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178 FORMALISM OF THE AVANT-GARDE
INTERNAL AFFAIRS
Walter Ruttmann's film Berlin is quite a different story. It does not present really visible spectacles. In it the definite shape of the pictures dissolves, and flickering, merging, blurred shapes and outlines project an inner vision out on to the screen.
Tramcars and jazz-bands, milk-floats and female legs, jostling street crowds and whirling wheels rise out of the fog of the subconscious like images seen in a half-sleep. Here the emphasis is no longer on the single self-contained spectacle, but on the total impression given by the fluctuating montage of the whole. The camera has turned inward as it were and its purpose is no longer to perpetuate an impression of the external world but project outward its reflection in the consciousness. This is no longer impressionism, it is expressionism. The impressionists, however subjectively ethereal they may have been, always wanted to reproduce faithfully the impressions they had actually received from reality. The expressionists want to project outwards the internal landscapes of the soul. Ruttmann's film could scarcely be used to guide a stranger arriving in Berlin for the first time. It summarizes far more the memories and residual moods of a traveller leaving that city. If nevertheless the film contains a characterization of the city, it is not in the shots themselves, but through their montage and rhythm.
Karl Grune was the first to show in his film The Street, the picture of a city as it is reflected in the inner vision of a young man thirsting for life. In the film Shadows of Yoshiwara someone goes blind and in the last flash of sight sees the colourful bustle of a festival. These pictures flow on to the screen without outline or shape, like the blood out of the injured eye.
This method of presentation, first used by the absolute film, was developed to a high degree of expressive power in the dream-pictures in certain artistic feature films, where they were equally not intended to reproduce realities. The absolute film approached human psychology not only in its bodily manifestations, for instance in facial expressions, but attempted to project inner conceptions of the mind directly on to the screen. Of course photographing such things is not a simple