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INHERENT AFFINITIES 65
Berlin everyday life in documentary style, tries to accomplish this task by capturing simultaneous phenomena which, owing to certain analogies and contrasts between them, form comprehensible patterns. Much like Vertov, he cuts from human legs walking the street to the legs of a cow and juxtaposes the luscious dishes in a deluxe restaurant with the appalling food of the very poor.7
Yet these linkages are purely decorative and rather obvious. More meaningful is the dense fabric into which various sections of space are woven in Room's remarkably mature Bed and Sofa, a 1926 Soviet film which dramatizes the bad housing conditions in contemporary Moscow. Its sustained emphasis on ubiquity enables the spectator to encompass, as if in one glance, overcrowded lodgings and wide city prospects, thus stirring him to wonder at their unaccountable togetherness.8 Another significant example of simultaneity, pointed out by Laffay,9 is A Night at the Opera. In this film, the Marx Brothers confirm the solidarity of a given universe by violently destroying it; the whole universe seems to collapse when all the objects filling it are removed from their set locales and forced to mingle, hodge-podge fashion.*
Second, films may follow the chain of causes and effects responsible for some event. This route, too, marks an attempt to suggest the continuum of physical reality or at least a continuum largely involving it. The attempt is all the more true to the medium since it is bound to drive home the impact which, as Cohen-Seat puts it, "the most minute incidental circumstances [exert] on the unfolding of destinies."10 His statement implies that the affinity for the fortuitous goes well together with the concern for causal interrelationships. Leaving aside the many science films whose job it is to trace, one by one, the reasons behind some physical or psychological phenomenon, there are enough feature films in which the same inquisitiveness asserts itself. D. W. Griffith insists on detailing, in his last-minute-rescue episodes, all the factors which obstruct or facilitate the rescuers' heroic enterprise. Collisions and interventions, trains missed or jumped, horses on highways and legs negotiating floes— everything that contributes, in one sense or another, toward the final result is exposed to scrutiny.
Even assuming that Griffith delays the inevitable happy ending as long as possible for the purpose of increasing audience suspense, he implements this intention in a manner which testifies to his genuine concern with establishing the connecting links between the initial stage of the action
* Note that the representation of spatial simultaneity on the screen has struck the imagination of writers and artists. When John Dos Passos in some of his novels juxtaposes simultaneous events at different points of the globe, he clearly follows the lead of the cinema.