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THE FILM OF FACT 207
lized and, much more frequent, the preoccupation with mental rather than physical reality.
PREVALENCE OF FORMAL RELATIONSHIPS
Walter Ruttmann's classic, Berlin, once and for all illustrates the implications of a formalistic approach. This "Symphony of a Great City" is particularly intriguing because it has the makings of a truly cinematic documentary: its candid shots of streets and their extensions are selected and arranged with an admirable sense of photographic values and transient impressions. And yet the film does not fulfill its promise. Ruttmann establishes his cross sections of Berlin everyday life by juxtaposing shots which resemble each other in shape and movement; or he uses crude social contrasts as linkages; or he turns, La Marche des machines fashion, parts of moving machinery into near-abstract rhythmical patterns.
Now it is inevitable that such cutting on analogies, extreme differences and rhythms should divert audience attention from the substance of the images to their formal characteristics. This perhaps accounts for Rotha's verdict on the "surface approach" of Berlin.23 Due to Ruttmann's formalistic approach, which may have resulted from his notions of art as well as his fear of committing himself, the objects pictured function mainly as the constituents of such and such relationships so that their content threatens to evaporate. True, these relationships seem intended to render the "tempo" of Berlin, but tempo is also a formal conception if it is not defined with reference to the qualities of the objects through which it materializes.24 Compare Berlin with Entr'acte: like Ruttmann, Clair interlinks dissimilar objects according to their surface similarities; yet unlike Ruttmann, he does so in a playful spirit. Entr'acte toys with real-life phenomena, thereby acknowledging them in their integrity, whereas Berlin, with a complete lack of playfulness, emphasizes resemblances and contrasts of phenomena, and thus superimposes upon them a network of ornamental relationships that tend to substitute for the things from which they are derived.
prevalence of mental reality
Documentary makers are often so exclusively concerned with conveying propositions of an intellectual or ideological nature that they do not even try to elicit them from the visual material they exhibit. In this case mental reality takes precedence over physical reality. Even before the appearance of sound such messages were delivered from the screen with complete indifference to the content of the images; then the task of disseminating them naturally fell to the subtitles and the visuals themselves. In the 'twenties, possessed with the idea of an "intellectual cinema" that