The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism: Walking in Films 9789048553655

Citation preview

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism Walking in Films

Aslı Özgen

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: © Gözde Onaran Cover design: Kok Korpershoek Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 475 3 e-isbn 978 90 4855 365 5 doi 10.5117/9789463724753 nur 670 © A. Özgen / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2022 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

to all wonderful women of 318 to my sister flâneuse Gözde



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 9 Introduction: Cinematic Pedestrianism in the City

13

1. Moving Body, Moving Pictures: The Emergence of Cinematic Pedestrianism 39 2. The Flâneur as Filmmaker

73

3. The Flâneuse and the Aesthetics of the Female Gaze

107

4. A Wandering Eye: The Kino-Pedestrian

135

5. Walking amidst Ruins: A Pedestrian Cinema

165

6. Feminist Nomads: The Politics of Walking in Agnès Varda

197

Cinematic Pedestrianism Afoot: A Conclusion

221

Bibliography 237 Filmography 249 Index 251

Acknowledgements Deleuze and Guattari’s opening words for A Thousand Plateaus read as follows: “The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was quite a crowd.” I cannot remember reading a better articulation of authorial multiplicity. There is always an immense amount of intellectual and emotional labour that goes into academic research, and eventually a book. While most of the time the process feels very lonely, the questions and the ideas cannot be separated from all the inspirational encounters all along the way. Deleuze would probably describe the process proceeding in zigzags. One’s steps are not guided by the most direct and shortest line to the ultimate destination, but affected by chance encounters, rhizomatic connections, and sometimes intuitions. This includes all the encounters—some immensely enriching, some deeply shocking, some temptingly appealing, and some utterly unsettling—throughout the long journey. This project was initially inspired by women’s engrossing screen journeys on foot. That summer that I spent reading Deleuze’s two-volume treatise on cinema while watching every film that he named, I met captivating protagonists whose dreamy wanderings, transgressive ramblings, and gleeful border-crossings intrigued my interest. While Deleuze did write on walking, these women were strikingly absent in his work. It was that summer that I met Patricia Pisters at Deleuze Studies Summer School in Cologne, Germany. One of the few women academics writing and thinking on Deleuze back then, Patricia has been an inspiring mentor to guide me into this research. In my subsequent academic explorations, she continued to be a powerful inspiration through her scholarly perspective, professional guidance, and heart-warming attitude. I wish to thank her for her continuous support during turbulent times and for her enlightening feedback that always impelled me to broader intellectual discoveries. This book would not have been possible without her. I am very lucky to have had the mentorship and insightful guidance of Frank Kessler, who played an increasingly bigger role as my research took on a historical angle. I first met Frank in 2012 at the Early Cinema Colloquium in Utrecht and soon started to follow his Screen Histories Seminar at Utrecht University. It has been a great honour and a truly enriching intellectual journey to have the opportunity to discuss with him all the ideas and explorations that emerged during the course of this research. His sharp and incisive questions have inspired further discoveries in this book.

10 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

My work benefited significantly from discussions in The Early Cinema Colloquium and Screen Histories Seminar, which rapidly turned my interest in film historiography into a lifelong passion. I am deeply indebted to the professors, colleagues, and fellow researchers for broadening my perspective and offering their critical perspectives on the earlier versions of some of the chapters in this book. Martin Loiperdinger, Nico de Klerk, Klaas de Zwaan, and Sarah Dellmann made very helpful comments on various parts of this work. It is impossible to forget the stimulating conversations at Colloquium dinners and wanderings across the streets of lovely Utrecht and Trier. I am so grateful for having the brilliant friend and mentor, Elif RongenKaynakci, Silent Film Curator at Eye Filmmuseum Netherlands. Elif’s strong passion for her profession, her immense knowledge of the remote corners of early film history, her unyielding enthusiasm and energy for new explorations have been truly uplifting, especially at moments of despair. I am also thankful to Elif for providing me access to fascinating archival material that has greatly enriched this research. I am thankful for the stimulating academic environment at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Many colleagues became close friends over the years. I am very much indebted to the incisive, supportive, and friendly academic community of ASCA, especially Blandine Joret, Erinç Salor, Nur Özgenalp, Aylin Kuryel, Geli Mademli, Irene Villaescusa Illán, Adam Chambers, Pedram Dibazar, Birkan Taş, Peyman Amiri, Simon Ferdinand, and all the other fellows whose paths I crossed in the labyrinthine corridors of P.C. Hoofthuis. I would also like to thank Eloe Kingma for her kind support. Writing this book would be impossible without the enriching encounters at the University of Amsterdam’s Media Studies department and the Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image Master’s programme. I could not have asked for more kind-hearted and supportive colleagues. Eef Masson provided illuminating comments to the initial version of this book and encouraged me in deeply nurturing ways in the early stages of my academic career. Floris Paalman gave insightful feedback as well as heart-warming support. This book has been enriched by our long conversations, and surely by the many remarkable historic postcards, lantern slides, stereoscopic photographs, magazines, and books that I received as gifts! Thanks also must go to Giovanna Fossati and Christian Olesen for their intellectual generosity and kindness. During the initial stages of my research, Prof. Ian Buchanan was very supportive and provided illuminating feedback on the multiple trajectories that I had in mind then. I remember the long talk we had in a shabby café in Copenhagen on Deleuze and pedestrianism, which encouraged me to

Acknowledgements

11

pursue the research that I had in mind. I also wish to thank him for his ongoing support in the early stages of my academic career. Nothing would be possible without my wonderful loving friends, who have become a family more than family over the years. The gleeful comradery and brilliant ideas of these amazing women make the life a better place at all times. It is impossible to describe all the affection and admiration that I have for them in a few lines here. Senem Aytaç’s article on Cléo de 5 à 7 sparked the initial idea for this research. Our endless wanderings with Gözde Onaran in whichever city—Istanbul, Amsterdam, Paris—are some of the best memories of my life. Even though our lengthy flânerie has unavoidably turned into stationary FaceTime conversations due to lockdowns and geographical distances, I have always felt very grateful for every minute we get to spend together. Zeynep Dadak always gave me strength and opened up new horizons with her sharp, critical, incisive humour. I am incredibly lucky to be surrounded by such stimulating, smart, passionate, and loving friends: Ayça Çiftçi, Övgü Gökçe, Berke Göl, Ali Deniz Şensöz, Enis Köstepen, Fırat Yücel, Abbas Bozkurt, and Nadir Öperli. You are the best! The intellectual and emotional labour of this book was fuelled by the warm support, brilliant ideas, and joyful humour of my loving partner Erwin Havekotte. His unyielding and comforting patience with the challenges of academic life meant a lot to me during the writing of this book. More importantly, I’m truly grateful for his openness to spontaneity, be it going for a walk, or an open-ended bike packing. I love you so much! Last but not least, this research would not have been possible without the unyielding support and unconditional love of my beloved parents, Tülay Özgen and Derya Özgen. Thank you for believing in me and helping me to embark on this journey!



Introduction: Cinematic Pedestrianism in the City Abstract In this introductory chapter, the ambulant protagonist of Paris qui dort (1923) provides a starting point to discuss the interrelationship between cinema and city via the figure of the pedestrian. Following a brief analysis of the film, this chapter formulates the concept of cinematic pedestrianism based on three key notions. Henri Lefebvre’s contention that space is ideologically and materially produced enables a critical reading of the politics underlying urban and cinematic spaces. Michel de Certeau’s ‘pedestrian acts’ points to the political potentials of walking, while Jacques Rancière’s theory of aesthetics illuminates how walking in the city and its cinematic articulations can disrupt the dominant construction of space. The chapter concludes by outlining the itinerary of the book. Keywords: f ilm historiography, Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, pedestrianism, Jacques Rancière, walking

In René Clair’s science-fiction comedy Paris qui dort (known as Paris Asleep or The Crazy Ray, 1923), the watchman of the Eiffel Tower Albert wakes up one morning to find the entire city at a standstill. As he looks down from the top of the Tower, he is perplexed by the absolute stillness of the streets. Bewildered, but not so bothered, Albert decides to snooze. As the clock ticks forward towards noon, the city does not wake up. The wide avenues, the meandering river Seine, the bridges, parks, and squares—all appear strikingly empty. Intrigued by the oddity of the situation and knowing what “the city should look like” at this time on an ordinary day, Albert descends the Tower and sets out for a walk along the streets of Paris.1 He roves around the city’s noted sights, such as the Pont d’Iéna, the Place de la Concorde, and 1

Quoted from the intertitles.

Özgen, A., The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism: Walking in Films. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724753_intro

14 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

the Champs-Élysées, only to find all of them completely deserted. In Clair’s surrealist cinematics, Paris—“the capital of the nineteenth century”—appears strangely uncanny when drained of its bustling rhythm. A large part of the film shows Albert’s flânerie across the city, while he investigates the reasons that brought the city to this unusual motionless state. The still images are linked through Albert’s walk: a car frozen in the middle of its journey, a man poised to jump into the Seine with a suicide note in his hand, a caretaker taking the garbage out, and a policeman about to catch a pickpocket—all paralysed in the middle of acting. In these shots, what we see for a couple of seconds is a scene of motionlessness, filled with “majestic inactivity,” to quote from the intertitles. Without any intervening movement, it is hard to discern whether we are looking at a still or moving image. We are only certain that the film is rolling when Albert walks into these fixed frames. The inanimate picture is thus converted into an animate picture by the pedestrian’s entrance into the frame. Specifically in this sequence, his walk interweaves stasis and movement, inanimate and animate, photography and film, which exist simultaneously on screen, making Paris qui dort a reflection on the emergence of cinematic movement. Produced at the height of the European avant-garde, the film stands out as a significant example to interrogate the aesthetic interrelationship between the city and the cinema via the figure of the pedestrian. Paris qui dort tackles cinema’s interrelation with urban modernity on a number of levels. Firstly, what brings the city to a complete halt is a recent technological innovation by mad scientist Dr. Crase, whose new machine emits a ray that can control time and movement within its range (hence the film’s US release title: The Crazy Ray). With this invention, the doctor is able to still or animate movements, bring life into and out of motion, speed up or slow down the course of events in the city. This is conveyed in the film through the use of fast motion, slow motion, and freeze-frames. If Dr. Crase is a filmmaker,2 as Annette Michelson argues, it’s impossible to miss the phonetic similarity of his name with that of Clair. Just like cinema’s ability to manipulate time and space on the screen, the doctor exerts dominance over the urban space. The film thus establishes an aesthetic correlation between cinema as a time- and movement-based medium and the city as the canvas of industrial modernity’s increasing control over time and movement. Secondly, the invisible ray is reminiscent of the “penetrating yet intangible new media,” such as telegraphy, photography, and radio, which were based on 2

Michelson, “Dr. Crase and Mr. Clair,” 47.

Introduction: Cinematic Pedestrianism in the Cit y

15

physical principles beyond the range of human sense organs.3 Throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, cultural imagination was influenced by the invention of ‘teleforce’,4 which the popular media called a ‘death ray’ or ‘death beam.’ It is therefore possible to situate Paris qui dort among such dystopic films as Lev Kuleshov’s The Death Ray (1925) and Harry Piel’s The Master of the World (1934), which similarly concern the destructive effects of a newfound invisible ray. These films ultimately depict the unwelcome effects of technology that enables the consolidation of authoritarian rule over the masses. From this perspective, we could also argue that Paris qui dort shares with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) a similar criticism of the corruption of power due to an advanced form of technology that can control, regulate, and govern bodies. The protagonist Albert stands out as an ordinary man who evades the effects of such corrupt power over the masses. Finally, following on from the previous point, the act of walking is represented as a privileged liberty as well as a protest against capitalist modernity’s productivity-driven regime of time and movement. Albert seems to be immune to the effects of the ray, as he was above its range (in the Eiffel Tower) when it was operated. He enjoys this privilege by leisurely walking and idling around the city. Considering its wider cultural context, Paris qui dort could be read in light of E.P. Thompson’s argument that the standardization and rationalization of time in industrial capitalism is closely linked to the structuring of the labour force as part of a “highly-synchronized automated industry.”5 This reading illuminates the politics of movement embodied by Albert’s free-flowing pedestrianism vis-à-vis the industrialist standardization of movement and time symbolized by Dr. Crase’s ray. From this perspective, Paris qui dort deals with the modernist tension between the dominant forms of time and movement (industrial time), on one hand, and the volatile, ephemeral, fleeting movement (wandering, flânerie) that evades such dominance, on the other. Unlike a conventional science-fiction hero, the protagonist of Paris qui dort is an everyman—a worker with no special powers. His only power is that he can leisurely wander at whatever pace he chooses while other people and objects in the city are stunned or compelled to move at an unusual pace (for example, when Dr. Crase operates his ray to accelerate the rhythm of the city). Following this line of reasoning, we can see another important concept represented in Albert’s idle wandering: contingency. Mary Ann Doane 3 4 5

See Blanco and Peeren’s “Introduction.” For example, inventions by Guglielmo Marconi and Nikola Tesla. See Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.”

16 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

argues that even though the rationalization of production and contingency might seem irreconcilable, the two are interdependent and allied in the structuring of temporality in modernity.6 We can stretch Doane’s argument and claim the same for movement. In modernity’s refashioning of social structures, the rationalization of time cannot be considered independently from the rationalization of movement, the ultimate objective of which is eff iciency in production. Hence, the so-called irrational movement, which is not productive in the sense of capitalist industrialism, equally needed to be eliminated from the system. Contingency, in the words of Doane, “emerges as a form of resistance to rationalization … Its lure is that of resistance itself—resistance to system, structure, to meaning.”7 In the film, pedestrianism thus encapsulates such resistance. In the chapters that follow, I demonstrate how this ephemeral, contingent, ungraspable movement of the pedestrian has been translated into cinematic aesthetics throughout the history of film, especially at moments of sociopolitical tension when the city became a theatre of authoritarian control, on the one hand, and resistance, rebellion, and activism, on the other. My starting point for this research was to counter the popular view that associates walking with unbounded freedom that benefits the mind, body, and soul. Instead, based on my own experiences of walking in the city, I am interested in exploring the instances when walking comes across boundaries, at times eluding and/or transgressing them. In this venture, following Henri Lefebvre and Jacques Rancière, I approach the city as an ideologically constructed space. Thus, walking as an act is performed within the confines of such constructions or beyond, and sometimes despite them. The question is then, how are such nuances in the experience and performance of walking articulated cinematographically? If the filmmaker or the protagonist enjoyed the privilege of unbounded freedom in their walks, how is this translated into cinematic aesthetics? Alternately, if the filmmaker or the protagonist was at risk during their wanderings, how did this transform their filming and cinematic language? In order to answer these questions, I embarked on historical research into the cinematic articulations of walking as an act that is entangled in two aesthetic regimes: that of the city and that of 6 Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 11. 7 This relation forms the main conflict and source of comedy in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), where the body of the worker cannot quite fit into the rationalization of production in the factory. In this film, the worker’s inappropriate movements can also be considered as a contingency that needs to be eliminated from the system but is in fact never completely eradicable.

Introduction: Cinematic Pedestrianism in the Cit y

17

cinema. It is in this vein that the aesthetic interrelation between city and cinema became a central question that underlies the analysis of images of walking in this research. In this diachronical study, I explore cinematic pedestrian acts in a mainly western European context from the 1870s to the 1970s, ranging from the emergence of industrial modernity to the burgeoning of liberation movements and the subsequent rise of globalized urbanism. Over the past two decades, there has been growing scholarly interest in walking, as can be seen in an increasing number of conferences, publications, and events dedicated to the topic. The activities of the Walking Artists Network, which brings together artists with researchers and scholars from a wide range of disciplines (including pedagogy, sociology, urbanism, and philosophy), have grown enormously since its foundation in 2007. The diversity of activities organized in connection with the network also attests to the interdisciplinarity of what can now be called the emergent field of Walking Studies. This scholarly and artistic interest has been accompanied by an increasing number of volumes in popular fiction, science, and philosophy that focus on walking. With the widening popularity of daily strolls and nature walks as healthy and safe pastime activities during pandemic lockdowns, the literature is likely to grow. Scholarly and popular writing on walking is rich and broad. Two books by Giuliana Bruno proved to be of major influence on me, inspiring some of the questions I posed while beginning this research: Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (1993) and Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (2002). Bruno’s analytical perspective, at the intersection of walking, urban space, and film (text and viewing), opened new horizons and encouraged me to tackle the aesthetic interplay between urban pedestrianism and the cinematic image of walking. Bruno’s interweaving of theories and insights from a range of disciplines—for example, the ways in which Walter Benjamin’s writings on arcades were expanded to explore pedestrianism and cinema—prompted me to see the potential of certain theories beyond their immediate field of application. In addition to Benjamin’s words on the flâneur, the urban theory of Henri Lefebvre, the everyday pedestrianism of Michel de Certeau, and the aesthetic theory of Jacques Rancière provided a productive lens through which to approach the interplay between the practice of walking and the practice of filming walking. In Atlas of Emotion, Bruno’s approach is largely informed by psychogeography to explore affective dimensions of urban, imaginary, and cinematic architectures that put “emotions in motion.” Suggesting a shift from “optic to haptic” in film theory, the book approaches cinema as a space of sensory

18 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

encounters, whereby film viewing becomes a form of travel and site-seeing: “film takes us to an elsewhere ‘now here’.”8 Bruno argues that the spectator, at once “embodied and kinetic,” is not a voyeur, as the highly influential psychoanalytical film theory has argued, but a voyageur (a traveller). This perspective prompted me to focus on the question: Why and how does the cinematic image of walking generate affective alignment with spectators? Or, to use an apt metaphor: How does the cinematic image of walking put viewers in someone else’s shoes? Following Bruno’s “feminist strategy of reading space,” I looked for such haptic, affective images of pedestrianism in cinema. Lois Weber’s Shoes—examined in detail later in this book—stood out for its reliance on lengthy walking shots to convey the predicament of its female protagonist, a low-paid precarious worker. However, conceptualizing the female spectator as voyageuse who, by way of cinema, can now experience a liberated, female form of flânerie, has certain limitations. Most importantly, it contradicts the long and rich history of feminist activism that aims to reclaim visibility, freedom, and safety in public space. Overlooking the active presence of women on the streets may ultimately reproduce the invisibility of women in public space and justify their confinement to a spectator position. Here both Bruno and Anne Freidberg, who makes a similar argument about cinema offering a mobilized virtual gaze in her book Window Shopping, focus primarily on the speculative effect of cinema on the (female) spectator. My interest, in contrast, lies in analysing the cinematic aesthetics of walking that convey and communicate feminist activism, especially via women’s pedestrianism on the street. In Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World (2020), Leslie Kern points to the long history of women viewing the city as both the site and the stakes of struggle. Taking to the streets speaks strongly to the long history of women’s marches, from suffragette rallies to female textile workers’ protests in 1917 Russia, Take Back the Night and Feminist Night Marches, which attract masses of attendees every year. Considering such activism, women’s spectatorship cannot be confined to a virtual mobile gaze and screen voyage. Moving the focus from spectatorship to women’s presence on the street as filmmakers and protagonists, I explore in this book such activist aesthetics of feminist pedestrianism. Zooming in on Walter Benjamin’s musings on flânerie, in 1986 Susan Buck-Morss wrote one of the most influential essays on the intersectional politics of urban walking: “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering.” In this article, Buck-Morss focuses on gendered 8 Bruno, Atlas of Emotion, 51.

Introduction: Cinematic Pedestrianism in the Cit y

19

and classed cartographies, practices, and cultures of loitering. Practising Benjamin’s historical method to illuminate the past images in relation to the present, and vice versa, Buck-Morss analyses social figures on the move, such as the flâneur, the sex worker, and the human billboard. Although these social types are characterized by ‘loitering’, their presence on the streets and their practices of walking had different class and gender implications. Such attentiveness to the cultural and political layers of walking in the city has been crucial to shaping my perspective in this research. Buck-Morss’s emphasis on the subversive aspect of loitering underlies some of the key analytical angles in this book, particularly—as I explained earlier via the example of Paris qui dort—the pedestrian embodying the ephemeral, contingent, and uncontrollable. While Buck-Morss uses many images in the essay, her focus does not expand into the realm of the moving image. However, just like the snippets and notes Benjamin collected from a myriad of sources on the flâneur, filmic footage could provide such a dialectical image to illuminate the past with the present, and vice versa. Dialectical images, for Benjamin, are images in which the old-fashioned, undesirable suddenly appear current, or the new, desired appear as the repetition of the same.9 In light of this approach, I was intrigued to explore the political potency of cinematic images of walking, especially its revival, refurbishment, and recycling in similar contexts of urban change. I explain the historiographical method more in detail below. It is possible to see Buck-Morss’s article as part of an increasing interest during the mid-1980s and early 1990s in the practices of walking and flânerie, and in the question of the flâneuse. Keith Tester’s edited volume The Flâneur is a seminal work in the field for having compiled cutting-edge research on the topic in 1994. This book provided a map of various angles and fields from which flânerie can be analysed. Zooming in particularly on the studies of walking and gender, Deborah L. Parsons’s Streetwalking in the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity (2003) has been an important milestone for tackling gendered cartographies of urban walking specifically in women’s modernist literature. Focusing on women writers and their representations of walking in major European capitals such as Paris and London, Parsons traces changing tropes of pedestrianism across a turbulent era, from the turn of the century to the Second World War. The stark distinctions as well as striking similarities that Parsons observes between literary representations of walking in the city across these years encouraged me to notice some similarities across the cinematic images of walking that stood out in my 9

Buck-Morss, “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore,” 100.

20 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

own research. For example, Lumière operators’ inclusion of pedestrianism as a pre-filmic step to read into workings of space continued inspiring many filmmakers across generations, including Dziga Vertov from the Soviet Montage school and Cesare Zavattini from Italian Neorealism. When it comes to women filmmakers, there are overlaps in the cinematic aesthetics that articulate women’s experiences of walking in the city, for example between Lois Weber’s and Agnès Varda’s feminist cinematics, especially in their subtle depictions of streets as unsafe, perilous, and sometimes liberating for women. At the intersection of walking, gender, and cinema, the scholarship has been increasingly productive, but the focus remains mostly on cinemagoing and spectatorship. Addressing women’s leisure and movie cultures, Kathy Peiss’s Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-theCentury New York (1986) studied loitering, walking, and idling on the street as non-commercial leisure activities among young working-class women, who could not always afford commercialized recreation. Although flânerie has widely (and reductively) been conceptualized as a commercialist activity, Peiss’s study boldly showed how idle walking was in fact a non-commercial form of leisure among economically precarious working-class women. From this perspective, it became possible to reclaim flânerie from its reductionist, classed and gendered conceptualizations. Peiss’s book inspired similar studies about women and urban cinema cultures. Lauren Rabinovitz’s For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in the Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (1998) paints a comparable picture of young women’s activities of leisurely loitering and cinemagoing for entertainment. Anke Gleber’s The Art of Taking a Walk: Flânerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture (1999) was a seminal work that expanded the concept beyond the confines of literature and visual art, where it was widely studied, to the domain of film and cinemagoing in Europe. In Off to the Pictures: Cinema-Going, Women’s Writing and Movie Culture in the Interwar Britain (2016), Lisa Stead adopts a comparable angle; however, it shifts the focus to textual representations and images of women’s cinemagoing. These books enrich the understanding of walking in the city in its many (textual and visual) representations. They also enhance the analysis of walking, thanks to their intersectional perspectives, probing classed and gendered structures, cultures, practices. While many popular titles have recently broadened the interest in the history, literature, and philosophy of walking, their study of pedestrianism have not always been as insightful as the titles I have mentioned above. Following Rebecca Solnit’s bestselling volumes Wanderlust: A History of

Introduction: Cinematic Pedestrianism in the Cit y

21

Walking (2000) and A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005), Geoff Nicholson’s The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, Literature, Theory and Practice of Pedestrianism (2008), Frédéric Gros’s A Philosophy of Walking (2015), Matthew Beaumont’s Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London (2015), and Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London (2016) have had great success. In the field of film studies, Thomas Deane Tucker’s Peripatetic Frame: Images of Walking in Film (2020) provides a survey of walking in films from a film-philosophical angle. While this rapidly growing scholarship on walking addresses multiple aspects of urban pedestrianism, they hardly approach walking as an aesthetic practice that is socially, culturally, and politically constructed. The examination of walking as an everyday act or its derivations—such as flânerie, the Situationist practice of dérive,10 drifting, wandering, tramping, window-shopping, rambling, and roaming—requires an exploration of how these acts are socially and politically shaped. On this point, Henri Lefebvre’s contention that urban space is ideologically produced and Michel de Certeau’s examination of walking as an activity that is able to subvert those ideological constructions have been foundational in my analysis of cinematic pedestrianism.

Walking as an Act of Resistance The proposition that walking can be examined and practiced as an everyday act of resistance was spelled out by Michel de Certeau. In The Practice of Everyday Life, the chapter “Walking in the City” starts with a trajectory from an elevated perspective down to ground level, similar to Albert’s descent in Paris qui dort from the top of the Eiffel Tower to the streets below. Certeau describes “seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center.” He is dazzled by the immense fluidity of the city: “a sea in the middle of the sea,” with skyscrapers lifting up here and sinking down there. From this high-rise position, “the gigantic mass” of the city appears “immobilized.”11 Elevated above all the rules that govern one’s movement in urban space (“one’s body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according to an anonymous law”), he enjoys the anonymity 10 See Debord, “Theory of the Dérive.” 11 Contrary to the ebb and flow that characterizes Manhattan in Certeau’s essay, in Paris qui dort Albert is confronted with an unsettling absence of movement on the urban streets. See Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.

