Berlin: Symphony of a City and Man With a Movie Camera

I just went on an internet journey in researching this post which pretty much peaked when I found this quote: "The male lead, played by Ewan McGregor ("Trainspotting"), is a bisexual translator named Jerome who spends most of the film with his uncircumcised penis flapping in the wind." Sounds fairly promising, I think. The journey itself was fairly straightforward, it's from a Salon interview with director Peter Greenaway, and I've been trying to track down an interview I heard last year on ABC Classic FM in which he discussed the changing nature of film viewing. The interview isn't there any longer, but hopefully I won't completely mangle what he said in trying to remember it. 


I was reminded of this interview because in it he discussed the way he watches films. He said he hadn't been to the cinema in about ten years, and that he much prefers to watch films at home, where he can eat what he likes, talk, answer the phone, and stop, start and rewind at a whim. In other interviews, such as this recent one with The Guardian, he says artists should always be at the cutting edge of technology, and it's this technology that imparts more control over the text to both the creator and the spectator. This is obviously a modern way of viewing, turning the film into less of a cinematic experience and more of a personal commodity. To an extent, silent films have an element of this non-universality of experience in their music, which would necessarily be different everywhere the film was shown, and possibly in the projection rate. But this is still a communal experience, whereas the viewing style Greenaway talks about, and the style most of us were talking about regarding these films, is very much isolated and personalised. 


I noticed our discussions of Rutman and Vertov kept coming back to what role music or YouTube or silence played in individual understanding or appreciation of the films. Personally, I watched both of them with the Cinematic Orchestra soundtrack for Man With a Movie Camera. I already had the soundtrack and I didn't know when I watched Berlin that it and Vertov's film were almost identical in intention, style, and (crucially) length. I just stuck it on and marveled at my own ingenuity when the results were so excellent. It seemed less miraculous the next week when I watched Movie Camera and it was practically identical. 


This sense of control over the film by playing the music I wanted with it was undermined by a guilty feeling stemming from not watching it with its intended soundtrack. Until I actually tried watching it with the 'real' soundtrack, of course, and it was so didactic that I would rather have watched it with practically anything else. I've decided to watch silent movies with music that makes me feel more sympathetic to the film, rather than what might be contextually appropriate (although the question of trying to be sympathetic to the text and put the wishes of the creator first is fraught itself). So, for example, if I watch Metropolis I prefer this soundtrack by The New Pollutants, because it's brilliant, and modern in a way that suits the futuristic aesthetic of the film. 


Given that the films we're watching are concerned with and reflective of the modernity of their own times, it seems appropriate to use the technology available in watching them. It doesn't seem to me to be a question of whether or not this is how the films were supposed to be experienced, but I know there's an argument for the immersion of a communal experience of theatre viewing out there which might be convincing. 


And to demonstrate the wizardry of the internet, this quote from the Guardian interview about Greenaway's latest film Nightwatching links me neatly to the previous post: "Martin Freeman plays Rembrandt: oddly plausible and often nude". I've never seen a Greenaway film but they sound like the sort you watch with headphones on and one eye on the door.