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Few episodes in cinema history appear more secure than the genre of the city symphony that emerged in the 1920s and whose best-known examples remain Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Walther Ruttmann, 1927) and Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929). Encompassing around twenty titles, city symphonies rely heavily upon montage to represent a cross-section of life in the modern metropolis.¹They typically are set in one or more identifiable metropoles whose population, central thoroughfares, and places of residence, employment, and leisure they depict over the course of a day, a temporal struc-ture that has inflected films noir such as The Naked City (Jules Dassin, 1948) and countless examples of narrative and experimental cinema. Yet such works resist categorization as documentary, experimental, or narrative film. Their in-terest resides in the cinematographic preservation of ephemeral urban life no less than an aesthetic structure that itself evokes the rhythms, parallels, and contrasts of metropolitan civilization.

The project of explicating the city symphony – as well as the less chronolog-ically structured city films of the 1920s in relation to the accounts of urban modernity developed by Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer – is one to which film analysts over the past two decades have de-voted increasing attention.² It was Annette Michelson who introduced Simmel’s work into cinema studies through her discussion of his 1903 essay

‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ in a 1979 analysis of The Crazy Ray (Paris qui dort) (René Clair, 1924).³Reading Clair’s film simultaneously as explora-tion of the ‘topography of a great city’ as well as metacinematic reflecexplora-tion upon the potentialities of the nascent film medium, Michelson stresses its represen-tation of ‘temporality, apprehended as movement in space’ and the signifi-cance of the temporal organization of the workday as mainspring of the urban capitalist economy.

Yet despite the abundance of scholarship on the city films of the 1920s there remains a key text in its history that largely has been ignored: László

Moholy-Nagy’s unfilmed scenario ‘Dynamic of the Metropolis’ (DM).⁴ Although known to cinema scholars through his films The Old Port of Marseilles (1929), Light Display: Black, White, Gray (1930), and Berlin Still Life (1931), Moholy-Nagy was a polymath whose virtuosity in the media of paint-ing, photography, design, and pedagogical innovations at the Bauhaus have tended to overshadow his interest in cinema.⁵This facility with diverse media is powerfully confirmed by the visual and conceptual synthesis he realized in DM that bears traces of the varied aesthetics of Constructivism, Dada, and De Stijl. And it is equally conveyed by the relation between urban perception and cinematic representation explored by Moholy-Nagy in his prescient 1925 book Painting, Photography, Film (PPF).

Although Moholy-Nagy began conceptualizing his ‘sketch of a manuscript for a film’ in 1921, it was not fully completed until the summer of 1924. He first published it in September of that year in Hungarian in MA, an avant-garde journal for which he served as a Berlin correspondent and whose contributors included Fernand Léger, Alexander Vesnin, Kurt Schwitters, and El Lissitzky.⁶

Figure 1

The text later was translated into German and published in 1925 as an appen-dix to PPF, the eighth volume in the Bauhaus book series that Moholy-Nagy directed. Reproducing aerial, scientific, and news photographs, frame enlarge-ments from films, photograms by Man Ray, and avant-garde compositions by Hannah Höch, PPF exercised a major influence upon the expanding discus-sion of photography during the Weimar Republic, and it subsequently was is-sued in a second edition in 1927. Thus, although DM appears in 1925 as an ap-pendix to the first edition of PPF, its gestation actually precedes the book by four years. This fact together with the book’s explicit references to DM, sug-gests the necessity of reading them in unison, the goal of this essay.

The earliest version of DM published in MA bears the copyright of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar where Moholy-Nagy began to teach the metal workshop and the foundation course in 1923 (figs. 1 and 2). Illustrated exclu-sively with hand drawings and what Krisztina Passuth calls ‘drawn signs al-most reminiscent of ideograms,’ its emphasis upon directional movement con-veyed by arrows is graphically intelligible even to readers who lack a