22 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

of distance.12 Positioned as the imagined totalizing eye of God, he can read the city as a text or a map. Such elevation thus transfigures Certeau into a voyeur, as he describes it, while his descent from the top of the World Trade Center (WTC) down to the streets feels like an “Icarian fall.” Unlike the panoptic voyeuristic pleasure of the god-like celestial eye, street-level vision is that of an ordinary person: “The ordinary practitioners of the city” walk.13 Juxtaposing the elevated position offered by the WTC with ordinary people treading the urban streets fulfils a metaphorical function in Certeau’s argument. The WTC is not only an icon of Western industrial capitalism, but also exemplifies the growth-oriented global urbanism of the 1970s. For Certeau, it is “the most monumental figure of Western urban development.”14 The project itself was an urban renewal venture of business tycoons, spearheaded by David Rockefeller, to make the New York City port area more attractive to transnational companies, and forced the displacement of a large group of local residents. Thus Certeau’s choice to start with his descent from the high-rise perspective at the top of the WTC to his exploration of the common everyday act of walking as resistance to the spatial order perfectly introduces two contrasting dimensions of the urban experience: on the one hand shaped, controlled, and monitored by the city planners, politicians, and the bourgeoisie; on the other hand, that of “ordinary practitioners” who confront, appropriate, or resist this prescribed experience. The example of the WTC also helps Certeau establish another axis: while the panoptic gaze from the 110th floor is privileged, it is also fixed. Against this all-encompassing mapping of urban space, Certeau reminds us that ordinary citizens down below are constantly mobile: they wander the streets and even sometimes “make use of spaces that cannot be seen.”15 Thus, he counterpoises an all-seeing panoptic power with buzzing, fleeting, and drifting pedestrians—the city’s true practitioners. At a conceptual level, the opposition of these two forces shares the opposition of the strict rationalization of time and space in industrialist capitalism to the contingent, untamed, and ephemeral movements which I introduced earlier through the example of the pedestrian in Paris qui dort. Certeau’s examination of walking as resistance and emancipation could shed light on the cinematic articulations of pedestrianism, especially at times of wider urban change. 12 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 92. 13 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 93 14 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 93. 15 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 93.

Introduction: Cinematic Pedestrianism in the Cit y

23

Defining Pedestrian Acts Published in 1980 in French and in 1984 in English, “Walking in the City,” was a strong inspiration for me as I tackled some of the problems that gave rise to this book. As an ordinary practitioner of the city, as a woman, I could relate Certeau’s “pedestrian acts” to my own experience of the city. Since my experience of walking ranges from walking for pleasure to having to walk, for example, to save on transport fare, or to protest, Certeau’s tactics of pedestrian acts offered an illuminating theory with which to reflect on my own pedestrian encounters with urban space. Meanwhile, as a film scholar, I became interested in tracing the articulation of urban experiences of pedestrianism in films from an intersectional perspective. How does the camera capture the insecurity or threat that sometimes comes while traversing the streets on foot? Why do filmmakers and others feel the urge to take the camera to the streets? How did the aim to film walking transform cinematic language? In “Walking in the City,” Certeau conceives of pedestrianism as a practice performed in public space, whose architecture and behavioural habits substantially determine the way we walk. For Certeau, the spatial order “organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g. by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g. by a wall that prevents one from going further)” and the walker “actualizes some of these possibilities” by performing within the rules and limitations. “In that way,” says Certeau, “he makes them exist as well as emerge.”16 Thus, as they walk, conforming to the possibilities brought about by the city’s spatial order, pedestrians constantly repeat and reproduce that spatial order, in a way ensuring its continuity. However, a pedestrian can also invent other possibilities. According to Certeau, “the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements.”17 That is, pedestrians can, to a certain extent, elude the discipline of the city’s spatial order. Instead of repeating and re-producing the permitted possibilities, they can deviate, digress, drift away, or depart from, contravene, disrupt, subvert, or resist them. These acts, as he calls them, are pedestrian acts. Certeau’s point of departure is a Foucauldian understanding of the structures of power. If one admits that spatial practices secretly structure the determining conditions of social life, would they then qualify as an apparatus that produces a disciplinary space? For Certeau, the implication is yes. In 16 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 98. 17 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 98.

24 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

the rest of his chapter, he sets out to investigate the “multiform, resistance, tricky, and stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised.”18 For Certeau, this investigation concerns the domain of everyday practices, of lived space.19 Pedestrianism is one such everyday practice that opens up a range of democratic possibilities to disrupt the rational plan of the city. Pedestrians may elude or subvert the possibilities shaped by the city’s disciplinary spatial order. That is, pedestrianism is not entirely outside the city’s spatial order because it operates within it; yet it also creatively (and playfully) challenges, transforms, and subverts that order. For Certeau, walking “affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, and respects, etc. the trajectories it ‘speaks’.”20 At this point, Certeau establishes a structural similarity between “the pedestrian act” and “the speech act” by claiming that “[t]he act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to the language.”21 If, from the perspective of semiotics, la langue refers to the entire system of a language, parole, translated into English as the “speech act,” refers to individual creative performances within the system, sometimes subverting, eluding or disrupting the system.22 Certeau strongly emphasizes this double specificity of pedestrianism: “the long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign to them (it can take place only within them), nor in conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from them).”23 Recognizing this double specificity of pedestrian acts is crucial to countering romanticized discourses that often equate an uninterrupted and supposedly undetermined everyday walking in the city with boundless emancipation, unrestricted self-actualization, or a rite of passage to self-discovery. Influenced by Henri Lefebvre’s ground-breaking analysis of the production of space, Certeau’s approach to pedestrian acts allows for an analysis of the ways in which urban space and its experience are constructed at the material, discursive, and imaginative levels. 18 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 96; my emphasis. 19 Here Certeau borrows a term from Lefebvre’s triad: Spatial Practices; Representations of Space; and Representational Space (also known as Lived Space). Lefebvre, The Production of Space. 20 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 99. 21 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 97. Also, Lefebvre uses semiotic references to explain the production and practices of space, See Lefebvre, The Production of Space. 22 It is also possible to analyse the cinematographic articulation of pedestrian acts from a semiotic perspective in the light of such classical f ilm semioticians as Christian Metz and Charles Sanders Peirce. 23 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 101.

Introduction: Cinematic Pedestrianism in the Cit y

25

From the perspective of both Lefebvre and Certeau, it is possible to identify, for example, the following factors that act on pedestrianism. First, the velocities or types of mobilities in the city are “inscribed and prescribed” by the construction or non-construction of spaces, such as roads, paths, pavements, underpasses, bridges, zebra crossings, squares, and parks. In addition, walking trajectories are strongly determined by mobility habits, the time of day, discourses of safety or about the cleanliness of a neighbourhood.24 They are also affected by one’s identity, such as age, gender, class, and race. Walking alone or walking accompanied may also determine itineraries while desires may lead one through certain pathways in a city. The body itself can govern the trajectory: following some alluring smell or escaping from a repellent smell; taking shelter from the sudden rain to avoid getting wet; being attracted to a cosy café where you might recover from your fatigue; longing to extend the visual spectacle by walking further and more slowly along a beautiful street; satisfying your hunger in a park; or looking for a suitable place to sleep… This perspective allows for an understanding of the forces that act on and shape the experience of every practitioner of the city. I will sum up by going back to the double specificity of pedestrianism. No matter how emancipated or boundless it may feel, pedestrianism is always caught up in certain constructions of dominant spatial (and body) politics. However, it is also an everyday act that opens up a range of possibilities to elude, subvert, or disrupt the material, discursive, and imaginative constructions of dominant spatial politics.25 Within the framework of this book, I use the term ‘pedestrian acts’ in a strictly Certeauan sense to refer to those creative, subversive, and disruptive walking activities that disturb 24 For example, Jennie Middleton’s research into the socialities of everyday urban walking explores several of these effects on the walking habits of a group of interviewees living in London. See Middleton, “The Socialities of Everyday Urban Walking and the ‘Right to the City’.” 25 At this point, Lefebvre’s notion of right to the city can also be considered a good example of multiple forms of resistance to the dominant politics of space. Is pedestrianism a statement of right to the city? Lefebvre warns us against the constant battle between the planners and practitioners of the city: policymakers and ordinary citizens constantly act on, produce, and alter the urban space. Lefebvre warns us not to confuse the right to the city of policymakers, scientific urban planners, and the bourgeoisie as self-acclaimed owners of the city. Through the example of public protests that disrupt the usual rhythm and movement of public spaces, such as “in front of the buildings,” he mentions the rights gained: “the rights of ages and sexes (the woman, the child, and the elderly), rights of conditions (the proletarian, the peasant), rights to training and education, to work, to culture, to rest, to health, to housing.” However, he criticizes the “right to the nature,” which he calls a pseudo-right, for veiling the ravaging of the countryside by the city. To avoid such pseudo-rights, Lefebvre clearly emphasizes that the working class, as the true practitioners of the city, can become the agents of the right to the city—a “transformed and renewed right to urban life.” See Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, 147–59.

26 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

the city’s dominant politics of space. I challenge overarching assumptions about the dominant politics of space by investigating in each chapter how it is constructed materially, discursively, and imaginatively. Therefore, in addition to the ways in which the pedestrian acts have been transposed into cinematic aesthetics, the following chapters also focus on the ways in which the dominant politics of space are articulated cinematographically.

Mapping the Trajectory Even though cinematic images of walking are abundant in film history, especially in city scenes, walking has not been analysed as an aesthetic practice that has informed film theory and praxis since its earliest days. My primary aim is to draw attention to an under-examined dimension in film historiography, namely the influence of the changing aesthetic experience of pedestrianism with the rise of modernity on the aesthetics of the emergent medium of film. In line with this aim, I chose to focus on a few canonical titles which contain walking as a central act but which have not been analysed from the perspective of pedestrianism, in order to show the ways in which walking has been a crucial stage in the films’ production as well as aesthetics. Extending my research to the extra-filmic, for instance the writings of the filmmakers, provided evidence of the crucial importance of pedestrianism. Alongside canonical works, I also focus on a selection of relatively understudied films, filmmakers, and theorists which have been overlooked in film historiography. This shows the potential of cinematic pedestrianism as a lens to further examine a wider scope of films and moving images. When making the selection of the titles I wanted to examine in this book, I specifically singled out films in which pedestrianism was a key act. Given this historical dimension, this book can be seen as a historical revisionist venture, in which I seek to re-interpret and re-explain certain moments in canonical and non-canonical film history through pedestrian acts. My position as a researcher working between history and theory is informed for the most part by recent scholarship in new film history and media archaeology, domains enriched by a poststructuralist critical perspective on history narratives and archival practices.26 26 Frank Kessler and Sabine Lenk address the perspectives offered by the new history of cinema, discussing their potentials and horizons within the historiographies of cinema in “Quelles perspectives pour l’historiographie du cinéma?.”

Introduction: Cinematic Pedestrianism in the Cit y

27

The in-between perspective that engages with both f ilm history and critical theory was tackled by Jane M. Gaines, specif ically in her articles “Film History and the Two Presents of Feminist Film Theory” (2004) and “What Happened to the Philosophy of Film History?” (2013). In these two pieces, Gaines argues that the intellectual legacy of history as a discipline has in fact always been laden with a certain level of self-reflexivity or a critical outlook. 27 Quoting Annette Kuhn and Jacky Stacey, Gaines reminds us that the separation between history and theory is a false division, albeit one that persists in the intellectual legacy of the discipline of history. 28 In “Film History and the Two Presents of Feminist Film Theory,” Gaines questions the limits of revisionist film history, specifically that of feminist film scholarship, which investigates the eclipsed forms of female labour in the early decades of the cinema. Her criticism is not a straightforward disapproval but rather an invitation to ask more critical questions in order to enrich our understanding of both the past and the present. For example, new discoveries of women’s activity in early cinema are never enough and they never speak for themselves. Gaines suggests instead that practicing film historians should also question the ways they revisit, represent, and rewrite these re-discovered facts.29 Quoting Keith Tribe, Gaines suggests that “invoking women’s history” is never complete unless women’s “actions can teach us something about our actions today.”30 Gaines’s emphasis on how rediscovered facts are represented, written, or narrativized can also be read in connection with cultural analysis, which takes the present as its primary point of departure. From a cultural analysis perspective, film history can investigate how cultural objects related to the cinematic medium—such as films, stories, institutions, and personae—function within their context, and how these objects, as well as the knowledge constructed by the current renewed interest in those objects, function in today’s society. From this methodological standpoint, excavating the history of cinema in order to counter and critique canonical historiography operates both retrospectively and prospectively, simultaneously shedding light on the past and the present, as argued by Thomas Elsaesser in his recent book Film History as Media Archaeology.31 The retrospective and prospective 27 Gaines posits the ambiguity of history/histoire—“what happened” / “that which is said to have happened.” Gaines, “What Happened to the Philosophy of Film History?.” 28 Gaines, “What Happened to the Philosophy of Film History?,” 71. 29 Gaines, “Film History and the Two Presents of Feminist Film Theory.” 30 Gaines, “Film History and the Two Presents of Feminist Film Theory,” 116. 31 Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology, 17–26.

28 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

interplay of film historical research borrows from Benjaminian historical method, which I mentioned earlier. In this vein, my analysis and examination of cinematic pedestrianism aims to illuminate the present via past, and vice versa. Since my study of cinematic pedestrianism is informed by an analysis of the interplay between the urban space and cinema as aesthetic constructions that are laden with politics, the films that I analyse in this book are not frozen in their own contexts, but they speak in many ways to the present. In this book, my endeavour to revisit the history of cinema from the perspective of the aesthetic interaction between the city and the filmic medium via the figure of the pedestrian is also informed by this methodological framework. Excavating cinematic pedestrianism in film history, enriched by the theory of aesthetics, can enhance our understanding, both retrospectively and prospectively, of the media produced by pedestrian acts that elude, subvert, or counter the dominant politics of urban public space. Thus, one of the aims is to open up perspectives from which to analyse the interrelationship between pedestrian experiences and visual media, while demonstrating how this interrelationship has transformed the filmic medium. Researching pedestrian acts in the history of cinema constructs an alternative history of visual media from the perspective of corporeal experiences articulated in the film language. The ways in which the cinematic medium has evolved in conversation with alterations in the experience of urban space can shed light on a wider area of diachronical research into the reciprocal relationship between the history of the city and the history of cinema. While there has been plenty of research into the influence of modernity-specific experiences, such as modern forms of transportation (train, automobile, steamship, airplane, etc.), on perception, cognition, and aesthetics, the experience and effects of urban walking are relatively under-examined in media scholarship. In Film History as Media Archaeology Elsaesser quotes Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka’s definition of media archaeology and claims that “discontent with ‘canonized’ narratives of media culture and history”32 is a driving force to dig deeper into the unspoken stories. My research contributes to exploring such unspoken stories of pedestrian acts that have imbued the cinematic medium by shedding light on the overlooked crucial role walking in the city played in the development of film language.

32 Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology, 20.

Introduction: Cinematic Pedestrianism in the Cit y

29

Cinematic Pedestrianism as Aesthetic Practice The methodological trajectory described above invites a series of further sub-inquiries: How were everyday pedestrian acts articulated in film in response to the dominant spatial order? Did new pedestrian experiences, which emerged with the changing socioeconomic landscape (for example the influx of women into the workforce), inspire new forms of cinematic articulation? My investigation of these questions is largely informed by Jacques Rancière’s conception of aesthetics. For Rancière, aesthetics refers to the distribution of the sensible (partage du sensible), which determines what presents itself to sense experience:33 The distribution of the sensible simultaneously establishes a common shared value as well as defining what is excluded. This redistribution of parts and places is premised on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines how a community presents itself to participation and the ways in which others take part in that community.34 Rancière gives as an example Aristotle’s definition of the citizen: Aristotle states that a citizen is someone who has a part in the act of governing and being governed. However, another form of distribution precedes this act of partaking in the government: the distribution that determines those who have a part in the community of citizens.35

This conceptualization can be linked, for example, to the women’s suffrage movement, with a different history of struggle in each nation. In many European countries, women did not gain the right to vote until around the First World War. It is possible to recognize the distribution of the sensible here in that women’s political voices were excluded, thereby silenced, by a system that determined who had a say or who did not in the community of citizens. In opposition to this, women tried various ways to speak out and make themselves heard, campaigning for the vote

33 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 13; Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, 57–59. 34 My translation of French original: “Un partage du sensible fixe donc en même temps un commun partagé et des parts exclusives. Cette répartition des parts et des places se fonde sur un partage des espaces, des temps et des formes d’activité qui détermine la manière même dont un commun se prête à participation et dont les uns et les autres ont part à ce partage.” Rancière, Le partage du sensible: esthétique et politique, 12. 35 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 12.

30 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

for women on equal terms with men.36 They took their campaign onto the streets. For example, in Edwardian Britain, they sold Votes for Women newspapers, marched, and staged massive demonstrations. When Emily Davison stepped in front of the king’s horse during the Epsom Derby race in 1913, her death was inscribed in memory as a strong political statement for the suffrage movement. Davison’s action can also be seen as a disruption of the distribution of the sensible, because she walked into a space where it was forbidden to walk. The incident was reported by all Britain’s major newspapers, captured by Pathé, and circulated as a newsreel around the world.37 Recent research has shown that Davison was attempting to attach a purple band, a symbol for the Votes for Women movement, onto the king’s horse when she was fatally trampled by the galloping animal.38 Attaching a visual symbol of well-deserved legal equality onto a royal body (in this case the king’s horse), which symbolizes the maintenance of rule and order, would have made a strong statement for the suffrage movement by making visible what the lawmakers were all the while ignoring, or trying to silence. To borrow Rancière’s expression, such a demonstration of right, or manifestation of “what is just,” triggers a reconfiguring of the distribution of the sensible.39 This happens on two levels. Firstly, the subjects that are not supposed to speak out, thereby opening up a new area of possibilities where the established distribution of the sensible (here, the right to vote on equal terms with men) is undermined. Secondly, others who hear the message can identify with those subjects and join the demonstrations, whereby a new community is formed based on a common value. This creates a new political subject different from the one delineated by the dominant power structure. 40 Hence, a re-distribution of the sensible emerges. The distribution of the sensible also determines, according to Rancière, those who can share in what is common to the community “based on what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed.”41 Rancière explains, through an example from Plato, that “artisans cannot be put in charge of the shared or common elements of the community, because they do not have time to devote themselves to do anything other than their work.” In other words, “they cannot be somewhere else because the work 36 Purvis, ““DEEDS, NOT WORDS’.” 37 Purvis, “Remembering Emily Wilding Davison (1872–1913).” 38 Thorpe, “Truth behind the Death of Suffragette Emily Davison is Finally Revealed.” 39 Rancière, Disagreement, 55. 40 Rancière, Disagreement, 52–59. 41 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 12.

Introduction: Cinematic Pedestrianism in the Cit y

31

will not wait.”42 This is observed, for instance, in the departmentalization of work in industrial modernity. In a sense, modernity’s distribution of the sensible is the specialized division of labour. The distribution of the sensible, therefore, refers to an implicit law (which could well be law, tradition, or ethics) governing the sensible order. It produces modalities of what is visible and audible as well as what can be said, made, or done. The distribution refers to acts as much as to the spaces and times in which these acts can take place. Accordingly, it operates through both inclusion (a community formed around shared values) and exclusion (values, people, and acts left out of a community). The term ‘sensible’ here specifically refers to what presents itself to sense experience, at which point the aesthetic dimension of the distribution of the sensible can be understood. Rancière’s conception of aesthetics is not, however, restricted to the discipline of art theory. He also provides a general definition of aesthetics based on its etymological sense: aisthēton or meaning, capable of being apprehended by the senses. Operating at an aesthetic level, the distribution of the sensible, then, is “the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience.”43 This conception of aesthetics sheds light on the “delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise.” This delimitation “determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience.” From this perspective, “politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and possibilities of time.”44 Rancière’s theory thus reveals that “there is an aesthetics at the core of politics” that is not synonymous with the aestheticization of politics. Rancière’s conception of aesthetics allows us to approach Certeau’s pedestrian acts as aesthetic practices that reveal or disrupt the distribution of the sensible. This is most obvious when, for example, in the mid-nineteenth century, women who idly walked on the streets were looked down upon and pejoratively called “streetwalkers.”45 Similarly, Matthew Beaumont describes how night-walking was a crime in medieval and early modern England. 46 This prohibition later travelled to the United States, where night-walking continued to be outlawed for many years. Although the law addressed both men and women going out after the curfew bell at 8 p.m., 42 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 12. 43 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 13. 44 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 13. 45 Buck-Morss, “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore.” 46 Beaumont, Nightwalking, 24.

32 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

night-walking strongly connoted sex work and was used in this sense in police records. Beaumont also finds evidence that the statute was used to “regulate the lives of the city’s working inhabitants, especially its apprentices and labourers.”47 Intended particularly to circumscribe the movement of the unemployed poor, the legislation aimed to protect property (against robbery) while serving to “police itinerants and vagrants of all kinds.”48 Beaumont concludes that, in practice, the curfew that forbade walking outside after 8 p.m. implemented a political economy. That is, it ensured the reproduction of the labour force, protected private property, and controlled the itinerant unemployed poor. The law was not repealed until 1827 in England, although it had already been superseded by another law in the Vagrancy Act of 1824. This pre-emptive law “criminalized people who were itinerant and unemployed as ‘suspected persons’, on the grounds that they might at some point commit an offence.”49 Beaumont reports that this law was “aggressively revived” under Margaret Thatcher’s administration “in order to fully marginalize youths from black and other ethnic minorities.” It was eventually repealed in August 1981, “as a result of the race riots that took place in cities across Britain that summer.”50 These examples demonstrate how the act of walking can be delimited by the dominant aesthetic order—the distribution of the sensible—of the city. Following from this point, Rancière’s theory also allows us to approach the city as an aesthetic order and to explore how the sensible is distributed. This opens up several possibilities to enhance the understanding of the city’s aesthetic order across different spaces (synchronically) and times (diachronically).51 Finally, Rancière’s conception of aesthetics enables a consideration of filmmaking as an aesthetic practice. It is possible to observe the distribution of the sensible in filmmaking, the final aesthetic film product, and the exhibition dispositif (for example, the film theatre). Through these stages, a film may reinforce the distribution of the sensible, or disrupt it, by representing the non-representable. I explain this in detail, for example, in Chapter Three, with reference to Lois Weber’s treatment of underpaid female labour with Shoes. 47 Beaumont, Nightwalking, 25 48 Beaumont, Nightwalking, 25. 49 Beaumont, Nightwalking, 31. 50 Beaumont, Nightwalking, 31. 51 For example, it is possible to approach Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” as one such diachronical study, where the distribution of the sensible changes from the disciplinary societies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, analysed by Michel Foucault, to the societies of control, described by Deleuze.

Introduction: Cinematic Pedestrianism in the Cit y

33

The Itinerary: A Walk through the Chapters The following chapters, organized chronologically, trace the interplay between walking and filming. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of cinematic pedestrianism with the aim of shedding light on recurrent themes, ideas, and tropes in its aesthetics. Chapter One analyses the philosophical conceptions of movement that informed the scientific studies of human locomotion in nineteenth-century Europe. In an era of widespread interest in anatomy, Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey stand out with their distinct photographic methods for analysing and depicting somatic movement. Coming from a photography background, Muybridge repeatedly used his 12-camera system to record various types of human locomotion, including walking. His instantaneous photography plates brought together a selection of certain instants, which showed the stages of a continuous stride. However, trained as a physiologist, Marey was more interested to register the movement in motion. For him, photography was a promising method to capture the changing rhythms and movements of specific bodies at various settings and rhythms (e.g., running up or walking down slopes). Where photography was not enough, he would experiment with chronophotography and later on cinematography to record the bodily action in its uninterrupted flow. Although Muybridge and Marey were informed about each other’s experiments, their conception of movement differed drastically. Marey was driven mostly by a Bergsonian understanding of movement which saw temporality and spatiality as an unmeasurable, unbreakable flux. He aspired to depict ungraspable, unrepresentable ephemerality as the true state and being of movement. The chapter explores the aesthetics of ephemeral and unrepresentable movement in the pre-cinematic images of walking. As such, it provides a historical as well as theoretical insight which would be used to analyse the changing articulations of cinematic pedestrianism in the years to come. The desire to capture on film the individual experience of walking in its fluidity and ephemerality has continued to inform the aesthetic choices made by filmmakers, for example in lengthy travelling shots. Taking its departure from the conceptual affinity between the ungraspable movement and the fleeting wanderings of the flâneur, Chapter Two investigates flânerie as a filmmaking practice. With an extensive selection of city scenes from around the world, the Lumière catalogue (1895–1905)52 52 The full title of the catalogue is Catalogue general des vue du Cinématographe Auguste et Louis Lumière. See Bernard Chardère, Lumières sur Lumière, 209.

34 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

presents matchless material for the study the aesthetic interaction between the city and the cinema at the turn of the century. The inventors of the cinématographe, the Lumière brothers first published a list of their films in 1897 with the intention of publicizing and selling them, and this version of their catalogue contained 358 titles.53 By 1903, it had expanded to include 2113 items.54 Their company stopped producing films in 1905. The final edition of the catalogue listed 2023 films, including street scenes from a wide array of geographical locations such as Algeria, Tunisia, England, Spain, Australia, and the US.55 Walking in the city was a common practice among Lumière cameramen, who studied the rhythm and movement of public space before they started filming. The proposition that camera operators’ wanderings and observations of city life can be compared to flânerie was first spelled out by film historian Livio Belloi in his 1995 article “Lumière and His View.” Drawing on this argument, I investigate Lumière’s cinematic aesthetics of pedestrianism and demonstrate how ambulant camera operators analysed the aesthetics of public space and drew inspiration for their cinematic aesthetics. Women, however, did not enjoy the same freedom as men to lounge, stride, or flâner in the city. In her seminal essay “The Invisible Flâneuse,” Janet Wolff claims that flânerie was essentially gendered male at the turn of the twentieth century. As we saw above, Susan Buck-Morss traced how women in nineteenth-century Paris risked being labelled “streetwalkers” or “whores” if they wandered aimlessly into public space. The politics that debased women sexually in public functioned to deny them power over that space. By the turn of the century, however, the ethics that prescribed women’s movement, visibility, and behaviour in the public sphere were challenged as women were increasingly integrated into the urban workforce. They not only became more visible in public on their way to and from work, but also became more widely active in leisure activities, which included loitering, aimless wandering, and hanging out, in addition to cinemagoing and shopping. This sociological phenomenon transformed both public space and the cinematic aesthetics that reflected it. Lois Weber’s progressive film Shoes (1916) is a powerful examination of underpaid female labour, the bourgeois ethics imposed on lower-class women, and the ways in which their increasing visibility in the public space challenged those ethics. Chapter Three 53 Chardère, Lumières sur Lumière, 209. 54 Chardère, Lumières sur Lumière, 210. 55 Chardère, Lumières sur Lumière, 210.

