In the discourse surrounding Berlin Symphony of a City, one critic, likens this documentarian montage to “a historical document, an insight into the patterns of life and living”. Whilst Wattman's film, provides a late 1920s glimpse of metropolitan Berlin, The Edukators, a 2004 film by Austrian director Hans Weingartner (notable director of Goodbye Lenin) strives to achieve in a similar but fictionalized vein, a take on contemporary Berlin from the perspective of three young left wing activists who echo the dissentients of German youths disheartend by their increasingly consumeristic capitalist society at the beginning of the noughties era.
Concerns over temporality seem to be an overarching theme in Berlin . The somewhat initially random images are conjoined by the repeated reminders of the human construct of time, notably in the inclusion of shots of clock time and the segregation of the film into five acts taking place from dawn to dusk. There is a sense of human control over the naturalistic setting via constrast between rural and the urban or the camera’s shots of ephemeral and fleeting moments as discussed in the seminar. As such this unique upclose insight gained becomes part of the film's aesthetic cinematic effect conveying to the viewer a sense of everday life in the public spaces of 1920s Berlin. That striking realism becomes apparent in The Edukators filmed entirely from a digital video camera, where the camera negates any point of view shots. Unlike Berlin, the film is driven by its linear narrative but the action appears documented in real time for instance when the male figures Peter and Jan are driving along real streets in Berlin and in the background an ambulance passes by. At the beginning of the film the central female character, Jules attends an anti-capitalism protest, the shaky actions of the camera capture the arrest of protestors as riot police move to break down the demonstrators. A sense that this is real pervades through this sequence, the viewer thrown admist the action as if occurring right before their eyes. The film seems to document the events through the course of a few days, these clues revealed in the stream of characters waking up or Julie’s night job. The natural style of acting, the sense of spontaneity also make this film very documentarian. Interestingly notion of the blurring of art and life is raised and in my background reading to The Edukators, I came across this article about copy cat acts inspired by this film which poses the question - what happens when life mimics art which mimicks life. Any ideas?
Strikingly, the prevalence of Berlin footage shot from a street level, as well as aerial shots, or close up shots of streets, railway networks, cafes, interiors of factories, workers and so forth illustrate the beginnings of this question of the use of surveillance in the modern city. Networks, circuitry, and interpersonal relationships are within Ruttmann's film, the major cohesive forces established by the series of shots showing the rail crossroads leading in all directions and aerial shots of the eerie quiet streets and rooftops. As such Berlin is well before its time in its references to surveillance in the modern city, via scenes of police martial power and eerily oblique aerial shots of the city. Individuals on the ground appear at times aware of the camera’s presence glancing at the camera with the knowledge they are being watched and at other times the camera obscured from view shows surveillance like footage.
Concerns over temporality seem to be an overarching theme in Berlin . The somewhat initially random images are conjoined by the repeated reminders of the human construct of time, notably in the inclusion of shots of clock time and the segregation of the film into five acts taking place from dawn to dusk. There is a sense of human control over the naturalistic setting via constrast between rural and the urban or the camera’s shots of ephemeral and fleeting moments as discussed in the seminar. As such this unique upclose insight gained becomes part of the film's aesthetic cinematic effect conveying to the viewer a sense of everday life in the public spaces of 1920s Berlin. That striking realism becomes apparent in The Edukators filmed entirely from a digital video camera, where the camera negates any point of view shots. Unlike Berlin, the film is driven by its linear narrative but the action appears documented in real time for instance when the male figures Peter and Jan are driving along real streets in Berlin and in the background an ambulance passes by. At the beginning of the film the central female character, Jules attends an anti-capitalism protest, the shaky actions of the camera capture the arrest of protestors as riot police move to break down the demonstrators. A sense that this is real pervades through this sequence, the viewer thrown admist the action as if occurring right before their eyes. The film seems to document the events through the course of a few days, these clues revealed in the stream of characters waking up or Julie’s night job. The natural style of acting, the sense of spontaneity also make this film very documentarian. Interestingly notion of the blurring of art and life is raised and in my background reading to The Edukators, I came across this article about copy cat acts inspired by this film which poses the question - what happens when life mimics art which mimicks life. Any ideas?
Strikingly, the prevalence of Berlin footage shot from a street level, as well as aerial shots, or close up shots of streets, railway networks, cafes, interiors of factories, workers and so forth illustrate the beginnings of this question of the use of surveillance in the modern city. Networks, circuitry, and interpersonal relationships are within Ruttmann's film, the major cohesive forces established by the series of shots showing the rail crossroads leading in all directions and aerial shots of the eerie quiet streets and rooftops. As such Berlin is well before its time in its references to surveillance in the modern city, via scenes of police martial power and eerily oblique aerial shots of the city. Individuals on the ground appear at times aware of the camera’s presence glancing at the camera with the knowledge they are being watched and at other times the camera obscured from view shows surveillance like footage.
The opening sequence of The Edukators shows footage of a family arriving home from their vacation to find the furniture in their opulent mansion rearranged, some even into Dada-esque configurations, one scene shows antique tin soldier figures dumped in the bathroom, even their stereo inside their refridgerator. This is the work of the primary figures of the Edukators, Peter, a alarm system engineer and his friend Jan, who are disenchanted by the increasing disparity between rich and poor within their society, monitor the mansions of the wealthy bourgeois and enter their targeted homes. The distinction from Wattman's film is the way in which surveillance in the public sphere such as Berlin is brought into the private sphere of the home. With a threatening tone, The Edukators stake their claim of private space of the wealthy, rearranging furniture and leaving a note “your days of plenty are few” or “you have too much money” in their attempt to ingrain a sense of fear among their targets. In a way their desire to shake and shift the private spaces of other individuals parallels their desire to fragment the structure of their materialistic society. In this way both films refer to surveillance, albeit much more candidly in The Edukators, as a power structure which one can utilise to rule over another and when anachronistically manipulated become a potent force used to momentarily destabalise the establishment of the modern city.
Although the documentary form is popularly used today in news, televisions, the use of documentary style, hand held cameras in popular cinema is still relatively rare; cinema verite style becomes a much more prevalent form used by independent film-makers. Aesthetically, the documentary style, popular in European cinema and convenient low budget independent films can be construed as a reaction against mainstream Hollywood cinema in much the same way French Nouvelle Vague directors utilised avant-garde techniques as a tool of subversion against the high polished films released by major Hollywood studios in the 1950s. (Notably in The Edukators the characters' departure to the country side in the second half of the film, the love triangle and the naming of Jules borrows largely from Truffaut’s film, Jules et Jim) The pervading sense of realism in The Edukators, heightened by directors cinema verite effects of the digital video camera, its deliberate destabalisation of the boundaries between art and life, its critique of consumeristic attitudes of contemporary society and rejection of mainstream cinema’s polished look mimics the protagonists disdain for their American capitalist influenced society which supports mainstream contemporary Hollywood studio system. The film certainly is striving to create an alternative cinema, attempting to get closer to the manner of Berlin: Symphony of a City and as such we could judge the latter film as avant garde even by contemporary mainstream cinema standards and a film advanced before its time.