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Fugure 2

knowledge of Hungarian.⁷Commencing with a filmstrip in the top of the left column, the page adopts a linear structure within which vertically organized blocks of text and graphic material appear analogous to the individual frames in a film strip. Passuth suggests the film experiments of Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter were the likely source of this design scheme, a hypothesis con-firmed by the former’s Diagonal Symphony (1922) and Richter’s vertical scroll painting Orchestration of Color (1923).⁸ Yet the frequency with which railroad imagery appears in Moholy-Nagy’s paintings from the 1920s suggests the material infrastructure of the city as a no less crucial intertext.⁹

Typographical experimentation was an important component of MA throughout the 1920s, and its editor Lajos Kossák produced his own concrete poems (Bildgedichte) and published those of Kurt Schwitters in the journal. Yet the earlier typographical explorations of Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Dadaist Raoul Hausmann in which multiple fonts are deployed in various sizes across the page present themselves as an equally important intertext for DM.¹⁰Explored by Stéphane Mallarmé in Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897) and later in the ‘lyrical ideograms’ of Guillaume Apollinaire (1914), the copious spacing in both Moholy-Nagy’s scenario and these prior examples necessitates the activities of reading and seeing in equal measure.

The eye wanders across the page, grasping the meaning of individual words and lines as well as the composed shapes they contribute to the poetic effect of the whole. More than merely a storyboard for an unrealized film, both the Hungarian and German versions of DM suggest themselves as kinetic works of visual and verbal poetry that mimic the dynamism of their subject, the city. It is important to remember that Moholy-Nagy began his career as a poet, and the graphic structure of DM exemplifies the syncretic ambitions evi-dent throughout his work in different media.

Theoretical statements of modernist typographic practice became increas-ingly common during the years 1923-25 and were expressed in a series of sepa-rate manifestoes by Moholy-Nagy and Russian Constructivist El Lissitzky. In his 1923 ‘Topography of Typography,’ the latter advocated ‘the design of the book-space using process blocks which issue from the new optics.’¹¹ Moholy-Nagy also espoused an ‘uninhibited use of all linear directions’ and devoted much of his 1923 essay ‘The New Typography’ to the significance of photogra-phy and film, the technologies exemplifying the new optics. Reflecting upon their social implications, he observes that:

It is safe to predict that this increasing documentation through photography will lead in the near future to a replacement of literature by film. The indications of this development are apparent already in the increased use of the telephone which makes letterwriting obsolete. It is no valid objection that the production of films

de-mands too intricate and costly an apparatus. Soon the making of a film will be as simple and available as now printing books.¹²

Ever attentive to the evolution of technological forms, Moholy-Nagy perceives the relation among literature, photography, and film as a dialectical one in which the final term, cinema, will eventually subsume the functions associ-ated with the earlier media. Read in the context of DM, his theory underscores the limitations of the scenario’s first draft, confined as it was to drawings and typographic symbols. It prefigures the significance that photography would assume in the German version of DM, published two years after his arrival at the Bauhaus, as well as the films which Moholy-Nagy would begin to make in 1926.

Moholy-Nagy recounts the gestation and aim of his project in an introduc-tion that precedes the scenario. He menintroduc-tions his hope to realize the project with his friend Carl Koch, from whom he derived significant ideas for it, as well as its rejection by the large film company UFA. ‘Other film people could

“find no action in it despite the good idea” and so declined to film it,’ Moholy-Nagy wrote.¹³He locates the aesthetic intention of DM in the attainment ‘of the FILMIC, that is of the film which proceeds from the potentialities of the camera and the dynamics of motion.’¹⁴He writes:

The intention of the film ‘Dynamic of the Metropolis’ is not to teach, nor to moralize, nor to tell a story; its effect is meant to be visual, purely visual. The elements of the vi-sual have not in this film an absolute logical connection with one another; their pho-tographic, visual relationships, nevertheless, make them knit together into a vital association of events in space and time and bring the viewer actively into the dy-namic of the city.¹⁵

Opposing his film to ‘literary, theatrical action,’ Moholy-Nagy aspires to attain a ‘dynamic of the optical’ with ‘much movement, some heightened to the point of brutality.’¹⁶‘Almost everyone on the roller coaster shuts his eyes when it co-mes to the great descent. But not the film camera,’ he observes.¹⁷The introduc-tion also documents his awareness of other cinematic experiments, and he al-ludes to Ballet Mécanique (Fernand Léger, 1924) and Entr’acte (René Clair, 1924), both films in which movement serves as a key structural device.¹⁸In a note to the second edition he also mentions Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City and Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927) as works of silent film which share the aspirations of DM and aim toward the realization of ‘simultaneous cinema,’ a notion to which I shall return.