Introduction: Cinematic Pedestrianism in the Cit y

35

analyses the pedestrian acts of this film’s main protagonist, Eva—a young working-class woman who has to work to support her family. In parallel to Eva’s pedestrian acts, I discuss Weber’s activist filmmaking as an aesthetic practice that ruptures the distribution of the sensible by questioning middleclass ethics, consumerism, class struggle, and power balances in the family. In Chapter Four, retaining my interest in the pedestrian acts of the working class in urban public space, I focus on the Soviet avant-garde filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom, 1929). In a similar fashion to Lumière’s flânerie, in Vertov’s film theory walking primarily has an analytical function to observe everyday life in its uninterrupted flow and to film life as it is. In contrast to Lumière, however, such observations formed the basis for Vertov’s revelationist cinema, which aimed to render visible the socio-political truth that underlay everyday life in Soviet cities. I specifically analyse a particular sequence towards the end of the film, in which a camera mounted on a tripod walks into the frame—just like a pedestrian. This fantasy unification of the operator with the camera resolves the duality, which I explain in Chapter Two, between the Taylorist conception of the human body as a machine and its counterpart, the flâneur, as an aimless wanderer. In the specific sequence that I analyse, the unification of man and machine blends the machine-like quality of vision (from the camera) with the anthropomorphic quality of walking (from the operator). It is through such an ambulant attainment of images from everyday life that the true workings of Soviet society at large could be revealed to audiences. Inspired by Vertov’s preoccupation with documenting everyday life and his conception of cinema as an art that can transform audiences, early Italian neorealist filmmakers also used walking as a tool to analyse everyday life in a war-stricken society. In Chapter Five, I focus on Italian Neorealism, in which displacement was a strong theme explored through wanderers, immigrants, bohemians, and tramps. Situating neorealism historically and socially, I investigate how the anti-fascist struggle was aesthetically articulated in the walking-shot, which was later transformed into an expression of displacement after 1948. That year was a turning point for the achievements of the resistance after the war. The walking-shot is a crucial aesthetic tool in neorealism, largely informed by Cesare Zavattini’s concept of pedinamento or ‘pedestrian cinema’. It also changes its meaning in the course of socio-political changes in Italy, from the anti-fascist struggle found in the early years of neorealist cinema to the distinctive tool of the later modernist cinema of Rossellini, Antonioni, and Fellini. Displacement also finds strong political expression around the insurgent social movements in Paris leading to May ‘68. Focusing on this last historical

36 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

moment, I investigate how walking, wandering, marching, or claiming social space changed meanings on the screen in the French New Wave cinema. Agnès Varda’s filmography provides a powerful object of analysis due to its diversity of genres, time span, and self-reflexive style, which allows her to comment on both social and cultural changes and filmmaking. Inspired by Patricia Pisters’s formulation of Deleuze’s aesthetics of cinema56 and Rosi Braidotti’s formulation of nomadology,57 in Chapter Six I analyse the images of walking in several Agnès Varda’s films: Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cléo from 5 to 7, 1962), Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond, 1985), and Les plages d’Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès, 2008). The activity of walking (as urban flânerie, circular travelling, or walking backwards) is central to these films and can be seen as a corporeal practice that not only interweaves striated and smooth spaces, to borrow the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari, but also offers a gender-sensitive, political contemplation of the forces of striation and smoothing as well as a re-invention of space. The women in movement in Varda’s films embody a transgression of stratified territories, such as the image-oriented society of the spectacle in Cléo, myths of adolescence and settled living in Sans toit ni loi, or the boundaries of aging in Les plages d’Agnès. These women on the move transform not only urban space but also the urban politics of subjectivity. My hope is that the cinematic pedestrian acts that I analyse in these chapters will trigger an exploration of the reader’s own everyday pedestrian acts that can elude, subvert, or contravene the dominant politics of space, and an imagination of the media aesthetics that they might inspire.

Works Cited Beaumont, Matthew. Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London. London: Verso, 2016. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Bruno, Giuliana. Streetwalking on a Ruined Map. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. London: Verso. 2007. Buck-Morss, Susan. “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering.” New German Critique 39 (1986): 99–140. 56 Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture. 57 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects.

Introduction: Cinematic Pedestrianism in the Cit y

37

Chardère, Bernard. Lumières sur Lumière. Lyon: Institut Lumière, 1987. D’Souza, Aruna and Tom McDonough, ed. The Invisible Flâneuse: Gender, Public Space and Visual Culture in Nineteenth Century Paris. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Debord, Guy. “Theory of the Dérive,” Les Lèvres Nues 9 (November 1956). Also available on Situationist International Online. http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/ si/theory.html. Accessed 6 May 2021. Del Pilar Blanco, Maria and Esther Peeren, ed. The Spectralities Reader. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control” October 59 (Winter 1992): 3–7. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum, 2004. Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Elkin, Lauren. Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. Elsaesser, Thomas. Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016. Gaines, Jane M. “Film History and the Two Presents of Feminist Film Theory,” Cinema Journal 44: 1 (Autumn 2004): 113–19. Gaines, Jane M. “What Happened to the Philosophy of Film History?,” Film History 25. 1–2 (2013): 70–80. Gleber, Anke. The Art of Taking a Walk: Flânerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Gros, Frédéric. A Philosophy of Walking. London: Verso, 2014. Kern, Leslie. Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World. London: Verso, 2020. Kessler, Frank and Sabine Lenk “Quelles perspectives pour l’historiographie du cinéma?” In At the Borders of (Film) History, Temporality, Archaeology, Theories. Ed. Alberto Beltrame et al. Udine: Università degli Studi Udine, 2014. 127–37. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1991. Lefebvre, Henri. Writings on Cities. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1996. Michelson, Annette. “Dr. Crase and Mr. Clair,” October 11 (Winter 1979): 30–53. Middleton, Jennie. “The Socialities of Everyday Urban Walking and the ‘Right to the City’,” Urban Studies 55.2 (2018): 296–315. Nicholson, Geoff. The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, Literature, Theory and Practice of Pedestrianism. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008. Parsons, Deborah L. Streetwalking in the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

38 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986. Pisters, Patricia. The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Purvis, June. ““DEEDS, NOT WORDS” The Daily Lives of Militant Suffragettes in Edwardian Britain,” Women’s Studies International Forum 18.2 (1995): 91–101. Purvis, June. “Remembering Emily Wilding Davison (1872–1913),” Women’s History Review 22.3 (2013): 353–62. Rabinovitz, Lauren. For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in the Turn-of-the-Century Chicago. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. London: University of Minneapolis Press, 1999. Rancière, Jacques. Le partage du sensible: esthétique et politique. Paris: La Fabriqueéditions, 2000. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. London: Continuum, 2004. Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Penguin, 2001. Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. London: Penguin, 2006. Stead, Lisa. Off to the Pictures: Cinema-Going, Women’s Writing and Movie Culture in the Interwar Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Tester, Keith, ed. The Flâneur. New York: Routledge, 1994. Thompson, E. P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (December 1967): 56–97. Thorpe, Vanessa. “Truth behind the Death of Suffragette Emily Davison is Finally Revealed” The Guardian (16 May 2013). https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/ may/26/emily-davison-suffragette-death-derby-1913. Accessed 6 May 2021. Tucker, Thomas Deane. Peripatetic Frame: Images of Walking in Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.

1.

Moving Body, Moving Pictures: The Emergence of Cinematic Pedestrianism Abstract This chapter analyses the philosophy of movement that informed the scientific studies of human locomotion in the nineteenth century, before the rise of the Lumière cinématographe. It contextualizes the use of the photographic method and wearable media to extend the scientific understanding of walking. Through a comparative analysis of Eadweard Muybridge’s and Étienne-Jules Marey’s studies, it explores the visual aesthetics that resulted from the ever-growing obsession with capturing movement in its continuous flow. The oeuvre of these two influential names in the history of moving images is thus crucial to an examination of the nascent visual aesthetics of temporality and spatiality in the representation of human stride, which eventually contributed to the visual vocabulary of cinematic pedestrianism. Keywords: Walking, human locomotion, wearable media, instantaneous photography

The history of the cinematic image of walking is undeniably underpinned by the contested ideals of the human body in nineteenth-century Europe. The rise of the factory and the industrialist model of production led to the praise for an abled, inexhaustible body which, as one moving part of the industrial process, would be efficiently integrated into automation.1 This quest concurred with the growing emphasis placed on physical robustness in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. Education policies, health programmes, and scientific research were geared towards improving the capabilities 1

See Rabinbach, The Human Motor.

Özgen, A., The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism: Walking in Films. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724753_ch01

40 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

of the body. Physical fitness was praised as the precondition for a strong mind and the key to scientific and, ultimately, socio-economic progress.2 The disciplines of anatomy, physiognomy, eugenics, anthropology, and ethnography prospered in this context. The invention of photography and subsequent technical advancements that shortened exposure time presented scientists with new opportunities to study the human body and locomotion. Early practitioners such as Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey photographed the human stride extensively in mid- to late 1800s. Chronophotography, and later on cinematography, were consulted as effective methods of registering the locomotion of the abled body as well as so-called aberrations, such as gendered, racialized, or diseased bodies. Fatimah Tobing Rony explains the colonialist male gaze that characterized the pathologized depictions of racialized bodies, especially in the early photographic and cinematographic images of walking. Furthermore, Rony underlines the key role that wider visual culture—photography, cinema, and stage shows—played in producing race as an optical marker of difference.3 By claiming to be scientific, chronophotographic studies of walking, in particular, made a strong contribution to this discourse. This chapter uses media archaeology as a method to trace early photographic and chronophotographic experiments with capturing the human stride. My analysis focuses on the conceptual frameworks of temporality and spatiality that informed the study of the movement, rather than the depiction of the human body or the act that was photographed. As such, I focus on an earlier era than Rony’s study of the ethnographic images of walking, which were largely produced by Marey’s student and follower Félix Regnault in the late 1890s. As I explained in the Introduction, media archaeology takes the present as its starting point. Instead of the myth of linear progress (i.e., a history of media based solely on technological advancements), it investigates ruptures, discontinuities, and cycles in the history of communication. As such, it is equally interested in obsolete and imaginary media, especially in order to enrich the understanding of present media cultures. Paradoxically, studying newer media practices can enhance the appreciation of older media. Such a dynamic conception of temporality helps, first of all, to shed the myth that 2 This ethos can be traced back to the Rousseauian ideal that the proper use of reason depends on the development of the sense organs. Rousseau himself was an ardent peripatetic and took regular walks to encourage his philosophical thinking by emerging himself sensuously in diverse settings, practising the ancient ideal of stimulating thinking via walking. See, for example, Rousseau, Reveries. 3 Rony, The Third Eye.

Moving Body, Moving Pictures: The Emergence of Cinematic Pedestrianism

41

past media are primitive and undeveloped, whereas new media are superior, sophisticated, and refined. A media archaeological perspective allows us to bring the old and the new into light reciprocally in order to enrich each other. Erkki Huhtamo’s concept of topoi helps crystallize such connections. Deriving from the Greek word for place, topos is a “literary convention” or “commonplace.”4 These commonplaces, for Huhtamo, are “always cultural, and thus ideological, constructs.”5 They can be abandoned or reactivated across time and different forms of media. As such, topos can help explain the aesthetic and stylistic issues. In this study, media archaeology helps to zoom in on the specific relation between the philosophical conception of ‘movement’ and the aesthetics that it gave rise to. From this perspective, I aim to shed light on a different genealogy of the cinematic image of walking, to argue that the aesthetics and politics of cinematic pedestrianism that come to the fore later have their roots in the photographic experiments of Marey. In many ways, capturing movement in motion, and seeking to convey an embodied temporality and spatiality, are topoi that recur in the cinematic image of walking. It is worthwhile noting that the study of walking was a major topic that intrigued scientists and artists alike before the nineteenth century. In the field of natural sciences, deciphering the anatomy of locomotion was a growing concern, expanding the earlier research and fascination with the human body since the sixteenth century. In many ways, the media archaeology of walking can be expanded to earlier representations and mediations of walking as well. Below, I examine the images of pedestrianism produced by Muybridge and Marey against a background of fascination with the phenomenon of movement in many areas of social and political life. It is possible to detect two different approaches to movement in the works of these two forerunners of moving images. Whereas Muybridge’s understanding of movement was based on a notion of time and space as external to the human body, Marey’s study of movement was based on an embodied understanding of time and space. For him, scientific studies of human locomotion had to reveal embodied time and embodied space. In this quest, Marey’s understanding of movement had a lot in common with Bergsonian philosophy, upon which I elaborate below. In my analysis, I will show how these two different approaches to the study of movement led Muybridge and Marey to produce different techniques and eventually different photographic aesthetics of movement. I argue 4 5

Strauven, “Media Archaeology,” 71. Strauven, “Media Archaeology,” 71.

42 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

that the (Bergsonian, or vitalist) philosophical foundations that underlie Marey’s conception of movement—that is time and space are embodied by the moving body—have continued to characterize the cinematic images of walking in subsequent years. The nineteenth-century conception of movement included the mechanical movement of machines, the physical movement of bodies, the movement of mind (reason), and the movement (progress) of history. This multi-dimensional conception was reflected in the widespread scientific investigations of both human and animal locomotion. Situating Muybridge and Marey within this framework can shed light on how they interacted with the era’s cultural and scientific landscape. It can also reveal how Marey, as a physicist, was building on a long tradition of the scientific study of walking. One of the earliest known and widely referenced studies of human gait is Giovanni Alfonso Borelli’s De Motu Animalium (1682), which is considered to be the foundation of biomechanics. Sharing the title of Aristotle’s book on animal movement, Borelli’s opus provided a key source for the study of human and animal movement in the nineteenth century. It was evoked many times in Marey’s work over the years, as well as in the works of other scientists studying human locomotion. According to the orthopaedic scholar Arthur Steindler, Borelli’s mechanical approach to human locomotion, and his fundamental concept of ‘muscle action’, anticipated the ideas of the nineteenth century.6 Steindler notes that, even though several scientific accomplishments were achieved in the eighteenth century, it was primarily nineteenth-century scientists who truly continued Borelli’s investigations.7 One study that deserves mention before moving onto the seminal works of the nineteenth century is Albrecht von Haller’s Elementa Physiologiae Corporis Humani (1757), which laid out the principle of the ‘electrical irritability of muscles’. In Nouvelle Méchanique des mouvements de l’homme et des animaux (1798), the physician and encyclopaedist Paul-Joseph Barthez similarly focused on the co-workings of body parts involved in the execution of movement. He analysed the interactions and correspondences of the body’s solid matter (such as muscles, bones, nerves, and fibres) with fluid matter (blood and other liquids). Barthez was a vitalist and deeply critical of a purely mechanical approach to analysing locomotion. He argued that something remained inexplicable in these workings: what he coined the 6 Steindler, “A Historical Review of the Studies and Investigations Made in Relation to Human Gait,” 540. 7 Steindler, “A Historical Review of the Studies and Investigations Made in Relation to Human Gait,” 540.

Moving Body, Moving Pictures: The Emergence of Cinematic Pedestrianism

43

“vital principle,” or “the principle of life” (le Principe Vital). As “the first cause of progressive movements of humans and animals,” the vital principle is inherent in each part of the body that moves and is communicated to the other moving parts.8 The co-ordinated operations of all the complex processes involved in walking were described further by Wilhelm and Eduard Weber, known also as the Weber brothers, in their Die Mechanik der Gehwerkzeuge (1836). What distinguishes them from their predecessors is their use of quantitative methods to measure temporal and spatial parameters during human locomotion.9 Using chronometers and telescopes, they sought to measure the co-workings of all parts involved in executing the gait. They also measured external factors that influence walking and running, such as wind and inclines.10 In the last chapter, they included a series of pictures representing a skeleton in each of the regular individual phases of walking,11 proposing on the final page to test the accuracy of their diagrams using stroboscopic slides.12 These methods—i.e. measuring the temporal and spatial parameters using devices, taking into account external factors that influence the execution of the gait, and creating pictorial representations that can be tested through the optical reproduction of movement—influenced Marey’s studies of human locomotion in many ways.13 In the “Natural History of Organized Bodies,” published in the Revue des Cours Scientifiques de la France et de l’Étranger in 1867, Marey argued for instruments and apparatuses to aid the limited human senses in the study of physiology. He wrote: we have seen that in physics, our senses teach us very little, and that it is necessary at every step, to have recourse to apparatus for analysing more delicate phenomena […] We must resort to instrumental aid for the demonstration of changes too delicate for the naked vision.14 8 My translation from French original: “la première cause des mouvements progressifs de l’homme et des animaux.” Barthez, Nouvelle Méchanique des mouvements de l’homme et des animaux, 6. 9 Andriacchi and Alexander, “Studies of Human Locomotion,” 1218. 10 Kirkup, “Mechanics of the Human Walking Apparatus,” 458. 11 Väliaho, Mapping the Moving Image, 48. 12 Bois-Reymond, “Science and Fine Art II,” 16. 13 For an in-depth study of the history of scientific locomotion research in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Mayer, Wissenschaft vom Gehen. In this book, Mayer traces some of the major scientific investigations of the human gait from an interdisciplinary vantage point, placing them at the intersection of physiology, neurology, anthropology, and psychiatry. 14 Marey, “Natural History of Organized Bodies,” 288. www.bium.univ-paris5.fr/histmed/ medica/cote?marey200. Accessed 4 May 2021.

44 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Around the 1870s, visual recording was integrated into scientific studies of human locomotion to compensate for the limits of human perception. Photography was recognized as a gateway to some hidden reality, one unrecognized by human vision. Freezing time and movement enabled scientists to scrutinize the recorded object within a specific space-time. Marey was a forerunner to use photography for analysing body movements during locomotion and registering the movements of selected points of the body.15 In addition to instruments and apparatuses, Marey and his team devised various photographic methods to record and measure movement. Around the same time, Muybridge, originally a photographer, was commissioned by Leland Stanford to photograph a horse in motion to reveal the actual stages of movement invisible to the human eye. The intersection of scientific studies with the photographic representability of movement blurred the boundaries between art and science, giving birth to a rich correspondence. The influence of the scientific analysis of human locomotion on aesthetics can be observed in several essays that appeared around that period. Marey dedicated a chapter of his book Movement to the benefits of chronophotography for artists—painters and sculptors alike—providing comparisons with ancient representations of human locomotion from Greek vases and sculptors.16 In an article that appeared in 1892 in Popular Science Monthly called “Science and Fine Art,” Emil du Bois-Reymond investigated potential correspondences between science and aesthetics. A physician and physiologist who had worked on nerve actions in the body, Bois-Reymond ruminated on a Schillerean sense of beauty observed in the mechanics of bodily movement. He suggested that science could increase art’s insights and improve its technical means by teaching it useful rules and guarding against errors.17 Instantaneous photography, he wrote, “catches the expression of the countenance and the attitudes during so short an interval that it makes good what escapes in the average expression, and thus leads to most valuable observations.”18 For Reymond, photography secured instructive data for art. Penned around the same time,19 Paul Souriau’s L’Esthétique du Mouvement is another early attempt to combine science with aesthetics. According to Souriau, the display of scientific images of motion not only has aesthetic 15 Steindler, “A Historical Review of the Studies and Investigations Made in Relation to Human Gait,” 541. 16 Marey, Movement, 169–85. 17 Bois-Reymond, “Science and Fine Art,” 754. 18 Bois-Reymond, “Science and Fine Art,” 761. 19 Originally published in France in 1889.

Moving Body, Moving Pictures: The Emergence of Cinematic Pedestrianism

45

value but can also explain how this aesthetic value is produced. For Souriau, understanding the anatomical properties that determine a movement, and identifying the mechanical conditions required for the proper execution of that movement, may clarify how certain expressions of movement (with force or grace) produce certain affects and the role played by the visual perception of movement.20 In light of this approach, he considers motion studies to be “a specific art” that includes performance, representation, and perception, and he endeavours to build a specific aesthetic methodology around it. Bois-Reymond notices a welcome congruity between the Webers’ visionary drawings and the photographic images of locomotion realized by Muybridge. However, he also raises a significant shortcoming: they do not capture movement as it is. In his words: [W]hen the series of pictures of a periodically moved object taken at suff iciently short intervals, whether it is presented to the eye in the daedaleum or each picture is illuminated for an instant in its passage, is well projected, the original thought of the Weber brothers is realized: the periodical motion, dissected as it were into differential pictures, is integrated again into an impression of the whole, and the accuracy of the apparently false pictures is demonstrated. The latter experiment has been worked out by Mr. Muybridge himself in his zoopraxiscope […] In both methods we see men and horses walking, running, jumping; but there is still one thing to be remarked—that is, that since the length of the passage past the eye of one of the slits of the daedaleum or of the illumination of the directly visible picture is the same for all the pictures, the appearance of the whole impression of the movement is a little different from the view of the same movement itself.21

Here Bois-Reymond’s criticism recalls Marey’s dissatisfaction with Muybridge’s instantaneous photography, which I explain further below. Based on these criticisms, I will show how Muybridge fragmented continuous movement and depicted privileged instants. Marey, on the other hand, strove to illustrate movement in its tiniest intervals without any detriment to its continuity. He was in pursuit of discovering, registering, and observing anyinstants-whatever of any movement. These film-philosophical concepts— formulated by Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 1: The Movement Image—are largely 20 Souriau, The Aesthetics of Movement, xxi. 21 Bois-Reymond, “Science and Fine Art II,” 18.

46 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

based on Henri Bergson’s philosophy of movement in Creative Evolution and Matter and Memory. In order to explain these distinctions better, we first need to zoom in on Deleuze’s use of these concepts in relation to cinema.

The Film-Philosophy of Movement In his two-volume treatise on cinema, Deleuze follows a chronological development of the moving images, and takes Bergson’s philosophy as a key point of entry to explain cinema’s fundamental concept: movement. Deleuze’s interest as a philosopher in cinema is underpinned by that medium’s potential to create dynamic encounters between the screen and the spectator. For Deleuze, cinema is a specific system of images that interacts with the world in a dynamic way to set in motion affects, ideas, thought, and action. He famously said in an interview “Cinema not only puts movement in the image, it also puts movement in the mind.”22 Underlying this statement is the presupposition that moving images, as different from photography, establish a close connection with the mind in their continuous flow. The images on the screen, filmed and organized in whatever order, enter into a direct relation with the mind triggering certain impressions, affects, actions. A cinematic image can thus produce or give rise to further mental images. For Deleuze, it should not be considered a coincidence that Bergson was writing Matter and Memory in 1896, shortly after the cinématographe was publicly exhibited in Paris. He argued that Bergson sensed a pivotal shift at that context: “Movement, as in physical reality in the external world, and the image, as psychic reality in consciousness, could no longer be opposed.”23 Bergson’s three theses of movement are key here to explain the emergence of a cinematic reflection on the world and cinema’s interaction with consciousness. Deleuze describes them in great detail. These are, in correct order: 1) “Movement and Instant,” 2) “Privileged Instants and Any-Instants-Whatever,” and 3) “Movement and Change.” The first thesis, “Movement and Instant,” differentiates movement from the space covered: “Space covered is past, movement is present, the act of covering. The space covered is divisible, indeed infinitely divisible, whilst movement is indivisible, or cannot be divided without changing qualitatively each time it is divided.”24 It is thus impossible to “reconstitute movement with 22 Deleuze, “Brain is the Screen,” 366. 23 Deleuze, Cinema 1, xiv. 24 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 1.

Moving Body, Moving Pictures: The Emergence of Cinematic Pedestrianism

47

positions in space or instants in time: that is, immobile sections.”25 While two instants can be brought together to infinity, movement always occurs “in the interval between the two.” Therefore, “however much you divide or subdivide time, movement will always occur in a concrete duration [durée]; thus each movement will have its own qualitative duration.”26 Bergson’s critique of the cinematographic apparatus in Creative Evolution is located here. The cinematograph, according to Bergson, sets in motion immobile snapshots. It therefore corresponds to what he calls an incorrect formula: “immobile sections + abstract time.”27 Here, the abstract time added to immobile sections does not bring us closer to movement; it gives us an illusion of movement. The second thesis of Bergson proposes that there are two illusions of reconstituting movement: the ancient and the modern. In the ancient sort, movement refers to intelligible elements, Forms or Ideas, which are themselves eternal and immobile. Conceived in this way, movement “will thus be the regulated transition from one form to another, that is, an order of poses or privileged instants, as in a dance.”28 In the modern illusion, modern scientific revolution replaced the dialectical order of poses with a succession of instants, and related the movement to any-instants-whatever containing the “immanent material elements.” For Deleuze, cinema seems to be the latest descendent of this modern scientific lineage. Although the scientific lineage of cinema is not easily definable, Deleuze argues, its determining conditions can be located in the transfer of equidistant snapshots onto a moving filmstrip that reconstitutes the movement from any-instants-whatever.29 Further in his discussion, Deleuze refers to Muybridge and Marey. Regarding the images of the horse’s gallop, he writes: [T]his could only be dissected exactly by Marey’s graphic recordings and Muybridge’s equidistant snapshots, which relate the organized whole of the canter to any-point-whatever. If the equidistant points are chosen well, one inevitably comes across remarkable occasions; that is the moments when the horse has one hoof on the ground, the three, two, one. These may be called privileged instants, but not in the sense of the poses or 25 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 1. 26 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 1. 27 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 1. 28 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 4. 29 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 5.

48 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

generalized postures which marked the gallop in the old forms […] If these are privileged instants, it is as remarkable or singular points which belong to movement, and not as moments of actualization of a transcendent form. The meaning of the notion has completely changed.30

Deleuze then argues that cinema eventually thrived on privileged instants, and that these privileged instants are unexceptionally any-instants-whatever. This then forms the groundwork for his discussion of Bergson’s third thesis, which basically concerns what can be called ‘qualitative movement’: “the movement expresses something more profound, which is the change in duration, or in the Whole.”31 The final thesis on movement is what was retained in cinematic pedestrianism in years to come. In what follows, I would like to dwell more on the notion of “choosing” as touched on by Deleuze in the quote above in order to differentiate privileged instants from any-instants-whatever. Muybridge’s technique in the production of his catalogue of instantaneous photography was based on the formula of “immobile sections + abstract time.” In light of Muybridge’s method of montage, I will explain the use of privileged instants. Subsequently, I will elucidate how Marey’s method, aspiring to represent the any-instants-whatever, has certain parallels with Bergson’s philosophy of movement. Finally, I will argue that the interrelation and interdependence of these two methods can be seen in the cinematic aesthetics of pedestrianism.

