The strangest of station names?: Changing trains with Kracauer and Benjamin

• Published in: New formations Vol. 61; no. 61; pp. 104 - 114
• Main Author: Langford, Barry
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Lawrence & Wishart 22.06.2007; Lawrence & Wishart Ltd
• Subjects: Benjamin, Walter; Cultural studies; Kracauer, Siegfried; Motion pictures; Movies; Portrayals; Railroad stations; Railroads; Railways; Stations; Technology; Trains; Germany
• ISSN: 0950-2378; 1741-0789

[...]the emphasis they share on the deep affinity of the film image and the landscapes of urban modernity in particular. [...]these include railway stations. Mary Brodnax has recently written that Berlin's 'rhythms lay claim to creating life,' arguing that Ruttman's explicit project was to infuse the as yet inert and anonymous mass body - both the filmed masses thronging Berlin's streets and the mass audience that (in theory at least if hardly in practice) awaited the film - through the agency of the machine with sentience and identity.11 Within the film, Ruttman depicts the cybernetic fusion of human and machine enthusiastically, if by no means as rhapsodically as would Dziga Vertov in his transcendent variant on the city symphony, Man With a Movie Camera; while the film's barrage of visual information compels the spectator to rely for a sense of form and structure upon the kind of associative devices Kracauer itemises in his own accounts of the film: parallelisms, frequently ironic and often none too subtle (the rich take luncheon in restaurants, beggars pick at scraps by the kerbside); didactic contrasts (from the frenzy of the stock exchange Ruttman cuts to dogs snarling and scuffling in the street); interpolated tropes such as automata and mannequins that hint at the underlying theme of dehumanisation; and reiterated formal patterns and graphic matches within and across sequences. [...]the ambivalent beauty of Benjamin's 'orchid in the land of technology', that unmediated reality which is now only perceptible by means of the most refined - and, the image suggests, elitist and probably unsustainable - technical means, is anticipated in Kracauer's deadpan vision of the 'glass clouds' that 'brew and then scatter'.17 Similarly, the slovenly mismatching of interiors and exteriors, process work and sound studio footage, that Kracauer execrates in 'Film 1928' bespeak not only technical shoddiness but a more fundamental dislocation of the relationship between image and world: 'it almost seems as if, with the increasing perfection of photographic technique, the object that this medium is meant to convey disappears'.18 Ruttman's montage aesthetic is poles apart from either UFA or Eisenstein and in fact on the face of it, one or two brief sequences of quasi-intellectual montage apart, would seem to exemplify metonymic principles; yet it is precisely on this account that Berlin so comprehensively fails, in Kracauer's eyes: because its myriad images of daily metropolitan life remain just that, 'thousands of details left unconnected, one next to the other,' linked merely as Kracauer writes in 1928, by 'some arbitrarily conceived transitions that are meaningless', such as the purely 'formal idea' of Berlin as the city of speed and work.1'' As Gertrud Koch and others have observed, Kracauer stood aside from the literary fashions of the period in deploring mere reportage. [...]Berlin is even less valuable than the 'stupid and unreal film fantasies' favoured by the poor little shop girls; it is not even usefully readable, as they are as 'the daydreams of society' (emphasis original), just because, unlike such fantasies, it proffers material truths, only incomplete, denatured and irreparable ones.24 Whereas the narratives of romances, musicals, and melodramas at least offer revealing distortions of modern life, Berlin's surface realism detains the viewer at the surface level and precisely by mirroring surface life all too accurately prevents any such insight into 'the secret mechanism of society'.