In its visual appearance the German version of DM differs from the Hun-garian scenario not merely through its photographic illustration but also through its design (figs. 3-6). Moholy-Nagy divides each page into a series of irregularly sized closed orthogonal figures. These squares and rectangles are

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formed by black lines of varying thickness running vertically and horizontally across the page and bleeding to its edges. They recall many of Piet Mondrian’s paintings from the early 1920s with which Moholy-Nagy, a contributor in 1922 to the journal De Stijl, was certainly well acquainted.¹⁹The lines radically trans-form the conventional figure and ground relation in most traditional graphic design by directing attention to the complete surface of the page; its white spaces now become an active part of the composition rather than mere back-ground.

Unlike the Hungarian scenario, the vertical columnar structure is aban-doned in the German version in which pages contain between two and six col-umns and sometimes no colcol-umns at all. Designed to be read vertically and hor-izontally, DM contains few recurrent stylistic features (apart from its typographic consistency) which would serve to orient the reader. Blocks of type of uneven widths are dispersed in a manner that makes it difficult to dis-cern their intended sequential relation. Moholy-Nagy varies the position of his commentary between the left and right sides of the page. Graphically promi-nent elements such as the thick black bar labelled ‘Screen Black for 5 Seconds’

pull the eye of the reader away from the top of the page toward the center. Such techniques exemplify the practice of ‘typofoto’ that for Moholy-Nagy ‘governs the new tempo of the new visual literature’ (fig. 6). Ideally suited for DM, the

Figure 3

typofoto realizes a visual structure whose ‘mode of modern synoptic commu-nication may be broadly pursued on another plane by means of the kinetic process, the film.’²⁰ Through its employment of the ‘phototext’ in place of words, Moholy-Nagy cites DM as an instance of typofoto.²¹

The text and images in DM support the account of photography that Moholy-Nagy develops throughout PPF, especially the ability of the camera to present spatial and temporal relations inaccessible to the unaided human eye.²²Thus, on the first page, the building of a zeppelin emerges through the joining together of moving dots and lines in an animated film so as to empha-size the compression of time (fig. 3). It is probably not coincidental that Moholy-Nagy begins his scenario by depicting a construction process, a meta-phor for the production of new relationships that he understands as the goal of art.²³Nearly every idea described in DM involves motion either in its concep-tion or in the manner of its cinematic representaconcep-tion. On the same page, in de-scribing the construction of a house, Moholy-Nagy expressly indicates that it is to be filmed from both below and above, thereby dynamizing its

presenta-Transfiguring the Urban Gray 115

Figure 4

tion through the use of the oblique angle favored by other practitioners of the

‘new vision’ such as Alexander Rodchenko.

On the second page of the scenario, Moholy-Nagy introduces two of the re-current motifs in DM (fig. 3). The word ‘tempo’ appears repeatedly through-out, as if to maintain the proper rhythm for the film (fig. 4). Recalling the simi-lar practice of indicating on a musical score the correct speed for its performance, its repetition in DM in the most graphically varied forms (verti-cal, horizontal, detached) serves to convey dynamism. Sometimes, as on the fourth page, the division of the word into its constituent syllables and their nonsensical reiteration evokes the poetic experimentation of his close friend Kurt Schwitters.²⁴Linguistic signifier and its signified are pulled apart to re-veal their intrinsically arbitrary relation masked by convention.²⁵

The other recurrent motif in DM is the savage animal, here introduced by a tiger pacing furiously around its cage. In a commentary in the margin, Moholy-Nagy emphasizes the ‘contrast between the open unimpeded rushing and the oppression, constriction. So as to accustom the public from the outset to surprises and lack of logic.’²⁶Two pages later, an angry lynx appears, and af-ter another ten pages a lion baring its teeth manifests itself. ‘The frequent and unexpected appearance of the lion’s head is meant to cause uneasiness and op-pression (again and again and again). The theatre audience is cheerful – and STILL THE HEAD comes! etc.’²⁷That producing such anxiety in the spectator constitutes an aesthetic goal of DM is as revealing as the means selected by Nagy to attain it. Despite the continual repetition of the lion, Moholy-Nagy aspires to retain the disturbing impact of its first appearance. In this con-cern with severing logical connections and disorienting the spectator DM be-trays more than a hint of Dadaism.