Muybridge and Abstract Spatiotemporality Muybridge had come to prominence when, in the late 1870s, he produced the famous Sallie Gardner at a Gallop, which showed his patron Leland Stanford’s horse galloping. Muybridge divided space and movement into equal spans to expose the tiniest intervals of motion. The snapshots captured 12 instants, which made the movement of the animal’s legs visible to the human eye thanks to the technology of photography. The international impact of this experiment secured Muybridge a tenure to study human locomotion at the University of Pennsylvania, where, as a contribution to the university’s anatomy research, he photographed various bodies of different sexes, ages, and capacities in the act of walking. 30 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 6. My emphasis. 31 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 8.

Moving Body, Moving Pictures: The Emergence of Cinematic Pedestrianism

49

Figure 1: Plate 1, “Male Nude Walking” (Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, 1887).

In 1879 (exhibited publicly in 1880), Muybridge developed his own projection device, called a “zoopraxiscope,” to simulate movement using hand-painted silhouettes of Sallie Gardner. Muybridge quickly applied this method to a larger number of animals and humans when, in 1884, he was invited by the University of Pennsylvania to conduct more experiments and provided with a studio with all the necessary technical equipment. By 1885, he had produced 781 plates (assembled from 19,347 single images),32 all of which were later collected and published under the title Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements. About 64 of the plates involved either male or female human models walking. In Muybridge’s catalogue of plates, the first 58 are dedicated to the human act of walking. During his time at the University of Pennsylvania, Muybridge was also commissioned to photograph the “walk of diseased people, paralytics etcr. [sic] so that by means of the zoopraxiscope they could show peculiarities to the medical student.”33 The catalogue lists 25 plates depicting “abnormal movements,” of which 20 illustrate just walking. Depicting pedestrianism was thus a key concern for Muybridge. In order to represent the phases of this most common everyday habit, Muybridge used a multiple-camera system operated by an electromagnetic device to activate the shutters. He had his subjects (university athletes, and male and female models) move along a track in front of a roofless enclosure. The background was covered with black cloth, divided by white vertical

32 Braun, Picturing Time, 232. 33 Braun, Picturing Time, 233.

50 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Figure 2: Plate 14, “Female Nude Walking” (Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, 1887).

and horizontal lines into squares to mark off the space traversed by the moving body.34 In his prospectus, to explain the type of movement conveyed in the plates and the logic of the montage, Muybridge gives the example of walking in reference to Plate 14 (Figure 2). The “quantity of movement” for Muybridge means two steps, or one stride, in the plate where the female model is walking towards the right. He photographs 12 successive phases of that movement from each of three points of view, namely lateral, rear and front. Then he arranges these successive phases of movement on a plate as per captured instants in Plate 14. For example, the laterals are placed in the first row, the rear foreshortenings in the second, and the front foreshortenings in the third. The vertical arrangement of images thus corresponds to the same bodily posture in the same fraction of movement, of time, and space. The horizontal sequence, on the other hand, presents fragments of movement with the body showcasing a different posture in each of the frames and a rightwards-linear representation of time and space. Even though Muybridge’s work was highly influential in the field of visual arts,35 personal letters dating from this period show that there was dissatisfaction among the university committee about the scientific accuracy of Muybridge’s work, for which he had been tenured.36 One major drawback 34 Muybridge, “Prospectus and Catalogue of Plates,” 7. 35 See, for example, the change from Théodore Géricault’s The 1821 Derby at Epsom to Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. (1912) and then to Francis Bacon’s Muybridgeinspired paintings. Also see Zhang, “Muybridge, Motion Analysis and Art,” 105–13. 36 See Braun, Picturing Time, 233.

Moving Body, Moving Pictures: The Emergence of Cinematic Pedestrianism

51

of Muybridge’s technique, as partly voiced by his superintendents at the University, was the lost interval of movement.37 It is possible to explain this critique by looking at the three aspects, which Marey considered inextricably bound together in the study of movement: body, space, and time. The image in Figure 2 can serve as an example, just as in Muybridge’s prospectus. First, even though the phases of walking in Plate 14 are captured from multiple points of view, it is impossible to see the movement of certain limbs or the stride of the body from one position to the next. In fact, the plate does not show any movement at all. Instead, it presents fragments of one continuous movement arranged according to an internal consistency. The single images that make up the plate only provide an insight into the relationship between different postures the body adopts at successive instants while walking. According to Marta Braun, Muybridge’s images therefore require the cooperation of the viewer in filling in the gaps to create the illusion of motion: “any sense of movement must be constructed by the viewer from [the] gestures, frame by frame.”38 Second, the single images, when taken together, fail to show the space traversed by the subject while walking. Looking at them as a whole, it is impossible to discern the subject’s correct spatial position in the course of movement at consecutive instants. Again, to quote from Braun’s general comments on Muybridge’s technique: Each photograph was made by a different camera (in tandem with the moving subject) against the same background as the one before and after it, but from a different vantage point. As a result, the subject and the camera seem to move in unison and thus effectively cancel out the sense of movement.39

The space in this image is an abstract one: a uniform black background that is coded in a geometrical matrix. This mathematical space does not have any discerning characteristic from one image to the next along the same row. Hollis Frampton contends that this “uniform grid of Cartesian coordinates” is also a kind of “universal frame of reference, ostensibly intended as an aid in reconciling the successive images of chronometry,” and because of that 37 Muybridge himself recognized this shortcoming of his technique in his prospectus: “Perfect uniformity of time, speed and distance was not always obtained.” Muybridge, “Prospectus and Catalogue of Plates,” 9. 38 Braun, Picturing Time, 237. 39 Braun, Picturing Time, 237.

52 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

it “destroys all sense of scale” as well as “annihilating any possible feeling of place.”40 Third, the time that each quantity of movement takes is not rendered by any means in the single images or the plate as a whole. Instead, Muybridge’s camera imposes an abstract temporality on this representation of movement by the rhythm of exposures and the selected rhythm of movement conveyed in the assemblage of images on the final print. Here, Muybridge’s technique can be interpreted as emblematic of the new time regime upheld by the cinema. To quote Mary Ann Doane, “the emerging cinema participated in a more general cultural imperative, the structuring of time and contingency in capitalist modernity.”41 In a way, Muybridge’s technique preceded cinema’s politics of time. The instantaneous photographs of Muybridge detached space and time from the movement of the body, which thus appeared only as static. Therefore, movement in itself was not analysed but annulled because it was broken down into its privileged instants. Braun describes the tactics of “insertion, expansion, contraction, and substitution” used by Muybridge to select and arrange the privileged instants. She demonstrates that when a phase of movement was missing, due to a camera failure or photographic imperfection, “Muybridge assembled the negatives that remained, gave them internal consistency, and renumbered them to appear consecutively in the print.”42 In her analysis of Muybridge’s plates, Braun also reveals other tactics. For example, where the gaps between phases of movement were “most blatant,” Muybridge would assemble and number consecutively the left-over pieces. Another way that Braun detects of masking the gaps in a series, or an incomplete series, is “to make the lateral and foreshortened views congruent on the page,” As she explains: This was accomplished by replacing a missing image with uncropped images (in other words, using one image to fill the space of two) [see Figure 3], printing one image in the series twice [see Figure 4], removing the central section of the image and abutting the remaining parts [see Figure 5], or even substituting a view of the empty backdrop taken from a viewpoint consistent with the rest of the series [see Figure 6]. 43 40 Cited in Tom Gunning, “Never Seen This Picture Before,” 222–72. 41 Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 3–4. 42 Braun, Picturing Time, 238. 43 Braun, Picturing Time, 238.

Moving Body, Moving Pictures: The Emergence of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Figure 3: Plate 137 (Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, 1887).

Figure 4: Plate 202 (Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, 1887).

Figure 5: Plate 448 (Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, 1887).

53

54 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Figure 6: Plate 34 (Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, 1887).

In light of the explanations up to this point, it can be argued that time and space in Muybridge’s study of human locomotion were built on an abstract notion of temporality and spatiality as external to the movement of the body: Muybridge determined the rhythm of the images assembled on the plate. Therefore, the concept of movement that underpins Muybridge’s images is based on privileged instants. Going back to Deleuze’s commentary on Bergson, we can now see how these images convey an understanding of movement as “the regulated transition from one form to another.”44 The way the immobile sections are photographed and arranged according to an external and abstract temporality increases the illusion of movement. 45 Here, the creation of privileged instants does not occur during the production of the images (by choosing the equidistant points) but, as it were, in postproduction, by rearranging or suppressing images that do not fit in well.

Marey in Search of Corporeal Spatiotemporality Conducting research on human locomotion at roughly the same time, Muybridge’s contemporary Étienne-Jules Marey was among the scientists who considered the lost interval of movement a major weakness in the analysis of motion. Particularly the abstraction and stillness found in Muybridge’s images were serious limitations. “It is necessary to see the things in action,” wrote Marey, not in their mysterious immobility. 46 44 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 4. 45 Braun, Picturing Time, 236. 46 Marey, “Natural History of Organized Bodies,” 279–80.

Moving Body, Moving Pictures: The Emergence of Cinematic Pedestrianism

55

Marey’s lifetime passion was to chart in a scientifically accurate way the plethora of simultaneous movements that occur during a specific locomotive act, such as walking. For Marta Braun, “Marey wanted to arrive at a visual description of the common types of human motion—the walk, the run, the jump, and so on—and the forces at work in their execution; specifically, he wanted these descriptions to depict the relationships in time and space of the various body parts.”47 For Marey, to know what was involved in the walk necessitated a depiction of the movement of the leg as one foot goes up and the other goes down, and of the oscillation of the lower part of the leg as it moves against the upper; of the relation of the up-and-down movement of the leg to the shifts in the body’s centre of gravity and of the connection of this movement to the movements of the arms and the head. Finally, he wanted to know the amount of muscular force needed to move the body through space […] Marey wanted to picture all these factors simultaneously, in a single and legible representation. 48

According to Marey, a complete conception of movement characterizes it by its form. That is to say, it takes account of the different phases of movement, not only its commencement and end, its maximum and minimum, but that which determines all the intermediate states. 49 This aspiration drove him to develop many graphic and photographic techniques, and ultimately chronophotographic and cinematographic methods. The reason for this primary difference between the works of Marey and Muybridge is rooted in their dissimilar approaches to movement. Marey’s fascination with movement had deeper scientific and philosophical roots than the optical revelatory principle that inspired Muybridge. Marey had a more holistic understanding of the universe as a giant machine where everything, from the invisible atom to the celestial body lost in space, was subject to motion.50 From this mechanist perspective, Marey participated in a general movement in physiology in the latter half of the nineteenth century that aligned the concept of life with movement, process, and change.51 According to François Dagognet, “[Marey’s] sole concern was to catch life at 47 Braun, Picturing Time, xvii. 48 Braun, Picturing Time, xvii. 49 Marey, “Natural History of Organized Bodies,” 289. My emphasis. 50 Marey, Animal Mechanism, 9. 51 Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 46.

56 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

its most characteristic: its incessant movement (the moving image).”52 In this context, Marey’s studies were directed towards translating movement into perceivable forms for scientific study. The early years of Marey’s career were marked by an outstanding focus on scientific studies of human locomotion. Marey was mainly interested in the energy flows and movements within the body, such as blood circulation, nerve impulses, and the rhythms of the pulse and the heart. In 1867, he turned to the study of animal and human locomotion, publishing his findings in 1873 under the title La Machine animale: Locomotion terrestre et aérienne (translated into English and published in 1874 as Animal Mechanism: A Treatise on Terrestrial and Aerial Locomotion). In this book, the chapter on the “Act of Walking in Man” specifically deserves attention for showing how, for Marey, movement was inextricably rooted within the body at this time, whereas later in his career he worked towards disengaging it from the body for better scrutiny.

Marey’s Wearable Media for Walking In “Act of Walking in Man,” Marey refers to walking as the most important type of human locomotion. The continua of impacts and supports, bends and extensions, contractions and relaxations are the core of this act, which, like a machine, continually propels the body forward in space. Fascinated by the complexity of such a fundamental everyday habit, he wrote, “The action seems very simple at first sight, but its complexity is soon observed when we seek to ascertain what are the movements which occur in producing this motion.”53 In order to scrutinize these movements, Marey devised an “experimental shoe,” which was worn by the pedestrian to measure the duration, phases, and intensity of footsteps (Figures 7 and 8). Marey described the way the experimental shoe worked as follows in Animal Mechanism: [A hollow chamber contained in the shoe], having upon it a small piece of projecting wood, is compressed at the moment that the foot exerts its pressure on the ground. The air expelled from this cavity escapes by a tube into a drum with a lever attached, which registers the duration and the phases of the pressure of the foot.54 52 Dagognet, Étienne-Jules Marey, 16. 53 Marey, Animal Mechanism, 111. 54 Marey, Animal Mechanism, 113.

Moving Body, Moving Pictures: The Emergence of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Figure 7: Experimental Shoe (Étienne-Jules Marey, Animal Mechanism, 1873).

Figure 8: Runner wearing experimental shoes (Étienne-Jules Marey, Animal Mechanism, 1873).

57

58 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

From the records thus obtained, Marey produced bar graphs and charts, which he called the “graphic method,” depicting the length of time each foot was on the ground and the moment of its transition. The fact that the experimental shoe is literally worn by the pedestrian gives it its distinctive value because it is connected to a mobile body, by virtue of whose intrinsic rhythm of walking it is put in operation.55 In a way, the shoe thus works as a supplement to the body as it translates its innate movements into legible data. It is, for example, sensitive to the amount of pressure that the body makes on the ground (the impression of a footstep), the duration that the body stays in touch with the ground (the length of a footstep), and the frequency with which the body meets and leaves the ground (the rhythm of footsteps) while walking. The aspects of the experimental shoe point to the three major principles that increasingly came to govern Marey’s technique in later years: expanded sensorium, indexicality, and legibility.56 In his aspiration to understand the phenomenon of movement, Marey was equally sensitive to movements inside and outside the body. However, for him, all human senses had certain limitations that restricted access to this information. Hence, he invented a plethora of different instruments, primarily to enhance the human sensorium. Dagognet underlines Marey’s passion for constructing such “sensors” to measure the tiniest fleeting movements, such as the pulse, the heartbeat, breaths, and the slightest organic dilations and stretches.57 Marey’s method was based entirely on sensitive instruments: “He is the inventor of the lightest and most reliable ‘sensors’—the sphygmogram, which was the first, the cardiogram, pneumogram, pantogram, thermogram and so on.”58 These instruments that Marey used to monitor and measure movement in the early stages of his career supplemented human sense perception. One such device, the experimental shoe, served as an “add-on” in increasing the pedestrian’s sensitivity to the pressure, duration, and rhythm of his or her footsteps. Thus, the first principle of Marey’s technique was to expand the human sensorium. As Braun aptly summarizes, “Marey created and constructed instruments that would see, touch and hear for him as well as mark down what was sensed.”59 55 German physician Hermann Vierordt was working on self-registering shoes to measure and analyse human locomotion around the same time, which was documented in his treatise Das Gehen des Menschen in Gesunden und Kranken Zuständen, published in 1887 in Tuebingen. 56 These three principles are charted in Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 33–69. 57 Dagognet, Étienne-Jules Marey, 175. 58 Dagognet, Étienne-Jules Marey, 175. 59 Braun, Picturing Time, 22.

Moving Body, Moving Pictures: The Emergence of Cinematic Pedestrianism

59

Figure 9: A graphic rendering of the tracings of the impact and rise of the two feet in ordinary walk (Étienne-Jules Marey, Animal Mechanism, 1873).

Second, for Marey, it was crucial that the body whose movement was being measured be the direct source for tracing.60 That is, unlike for Muybridge, the most crucial aspects of movement—temporality and spatiality—are not abstracted from the human body in motion. The experimental shoe was designed to chart the pedestrian’s own temporality through the frequency of footsteps, and during his experiments Marey discovered that spatiality was also deeply rooted in the locomotion of the body. He relates in “Act of Walking in Man” how the body’s attitude of walking changes on different surfaces; furthermore, the body never advances with a uniform velocity.61 At certain points on his or her trajectory, for example when walking in a circle, the pedestrian’s style of walking changes.62 Hence, both temporality and spatiality are implied in the human body in motion. In other words, these abstract notions in Muybridge’s images become corporeal units that are deeply rooted within the body for Marey. Yet Marey grew dissatisfied with his graphic method, primarily because the recording of movement was always mediated. Marey’s major concern was intervention. In “Natural History of Organized Bodies” he wrote: “The physiologist should endeavour to inflict on the animal which he is examining as little mutilation as possible, if he would obtain an exact idea of the normal conditions.”63 What was important throughout was to eliminate the human intermediary, which was a screen that further complicated, distorted, and prevented access to reality.64 Marey therefore envisioned an unmediated representation, which brings us to the second principle that governed his 60 Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 42. 61 Marey, Animal Mechanism, 123. 62 Marey, Animal Mechanism, 123–27. 63 Marey, “Natural History of Organized Bodies,” 290. 64 Dagognet, Étienne-Jules Marey, 43.

60 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

work: indexicality. Marey was increasingly intrigued by how to improve methods of capturing and translating phenomena in a web of inscriptions where it became first visible and then readable (that is, intelligible).65 This quest drove Marey to photography, which was ideal in this respect for his purposes “since its means of connecting object and representation—that is, light waves—were literally intangible and greatly reduced the potentially corruptive effects of mediation.”66 In his 1895 treatise, Movement, Marey wrote: Photography could produce the trajectory of a body moving in space; but the idea of successive changes in position was not sufficient to define the movement. The power to do so presupposes a knowledge of the relationship existing at any moment between the distance traversed and the time occupied.67

He found the photographic method useful since it could register both temporality and spatiality directly from the body in movement. Photography not only displays a continuous trace of the movement but also gives a stronger impression of bodily positions taking a longer period of time. Hence, using photography, Marey could track down not only the tiniest intervals of muscular movement but also the time duration of each bodily position. In this context, the notion of trace, which was a key concept throughout Marey’s experiments, became more prominent when he took the path of the photographic method in the study of movement. According to Dagognet, for Marey the trace was “nature’s own expression, without screen, echo or interference: it was clear and, above all, universal. All we had to do was translate what nature itself told us about itself.”68 Here it is possible to draw parallels between Marey’s idea of attaining reality without any mediation and André Bazin’s idea of an ontological photographic realism. Although postdating Marey’s experiments, in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” Bazin underlines the “objective character of photography”69 and emphasizes its “true realism” due to its unmediated character: “For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man. All the arts are 65 Dagognet, Étienne-Jules Marey, 43. 66 Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 48. 67 Marey, Movement, 33. 68 Dagognet, Étienne-Jules Marey, 63. 69 Bazin is here referring to the word lens, which in the French original is objectif. See translator’s note in Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 13.

Moving Body, Moving Pictures: The Emergence of Cinematic Pedestrianism

61

based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence.”70 For Marey, this quality of absence made the photographic medium a privileged mode of scientific representation. In the 1880s, Marey looked for ways to expand the range of the graphic method and developed what he called a fusil photographique—a photographic gun. Marey designed the photographic gun based on an earlier model by Jules Janssen but improved its speed. Marey describes it as follows: The barrel of this gun is a tube that contains a photographic lens […] A central axis makes twelve revolutions per second and commands all the parts of the instrument. The first of these is a metal disk pierced with a narrow slot. The disk forms the shutter and lets the light penetrate only twelve times a second for the duration of 1/720 each time. Behind this first disk is another turning freely on the same axis. This disk has twelve openings, and attached to it is the sensitized glass, which can be either round, or octagonal. This second disk must revolve in a regular and intermittent manner so as to stop twelve times per second in front of the ray of light that penetrates the lens.71

The photographic gun could register the movement of any moving object without it being tied to any device in the laboratory. It also allowed its operator to roam freely and record any moving object in its natural environment without the slightest intervention for the analysis of motion. It was a quick camera, registering 12 images per second, which made it possible to achieve a synthesis of continuous motion on a phenakistoscope.72 According to Marta Braun, Marey used this photographic gun to make “sequential photographs of bats and birds in flight,” and “of horses and people on the street.”73 By allowing him to register movement when in movement, the gun shares some aspects with the Lumière cinematograph, which could be carried easily anywhere to record daily life. This will be examined further in the next chapter. Marey’s dissatisfaction with the photographic gun was primarily due to the absence of the spatial dimension. Although it was more advanced than Muybridge’s technique, one shortcoming persisted: it was not possible to see the space traversed and the time that elapsed from one position to 70 Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 13. 71 Braun, Picturing Time, 57. 72 Braun, Picturing Time, 61. 73 Braun, Picturing Time, 61.

62 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Figure 10: Image depicting the mechanism of Marey’s photographic gun (Étienne-Jules Marey, Movement, 1895)

the other. His aspiration to represent movement in all its intermediate states was not satisfied. When discussing these shortcomings and possible ways to overcome them, Marey clearly dismissed the use of multiple cameras, since the “photographs taken from different points of view are incapable of comparison.”74 Marey was certain that movement must be registered in its natural continuity from a single perspective. Along with Georges Demenÿ, he devised a chronophotographic camera, which could register phases of a single movement via a multiple exposure system on a single fixed plate. Named “photochronography,” or “chronophotography,” this method enabled the movement of a moving body in space to be represented.75 Marey developed the technique of chronophotography to “determine with exactitude the characters of a movement.” That is, “such a method ought to represent the different positions in space occupied by a moving object, i.e. its trajectory, as well as define the various positions of this body on the trajectory at any particular moment.”76 The method involved a pitch-black background and a stationary photographic camera facing it. A subject wearing contrasting light colours walked before the camera while the shutter remained open and recorded the entire movement from 74 Marey, Movement, 114. 75 See Marey, “History of Chronophotography.” 76 Marey, Movement, 54.

Moving Body, Moving Pictures: The Emergence of Cinematic Pedestrianism

63

a single perspective.77 In contrast to Muybridge’s separately framed images that annulled movement, the chronophotograph thus displayed all the successive positions of a single subject within the same frame. In line with Marey’s principle of heightened sensory perception, the chronophotograph was designed to render visible, in the most accurate way possible, that which escaped the restricted capability of human vision. Furthermore, there was no mediation involved because the pedestrian did not wear any wires, carry any special instruments, or was not connected to some device that could alter the normal conditions of his or her everyday walk.78 And finally, the principle of indexicality was fulfilled: the body itself was the source of both the spatiality and temporality of the movement registered.79 It was possible to see a complete trace of the movement and the amount of space traversed, as well as the duration of each quantity of movement. Hence, the viewer could read what occurred within the frame as happening within a certain period of time and over a certain span of space. Yet this set-up of chronophotography also posed a problem for Marey. This was because the impressions of the movement at certain points were either too blurred, or there were too many superimpositions that made the photograph hard to read for a scientist. His efforts to overcome this problem shed light on the third aspect of his work: legibility. As a consequence of superimposition, legibility of time and movement were seriously impaired. As Marey noted, “This confusion from the superimposition of images sets a limit to the application of chronophotography on fixed plates, yet in many cases, by means of certain appliances, this difficulty may be overcome.”80 These involved a special suit that Marey and his assistant Demenÿ designed in order to translate the entire body into a graphic of movement. The idea 77 Marey was very cautious about the shutter time. He wrote, “The duration of the exposure must be very brief in order that the object may not move an appreciable distance during a single admission of light.” See Movement, 55. 78 Marey was explicitly making this point in Movement: “In the study of movement, photography has the advantage of not being obliged to borrow any motive power from the object observed” (50). 79 Even though in the later stages of his experiments Marey had to work with multiple shutters and a chronometric dial, there was a preliminary procedure whereby the distance and the intervals of time could be calculated from the body’s movements (see Movement, 56). The shutters were then adjusted according to the data obtained from this procedure. “Such photographic pictures contain the two necessary elements for understanding a movement; namely a notion of space as well as that of time,” wrote Marey, explaining that “nevertheless […] it is often difficult to harmonize two such incompatible notions without having recourse to certain expedients” (Movement, 57). 80 Marey, Movement, 60.

64 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

was to blacken and render invisible those parts of the body that were not wanted in the photograph while accentuating the movement of those portions that were to be studied. “Thus a man dressed in black velvet, with bright stripes and spots on his limbs, is reproduced in the photograph as a system of white lines, which indicates the various positions assumed by the limbs,” explains Marey.81 Using this technique, called “geometrical chronophotography,” eliminated the undesired overcrowding of superimpositions without foregoing the complexity of the representation of movement. In a way, the geometrical chronophotography was a blend of the photographic medium and the earlier graphic method as regards the latter’s tendency to provide abstract translations. By converting the entire body into a graphic drawing that is at once legible and indexical, it can be maintained that Marey managed to detach movement from the moving body in order to analyse it in itself. An analysis of Marey’s and Demenÿ’s chronophotographic works reveals that certain forms of chronophotography allowed the capture of any-instants-whatever of movement for analysis. However, it also posed problems. Marey describes the shortcomings of chronophotography in the final chapter of Movement, dedicated to the analysis of machines that synthesize movement: Although chronophotography represents the successive attitudes of a moving object, it affords a very different picture from that which is actually seen by the eye when looking at the object itself. In each attitude, the object appears to be motionless, and movements, which are successively executed, are associated in a series of images, as if they were all being executed at the same moment. The images therefore appeal rather to the imagination than to the senses.82

In many ways, Marey’s last chapter in Movement is a harbinger of the cinematographic method as it contains a detailed description of “a good apparatus.” After careful examination of the stroboscope, the phenakistoscope, the zootrope, Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope, Reynaud’s praxinoscope, and Demenÿ’s photophone (a device that enabled the analysis and reproduction of movements executed during speech), Marey concludes with a description of a chronophotographic projector designed “to realize the nature of a movement satisfactorily.” Fitted with perforated sensitized film, long enough 81 Marey, Movement, 61. 82 Marey, Movement, 304.

