Princeton Architectural Press: USA

Schleier, M. 2002, ‘Ayn Rand and King Vidor's Film "The Fountainhead": Architectural Modernism, the Gendered Body, and Political Ideology’ in The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 61, No. 3, pp. 310-331.

Anna May Wong

For me the best thing about Piccadilly was Anna May Wong as Shosho. In the film she is radiant and so beautiful. She had me captivated and I guess wanting to find out more. So many of the pictures just transfix you. She is startling and so divine. To me she is an old world beauty that modern actresses can never measure up to. I found that she became fixed in mind so I thought I might share with you some more that I found out about her.

Anna May Wong was the first notable Chinese American Actress. She was born in January 3 1905. Her first role was in the silent film Red Lantern (1919) as an un-credited extra. Her ethnicity prevented her from getting many choice roles during much of her career. When MGM was casting for The Good Earth (1937), she was offered the part of Lotus, but Wong refused to be the only Chinese American playing the only negative character, stating: "...I won't play the part. If you let me play O-lan, I'll be very glad. But you're asking me - with Chinese blood - to do the only unsympathetic role in the picture featuring an all-American cast portraying Chinese characters."

Despite the racists attitudes at the time she still manged to have a number of significant films roles. In Piccadilly she plays Shosho, the scullery maid who becomes a dancing marvel and an object of desire for impresario Valentine. In the film she displays the cold ambition and manipulative sexuality of the classic femme fatale. Yet she also has vulnerability that gives her character a sense of depth.

Piccadilly's publicity made much of Wong's exotic beauty: one picture used for promotion featured her topless and many more convey her brilliant sexuality. It would have been unthinkable to portray a white actress in this way however Wong, being exotic and Chinese was seen as the ‘other’.

Just as she was the femme fatale in the film she was in life. Wong never married, largely because of the Chinese custom of the time for a wife to stay at home, coupled with miscegnation laws, though she reportedly was a mistress to a number of men. Anna became know for her fluid grace and languid sexuality and even had her own televsion show.

Tokyo Story: A few thoughts...

In this Blog I really want to start to discuss some of the ideas that I hope to look at in my essay – and I have already begun to think about- since watching Tokyo Story.

I feel that Tokyo Story is such a beautiful, yet personal, story. It feels monumentally unimportant yet at the same time leaves you with so many ideas about family that it feels more important the more you think about it.

I was reading one critic’s account of the film and he stated that it was one of the greatest films of all time. I have to say I disagree completely with this comment. Not because it is a bad film, I found it very enjoyable. However I feel that this film simply doesn’t set out to be a ‘greatest film of all time’ unlike films such as King Kong and Titanic. It aims for something much more personal, much more micro. It echoes a quite sentiment, a sadness that is neither grand nor great but instead poignant in its simplicity.

The film is at time stagnant, the staging is so rigid and false it seems at times to miss opportunities where the characters feelings could have really been explored. Yet the emotion is still there and its encouraged instead by universal characters that allow us to reflect upon our lives and situations. When I watched the film I thought about my own only surviving Grandmother. She is such an important person in my life, yet sometimes when she is around I find myself spacing out in our conversation and I know I don’t visit her enough anymore. I hate that I’ve actually written that down because, like the movie suggests, we don’t want to admit these bigger things in life and instead focus on smaller things like work, weather and TV. To me the message was very simple yet very true.

Interior in the film also blocks emotion, and contains the characters just as they contain their emotion. The film is shot about three feet above the floor, giving it a two dimensional feeling and the camera never moves. This encourages a composition of interior that feels like the audience is not a part of the action, we to are emotional disabled by the film. This use of camera stillness and framing of shots also encourages the audience to feel as if they are looking in on the action. It seems as though we are the nosy neighbor looking in on a family.

Another thing I really like about this film is the old couple. Their contentment and comfortable emotion around each other is so real. They’ve know each other for so long there is no need to talk about emotion or acknowledge their connection. Yet the love is there, maybe hidden by years, but its there and despite death it remains in that contented, old fashioned way. The film makes you value emotion and connectedness. It’s not the passionate love of Fountainhead, but it’s more real and to me more enviable.

The real and imagined blood of a poet

Cocteau believed film was a dream in which we all participate… by dream, he says, “I mean a succession of real events that follow on from one another with the magnificent absurdity of a dream”[1]. Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet is just this; both suggestively biographical yet more like an animated cartoon than a true live-action film. The film imagines Cocteau’s life events the “real blood” and also the artistic process and the pain and self reflecting doubt it causes, the “imagined blood” through the techniques of the surreal and absurd. Cocteau described its disturbing series of voyeuristic tableaux as "a descent into oneself, a way of using the mechanism of the dream without sleeping, a crooked candle, often mysteriously blown out, carried about in the night of the human body."