Preserving this freshness of perception is also suggested by the filming from unusual angles described throughout DM. A typical strategy involves the presentation of alternate high and low angle views. Thus, a moving train is first filmed from a bridge above and is followed by a shot from the trench be-low.²⁸Aerial photographs are juxtaposed with shots of the sewers, a chimney slanting upward is presented with a deep-sea diver who emerges from it and plunges into water. These antitheses might justly be described as optical calis-thenics whose intention is to educate vision and expand sensory perception.²⁹ They extend to tonal contrasts, as in the transformation of total darkness into light or in the opposition of arc lamps, electric signs, and fireworks to the blackness held on the screen for five seconds.

Besides introducing an oscillating rhythm into DM, such oppositions em-phasize the range of the formal capabilities of cinema, including its ability to slow down or reverse time and motion. Thus, in one caption Moholy-Nagy de-scribes automobile traffic moving away from the urban center, only to change

direction back toward the center, where it sinks into the ground. And in an even more dramatic example, Moholy-Nagy writes that ‘from here the whole film (shortened) is run BACKWARDS as far as the JaZZ BAND (this back-wards too).’³⁰Once again, the effect of such a technique (that prefigures both Man with a Movie Camera and much subsequent avant-garde cinema) is to denaturalize the unfolding of the film in a gesture of self-reflexivity.³¹

The reliance upon contrasts in DM touches upon the profound characteris-tics of urban life. Writing of the cultural forces that stimulate the development of non-objective art, Moholy-Nagy claims:

One such factor, for example – as it will be of some importance to recognise – is that the interplay of various facts has caused our age to shift almost imperceptibly to-wards colourlessness and grey: the grey of the big city, of the black and white news-papers, of the photographic and film services, the colour-eliminating tempo of our life today. Perpetual hurry, fast movement cause all colours to melt into grey. Organ-ised grey-relationships, the living relationships of chiaroscuro, will, of course, emerge later on as a new aspect of the biological-optical experience of colour. Inten-sive examination of photographic means will certainly contribute much to this. In view of these contingencies, we shall need to bring greater readiness and care to sovereign creation in colour, if we wish to prevent the atrophying of our optical or-gans.³²

Reading this passage, one thinks immediately of a similar idea developed by Simmel in ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ where he writes that:

This physiological source of the metropolitan blasé attitude is joined by another source which flows from the money economy. The essence of the blasé attitude con-sists in the blunting of discrimination. This does not mean that the objects are not perceived, as is the case with the half-wit, but rather that the meaning and differing value of things themselves, are experienced as insubstantial. They appear to the blasé person in an evenly flat and gray tone; no one object deserves preference over any other. This mood is the faithful subjective reflection of the completely internal-ized money economy.³³

Yet the differences between Simmel and Moholy-Nagy could not be more striking. Both understand the metropolis as the seat of the exchange process whose intensity and rapidity blunts the perception of specific qualities and levels the world into a series of gray tones.³⁴Unlike Simmel, Moholy-Nagy grasps this state not as a malaise but as an aesthetic opportunity, the condition of possibility for his own artistic and cinematic practice. As he claims above,

‘organised-grey relationships’ can be assimilated within a new experience of color through the appropriate utilization of photography. The way beyond the grayness of the devalued objects of urban civilization resides not in the further

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Taylorization of perception but rather in a more nuanced intake of sensory stimuli, albeit one now consciously organized by the artist.

Taylorization of perception but rather in a more nuanced intake of sensory stimuli, albeit one now consciously organized by the artist.