Moving Body, Moving Pictures: The Emergence of Cinematic Pedestrianism

65

to contain “forty or sixty figures,” the chronophotographic projector is illuminated from behind with an electric lamp or sun light.83 It is important to emphasize that when Marey invented the photographic method, the chronophotographic method, and eventually the cinematographic method, he did not abandon the previous methods. Rather, looking at the large body of his work, it is possible to see many combinations, intersections, and deviations of various methods. Even chronophotography, which forms perhaps the largest part of his oeuvre, contains many variations and forms such as chronophotography on fixed plates, chronophotography on moving plates, geometrical chronophotography, and microscopic chronophotography.84 Marey’s thirty-year scientific search to measure, record, analyse, and represent movement in all its intermediate states ends with the cinematographic method, which, despite its advantages, proved dissatisfactory for Marey. Even though the movement was registered and reproduced in a lifelike fashion, it slipped away too quickly for the scientist’s analytical gaze.85

Searching for Pure Movement With regard to all the aspects considered above, it is possible to chart three main differences between Muybridge’s and Marey’s technologies of conveying and representing movement. First, Muybridge produced fragmented instants of movement, thereby conveying a set of privileged instants to which an abstract, external spatiotemporality was added to achieve the illusion of movement. Marey, on the other hand, strove to observe movement in its tiniest intervals without any detriment to its execution and continuity. He sought to represent any-instants-whatever of any movement—that of humans and animals, as well as of matter, such as water and air. Second, Muybridge’s images have an abstract temporality and spatiality imposed on them by the technician, whereas both temporality and spatiality were corporeal aspects of a moving body for Marey. Instead of imposing an abstract rhythm and a mathematically coded background, he sought the ideal intervals of time and space to photograph the movement of a body within that body. Determining the exposure speed, for instance, was tied 83 Marey, Movement, 304–18. 84 See Mannoni, Étienne-Jules Marey. 85 Marey, Movement, 318.

66 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

not only to the physical factors of light and sensitized plates or film, but also to the speed of the movement to be captured. Marey endeavoured to extract the movement from his object of study (any kind of body in motion). Even though the modern parameters of temporality, such as seconds or milliseconds, were a concern, he conceived of movement in relation to the corporeal temporality (rhythm) of the moving object. Third, in contrast to Muybridge’s detached spatialization of time based on successive images, Marey’s desire was to render simultaneous movements of different parts of the body on a single photographic plate. If time meant succession for Muybridge, it meant simultaneity of various movements in a single frame for Marey. From his work outlined so far, it is possible to argue that Marey’s understanding of movement differed from that of Muybridge while sharing significant parallels with the philosopher Bergson’s conception of movement. Just as Marey was dissatisfied with Muybridge’s method of instantaneous photography, Bergson was critical of the “halt” that gives the illusion of a movement’s divisibility. Bergson contends that these halts only mask the perception of real movements: [T]hese points have no reality except in a line drawn, that is to say motionless. And by the very fact that you represent the movement to yourself successively in these different points, you necessarily arrest it in each of them; your successive positions are, at bottom, only so many imaginary halts.86

Real movement, for Bergson, is indivisible because it implies a passage or becoming, a change of state or quality. It is the human mind that is always inclined to think of movement in relation to external points in space. Bergson values passage as a more productive way to think about movement as an indivisible phenomenon: “A passage is a movement and a halt is an immobility. The halt interrupts the movement; the passage is one with the movement itself.”87 The passage is not identical to the line extending from point A to point B because such points are but extraneous (and immobile) points in relation to which we are inclined to think of movement. This way of conceiving movement substitutes the path for the journey; and just because the journey is subtended by the path, the two do not necessarily coincide: 86 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 189. 87 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 189.

Moving Body, Moving Pictures: The Emergence of Cinematic Pedestrianism

67

As every point of space necessarily appears to me fixed, I find it extremely difficult not to attribute to the moving body itself the immobility of the point with which, for a moment, I make it coincide; it seems to me, then, when I reconstitute the total movement, that the moving body has stayed at infinitely short time at every point of its trajectory.88

Now we can go back to Bergson’s critique of the cinematographic apparatus, for it is rooted in this drawback of perception. Common sense perception always reconstructs movement in relation to supposedly immobile points of space and time. Muybridge’s instantaneous photography, therefore, can be considered as an embodiment of this idea, with all the intervals and gaps to be filled in by perception. Muybridge’s extraneous rhythm and mathematical space prevents real movement from being captured if not understood, and only maintains the limits of human perception. This mechanism precludes an understanding of movement as an uninterrupted flow of moving matter and moving mind. In Creative Evolution Bergson writes: Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself. Perception, intellection, language so proceed in general. Whether we would think becoming, or express it, or even perceive it, we hardly do anything else than set going a kind of cinematograph inside us. We may therefore sum up what we have been saying in the conclusion that the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind.89

Marey’s approach, in all its differences from Muybridge’s, can be seen as an attempt to circumvent this mechanism and understand movement in its continuity and complexity. For Marey, movement equals life; hence it needs to be understood in its uninterrupted flow, in its all any-instants-whatever. This conception of movement was a guiding principle in Marey’s efforts to analyse the act of walking. It is worthwhile noting, however, that Marey’s and Bergson’s conceptions of movement differ in certain respects, especially with regard to 88 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 189. 89 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 332. Emphasis in original.

68 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

chronophotography. In “Évaluation, mesure, mouvement: la philosophie contre la science et le concepts du cinéma (Bergson, Marey)” Maria Tortajada reminds us of the contextual paradigms needed to comprehend fully Bergson’s philosophy of movement and his dissatisfaction with cinematography as a model for thought. Tortajada emphasizes that the cinematography that Bergson mentions was primarily chronophotography, and that this instrument was concerned first and foremost with science.90 According to Tortajada, it is crucial to distinguish the philosophical from the scientific notion of movement that researchers sought to analyse, dissect, and synthesize for scientific scrutiny. In Bergson’s philosophy, movement is essentially indivisible (indécomposable) so the only way to grasp or comprehend movement is through intuition.91 Tortajada emphasizes that Bergson’s main point in Creative Evolution is not to oppose the photographic image to a moving image, but to show that the breakdown of movement, as perfectly seen in the breakdown of shots of a moving image, fails to capture and thus decomposes real movement.92 From a Bergsonian standpoint, in its endeavour to dissect and analyse movement, science creates false terms—stops, instants, and intervals are but scientific or theoretical abstractions that cannot grasp movement: “The movement will always slip away in the interval.”93 For Marey, however, movement is a natural phenomenon that awaits being revealed, measured, interpreted, and formulated by science. This is where the major difference between their approaches to movement lies: while, for Bergson, movement can only be grasped by intuition, for Marey movement can be analysed by science beyond the register of human sensory organs. Unlike Bergson, as a physiologist Marey constantly sought new devices to render movement legible for scientific analysis, as I have described earlier in this chapter. Marey’s persistent experiments with photographic, chronophotographic, and cinematographic media aimed to record the movement that escaped limited power of human vision. Marey wanted to represent what the eye cannot see. Thus, phases of movements, which were false scientific abstractions that failed to grasp movement for Bergson, 90 Tortajada, “Évaluation, mesure, movement,” 97. My translation from the exact quote: “Le cinématographe de Bergson appartient à l’espace de la chronophotographie, et celle-ci s’élabore dans le champ de la science.” 91 Also see Deleuze’s “L’Intuition comme méthode” in Le Bergsonisme. 92 “Ce qui intéresse Bergson, ce n’est pas d’opposer l’image photographique à une image en mouvement […] mais de montrer que la série d’instantanés fige le mouvement en le décomposant.” Tortajada, “Évaluation, mesure, movement,” 99. 93 My translation from French original: “Le mouvement glissera dans l’intervalle.” Tortajada, “Évaluation, mesure, movement,” 100.

Moving Body, Moving Pictures: The Emergence of Cinematic Pedestrianism

69

were necessary steps to analyse the natural phenomenon of movement for Marey. However, despite these well-observed differences between their conceptions of movement, I would propose that a parallelism can still be detected, especially in the last stages of Marey’s studies of human and animal locomotion. Towards the end of his penultimate treatise on locomotion, Movement, Marey acknowledges the limits of each apparatus for capturing movement and concludes his book with a dissatisfied tone, pointing only to further research in the field. He even discloses his “doubts” that “more perfect” tools are possible. Marey’s constant dissatisfaction with each method he develops, and his final remarks humbly pointing to further investigations to capture movement for scientific analysis, indicate that there is always some aspect of movement that was ungraspable and unattainable by such tools. It is here that I see a possible connection between Bergson’s and Marey’s conceptions of movement.

Conclusion: Pre-Cinematic Pedestrianism In an interview in 1914, after being asked about his views on cinema, Bergson elaborates more, and in a slightly different way, from his conceptualization in Creative Evolution, quoted earlier. He comments on cinema not as an analogy of limited practical understanding but as a synthesis of memory, which contains different times and different movements fused into one. He says: Memory is like cinema, a series of images. Immobile, in its natural state; in movement, it is life itself. And some might conclude, or have concluded, that life is movement. Is not vibration the essence of light and sound? Is not the living eye a cinematograph?94

According to Louis-Georges Schwarz, who translated the interview from French for Cinema Journal, while Creative Evolution compared cinematographic technology to practical understanding, the cinematographic image is compared here to subjective experience.95 From this perspective, certain aspects of Deleuze’s interpretation of Bergson’s philosophy of movement in relation to cinematic aesthetics become clearer, especially his concepts of movement-image and time-image. 94 Schwarz, “‘Henri Bergson Talks to Us About Cinema’,” 82. 95 Schwarz, “‘Henri Bergson Talks to Us About Cinema’,” 80.

70 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Going back to Paris qui dort, which I described in the Introduction, it is now possible to see how the cinematic medium brings together two conceptions of movement that characterized industrial modernity. While the ray in the film represents the standardized time and movement that produced the technology of cinematographic movement, the ephemeral and free-flowing movement of the pedestrian represents the immanent contingency that escapes or eludes such standardization. The pedestrian in Paris qui dort embodies the corporeal spatiotemporality, the subjective experience of movement vis-à-vis the standardized and rationalized form of movement. In that sense, the movement of the pedestrian in the film is closer to a Mareyesque or Bergsonian notion of movement—unattainable, ungraspable and elusive. On another level, the cinematic images of walking retain such sensitivity to the particular, individual, and embodied experiences of temporality and spatiality in their articulation of a free-flowing pedestrianism. As we shall see in the coming chapters, one characteristic of cinematic pedestrianism is conveying the experience of walking in the city in such a way to trigger impressions, affects, actions, thought. The moving body, and later on the moving camera, enables dynamic encounters between the screen and the spectator.

Works Cited Andriacchi, Thomas and Eugene J. Alexander. “Studies of Human Locomotion: Past, Present, and Future.” Journal of Biomechanics 33 (2000): 1217–24. Barthez, Paul-Joseph. Nouvelle Méchanique des mouvements de l’homme et des animaux. Carcassonne: De l’imprimerie de Pierre Polere, 1798. Bazin, André. What is Cinema? Volume 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. New York: Random House. 1944. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books. 1992. Bois-Reymond, Emil du. “Science and Fine Art.” The Popular Science Monthly (April 1892): 751–63. Bois-Reymond, Emil du. “Science and Fine Art II.” The Popular Science Monthly (May 1892): 16–27. Bonitzer, Pascal et al. “The Brain is the Screen: An Interview with Gilles Deleuze.” In Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema. Ed. Gregory Flaxman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 365–74. Borelli, Giovanni Alfonso. De Motu Animalium. Lugdunum Batavorum: Petrum vander Aa, Cornelium Boutesteyn, Johannem de Vivie, Danielem à Gaesbeeck, 1682.

Moving Body, Moving Pictures: The Emergence of Cinematic Pedestrianism

71

Braun, Marta. Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Dagognet, François. Étienne-Jules Marey: A Passion for the Trace. New York: Zone Books, 1992. Deleuze, Gilles. Le Bergsonisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. London: Continuum, 2004. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London: Continuum, 2005. Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Gunning, Tom. “Never Seen This Picture Before: Muybridge in Multiplicity.” In Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement. Ed. Phillip Prodger and Tom Gunning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. 222–72. Kirkup, John. “Mechanics of the Human Walking Apparatus.” Medical History 37.4 (Oct. 1993): 458. Lavater, Johann Caspar. Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe. Leipzig: Weidman und Reich, 1775–78. Mannoni, Laurent. Étienne-Jules Marey: La memoire de l’œil. Milano: Mazotta, 1999. Marey, Étienne-Jules. “Natural History of Organized Bodies.” Annual Report of the Board of the Smithsonian Institution for the Year 1867: 278–304. www.bium. univ-paris5.fr/histmed/medica/cote?marey200. Accessed 4 May 2021. Marey, Étienne-Jules. Animal Mechanism: A Treatise on Terrestrial and Aerial Locomotion. New York: D. Appleton, 1874. Marey, Étienne-Jules. Movement. New York: D. Appleton, 1895. Marey, Étienne-Jules. “The History of Chronophotography.” Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for the Year Ending June 30, 1901, 1902: 317–40. http://www.bium.univ-paris5.fr/histmed/medica/cote?marey067. Accessed 4 May 2021. Mayer, Andreas. Wissenschaft vom Gehen. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2013. Muybridge, Eadweard. Animal Locomotion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1887. Rabinbach, Anson. The Human Motor. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Rony, Fatimah Tobing. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Schwarz, Lois-Georges “‘Henri Bergson Talks to Us About Cinema’ by Michel Georges-Michel from Le Journal, February 20, 1914,” Cinema Journal 50.3 (Spring 2011): 79–82. Souriau, Paul. The Aesthetics of Movement. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1889.

72 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Steindler, Arthur. “A Historical Review of the Studies and Investigations Made in Relation to Human Gait.” The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery 35.3 (July 1953): 540–42. Strauven, Wanda. “Media Archaeology: Where Film History, Media Art, and New Media (Can) Meet.” In Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art: Challenges and Perspectives. Ed. Julia Noordegraaf et al. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013. 59–80. Tortajada, Maria. “Évaluation, mesure, mouvement: la philosophie contre la science et le concepts du cinéma (Bergson, Marey).” Revue européene des sciences sociales XLVI-141 (2008): 95–111. Väliaho, Pasi. Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema Circa 1900. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010. Vierordt, Hermann. Das Gehen des Menschen in Gesunden und Kranken Zuständen. Tuebingen: 1887. Von Haller, Albrecht. Elementa Physiologiae Corporis Humani. Lausanne: Julium Henricum Pott, & Socios, 1757–66. Weber, Wilhelm and Eduard. Die Mechanik der Gehwerkzeuge. Göttingen: Dieterichschen Buchhandlung, 1836. Zhang, Xiang. “Muybridge, Motion Analysis and Art.” Arts Biomechanics 1.2 (2012): 105–13.

2.

The Flâneur as Filmmaker Abstract This chapter investigates flânerie as a filmmaking practice undertaken by Lumière cinématographe operators in the late nineteenth century. It first explores the socio-historical context that led to flânerie being vilified as aimless and unproductive movement in the face of an industrialist ethics that envisioned rationalization of production through maximum integration of the human body into automation. Shifting its focus to the conceptualizations of flânerie in artistic and social discourse, it analyses flânerie-inspired cinematic aesthetics through an in-depth study of city scenes in Lumière filmography. It proposes three aesthetic components of early cinematic aesthetics of walking, inspired by flânerie: the gaze as a wandering eye, the drift as porous framing, and crowds as the paradox of detached belonging. Keywords: Flânerie, flâneur, Taylorism, walking, cinematic city

Flânerie was an urban social and cultural activity of idle wandering (mostly practiced by urban men) in the mid-nineteenth-century metropolis. Here I take the experience of flânerie—a concept which has been fruitful for writers and philosophers—and explain how, with the advent of cinema as a popular form of visual entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century, it was translated into cinematic aesthetics. Because most research on flânerie focuses on its existence and experience in European metropolises, a wider investigation of the alternative histories and geographies of flânerie is necessary. Lumière operators’ experiences and cinematic aesthetics of strolling in non-European cities may provide an interesting starting point for research in this field. The inventors of the cinématographe, the Lumière Brothers, published a list of their films in 1897 with the intention of publicizing and selling them, and this version of their catalogue contained 358 titles.1 By 1903, it 1 Chardère, Lumières sur Lumière, 209.

Özgen, A., The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism: Walking in Films. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724753_ch02

74 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

had expanded to include 2113 items.2 Their company stopped producing films in 1905. The final edition of the catalogue listed 2023 films, including street scenes from a wide array of geographical locations such as Algeria, Tunisia, England, Spain, Australia, and the US.3 Walking in the city was a common practice among Lumière cameramen, who studied the rhythm and movement of public space before they started filming. In this chapter, my use of the term ‘Lumière filmography’ is not strictly limited to the films made by Lumière Brothers; instead, it indicates the films produced by various camera operators using the cinématographe. Similarly, the concept ‘Lumière view’ alludes to a common cinematic aesthetics that is widely shared across the street scenes in the Lumière Catalogue. This chapter builds on the previous one, in which I showed how ÉtienneJules Marey aspired to capture the body’s own rhythm and movement during the act of walking. In many ways, Marey’s aspiration to capture movement in its uninterrupted flow has conceptual overlaps with the cinematic aesthetics of Lumière films. In the films that I analyse below as emblematic of this approach, filming everyday street life entailed incorporating walking as an analytical practice in order to read into the workings of public space. In other words, idle wandering was necessary for the discovery of the space’s rhythm and structures of mobility. A number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors, including Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Franz Hessel, and Walter Benjamin who provided the most influential descriptions of flânerie, highlighted the connection between strolling and a close sensuous engagement with public space. Flânerie was singled out by these writers as an activity to experience, observe, analyse, and reflect on the ebb and flow of urban life. These characteristics of flânerie, which I will detail in relation to the emergence of a cinematic aesthetics of bodily movement, reveal an affinity between flânerie and pedestrian acts, as described by Michel de Certeau in the The Practice of Everyday Life. 4 In what follows, I will first describe the nineteenth-century efforts to restrict bodily movement in line with the aims of the rationalization and standardization of labour to maximize profit. Briefly explaining the use of photographic and later cinematic media to discipline the movements of bodies, I will show how flânerie was seen as an unproductive form of movement that needed to be eliminated from the system. Expanding on 2 Chardère, Lumières sur Lumière, 210. 3 Chardère, Lumières sur Lumière, 210. 4 See the Introduction to this book.

The Fl âneur as Filmmaker

75

the two different conceptualizations of movement explained in the previous chapter (namely, industrialist vs. embodied), I will situate flânerie as an uncontainable form of movement with its unique rhythm and spatial mobility. I will explain the close affinity between flânerie and cinema through Walter Benjamin’s use of the term ‘phantasmagoria’—a metaphor that alludes to a popular eighteenth-century form of visual entertainment. Finally, I will demonstrate how flânerie informed the cinematic aesthetics of movement (both pre-filmic and filmic) in the Lumière filmography.

Taylorism versus Flânerie: The Politics of Bodily Movement In a 1914 article, “Man’s Enslavement by the Machine,” Vladimir Lenin raised awareness about experiments carried out on workers in the USA: An electric lamp was attached to a worker’s arm, the worker’s movements were photographed and the movements of the lamp studied. Certain movements were found to be ‘superfluous’ and the worker was made to avoid them, i.e., to work more intensively, without losing a second for rest.5

Aiming to increase the efficiency of the worker’s body in order to maximize production, these experiments made use of cameras, and later cinematic apparatuses, to discover and prescribe the best movements for a worker and therefore to avoid wasting energy and time. These photographs, showing the worker almost as a component of the machine, attest to the emergent mechanisms of controlling bodily movement in the era of modern industrialism. Lenin describes how these images were used not only to determine but also to monitor and stipulate the most efficient body movements for maximizing production: The cinema is systematically employed for studying the work of the best operatives and increasing its intensity, i.e., ‘speeding up’ the workers. For example, a mechanic’s operations were filmed in the course of a whole day […] A newly engaged worker is taken to the factory cinema where he is shown a ‘model’ performance of his job; the worker is made to ‘catch up’ with that performance. A week later, he is taken to the cinema again and shown pictures of his own performance, which is then compared with the ‘model’.6 5 Lenin, “The Taylor System.” 6 Lenin, “The Taylor System.”

76 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Lenin’s essay points to the dominant metaphor in the socio-cultural life of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the figure of ‘the human motor’ as an inexhaustible body whose experience is equated to that of a machine.7 The worker’s body was conceptualized as part of a “highly-synchronized automated industry,” in the words of E.P. Thompson.8 The substitution of natural cyclical time with abstract linear time at the onset of industrialism also meant training the body to follow the latter. At the turn of the twentieth century, Frederick Winslow Taylor and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth used photography and motion pictures to structure the temporality (rhythm and time) and movement (profitable execution of work gestures) of workers’ bodies. In his 1911 book, Principles of Scientific Management, Taylor emphasized gaining maximum efficiency from both machine and worker as key for maximization of profit.9 The fundamentals of this methodology, which later came to be known by his name, Taylorism, involved strict time and motion control for optimum performance. In order to prescribe the most efficient movements that a worker must carry out to maximize production and minimize fatigue, Taylor carried out “Time and Motion Studies” using an indexical rendering of the photographic medium, as described by Lenin in the quotations above. Following Taylor’s discoveries, Frank Gilbreth (later joined by his wife, Lillian) enhanced these motion studies by specifically focusing on the “human element” to improve the output of production and make it a “valuable aid to the management.”10 The Gilbreths formulated an index of work motions that could contribute to the rationalization of production across a range of industries.11 In order to obtain accurate timings of labour movements, Gilbreth added a specially calibrated clock and a microchronometer. An article in The Outlook in 1913 explained that Mr. Gilbreth’s invention consists in the use of the standard moving-picture machine in conjunction with a special chronometer, or ‘clock’. Suppose a series of pictures are taken with the usual immense rapidity, say, of a workman assembling a machine. Every one of the countless small moving-picture films contains also the picture of the clock; and thus a

7 Rabinbach, The Human Motor, 18. 8 Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” 9 See Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management. 10 See Galloway, Organization and Management. 11 The Frank and Lillian Gilbreth Collection is held by Purdue University, which received the donation following Lillian Gilbreth’s death in 1972.

The Fl âneur as Filmmaker

77

minute and precise measure of the time used in every movement of the workman is recorded.12

The short films made by Gilbreth in line with this aim showed the repeated execution of the same work movement, such as bricklaying, canning, cutting, assembling, or writing. The Gilbreths mostly filmed close-up shots of shop-floor labour, depicting the space travelled and time elapsed by each movement required to complete the mechanical work. In addition to these close-ups, they also used other cinematographic techniques, such as slow- and fast-motion, for better analysis and demonstration of the motion. In The Quest of the One Best Way, a film edited in 1945 by James Perkins from the original footage shot by the Gilbreths in the early twentieth century, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth are seen walking along the street towards the camera while the microchronometer occupies a central position in the frame.13 The scene, which has the aesthetics of any actuality film shot during the first years of the cinematograph, captures the different velocities of pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, and automobiles that characterized urban mobility at the turn of the twentieth century. The clock, which is characteristic of time and motion studies, provides an abstract rhythm against which all velocities can be measured. The Gilbreth couple, along with their companions, walk towards the camera, with their bodies sliding out of the frame second by second. While the clock is reminiscent of the chronographe éléctrique, which is seen in some Marey’s choronophotographs, the way the street is framed seems to be chosen to maximize the diversity of movement—perhaps a reflection on the centrality of mobility in modern industrial culture. Appropriately, the Gilbreths occupy the centre of the frame as the original clock-setters of diverse mobilities. It is worth briefly mentioning here several affinities between Taylor’s and the Gilbreths’ studies of labour motion and Muybridge’s and Marey’s studies of human locomotion, because both Taylor and the Gilbreths referenced Muybridge and Marey.14 Most of their inspiration came from what I described in the previous chapter as attempts at standardizing and rationalizing production by imposing abstract time and space on the body. 12 N.A., “Many Inventions.” 13 The analysis here is based on the digitized copy held by the Library of Congress, which is available for viewing at https://archive.org/details/original-films-of-frank-b-gilbreth-1945. Accessed 4 May 2021. 14 See for example Braun, Picturing Time; Goldberg, Power of Photography, 69; Hediger and Vondreau, Films That Work.

78 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

In some of their images, Taylor and the Gilbreths used a similar abstract grid against which the body’s motion was measured. However, although the Gilbreths’ micro-chronometer obviously resembles the chronographe éléctrique Marey used in his locomotion studies at La Station Physiologique, it could be argued that it represents a different conception of temporality. In the former, although it records the temporality of the worker’s body executing work and could therefore be argued to represent his own corporeal temporality in a Mareyesque sense, when the motion picture is used to prescribe other studies of how to execute work so as to increase efficiency, it becomes symbolic of an abstract and external temporality imposed on the workers’ bodies. Although aiming to decrease workers’ fatigue while increasing productivity, the Gilbreths’ project was still about standardization.15 Furthermore, the goal of Time and Motion Studies was not limited to eradicating time loss. Rather, eliminating unproductive movement from the system was also implicated in the Taylorist agenda. Lenin writes, for example, that the layout of new factory buildings was planned in such a way that “not a moment will be lost in delivering materials to the factory, in conveying them from one shop to another, and in dispatching the finished products.”16 This absolute rationalization of bodily movement attests to the emergent body politics that was strongly connected with the re-construction of space and time in industrialist capitalism. The aspect of corporeal spatiotemporality that governed Marey’s studies of human locomotion was not therefore something that needed to be discovered in Taylor’s and the Gilbreths’ studies, but something that needed to be disciplined for shop-floor efficiency. Despite their nuances, the motion studies of Taylor and the Gilbreths shared a rhetoric of scientific objectivity, one that disregards the particularities of individual bodies to achieve a temporal and spatial standardization of production.17 In Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity, and Drift, Leo Charney claims that, in his obsession with control, Taylor tried not to dispel entirely but to accommodate unproductive movement18 in his scheme of an ideal worker’s movements. In other words, he wanted to “tame” the drift by prescribing certain moments for rest while the worker was still engaged in productive 15 Curtis, “Images of Efficiency.” 16 See Lenin, “The Taylor System.” 17 See Curtis, “Images of Efficiency.” 18 Here, unproductive denotes not producing any saleable product on the assembly line. Flânerie could very well be seen as a productive activity: “Basic to flânerie, among other things, is the idea that the fruits of idleness are more precious than the fruits of labour.” Benjamin, “Convolute M: The Flâneur” in The Arcades Project, 453.