The idea for a film began during a house party in 1929. Georges Auric, Cocteau's lifelong musical collaborator, surprised his hosts by announcing that he wanted to compose the score for an animated cartoon. Cocteau was asked on the spot to provide a scenario. After some discussion the hosts of the party agreed to give Cocteau a million francs to make a real film with a score by Auric. This became The Blood of a Poet.

The Blood of a Poet maintains the animated cartoon style that Auric has envisioned. There is magic and imagination, surreal events and strange occurrences. While Cocteau delves into the autobiographical, it is the imagined quality of the film that the audience will remember. The film begins with a young man, a poet, attempting to draw a series of faces. Suddenly, the mouth of one of these 'faces' rubs off in his hand and starts smiling. Terrified, the poet accidentally smears off the mouth of the statue he was working on previously. The statue comes to life and, in return, forcefully sends the young man through the mirror to another, imaginary locale at a mysterious hotel. The use of artwork throughout the film delves into Cocteau’s own experimentation with many art forms.

The young poet's journey to a mysterious hotel becomes an exploration of the artistic process. In the hotel, the poet witnesses a series of scenes involving a child being whipped by her mother in something resembling a strangely orchestrated, sadistic ritual. Both the mother and child play a wicked game with each other, resulting in the child levitating up the ceiling while the threatening mother pursues her with a whip. This exploration into the artistic process, and the result of punishment and self doubt, show the “imagined blood”.

Cocteau presents artistic effort as a self-inflicting act of suffering using suicide or violent death as recurring motifs in the film. In one scene, the film shows a group of schoolboys throwing snowballs at each other. Accidentally, one of the boys gets killed by a snowball; he falls down and bleeds in theatrical, staged fashion. Later in the film, the poet transforms into a high society figure that plays a game of cards, loses, and shoots himself in the head. These motifs of suicide and suffering are elements of the “real blood”: Cocteau's father committed suicide when he was nine or ten.

[1] Cocteau, Jean The Art of Cinema, trans. Robin Buss. London and New York: Marion Boyars, 2001, p. 40.

Rose Hobart: The images of a dream

According to sources, when Salvador Dali viewed Rose Hobart for the first time he leapt up and overturned the projector claiming that Joseph Cornell has stolen the idea from his subconscious. I wonder if in fact Salvador Dali had been lulled into the dream like quality of the movie and felt he had witnessed it before in his subconscious experience. For the experience of watching Rose Hobart, for me, was as if I was remembering a dream. The wonderful sense of mystery, the lack of connection between the scenes and the feeling of being in a murky underworld seems to be just like what we see in sleep, fluttering images of objects and experiences we have collected and stored from the day just passed.

Joseph Cornell created the film Rose Hobart from clips taken from his film East of Borneo, a 1931 jungle film. What results is a twenty minute short consisting almost entirely of images of Rose Hobart. Through his intent focus on Hobart, Cornell takes the viewer on a journey where the camera becomes a fans obsessive gaze. He focuses in on Rose Hobart and the camera fixates on her. She is beautiful, spell-binding and trapped within the camera. The focus on Hobart gives the audience a sense of ownership of her. She is mine, to gaze at and admire. Cornell’s techniques reminded me of the repetitive thoughts we can experience about a beautiful object we remember seeing and how we replay this over in our head to recapture the memory.

Cornell projects Rose Hobart through dark blue glass, giving the film an opaque quality and creating the murkiness of a hazy memory. The speed of projection is slower and the characters move as if suspended in time and place. Slow and ethereal Rose Hobart is languid and unhurried.

Cornell’s use of collage reinforces the film as something obscure and almost forgotten in the mind of the viewer. The viewer is transported into a mental state were they participate in the experience of dreaming. The film becomes a kaleidoscope of broken parts that together do not signify a whole. Instead when we see the pieces of the film it is as if we have forgotten the whole and are remembering only parts of it.

Interestingly the music, while in stark contrast to the slow timing of the projection, reinforces the broken and unconnected feel of this movie. Cornell apparently found the music in a Manhattan junk store. The music is repeated during the film and the audience is collective hypnotized by this repetition. Again we are lulled into a dream like state through this technique.

There are few scenes that do not feature Rose Hobart. These scenes reinforce the sense of the adoring watcher or star gazer. The solar eclipse and ball splashing into moonlit water reinforces the idea of looking to the heavens. Just as the opening scene depicts an audience actively doing this. These scenes draw attention to Rose Hobart as the star or heavenly body. The audience is taking part in an experience of star gazing at something dreamlike and wonderful.
When the film ended I was left with a feeling that I could not remember it all. The film also leaves you reflecting on Rose Hobart and her image haunted me for sometime afterwards.

My first post...

Hello !

This is my first ever post, on my first ever blog! This Blog has been created for Cinematic Modernism. I will make six comments on films watched during the course and then members from the class will make further comments.
I am a Media Communication student, majoring in media and english. This is my final year.

see you later!