The Fl âneur as Filmmaker

79

action, thereby linking its value to profit measures.19 Untamed drift, on the other hand, was vilified as idleness and the primary form of resistance to work. Georges Freidmann, who has researched the sociology of labour from 1895 to 1935, writes in La Crise du Progrès that “Taylor’s obsession, and that of his collaborators and successors, is ‘the war on flânerie’.”20 Any kind of indomitable, unproductive, or uncontrollable movement was a great source of anxiety for the industrialist hive mind. Unlike the controlled movement encapsulated by the Taylorist conception of the human motor, it could be argued that the flâneur embodied movement per se in his free flow throughout the city. Defined as the unrestrained flow of a body in a multitude of spaces, flânerie represents corporeal spatiotemporality (one’s own time) in contrast to the human motor, which represents a body politics whereby abstract time and spatiality are imposed on the body.

Flânerie as Phantasmagoria: A Reflection on Method Flânerie was first associated with the phantasmagoria of modernity by Walter Benjamin, who provided the most influential and comprehensive study of the phenomenon in The Arcades Project. This association is particularly significant for my analysis of the affinity between the experience of moving images and the city at the turn of the twentieth century. Investigating the possibility of re-writing urban history from the most basic and under-studied elements of the everyday, such as cultural productions or objects of mass consumption, Benjamin argues that “the new forms of behaviour and the new economically and technologically based creations that we owe to the nineteenth century enter the universe of a phantasmagoria.” He continues: These creations undergo this ‘illumination’ not only in a theoretical manner, by an ideological transposition, but also in the immediacy of their perceptible presence. They are manifest as phantasmagorias. Thus appear the arcades—first entry in the field of iron construction; thus appear the world exhibitions, whose link to the entertainment industry is significant. Also included in this order of phenomena is the experience of the flâneur, who abandons himself to the phantasmagorias of the marketplace.21 19 Charney, Empty Moments, 80–81. 20 Quoted in Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 436. 21 Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century [exposé of 1939]” in The Arcades Project, 14.

80 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

However, Benjamin never clearly defines the meaning of phantasmagoria. In fact, in his repeated use of the term, he seems to assume the reader’s familiarity with it. Composed of two Greek roots (phantasma meaning ‘apparition’ and agoria meaning ‘speaking publicly’), phantasmagoria denotes a form of elaborate magic lantern entertainment, which was popular in the late eighteenth century. In its widely practiced and experienced form, phantasmagoria can be defined as a play that incorporates several unexpected interventions by magic lanterns projecting unsettling images of ghosts, skeletons, and other demonic creatures. Tom Gunning identifies three aspects of phantasmagoria from its most advanced form as practised in Paris during the 1790s.22 First, the projections were performed in an abandoned monastery and audiences encountered various symbols and decorations as they entered, ensuring suspension of disbelief. This was further enhanced by music and sound effects. Second, unlike traditional magic lantern shows, phantasmagoria sometimes used multiple lanterns hidden behind a screen. This back-projection technique increased the effect of the visual images. Third, several movement effects were achieved, not only through trick slides that performed movement, but by mobile lanterns mounted on wheels.23 This gave the impression of a fleeting apparition, while three-dimensionality could be achieved by projecting the images on smoke.24 Phantasmagoria thus captivated spectators by sensory immersion, ephemerality of images, and shocking encounters. Terry Castle, in a detailed genealogy of phantasmagoria, points to a paradox at the heart of this optical illusory entertainment that continued informing its metaphorical uses in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, phantasmagoria participated in the discourse of Enlightenment: it claimed to demystify supernatural apparitions and to show that they could be explained through science. In some phantasmagoria shows, the magic lantern and accompanying set-up would be shown to reveal the production of these spellbinding spectacles. Spectres, ghosts, and haunting—no matter how petrifying or captivating they might be—could thus be unravelled. On the other hand, for Castle, phantasmagoria consolidated the emotional aura of the supernatural by turning it into a sensational spectacle. Accordingly, in 22 Gunning, “Phantasmagoria and the Manufacturing of Illusions and Wonder.” 23 For further and more elaborate technical information about the evolution of phantasmagoria lanterns, see Jordi Pons and Daniel Pitarch, “History of a Fantascope.” 24 See N. A., “Magic Lantern Shows” and Gunning, “Phantasmagoria and the Manufacturing of Illusions.”

The Fl âneur as Filmmaker

81

its metaphorical uses, phantasmagoria had connotations of being captivated by apparitions that haunt the mind and memory, as well as unravelling such apparitions.25 Such double meaning can be seen, for example, in Arthur Rimbaud’s poem from 1870s, entitled “Night in Hell:” “I will unveil every mystery: whether religious or natural, death, birth, the future, the past, cosmogony, the void. I have mastered phantasmagoria.”26 In “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,”27 Benjamin associates the phantasmagoria with the beguiling sensory experience of the modern metropolis. That is, for Benjamin the experience of all the produced spaces of the modern metropolis—its arcades, boulevards, panoramas, streets, world exhibitions, and even interiors—is analogous to a phantasmagoria.28 Just like the hidden magic lantern, the apparatus that produces the phantasmagoria’s deceptive and enchanting images, the actual political economy and ideology underlying the production (and reproduction) of these spaces must be revealed. Benjamin’s analysis of urban milieus (arcades, boulevards, and streets), cultural artefacts (world exhibitions, museums, and fashion), social types (flâneur, detective, and streetwalker) and modes of experience (idleness, boredom, and dreams) aims to illuminate “the darkness of the lived moment.”29 He conceived the Arcades Project as “an experiment in the technique of awakening,” aiming to transform the “not-yet-conscious knowledge of what has been” into “something that just first happened to us, first struck us.”30 In other words, excavating present experiences to decipher the history and politics that have created them sheds light on the functioning of modern metropolitan society. Benjamin argues that “remembering and awakening are most intimately related.”31 This connection between alienating oneself from the immersive sensory experience of the present by remembering the mechanisms that constructed that present borrows from the mechanism of phantasmagoria. According to Gunning, the phantasmagoria was deliberately presented in the zone of tension between credulity (certain audience members who actually believed the show they witnessed contained actual revenants) and the announced 25 Castle, “Phantasmagoria.” 26 Rimbaud, “Night in Hell.” 27 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 14–26. 28 See Gilloch, “Urban Optics.” 29 Sayer, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century, 3. 30 Sayer, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century, 3. Emphasis in original. 31 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 389.

82 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

demystification of the show by the lecturer as an optical novelty fully explainable in terms of scientific principles—in other words, as an avowed illusion.32

Gunning’s idea here makes the reason for Benjamin’s analogy between phantasmagoria and modern metropolitan culture more apparent. Just like the coexistence of immersion and disenchantment implied by phantasmagoria, the experience of metropolitan everyday life cannot be reduced to illusion only. Rather, phantasmagoria performed something more complex than “the simple effacing of the labour of illusion or the ideological positioning of a docile spectator,” says Gunning. He adds, “reflecting the ideological and historical contradiction of the subject matter of phantasmagoria” such as “ghosts haunting the Age of Reason,” the illusion drew its full effect from “the contradiction between cueing certain physical sensations of motion and emotional reactions, while also revealing their unreal nature.”33 Gunning’s emphasis on history haunting the experience of the present can be considered in relation to Benjamin’s dialectical image. “The dialectical image,” Benjamin claims, “is an image that emerges suddenly, in a flash.” He explains, “It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past […] rather, what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.” He then further clarifies: “the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent.”34 From this perspective, Benjamin’s formulation of phantasmagoria also entails the critical exploration of cultural analysis, which takes as its principle the analysis of present cultural objects to discover their emergence and function in society.35 “One can read the real like a text,” Benjamin maintains,36 echoing Franz Hessel’s description of flânerie: “a kind of reading the street, in which faces, shop fronts, shop windows, café terraces, street cars, automobiles, and trees become a wealth of equally valid letters of the alphabet that together result in words, sentences, and pages of an ever-new book.”37 Benjamin includes “the experience of the flâneur” among his examples of phantasmagoria in “Paris, the Capital of Nineteenth Century.” The disposition of the flâneur is two-fold: he is not only a phantasmagoria; he also “abandons 32 Gunning, “Phantasmagoria and the Manufacturing of Illusions and Wonder,” 34. 33 Gunning, “Phantasmagoria and the Manufacturing of Illusions and Wonder,” 35. 34 Sayer, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century, 3. 35 See Susan Buck-Morss, “Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk.” 36 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 464. 37 Hessel, Spazieren in Berlin, quoted in Tester, ed. The Flâneur, 81.

The Fl âneur as Filmmaker

83

himself to the phantasmagorias” surrounding him.38 That is, the flâneur is a creation of the nineteenth century, and flânerie an activity of cultural analysis that observes, takes in, and contemplates other creations that are immediately present. In the same essay, Benjamin proposes Charles Baudelaire as the flâneur par excellence because of his habit of strolling along the streets of Paris and his utilization of flânerie as a trope in his poetry. According to Keith Tester, flânerie is one of the main narrative devices of Baudelaire’s collection Paris Spleen, which provides an insight into exactly what it is that the flâneur does. These poems, when taken individually, provide a series of snapshots from the streets of Paris. For, as Dujardin states, Baudelaire was more concerned with implanting the image in the memory, than with adorning or elaborating it.39 Even though his walks are not present within his poems, flânerie is the main motif that ties all these scenes together and makes felt the presence of a free-flowing eye amidst the city’s public spaces. Tester posits that for Baudelaire, the poet is the man who can reap aesthetic meaning and an individual kind of existential security from the spectacle of the teeming crowds—the visible public—of the metropolitan environment of the city of Paris. 40 In “The Painter of Modern Life,” which was published in 1863, Baudelaire wrote of the flâneur: “The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water that of the fish. His passion, and his profession, is to merge with the crowd.”41 In a 1995 article, film historian Livio Belloi uses the same quotation to describe the cinematic aesthetics of Lumière operators. Taking this quote as a departure point, Belloi suggests that “the figure of the Lumière cameraman prolongs, in his way, in a double gesture of recapture and variation, the cardinal figure of the stroller, or passer-by (flâneur).”42 The crux of Belloi’s argument is that Lumière operators wandered around the streets and public spaces, and mingled with the masses as unrecognizable flâneurs in order to find filmable moments. However, as soon as they started operating the cinematograph, they became observers, now recognized as the holders of the gaze and thus differentiated from the crowd. Belloi also points to the permeability of space in Lumière’s cinematic aesthetics, referencing Jacques Aumont: “one of the most salient compositional 38 Here, I opt for a denotation of the flâneur as male and leave the complications of its definition for a detailed discussion of the flâneuse in the following chapter. 39 Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” in Illuminations. 40 Tester, “Introduction,” 2. 41 Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 399. 42 Belloi, “Lumière and His View,” 462.

84 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

principles of the Lumière view” is that the “on-screen space (champ), offscreen space (hors-champ) and forefield (avant-champ) remain infinitely permeable; the boundaries are supple, or even better, porous.”43 This extends the dynamism of the image thanks to in- and outflow of moving objects, such as pedestrians, car, trams, and trains. Finally, for Belloi, because of the “intuitive exploration of interpersonal space and its founding rites,” the Lumière view involves a “thought of the space of interaction, of its places, practices, and uses.”44 These aspects of the Lumière view, woven together through a parallelism with Baudelaire’s poetic style, I would contend, convey a cinematic aesthetics of flânerie. To put it more clearly, in Lumière films, we witness a translation or transposition of the activity of flânerie into cinematic aesthetics. It is therefore possible to draw parallels between these three aesthetic tropes in Lumière films and the three main concepts into which descriptions of flânerie can be grouped. First, the intricate relationship between gaze and flânerie, as described by Belloi in relation to Lumière cinematograph operators, opens up a new way to problematize the widely accepted descriptions of the flâneur as a scopophiliac. Second, the permeability of vision through the continuous interplay of champ and hors-champ can be considered an aesthetic transposition of the flâneur’s free-flowing drift through a multitude of spaces. Hence, with an ever-changing visual input and an ever-drifting centre of action, a new way to challenge fictive completeness and the privileged position of the subject is introduced into moving images. Third, the crowds that populate the urban streets become an intriguing image to represent the different mobilities and velocities of the individuals comprising metropolitan society. Because the filmmaker is part of the crowd yet at the same time differentiated from it, he or she is positioned as both maker of the image and possessor of an analytical perspective. The ‘illumination’ process that the filmmaker triggers by transposing the world into images involves an analytical disposition, which brings us back to cinema as phantasmagoria. Treating film as phantasmagoria allows for an awareness of the ideological transposition behind the images and, furthermore, considers those images as a tool for cultural analysis. This is perhaps most detectable in the above-mentioned sociological aspect of Lumière views in their recognition of a politics of space (as regards the interaction and movement of bodies). Lumière cameramen were chiefly interested in the daily life of cities, villages, 43 Quoted in Belloi, “Lumière and His View,” 467. 44 Belloi, “Lumière and His View,” 473.

The Fl âneur as Filmmaker

85

and factories, and their interest expanded worldwide. As the art of cultural travel was on the rise in the early twentieth century, the Lumière Company encouraged its operators to travel around the world, walking the streets to document daily life. 45 These aspects prove the continuing close connection between the thriving art of cinema and pedestrianism. Taking Belloi’s argument a step further, it is therefore possible to suggest that Lumière operators used flânerie as a trope, much like Baudelaire did in his poetry, and developed various cinematic aesthetics to translate the flâneur’s presence and experience. The phenomenon of Lumière operators as flâneurs, and the aesthetic devices they used to depict the social life of their era and enhance the cinematic language, perfectly exemplify the mutually effective relationship between pedestrianism and cinema. These aesthetic devices, as will be explained through examples below, were further developed and diversified as the medium advanced, and as the politics of urban space and of the body evolved.

Lumière’s Cinematic Aesthetics of Movement: A Reflection on the Diagonal In a documentary made in celebration of the centenary of the Lumière cinematograph, Bertrand Tavernier underlines the enthusiasm of August and Louis Lumière to register movement in the best possible way. Tavernier says, “Calling this invention cinématographe, which meant the writing of movement, meant something for Louis Lumière. He was always looking for ways to give movement at its best.”46 Being an exceptionally talented photographer, Louis Lumière knew how to compose an image; in line with his enthusiasm to convey movement in the richest possible way, he devised the diagonal perspective.47 One of the best-known examples that Tavernier refers to is the L’arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat (Catalogue Lumière [hereafter C.L.] No. 653). This film has a vanishing point in the upper right-hand corner of the frame from where diagonal rails extend towards the lower left-hand corner. The passengers on the platform are lined up along the right-hand side of the frame, which increases the effectiveness of the vanishing point. The 45 Frank Kessler notes for example that sometimes no-name streets were filmed for a more “generic” representation of everyday life. See Kessler, “Comment cadrer la rue?.” 46 Tavernier makes this statement in a documentary, The Lumière Brothers’ First Films (1996), between 06’57’’ and 07’20’’. 47 Tavernier makes this statement in a documentary, The Lumière Brothers’ First Films (1996), between 06’57’’ and 07’20’’.

86 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

locomotive emerges from this vanishing point before rushing towards the camera along the diagonal axis. After passing the camera, it stops sometime after going out of the frame. The film is perhaps best known for the legend according to which it caused panic and terror in the audience during its screening. 48 L’arrivée takes its affective power from this diagonal composition of movement, which enables Lumière to cover a longer duration of movement over a larger expanse of space, thereby creating an ever-growing feeling of proximity thanks to the rapid flux of the object in motion from the background to the foreground. The film’s depth of field, created by the diagonal perspective, is further enhanced by a lens defect, which makes the approaching locomotive appear to be accelerating, bringing the background into contact with the foreground at an unexpected pace. As the light grey shades dominating the earlier frames are swallowed by the ever-growing black object (i.e., the approaching locomotive), this illusory acceleration adds to the palpability of an object in motion. This ‘reality’ effect is largely achieved because the train overruns almost all the planes of proximity at such speed that the audience expects it to protrude beyond the confines of the cinema screen. The physicist and astronomer Félix Regnault describes his perceptual experience of the cinematographic locomotive as follows: “The locomotive appears small at first, then immense, as if it were going to crush the audience; one has the impression of depth and relief, even though it’s a single image that unfolds before our eyes […] You’d think you were there.”49 This enriched movement perspective, caused by portraying a longer duration of movement over a larger expanse of space, somehow boosts the ‘realness’ or ‘as-if-ness’ of the image. The affective response 48 We read from film historian Martin Loiperdinger that three versions of this film are known to have existed, although the Catalogue Lumière website states that the commercial catalogue only lists one version of the ‘train arrival’. The famous one that survives today is this third version, filmed by Louis Lumière in the summer of 1897. It was screened on 10 October 1897, according to an announcement in Lyon Republicain. According to the data presented in the Catalogue Lumière, “There are two other versions, non cataloguées [not in the commercial catalogue], that have been found in the Lumière archive by historians. One of those versions was shot in early 1896, as there were 32 stills used in a newspaper article about Le Cinématographe (published in La Science française, Paris, nr 59, March 13, 1896, 89). Possibly, this version was screened on January 25, 1896, in Lyon.” The analysis here is based on the third version, C. L. No. 653. Catalogue Lumière Accessed 4 May 2021. However, another important point is that many films of the same theme and a similar cinematic aesthetic were shot in the early years of cinema. See Loiperdinger, “Lumière’s Arrival of the Train.” Also refer to the same article for a detailed discussion of the panic myth. 49 Cited in Loiperdinger, “Lumière’s Arrival of the Train,” 97.

The Fl âneur as Filmmaker

87

Figure 11: Albert Truchet’s poster for Cinématographe Lumière, 1896.

to this unusual way of framing and conveying movement was visualized simply in an 1896 poster (Figure 11). Most of the image is occupied by the screen, while two women watch from the lower right-hand corner as the locomotive approaches. The poster’s most striking feature is in the bottom left-hand corner, where the railway tracks protrude from the screen and extend into the hall. This creates the strong impression that the train will run into the hall rather than stopping. Truchet’s poster thus takes its strength from visually depicting this affective shock. L’arrivée and its reception, as depicted in this poster, may be a good point of departure to demonstrate the three most important aesthetic outcomes of the diagonal framing that characterize the Lumière view, and which gave birth to the cinematic trope of flânerie. The diagonal framing, first, ensures a sense of realness through a rich depiction of movement, achieved by a gaze positioned to register the action flowing in and out of the frame. Second, the flow of action along the diagonal axis creates a permeability between background and foreground, and inside and outside the frame. Third, the way the crowds are used as an element to frame such diagonal flow of action exposes Lumière’s talent for reading the structures that shape spaces of interaction. These three aesthetic outcomes of diagonal composition of movement therefore encapsulate the three main concepts—gaze, drift, and the paradox of detached belonging—that I introduced earlier to draw parallels between the Lumière view and flânerie.

88 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Lumière’s Cinematic Aesthetics of Flânerie It was Lumière’s passion to bring images of daily life from across the world to screening halls, which is perhaps the strongest reason why the Lumière Catalogue is also a very early example of cinematic ethnography. Lumière operators wandered around cities filming daily street life. The most prolific operator, Alexandre Promio, as well as others like Gabriel Veyre and Charles Moisson, travelled around the world recording authentic dances, dining habits, celebrities, royal processions, and historic moments, but most importantly squares, streets, ports, and marketplaces—the hubs of everyday life. Initially, flânerie was both a way to travel and a tool to encounter filmable instants and draw aesthetic meaning from the spectacle of teeming public spaces. Flânerie (and travel) as a method to experience as well as archive the fleeting moments and scenes of everyday life brings us back to Baudelaire and his most-cited description of flânerie: For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting, and the infinite […] To see the world, to be at the centre of the world and to remain hidden from it are some of the tiny pleasures.50

Livio Belloi also contends that, in the manner of Baudelaire’s stroller, Lumière operators chose crowds as their privileged territory. Perhaps the strongest example is the very first film Auguste and Louis Lumière shot—La Sortie d’Usine Lumière—which portrays a crowd of workers passing out of the factory gate. In the later films, especially the city scenes, crowds continue to be a major element of the frame. As Belloi notes: Micromovements, flux and reflux, attitudes and faces of anonymous passers-by, clothing and accessories of beautiful ladies, children’s games: so many fleeting and transitory phenomena that provide material for his inspection at the same time delineating the contours of his sphere of intervention […] The ‘undulating’ and the ‘fugitive’ are what most interest the Lumière operators.51

Belloi further emphasizes the “strong optical relation” that the stroller maintains with the crowd and suggests the duplicity of the camera 50 Cited in Belloi, “Lumière and His View,” 462. 51 Belloi, “Lumière and His View,” 462.

The Fl âneur as Filmmaker

89

operator’s position before and during the shooting. If operators wandered incognito to draw aesthetic meaning from the electrifying streets, the moment they started operating the cinematograph they became detached from the crowd and differentiated from it. It is also possible to take Belloi’s argument further by suggesting that while the flânerie in the street ends for the operators, the flânerie in the cinema just begins. It is the very act of flânerie that informs the perspective from which the recording is made. Hence, flânerie cannot be considered separately from the content, style, and perspective of shooting; instead, it remains the absent trope that connects different films in the Lumière Catalogue, similarly to the poems in Baudelaire’s Spleen de Paris. 1. The Gaze: A Wandering Eye In his introduction to an edited volume on The Flâneur, while formulating flânerie as a poetic trope in Baudelaire, Tester underlines that, “The flâneur is the secret spectator of the spectacle of the spaces and places of the city.”52 A close study of Baudelaire’s Spleen de Paris suggests an understanding of flânerie as “the activity of the sovereign spectator going about the city in order to find the things which will occupy his gaze.”53 These definitions of the flâneur and flânerie can equally correspond to a camera operator wandering around and observing various spaces and places to film. According to Henri Langlois, the Lumière cameramen “started by observing what they intended to film, at length, if the subject lent itself to that by its repetitious nature.”54 Langlois cites a view of Church Street (C.L. No. 700), which shows double-decker buses arriving and departing at regular intervals, conveying a sense of rhythm that dominates the street. This brings us back to the “strong optical relation” that Belloi suggests. The activity of flânerie determines both the perspective and the length of time the cinematograph will film. In that moment, Belloi suggests, the operator changes from a flâneur to an observer: Much like the stroller, the Lumière cameraman then adopts an ambulatory posture, an avid gaze, waiting for visual stimuli. His posture is however radically modified as soon as the operation of the shot begins. Renouncing motion, focusing on a fixed point in space, the operator leaves the crowd, singularizing himself. From strolling to immobilization, from fusion to 52 Tester, “Introduction,” 7. 53 Tester, “Introduction,” 7. 54 Paraphrased in Aumont, “Lumière Revisited,” 426.

90 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

distancing, the stroller transforms himself, at this precise moment, into an observer.55

Evocative of this manner of working, the films in the Lumière Catalogue are called vue (view). This word choice emphasizes the heavily present element of perspective and gaze. Acknowledging the vues in the Lumière Catalogue as embodied viewpoints reinforces the formulization of flânerie as a cinematic trope in Lumière films. The embodied gaze is also richly varied in the Lumière catalogue. The extensive variety of experimental vues with a kinaesthetic quality—such as from a rowing boat (Vue prise d’un baleinère en marche [C.L. No. 1241]), a ship caught in a storm (Vue de l’avant d’un transatlantique [C.L. No. 1039]), a hot-air balloon (Panorama pris d’un ballon captif [C.L. No. 997]), or the lift of the Eiffel Tower (Panorama pendant l’ascension de la Tour Eiffel [C.L. No. 992])—may all help challenge the privileged centre of projection in cinema. Judging from these examples, it could be suggested that the Lumière view not only often possesses kinaesthetic qualities but also implies a gaze that is almost always laden with a sense of presence and observance. ‘Panorama’, another word that Lumière used for tracking shots, is also strongly suggestive of an embodied viewpoint on the move. Composed of two Greek roots (pan, meaning all and horama meaning view), panorama denotes an “unbroken view of a whole region” or “a picture or photograph containing a wide view.”56 However, for nineteenth-century audiences, panorama also meant a popular form of visual entertainment. In his comprehensive research on forms of panorama, the media archaeologist Erkki Huhtamo differentiates between two types of panorama: a circular panorama, which is a 360-degree panoramic painting shown in a cylindrical building erected for that purpose, and a moving panorama, which consists of a long roll painting moved in front of the audience by means of a special apparatus.57 A circular panorama was designed to provide an immersive wrap-around environment where the spectators, as they step into the structure, are transported to historic moments or to touristic hotspots in distant lands. The spectators are immersed in a distant space-time and enjoy this experience with the whole body in motion. It is an instance of this form of panorama that Benjamin describes in The Arcades Project: 55 Belloi, “Lumière and His View,” 463. 56 Oxford Dictionary of English. 57 See Huhtamo, “Global Glimpses for Local Realities” and Uricchio, “A ‘Proper Point of View’.”

The Fl âneur as Filmmaker

91

View from raised platform, surrounded by a balustrade, of surfaces lying round about and beneath. The painting runs along a cylindrical wall approximately a hundred meters long and twenty meters high.58

In contrast, the moving panorama, which Huhtamo’s detailed study demonstrates has been significantly under-researched, was enjoyed by spectators in a fixed position. Instead of being surrounded by the image, the audience was seated in front of it, as in a theatre or lecture hall. The scroll was then rolled out on the stage using a cranking mechanism, which remained invisible to the audience. The shows were accompanied by music and a lecturer’s commentary. As Huhtamo points out, these moving panoramas as objects and performances were very diverse. But their common characteristics allow the author to establish connections with cinematic experience. By naming some of their vues as panoramas, the Lumière Brothers were thus perhaps embracing the connotations of this entertainment medium and channelling them into the new medium of cinema. Instead of visitors gaining an embodied experience by walking around a circular panorama, it was now the camera operator who did the walking while the audience was introduced to a new way of perceiving and experiencing the view in an embodied way. Furthermore, just as the moving panorama scrolls, the film strip glides smoothly before the viewers to present a continuous snippet of movement. Considering such characteristics of viewpoint in their filmography, the common features of the gaze in Lumière’s cinematic aesthetics can be sketched as follows: it is embodied, anchored in the present, and gives an uninterrupted snippet of daily life in the richest way possible. Providing this snippet meant not only extracting a sense of rhythm and movement from a particular place, but also indicating that the recording was only partial. While Lumière filmed movement along a diagonal axis to give an extended sense of time and space, it was equally important to allow for the action to flow into and out of the frame. The best instances of a few hundred films that could be cited are Sortie d’Usine (C. L. No. 91,1), Place des Cordeliers (C. L. No. 128), Place Bellecour (C. L. No. 129), Mi-Carême: Char de la reine des reines (C. L. No. 156), and Char et batailles de confettis (C. L. No. 1010). In such diagonal framing of movement, the paragon of which is L’arrivée, the object or objects (such as a train, a procession, a cavalcade, or a mass of people) enter at the rear of the frame before exiting from the front at various speeds. The frame thus remains porous on all four sides, indicating 58 Benjamin, “Convolute Q: The Panorama” in The Arcades Project, 528.

92 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

that the action (such as the movement of a train, pedestrians, or horsedrawn carriages) within the champ continues in the hors-champ, or that the hors-champ has the potential to flow into the champ and alter the composition or meaning of the image. This brings us to the second aspect of the diagonal framing of movement: the permeability of vision. The fact that an image’s in-frame composition, and thus its meaning, is always susceptible to change due to transformative forces from within and without corresponds conceptually to the drift of the flâneur. Hence, the permeability of vision in the Lumière view can be seen as characteristic of an aesthetics of drift. 2. Drift: Porous Framing, or Permeability of Vision The drift of the flâneur, being constantly and insatiably on the move, is probably most effectively described by Benjamin in his Arcades Project: An intoxication comes over the man who walks long and aimlessly through the streets. With each step, the walk takes on greater momentum; ever weaker grow the temptations of shops, of bistros, of smiling women, ever more irresistible the magnetism of the next street corner, of a distant mass of foliage, of a street name.59

The perpetual urge to walk that characterizes the flâneur implies a constant change of the content of the visual field and mobilization of the central viewpoint. The flâneur’s attention is caught by various elements on the street and by being constantly on the move while his perspective is also set in motion. Hence the drift of the flâneur is two-fold: it concerns a change of both content and perspective. In numerous Lumière views, both elements are established via the diagonal framing of movement. The content of the image continually changes due to inflow or outflow, or the changing aspect of an object or mass in motion. Secondly, Lumière provides a change of perspective, often by re-filming a certain view from a different perspective. At other times, they opt for ‘non-centring’, which implies the absence of any privileged centre of action. Noël Burch contends that the Lumière aesthetics consisted of choosing a frame as suitable as possible to allow for a ‘trapping’ of an instant of the real, then to film this frame without any concern for controlling or centring the action. Perhaps the best moment from the Catalogue Lumière to start a discussion on the aesthetics of drift from this perspective is to look at the four versions of Vue prise d’un plate-forme mobile (C.L. No. 1155–1158). In these vues Lumière 59 Benjamin, “The Arcades of Paris” in The Arcades Project, 880.

The Fl âneur as Filmmaker

93

Figure 12: Still from Vue prise d’une plate-form mobile I (C.L. No. 1155).

operators film a moving pavement that was installed in Paris during the Universal Exhibition of 1900. The cinematograph was positioned to the side to show the flow of passengers on and off the pavement along a diagonal line. The composition of each version, as can be seen from the image above (Figure 12), is very similar to L’arrivée, the paragon of the diagonal framing of action in the Catalogue Lumière. The moving pavement, the subject matter of this particular Lumière film, was a temporary structure that facilitated access from one gallery to another in the Exposition grounds. An article in La Revue Scientifique from the same year explains the convenience as follows: A certain number of inclined mobile planes have been mounted in the Exposition of 1900 to facilitate the movement of visitors between galleries; one can only regret that this solution is not applied to cross the tracks in public traffic: the Pont des Invalides, Pont de l’Alma, etc.60 60 My translation from the French original: “Un certain nombre de plans inclinés mobiles ont été répartis dans l’Exposition de 1900, pour faciliter aux visiteurs l’accès des galeries; on peut seulement regretter que cette solution n’ait pas été appliquée à la traversée des voies conservées à la circulation publique: pont des Invalides, pont de l’Alma, etc.” N.A., “Les trottoirs roulants de l’Exposition.

94 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Designed to transport thousands of visitors along a track of 3.5 kilometres and 9 stations in the heart of the Exposition,61 the moving pavement was constructed on a wooden viaduct 7 metres high, which operated along the following itinerary: Invalides, Rue Fabert, Quai d’Orsay, Champ de Mars, and Avenue de Lamothe-Piquet-Invalides. Huhtamo describes how it was divided into three parallel platforms with three different speeds: “On the outer edge, there was a stationary platform; next to it, a slow platform moving about 1 metre per second; next to it, a fast platform moving at about twice that speed.”62 According to Huhtamo, the moving walkway was one of several technologies designed to control the mobility of visitors to the fairgrounds.63 He argues that the Exhibition was “a highly scripted space” and that visitors’ movements were “part of the overall design.” From this perspective, the moving walkway represents a highly restricted regime of mobility, which only allows pedestrians, or passengers, to move along a strictly determined route at a predetermined velocity. However, Huhtamo also f inds some examples that prove that it generated practices other than those intended: “Of course, people don’t always do what they are told. They make their own decisions, change their minds, follow a moment’s fancy […] Mobility systems are not only used as intended—they are tested, re-interpreted, and even re-functionalized.”64 While Huhtamo admits that further research is needed to prove which re-interpretations were attempted, he maintains that the visitors still enjoyed their own trajectories no matter how strictly the Exhibition’s organizers predetermined the visitors’ routes and mobilities. Huhtamo sees an association between the panorama and the moving walkway. In support of this, he cites a guidebook that reported how the travellers on the trottoir roulant were able to admire “from the top of the balcony, the details of the panorama offered to their eyes.”65 Just as visitors in a circular panorama walked around the viewing platform to see all the aspects of the painting, so did the moving walkway turn actual scenes of the city into a panoramic visual spectacle.66 Not surprisingly, the moving walkway attracted huge attention from photographers and 61 62 63 64 65 66

N.A., “Les trottoirs roulants de l’Exposition.” Huhtamo, “(Un)walking at the Fair,” 69. Huhtamo, “(Un)walking at the Fair,” 69. Huhtamo, “(Un)walking at the Fair,” 64. Huhtamo, “(Un)walking at the Fair,” 73. Huhtamo, “(Un)walking at the Fair,” 73.

The Fl âneur as Filmmaker

95

cinematographers, although public interest was much less than expected.67 Not only Lumière operators (those who filmed the moving walkway are currently unidentified),68 but also Georges Méliès and Edison cameraman James H. White took the opportunity to film the moving pavement.69 In Panorama pris du trottoir roulant (Panorama from the Moving Boardwalk) and Les Visiteurs sur le trottoir roulant (Visitors on the Rolling Footpath) by Méliès, the camera is positioned on the moving sidewalk itself to offer a panorama. Edison’s operator White, instead, places his kinetograph on the moving boardwalk to provide a sense that the urban spectacle is a phantom ride, and also to show how fellow voyagers hop on and off the walkway. In the one surviving version of White’s film Panorama from the Moving Boardwalk at the Library of Congress, snippets from the itinerary are seen edited together.70 Since street scenes had to be shot from an upper level with a kinetograph, the view achieved by White is closer to that of a phantom ride. The Lumière cameraman, on the other hand, preferred to offer a view of the landing platform along a diagonal axis, whereby the movement of passengers flows from the background to the foreground. In the four films in the Catalogue Lumière, the cinematograph is always positioned to register movement from such a perspective. Compared with mounting the camera on a moving track, the Lumière versions convey a mastery of the diagonal perspective in depicting the flow of movement from eye-level, in the same way as in L’arrivée. From this standpoint, Vue prise d’une plate-form mobile I stands out from the other three films shot on the same day due to its exceptional convergence of diagonal lines that provide enriched representation of space, movement, and time. The other three versions provide slightly different perspectives on the same subject matter. From a film historical perspective, it remains uncertain whether the same cameraman or different Lumière operators filmed these vues at various points along the track. From a film theoretical perspective, however, it is possible to take these four as 67 See the detailed information provided at the off icial website of Universal Expositions at http://www.expositions-universelles.fr/1900-exposition-universelle-Paris.html. Accessed 4 May 2021. See also Huhtamo’s discussion of ticket prices in “(Un)walking at the Fair,” 71. 68 Ple a s e r e f e r t o C a t a l og u e Lu m i è r e w eb s i t e : ht t p s ://c at a lo g ue - lu m ie r e . com/?s=Vue+prise+d%27une+plate-form+mobile+.Accessed 4 May 2021. 69 Huhtamo, “(Un)walking at the Fair,” 76. 70 The version that is referred to here is an open access version available on the Library of Congress website, restored from the paper print in 1996: Thomas A. Edison, Inc, and Paper Print Collection. Panorama from the Moving Boardwalk (United States: Edison Manufacturing Co, 1900). Video. Retrieved from the Library of Congress on 4 May 2021, https://www.loc.gov/ item/00694265/.

96 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

variations on the same theme and to suggest a comparative analysis of various diagonal angles used to compose the image aesthetically. However, I would like to focus only on Vue prise d’une plate-form mobile I in order to provide a general discussion on the aesthetics of drift. Vue prise d’une plate-form mobile I provides a perfect instance of Lumière’s aesthetics of drift. First, the space within the frame is composed of many planes: the landing platform, the slow-paced narrow platform, and the wider fast track on the right. The elongated perspective into the vanishing point provides not only a richer sense of space but also a stronger feeling of movement due to the possibility of seeing at least two different speeds of motion. Second, the vertical patches of dark colour conveyed by the bodies of passengers, in contrast to the light colour of the sky and the wooden track, increase in size as they move diagonally from the background to the foreground before eventually flowing out of frame. The permeability of the upper and lower right-hand borders is further complicated as more passengers haphazardly walk into the frame. In light of all these characteristics, the film testifies to what Aumont’s claim, cited above, concerning the composition of on-screen and off-screen space in Lumière films: the champ (on-screen space), hors-champ off-screen space, and avant-champ (forefield) are porous borders.71 The constant variation of the visual field brought about by this permeability of the champ, hors-champ and avant-champ is also tackled by Pascal Bonitzer in Le Champ Aveugle. Writing on the discontents of the cinematographic image, he formulates the frame and out-of-frame relationality as follows: Any image contains an infinite number of virtual images, and often one of the tricks of cinema is to ‘bring out’ an infinite number of images from the original image via, for example, the effect of zooming (in or out), by indefinitely widening or narrowing the field.72

Bonitzer here advances a logic of variation, which is more or less a declension, whereby the actual contents of the visual field are transformed by opening onto the virtual domain of the hors-champ. The borders of the image, or 71 Cited in Belloi, “Lumière and His View,” 466. 72 My translation of French original: “Toute image contient une infinité virtuelle d’images, et c’est l’un de jeux du cinéma, parfois, de faire ‘sortir’ par l’effet par exemple du travelling optique (avant ou arrière), par l’élargissement ou le rétrécissement indéf ini du champ, une inf inité d’images d’une image initiale.” Bonitzer, Le champ aveugle, 12.

The Fl âneur as Filmmaker

97

the field, remain open to outside forces, hence the image is never complete or fixed but always fleeting and ephemeral. This porosity of the frame, paradoxically, adds to the feeling of reality by betraying the partialness of the recording. That is, the champ is merely part of the hors-champ. Hence, the centre of action is always displaced, if not a-centred contingently. In Vue prise d’une plate-forme mobile I, the moment viewers fix their eyes on one passenger, that passenger drifts away before sliding out of frame to be lost forever. Viewers then need to fix their eyes on another passenger. Hence, the centre of action in this particular film is always displaced. The contingent a-centring of action, on the other hand, is most dramatically present in Football (C.L. No. 699) and Bicycliste (C.L. No. 17). In the former, the centre of action is gradually lost with the ball sliding hors-champ to leave the viewers with a frame filled with players waiting to get the ball. Each of their bodily gestures becomes a sign to guess the hors-champ or anticipate how the centre of action will return onto the champ from elsewhere. In the latter film, a boy showing off acrobatic movement on his bicycle occasionally slides out of frame. However, the majority of instances in the Lumière Catalogue of porous framing involve the inflow of pedestrians, particularly in city scenes. A perfect instance is Le Pont Neuf (C. L. No. 688), where the camera is positioned to film the flow of pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages across the bridge. In this film, the pedestrian traffic on the pavements and the horse-drawn carriage traffic on the road are shown to have a harmonious rhythm. Another film, Rue Bab-Azoun (C.L. No. 201), portrays a vibrant market square in Algiers, with the camera again positioned to allow for a diagonal flow of pedestrians, horses, and carriages. In Piccadilly Circus (C.L. No. 255), we find a similar view, this time from London. In all these examples, the aesthetics of drift described above is outstandingly present. We learn from Belloi that the porosity of the frame sometimes posed a difficulty for Lumière operators: “this porosity reveals itself in the most emblematic of ways when the conduct escapes the control of the operator, virtually threatening the site of the point of view.”73 In such moments, the operator would move the crowd away with his hand or sometimes with a stick to clear the field. In Course en sacs (C.L. No 109), for example, while filming a sack race Louis Lumière had to gesture to the crowds to move aside as they gradually congested in front of the cinematograph to block the view. But Lumière’s true ingenuity in overcoming such diff iculties was to decipher the codes of behaviour implied by each space or place of 73 Belloi, “Lumière and His View,” 466.

98 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

action. As Jacques Aumont notes, the Lumière view based its aesthetic on the reproduction of a mise-en-scène already included in the real.74 In other words, they utilized the pre-existing structure of the space to frame the action. At best, the Lumière view consisted of a thorough observation of the space to fathom its latent workings—that is, the rhythm of the space, the movement of bodies in that space, the actions allowed or not allowed, and the invisible borders that divide that space. The best instances in the Catalogue Lumière are processions and sports events, where the operators mostly placed the cinematograph on the borderline between the place of action and the crowds. Since people were not allowed to step onto the sports f ield or the procession track (the place of action), the possibility of the view getting blocked was effectively eliminated. Furthermore, the crowds lining the borders of action functioned as an aesthetic element to mirror the film’s audience. In this paradigm, the in-between position of the operator, part of the crowd yet differentiated from it, ensured unobstructed f ilming of the maximum quantity of movement. This brings us to the third aspect of diagonal framing: the crowds and the alienated belonging of the flâneur. 3. Crowds: The Paradox of Detached Belonging The third aspect of diagonal framing as an aesthetic tool reflecting the manner of flânerie in Lumière’s cinematography is the way the crowds are used. In the Lumière view, crowds have two functions. First, the masses serve as an analytical element to decipher the workings of the space. In order to make this observation, the Lumière operators, just like the flâneur, took in and observed the everyday rhythms and flows of space they were to film. Aumont explains with reference to Henri Langlois that “the cameramen did not film extempore, but on the contrary, started by observing what they intended to film, at length if the subject lent itself to that by its repetitious nature, more rapidly if it occurred only once.”75 It is with respect to this quality of the Lumière view that Belloi claims that Lumière can be considered as a sociologist: not so much because his perspective and his points of interest (family, property, etc.) reflect a powerful effect of class […] but because of his intuitive exploration of interpersonal space and its founding rites.76 74 Aumont, “Lumière Revisited,” 427. 75 Aumont, “Lumière Revisited,” 426. 76 Belloi, “Lumière and His View,” 470.

The Fl âneur as Filmmaker

99

Lyon: Debarquement d’une mouche (C.L. No. 424) perfectly exemplifies this observation. In this film, we see passengers alighting from a ship along a gang plank. The cinematograph is positioned on the quayside, again to show the crowd’s movement along a diagonal axis. According to Belloi, this particular view represents all the aesthetic properties that collapsed at the end of Course en sacs (C.L. No. 109), which concludes with the crowd gathering in front of the camera to block entirely the view as soon as the sack race finishes. In fact, Course en sacs (C.L. No. 109) shows how the rules of the space are transformed once the spectacle comes to an end. The diagonal axis along which the crowd of spectators is lined dissolves and the view becomes invaded from all sides. Although Louis Lumière tries to re-establish the aesthetic composition by gesturing to the people to move away, he is ineffective. In Transport de la cloche de l’Indépendance (C.L. No: 346), however, it turns out that the police are more effective in establishing the order of the space, which also involves clearing the visual field. At one moment in this film, a large portion of the visual field becomes blocked by the crowd watching the procession. However, with the arrival of policemen, the crowd makes way for the procession and the frame is cleared, although once the police leave, the crowds start pressing again. In Lyon: Debarquement d’une mouche, Lumière places the cinematograph on the quayside just at the end of the gang plank to ensure that he can film an unobstructed flow of people along a diagonal axis without the risk of the visual field becoming clogged. The aesthetic composition of the picture is thus guaranteed by the rules of the space: the passengers have no choice but to continue walking along the gang plank, thereby ensuring as much movement as possible, a constant drift of pedestrians and maximum visibility. From this perspective, the Lumière view, very much in the manner of the Baudelairean flâneur, draws aesthetic meaning from the crowds. For Baudelaire’s flâneur, “(t)he crowd is his territory,” and this description can perfectly correspond to the Lumière operators as well. The masses in Lumière films are never merely one aesthetic element of the frame but rather an analytical tool to convey the construction of space. Benjamin’s comment on Baudelaire can shed light on this double aspect of the masses in Lumière films: “As regards Baudelaire, the masses were anything but external to him; indeed, it is easy to trace in his works his defensive reaction to their attraction and allure.”77 If filming consisted of at least two stages for Lumière, i.e., an intimate participation in and observation of the space to be filmed, plus a disengagement from the space and the crowds the moment the 77 Benjamin, Illuminations, 167.

100 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

cinematograph starts to roll, it can be argued that the flâneur-cameramen has a paradoxical relationality. He is part of the crowd but also alienated from it: the moment the anonymous ‘drifter’ becomes the disinterested ‘observer’, the crowds are objectified as an aesthetic component. This brings us back to the second aspect of the way that crowds function in the Lumière view. In addition to conveying an analytical perspective on the construction of space, the crowds serve as an aesthetic element to border the action and mirror the film’s audience. The best example to describe this aspect is Londres: danseuse des rues (C.L. No. 249), where we see a group of dancers on the street, the wet surface of which beautifully accentuates the rhythmic movement of their dancing feet. One man in the background participates by moving his arm up and down, which perhaps helps to convey a sense of rhythm to help the audience establish their own rhythmic connection to the film. From this perspective, the man fulfils a function both in the world of the film and in the world of the viewers. Taking this argument one step further, this figure perhaps plays an important role in drawing an affective response from the audience. Belonging both to the action and to the audience, this man testifies to a general motif in Lumière films: the borderline character. Such characters not only participate in or transform the space but also establish a sense of the collective by mirroring the audience. Another example, Jeu de la poêle (C.L. No. 955), shows a crowd of spectators facing the camera, reflecting the gaze of cinema audience. The activity of watching is thus shared, and a sense of the collective is established. In light of these examples, the paradoxical relationship between the flâneur and the crowds can be considered in parallel to the paradoxical relationship between the Lumière cameramen and the masses. In both cases, there is a paradox of ‘detached belonging’, of involvement in the crowds and urban spaces on the one hand, but an alienation from them on the other.

Conclusion: The Cinematic Pedestrianism of Lumière The turn of the twentieth century was marked by the spread of Taylorist principles, which equated movement with production and aimed to eliminate unproductive movement from any system. This perspective further entrenched a certain politics of the body that perceived of it as a machine that could effectively act as an integral component of larger machines. In addition to a new conception of the body as machine and an efficiencybased understanding of movement, Taylorism entailed a re-construction of space, such as factory spaces or urban planning. Furthermore, the

The Fl âneur as Filmmaker

101

Taylorist approach to production not only shaped but also literally produced new spaces, such as working-class neighbourhoods around factories and industrial cities. Targeting proximity, among other things, to maximize production, unproductive movement was something to be eliminated in all systems, including the city. Hence flânerie, wandering, and drift all became associated with unproductivity in this context. Seminally described by Baudelaire and Benjamin as the activity of strolling, aimless wandering, and drift, flânerie connotes idleness as opposed to labour. Because the flâneur is in control of his own activity of walking through a particular space at a certain pace, flânerie represents a kind of free-flowing movement that Taylorism wishes to tame. In opposition to the strict time-management principles of Taylorism, which find expression in daily life via punch cards, factory supervisors, and an increasing number of clocks, flânerie is characterized by its independence from clock time. More precisely, Baudelaire describes it as “dependent on the natural cycle.”78 As mentioned earlier, for E. P. Thompson, the substitution of natural cyclical time with abstract linear time at the onset of industrialism is emblematic of the domination of production. In light of these two conceptions of mobility in the nineteenth century, this chapter has focused on the activity of flânerie, explaining its philosophical connotations pertaining to movement and its transposition into cinematic aesthetics, both on a pre-filmic and a filmic level. Similar to the way flânerie is employed as a poetic trope by Baudelaire in Spleen de Paris to convey a sense of everyday life in Paris, Lumière filmography uses flânerie as a method to depict and reflect on daily life, and as a means to create a cinematic aesthetics. From this standpoint, the diagonal framing of movement appears as a crucial aesthetic tool. The three most outstanding features of flânerie are fed into the three aesthetic features of the Lumière view: gaze, drift, and the paradox of detached belonging. Featuring a rich catalogue of vues and panoramas, Lumière filmography conveys a sense of an embodied gaze, very much in the manner of flânerie. The drift of the flâneur, which connotes a disjuncture of the privileged point of view and a displacement of the centre of action, finds expression in the porosity of the frame in Lumière films. Crowds, which the flâneur paradoxically both revels in and is alienated from, are used as an aesthetic element to convey this duality of belonging and detachment. From this standpoint, Lumière filmography can be seen as a crucial moment in film history because it drew from the social activity of flânerie 78 Tester, “Introduction,” 15.

102 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

to gain a cinematic aesthetic. At this point, it is worthwhile emphasizing the cultural analytical dimension of Lumière. According to some scholars, the fact that Lumière operators wandered around the streets observing the workings of public spaces before depicting them in their work in order to convey the maximum quantity of movement makes Lumière filmography a form of ethnography.79 Fremaux highlights that Lumière wanted cinema to be a “witness of its time” and initiated an understanding of cinema as “a way to understand the history of the world.”80 In their careful reading of the politics and aesthetics of everyday spaces—the codes of behaviour and mobilities—the Lumière films can be considered sociological documents of an era across a wide range of geographies. The Larousse definition of flâneur that Walter Benjamin cites in The Arcades Project clearly corresponds to the Lumière cameramen: “His eyes open, his ear ready, searching for something entirely different from what the crowd gathers to see.”81

Works Cited N. A. “Les trottoirs roulants de l’Exposition.” La Revue Scientifique 4e série, Tome XIV: No: 21–26 (May 1900). http://sciences.gloubik.info//spip.php?article334. Accessed 4 May 2021. N. A. “Many Inventions.” The Outlook (29 March 1913). 736–37. N. A. “Magic Lantern Shows.” In The Encyclopaedia of Early Cinema. Ed. Richard Abel. London: Routledge, 2005. 582. Aumont, Jacques. “Lumière Revisited.” Film History 8 (1996): 416–40. Baudelaire, Charles. “The Painter of Modern Life.” In Selected Writings on Art and Artists. Ed. P.E. Charvet. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. 390–435. Belloi, Livio. “Lumière and His View: The Cameraman’s Eye in Early Cinema.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television, 15.4 (October 1995): 461–74. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London: Verso, 1997. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Belknap Harvard, 1999. Bonitzer, Pascal. Le champ aveugle: Essais sur le realisme au cinema. Quetigny: Cahièrs du Cinéma, 1999. 79 See Russell, “Ethnotopias.” 80 Hopewell, “Thierry Frémaux on Lumière, the World’s First Film, the Artistry of Louis Lumière.” 81 Benjamin, “Convolute M: The Flâneur” in The Arcades Project, 453.

The Fl âneur as Filmmaker

103

Braun, Marta. Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Buck-Morss, Susan. “Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk: Redeeming Mass Culture for the Revolution.” New German Critique 29 (Spring/Summer, 1983): 211–40. Castle, Terry. “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie.” Critical Inquiry 15.1 (Autumn 1988): 26–61. Chardère, Bernard. Lumières sur Lumière. Lyon: Institut Lumière, 1987. Charney, Leo. Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity, and Drift. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Cohen, Margaret. “Walter Benjamin’s Phantasmagoria.” New German Critique 48 (Autumn: 1989): 87–107. Curtis, Scott. “Images of Efficiency: The Films of Frank B. Gilbreth.” In Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media. Ed. Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. 85–100. Galloway, Lee. Organization and Management. New York: Alexander Hamilton Institute, 1916. Gilloch, Graeme. “Urban Optics: Film, Phantasmagoria and the City in Benjamin and Kracauer.” New Formations 61 (2007): 115–32. Goldberg, Vicki. The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives. New York: Abeville Press, 1991. Gunning, Tom. “Phantasmagoria and the Manufacturing of Illusions and Wonder: Towards a Cultural Optics of the Cinematic Apparatus.” In The Cinema, A New Technology for the 20th Century. Ed. André Gaudreault et al. Lausanne: Editions Payot, 2004. 31–44. Hediger, Vinzenz and Patrick Vondreau, ed. Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. Hessel, Franz. Spazieren in Berlin. Berlin: Verlag, 2013. Hopewell, John. “Thierry Frémaux on Lumière, the World’s First Film, the Artistry of Louis Lumière.” Variety (15 January 2017) http://variety.com/2017/film/global/ thierry-fremaux-lumiere-artistry-louis-lumiere-unifrance-1201960812/ Accessed 4 May 2021. Huhtamo, Erkki. “Global Glimpses for Local Realities: The Moving Panorama, A Forgotten Mass Medium of the 19th Century.” Art Inquiry 4.13 (2002): 193–223. Huhtamo, Erkki. “(Un)walking at the Fair: About Mobile Visualities at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1900.” Journal of Visual Culture 12.1 (2013): 61–88. Kessler, Frank. “Comment cadrer la rue?” In Lo Stile Cinematografico/Film Style. Ed. Enrico Biasin et al. Udine: Forum, 2007. 95–101. Lenin, Vladimir. “The Taylor System—Man’s Enslavement by the Machine.” Marxists Internet Archive. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/mar/13. htm. Accessed 4 May 2021.

104 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Loiperdinger, Martin. “Lumière’s Arrival of the Train: Cinema’s Founding Myth.” Moving Image 4.1 (Spring 2004): 89–118. Pons, Jordi and Daniel Pitarch. “History of a Fantascope: A Device for Education in Nineteenth-Century Girona.” Early Popular Visual Culture 15.1 (2017): 83–99. Rabinbach, Anson. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. California: University of California Press, 1992. Rimbaud, Arthur. A Season in Hell and Illuminations. New York: Random House, 2005. Russell, Catherine. Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. USA: Duke University Press, 1999. Sayer, Derek. Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Taylor, Frederick Winslow. Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1911. Tester, Keith, ed. The Flâneur. London: Routledge, 1994. Thompson, Edward P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past & Present 38 (Dec. 1967): 56–97. Uricchio, William. “A ‘Proper Point of View’: The Panorama and Some of Its Early Media Iterations.” Early Popular Visual Culture 9.3 (2011): 225–38.

Filmography La Sortie d’Usine Lumière (C. L. No: 91,1), 1895. Place des Cordeliers (C. L. No: 128), 1895. Course en sacs (C.L. No: 109), 1896. Place Bellecour (C. L. No:129), 1896. Rue Bab-Azoun (C.L. No: 201), 1896. Londres: danseuse des rues (C.L. No: 249), 1896. Piccadilly Circus (C.L. No: 255), 1896. Transport de la cloche de l’Indépendance (C.L. No: 346), 1896. Lyon: Debarquement d’une mouche (C.L. No: 424), 1896. Bicycliste (C.L. No: 17), 1896/1897. Le Pont Neuf (C. L. No: 688), 1896/1897. Mi-Carême: Char de la reine des reines (C. L. No: 156), 1897. L’arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat (C. L. No: 653), 1897. Church Street (C.L. No: 700), 1897. Football (C.L. No: 699), 1897/1898. Jeu de la poêle (C.L. No: 955), 1897/1898. Panorama pris d’un ballon captif (C.L. No: 997), 1897/1898.

The Fl âneur as Filmmaker

105

Panorama pendant l’ascension de la Tour Eiffel (C.L. No: 992), 1898. Vue de l’avant d’un transatlantique par un gros temps (C.L. No: 1039), 1898/1899. Char et batailles de confettis (C. L. No: 1010), 1899. Vue prise d’un baleiniere en marche (C.L. No: 1241), 1900. Vue prise d’un plate-forme mobile I (C.L. No: 1155), 1900. Vue prise d’un plate-forme mobile II (C.L. No: 1156), 1900. Vue prise d’un plate-forme mobile III (C.L. No: 1157), 1900. Vue prise d’un plate-forme mobile IV (C.L. No: 1158), 1900. Panorama pris du trottoir roulant, dir. Georges Méliès, 1900. Les Visiteurs sur le trottoir roulant, dir. Georges Méliès, 1900. Panorama from the Moving Boardwalk, in Thomas A. Edison, Inc, and Paper Print Collection (United States: Edison Manufacturing Co), 1900. The Quest of the One Best Way, dir. James Perkins, 1945. The Lumière Brothers’ First Films, 1996.

3.

The Flâneuse and the Aesthetics of the Female Gaze Abstract In the nineteenth century, women did not enjoy the same freedom as men to flâner in the city. By the turn of the century, however, the ethics that prescribed women’s movement, visibility, and behaviour in public spaces were strongly challenged as women were increasingly integrated into the urban workforce. This sociological phenomenon transformed both public space and the cinematic aesthetics that reflected that space. This chapter analyses the feminist pedestrian acts in Lois Weber’s Shoes (1916), a powerful representation of underpaid female labour and the insecure economic and social conditions of working-class women. It contextualizes Weber’s activist filmmaking as an aesthetic practice in a Rancièrian sense through representation of precarious women’s pedestrianism in the city. Keywords: Flânerie, flâneur, flâneuse, pedestrian acts, shoes

In the previous chapter, I examined the association of flânerie—the nineteenth-century phenomenon of wandering in urban space—with the free-flowing public movement of the cameraman. That chapter focused on men’s movements around the city, leaving open the question of the gendered segregation of spaces in turn-of-the-century metropolises. Here I take up this issue through an analysis of Lois Weber’s film Shoes (1916). May aim is to investigate the female pedestrian acts that have been disregarded or eclipsed in the social historiography of urban social space and early film history. After discussing normative definitions of flânerie as essentially the activity of a man freely wandering and observing the city, I explore the contested notion of female flânerie via the female protagonist, her encounters in the city, and other women characters in Shoes. I take as a departure point Shelley Stamp’s idea that Shoes can be seen as a film that makes a sociological inquiry into a changing society, marked by an influx of young women into

Özgen, A., The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism: Walking in Films. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724753_ch03

108 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

the workforce and the emergence of new leisure forms following the gradual gains of the movement for the eight-hour working day. This change brought about a re-organization of public space, specifically a modification of gender segregation, with young women becoming increasingly visible in public as well as in their workplaces. Movie theatres, dance halls, and social clubs attracted these women, at least those who could afford cheap commercial entertainment. Others—who were committed to supporting their families or were simply underpaid, like the protagonist of Shoes—sought out noncommercial leisure activities instead. Taking a walk, rambling in the park, hanging out on pavements, squatting outside their front doors to chat with neighbours and friends—these were cheaper, non-commodified forms of amusement. As a product of this context, Shoes is a valuable object of analysis for investigating the cultural and political influences of young women’s new visibility in the public space. The film depicts, and also draws from, the aesthetic reorganization of public space brought about by these working women’s activities outside the domestic sphere, such as walking, strolling, and rambling. Through portraying the pedestrianism of the protagonist Eva, a young working-class woman from the lowest segment of society, Shoes points to an under-represented social presence. While there is an abundant literature regarding female pedestrianism in turn-of-the-century urban public space, particularly the commodified mobility of women, academic research into non-commercial or non-commodified forms of female pedestrian acts is strikingly limited. Yet, the impact of these female pedestrian acts on the aesthetic reorganization of public space and cinematic aesthetics demands academic scrutiny. Shoes is a significant text for an exploration of these overlooked dimensions for two reasons. First, the film represents and opens up a space for working-class female pedestrian acts; second, its director, Lois Weber (herself a woman filmmaker substantially ignored in the historiography of fledgling Hollywood)1 consistently grappled in her films with profound social changes in women’s lives and with normative representations of women. Hence, both the film and the filmmaker encapsulate in their separate ways the problems encountered by women as they challenged the gender segregation of space by breaching accepted norms. From this perspective, the film also enables a discussion 1 On the Women Film Pioneers Project website, Stamp writes that Weber was “rediscovered” in the 1970s by “historians like Anthony Slide, who dubbed her ‘the director who lost her way in history’ (1996) and Richard Koszarski, who remarked that ‘the years have not been kind to Lois Weber’ (1977).” Stamp adds, “it is now time to ask what a history rewritten with Weber’s legacy in mind might look like.”

The Fl âneuse and the Aesthe tics of the Female Gaze

109

of the cinematic aesthetics of the flâneur, as exemplified in the previous chapter through the Lumière cameramen, and a cinematic aesthetics of the flâneuse, here exemplified by Lois Weber’s cinema—specifically Shoes.

The Flâneuse at Standstill: Revisiting the Debates on a Contested Concept The nexus of the debate around the mobility of women and the gender segregation of public space in emergent modernity concerns the figure of the flâneuse, or female flânerie. Flânerie, the activity of strolling and looking, is “a recurring motif in the literature, sociology and art of urban, and most especially of the metropolitan, existence specific to the nineteenth century.”2 As I explained in the previous chapter, the most influential definition of the flâneur is that which Walter Benjamin distilled in large part from the work of Baudelaire. However, in addition to his analysis of the French poet, Benjamin’s collection of notes in The Arcades Project, cataloguing everyday life in nineteenth-century Paris, provides richer material on the figure of the flâneur. Broadly, the flâneur is described as a man who wanders around the city freely at a slow pace (famously described as “taking tortoises for a walk”) to observe everyday life.3 This normative definition of flânerie is premised upon the relentless gaze (“botanising on the asphalt,” “adventures of the eye”), the scrutiny of daily life (“flânerie is a way of reading the street”), and prolonged perambulation (“with each step, the walk takes on greater momentum”). Some other aspects of flânerie as chronicled by Benjamin have remained mostly subordinated and overlooked, gradually disappearing from subsequent analysis and fading into oblivion. First, contrary to the general conviction that the flâneur is primarily an observer, Benjamin’s essays clearly emphasize other senses (especially smells and sounds: “that anamnestic intoxication in which the flâneur goes about the city not only feeds on the sensory data taking shape before his eyes but often possesses itself of abstract knowledge—indeed, of dead facts—as something experienced and lived through”).4 Similarly, “in the asphalt over which [he] passes, his steps awaken a surprising resonance.”5 Second, flânerie is not essentially a disembodied gaze but a simultaneously strongly corporeal experience. Exhaustion, hunger, 2 Tester, The Flâneur, 1. 3 See Walter Benjamin’s “Convolute M: The Flâneur” in The Arcades Project. 4 Benjamin, “Convolute M: The Flâneur,” The Arcades Project, 417. 5 Benjamin, “Convolute M: The Flâneur,” The Arcades Project, 417.

110 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

and sensuous impressions are frequently cited in Benjamin’s snippets on the flâneur in The Arcades Project. It is therefore important to remember these “other” components of flânerie that have been addressed less frequently in academic research on pedestrianism so that we avoid the vicious circle of normative definitions. In fact, it would be more in keeping with the spirit of flânerie, with its ephemeral and fleeting quality, if the concept were freed from its current standstill and set back in motion. The same observation can be made regarding the flâneuse. The investigation of female flânerie or the figure of the flâneuse has raised a lot of controversy, especially since the mid-1990s. Since women at the turn of the last century could not enjoy the same freedom of movement as men, the widely shared view is that the flâneuse did not exist. In Vision and Difference, Griselda Pollock argues that flânerie was strictly gendered and class-bound, therefore only truly enjoyed by bourgeois men.6 Janet Wolff’s essay, “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” has been quite influential in investigating a potential history of female flânerie. The nineteenth-century gendered division of public and private prohibited women from strolling alone; hence, as Wolff succinctly notes, “Women could not stroll alone in the city.”7 However, Wolff’s contention is not a straightforward denial that simply argues that “the flâneuse did not exist.” Instead, she questions the absence and subordination of the female stroll in modern literature as well as the silence about women’s different experiences of modernity. Despite having always worked in workshops and factories, and later in the bureaucracy of turn-of-the-century cities, women are largely invisible in the historiography of modernity, especially in the public world of work, politics, and city life. Wolff argues that when women do appear in the public sphere, they do so “through their relationships with men,” that is, in the role of the sex worker, the widow, or the murder victim.8 Hence, their presence in the public sphere is subordinated to that of men: “None of these women meet the poet as his equal. They are subjects of his gaze, objects of his botanising.”9 In a way, therefore, the literature of modernity functioned as a controlling mechanism to regulate how women became visible in public. For Wolff, this makes it appropriate to talk of the world of modernity primarily as a ‘male’ world: its authors (sociologists,

6 Pollock, Vision and Difference. 7 Wolff, “Invisible Flâneuse,” 41. 8 Wolff, “Invisible Flâneuse,” 44. 9 Wolff, “Invisible Flâneuse,” 42.

The Fl âneuse and the Aesthe tics of the Female Gaze

111

poets, and social commentators) and its protagonists are invariably male, as epitomized in the figure of the flâneur. Wolff argues that the establishment of the department store in the 1850s and 1860s created an important new arena for the legitimate public appearance of middle-class women. However, she adds, although consumerism was a central aspect of modernity, some of the peculiar characteristics of the modern, such as the fleeting, anonymous encounter, and purposeless strolling, do not apply to shopping. Wolff calls for a feminist revision of sociology and social history to illuminate “the very different nature of the experience of those women who did appear in the public arena.”10 Shoes indeed does depict the diverse experiences of women who did appear in the public arena in the early twentieth century. And, as previously mentioned, Lois Weber’s appearance in (and disappearance from) the public arena of the cinema industry deserves attention as one such instance. While several previous studies have tried to recover the “invisible flâneuse” in social historiography, they have tended to look for the female experience of flânerie strictly in commodified forms of pedestrianism, such as shopping, which are strongly premised on the emergent consumerist culture and the gaze. In her seminal book, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, Anne Friedberg argues that shopping provided an excuse for middle-class women to leave the domestic space and wander the streets. Friedberg concludes: “It was as a consumer that the flâneuse was born,”11 because the female flâneur, or flâneuse, was not possible until she was free to roam the city on her own. And this was equated with the privilege of shopping on her own. The development in the late nineteenth century of shopping as a socially acceptable leisure activity for bourgeois women, as a ‘pleasure rather than a necessity’, encouraged women to be peripatetic without escort.12

Similarly to Wolff, Friedberg sees the emergence of the department store as a significant threshold for the emergence of female strolling: “The flâneuse appeared in public spaces—department stores—made possible by the new

10 Wolff, “Invisible Flâneuse,” 45. 11 Friedberg, Window Shopping, 34. 12 Friedberg, Window Shopping, 36.

112 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

configurations of consumer culture.”13 However, contrary to Wolff’s contention that “the fleeting, anonymous encounter and the purposeless strolling do not apply to shopping,”14 Friedberg limits female flânerie experience to this activity. Such a direct equation of female flânerie with consumerism has some important drawbacks. First, implicated in this equation is scopophilia (the centrality of pleasure derived from looking), which is borrowed uncritically from its male counterpart, the flâneur. Griselda Pollock succinctly shows that the gaze of the flâneur articulates and produces a masculine sexuality, which enjoys the freedom to look, appraise, and possess. As Susan Buck-Morss argues, if women roamed the streets, they were considered streetwalkers and prostitutes, carnal commodities on sale alongside other items in the arcade.15 According to Elizabeth Wilson, “it is this flâneur, the flâneur as a man of pleasure, as a man who takes visual possession of the city, who has emerged in postmodern feminist discourse as the embodiment of the ‘male gaze’.”16 In light of these studies, it can be argued that the flâneur represents men’s visual and voyeuristic mastery over women. Referencing Buck-Morss, Friedberg claims that “women were objects for consumption, objects for the gaze of the flâneur”; however, as part of consumer culture, they were also empowered as bearers of the gaze. In this transition from the “object for the gaze of the flâneur”17 to the “bearer of the gaze” there isn’t any engagement with masculine and feminine positions of looking. In a culture where gender segregation was deeply embedded in public space, it is vital to investigate or question any possible differentiation between the male (constructed as the dominant actor in the public sphere) and the female (constructed as to-be-looked-at) gaze. For instance, E. Ann Kaplan, tackling this question from a psychoanalytical perspective in the context of Hollywood melodrama in her article “Is the Gaze Male?,” concludes that the male gaze contains the power of action, domination, and possession, which are lacking in the female gaze. “Women receive and return a gaze,” she contends, “but cannot act upon it.”18 In this disposition of the male gaze, which recalls the well-known image from Baudelaire’s famous poem “À une passante,” Kaplan detects a dominance-submission pattern, which reproduces the dominant and possessive position of the holder of the 13 Friedberg, Window Shopping, 12. 14 Wollf, “The Invisible Flâneuse,” 44. 15 Buck-Morss, “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore.” 16 Wilson, “The Invisible Flâneur,” 98. 17 Friedberg, Window Shopping, 36. 18 Kaplan, Women and Film, 31.

The Fl âneuse and the Aesthe tics of the Female Gaze

113

gaze. She argues that the gaze may not necessarily be male (literally) all the time, but “to own and activate the gaze […] is to be in the ‘masculine’ position.”19 How, then, can the female gaze be defined? Kaplan suggests that the female gaze can include an understanding of how “women are constituted through social practices in culture” and produce “an aesthetics designed to subvert the production of ‘woman’ as commodity.”20 I would like to argue that, in Shoes, Weber’s gaze as a female filmmaker displays such an understanding. In her filmography, Weber repeatedly interrogated the reproduction, circulation, and commercialization of female imagery in cinema.21 Therefore, Shoes is a relevant object of research for investigating this female gaze that has largely been neglected in the writing and debates of film history. Returning to Friedberg, it becomes even clearer from the following comments that the gaze of the flâneuse as she describes it reproduces the relationship between looking and possessing. Therefore, one can also argue that this definition of the female gaze fails to emancipate women from the male gaze. To the contrary: it is constructed as a structural analogy to the male gaze, which entails the commodification of women as the object of the gaze. As Friedberg puts it: Unlike the arcade, the department store offered a protected site for the empowered gaze of the flâneuse. Endowed with purchase power, she was the target of the consumer address. New desires created for her by advertising and consumer culture; desires elaborated in a system of selling and consumption which depended on the relation between looking and buying, and the indirect desire to possess and incorporate through the eye.22

This description of the flâneuse’s gaze raises several questions. Empowerment is directly linked with the capacity to purchase the expensive items exhibited in the department store. In other words, the flâneuse is basically constructed as an upper-class or bourgeois woman, whose freedom to move and look is enabled by her freedom to buy things. This definition of the flâneuse excludes lower- or working-class women (for example, those 19 Kaplan, Women and Film, 30. 20 Kaplan, Women and Film, 3. 21 Weber’s films Fine Feathers (1912), A Japanese Idyll (1912), Suspense (1913) are examples that may be added alongside Shoes. 22 Friedberg, Window Shopping, 7.

114 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

working in those very department stores),23 and equates emancipation with purchasing power. I will further discuss this unacknowledged class bias latent in the quote later in the chapter. Such a conceptualization of the flâneuse, premised on the male gaze and commodification, ultimately consolidates male dominance over the public space. Friedberg does not propose that shopping was merely an excuse that women fabricated in order to wander around freely. On the contrary, for her the flâneuse is strictly defined as a consumer who holds purchasing power and derives pleasure from the desires produced by a system hinged on the relation between looking and possessing. Limiting female flânerie to shopping remains blind to the subversive effects that the female stroll might have in the male-dominant public space. I will come back to this discussion of the gaze and emergent consumer culture in scene analyses from Shoes, where Eva is attracted to a pair of shoes in the shop window. Another weakness of Friedberg’s definition of flânerie is that it remains insensitive to a paradox that stems from her concept of the “mobilized virtual gaze.”24 For Friedberg, both proto-cinematic entertainment (such as the panorama and the diorama) and cinema itself extend the “virtual gaze of photography” to provide “virtual mobility.” Friedberg calls these technological devices “the machines of virtual transport,” which produce an “imaginary flânerie” which elsewhere in the book she calls a “spectatorial flânerie.” Friedberg argues that “many proto-cinematic devices negotiated spatial and temporal illusions,” and that “all of these forms depended on the immobility of the spectator, a stasis rewarded by the imaginary mobilities that such fixity provided.” She adds that “such imaginary flânerie produced a new form of subjectivity—not only decorporealized and derealized, but detemporalized as well.” Hence, “for the cinematic observer, the body itself is a fiction, a site for departure and return.”25 Such a conceptualization of imaginary flânerie equated with a supposedly decorporealized spectatorship ignores the flâneuse’s ability, or potential, to act on the public space. Although Friedberg does not specifically refer to female flânerie as such, her analysis of imaginary flânerie is not male specific. Hence, it can be argued that women’s claim to the public space and the streets is diminished by further confining them to a supposedly passive spectator’s position. 23 This discussion raises the question, for instance, of how the gaze of women workers in department stores is different from the gaze of the customer. 24 Friedberg, Window Shopping, 37–40. 25 Friedberg, Window Shopping, 37–40.

The Fl âneuse and the Aesthe tics of the Female Gaze

115

Thus, extracting active perambulation from female flânerie may ultimately reproduce the flâneuse’s ‘invisibility’ in the public sphere. Finally, Friedberg’s analysis ignores class, being limited to the experience of middle and upper-class women, who are “endowed with purchase power.”26 Restricting the activity of flânerie to the exclusive experience of a higher class overlooks other possible forms of female flânerie, and of the female stroll on a wider scale. Since this proves that other forms of flânerie still demand further investigation and analysis, Wolff’s call to look at the experiences of all women who did participate in the public sphere is still valid. Wolff’s and Wilson’s emphases on non-bourgeois and working-class women’s experiences of public space enrich the notion of female pedestrianism instead of limiting it. Wilson, criticizing widespread conceptualizations of the flâneuse and the reductive representations of women in modern literature, calls for an emphasis and insistence on the presence of women in the cities, rather than the dangers that awaited them in everyday life. Merely reiterating that women were victims of the male-dominated ethics of public space is unhelpful “since it creates such an all-powerful and seamless ideological system ranged against women, and one upon which they can never make an impact.”27 She therefore encourages zooming in on “intermediate zones inhabited by women of indeterminate class and who often escaped the rigid categories into which society tried to force them.”28 Lois Weber, I contend, shifted between such intermediate zones and brilliantly escaped rigid categories, such as those of the committed wife and elegant actress, to become a fearless filmmaker. Shoes is particularly important in Weber’s filmmaking for tackling the impact that working-class women had on the public space, as well as the bourgeois ethics imposed on them. Wilson notes that working-class women “thronged the streets” in the late nineteenth century, which “was one of the major threats to bourgeois order.”29 Highlighting the presence of women on the streets, Wilson adds, “to read the journalism of the mid and late nineteenth century is to be struck by their presence rather than their absence.”30 She concludes by noting that “there were flâneuses,” such as writers and journalists, but there were also indomitable working-class youth. 26 Friedberg, Window Shopping, 37. 27 Wilson, “The Invisible Flâneur,” 100. 28 Wilson, “The Invisible Flâneur,” 104. 29 Wilson, “The Invisible Flâneur,” 100. 30 Wilson, “The Invisible Flâneur,” 100.

116 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

In her detailed study, Cheap Amusements, Kathy Peiss demonstrates that “the city streets were public conduits of sociability and free expression for all working-class people, avenues for protest, celebration, and amusement.”31 In particular, “young working-class women,” Peiss writes, “were among those who flocked to the streets in pursuit of pleasure and amusement, using public spaces for flamboyant assertion.”32 For Wilson, the issue is not so much the “invisibility” of the flâneuse but the need to uncover and decode the ways in which the flâneuse was “represented.” She finds Mary Poovey’s approach fruitful: Representations of gender constituted one of the sites on which ideological systems were simultaneously constructed and contested; as such […] representations of gender […] were themselves contested images, the sites at which struggles for authority occurred, as well as the locus of assumptions used to underwrite the very authority that authorized these struggles […] The middle-class ideology we most often associate with the Victorian period was both contested and always under construction; because it was always in the making it was always open to revision, dispute, and the emergence of oppositional formations.33

In light of this perspective, I would like to approach the images of female pedestrianism in Shoes as contested and contesting images, which open up late nineteenth-century middle-class ethics to revision and dispute. I will take as my point of departure Shelley Stamp’s contention that Weber develops an “activist, engaged cinema.”34

Filmmaking as Aesthetic Practice: “An Activist Cinema”? Weber’s Shoes has been widely circulated since 2010, when it was restored by Amsterdam’s Eye Filmmuseum and its laboratory partners. The restoration was based on three different source materials: two tinted and toned nitrate copies from the Eye archive, and one safety copy from a short re-edited version called The Unshod Maiden from 1932, owned by the Library of Congress. In 2016, the film’s original script was discovered at Universal’s 31 Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 57. 32 Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 58. 33 Wilson, “The Invisible Flâneur,” 100. My emphasis. 34 Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, 91.

The Fl âneuse and the Aesthe tics of the Female Gaze

117

archives; Milestone has released a DVD following this script. This version also includes some scenes from The Unshod Maiden, which were not included in the 2010 restored version. The latest version, following Weber’s original script with minor additions from the 1932 cut, has a few differences from the 2010 restored version, so my analyses here are based on this newer version. The restoration and re-release of Shoes has rekindled interest in Weber’s career as one of the few women directors in the emergent film industry, which is widely acknowledged to remain a male-dominated sector worldwide. This interest has produced several exciting findings, especially in the field of feminist film historiography. In addition to a number of articles in reputable journals in English-speaking academia, of particular note is Shelley Stamp recently published Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, only the second monograph on Weber after Anthony Slide’s ground-breaking Lois Weber: The Director Who Lost Her Way in History.35 Stamp’s book places Weber in context, commenting on her public persona in the film industry and in contemporary popular culture, since she was a popular figure who regularly appeared in newspapers and magazines. For Stamp, Weber’s public persona provides a prism for a larger analysis of early Hollywood—its institutional structures, its celebrity culture, its evolving visual grammar, and its ever-increasing dominance in American daily life. Furthermore, from a more gender-sensitive perspective, Weber’s career enables an analysis of the role played by women in shaping early film culture. Stamp also analyses Weber’s films in order to shed light on the ways they functioned within the period in which they were produced and circulated. In so doing, Stamp provides several controversial insights into Weber’s films, especially from feminist perspectives, and highlights Weber’s talent for creating a form of sociological inquiry in her films. As Stamp puts it, Weber develops an “activist, engaged cinema.”36 Below, I will primarily analyse the cinematic pedestrianism of Eva in Shoes in order to explore the aesthetic tools of this “activist, engaged cinema.” Given that activism denotes “the policy or action of using vigorous campaigning to bring about political or social change,”37 I ask two key questions: To what extent does Shoes draw from actual social conditions, and in what ways does the film engage with these social conditions on an aesthetic level? Within the framework of this book, I draw on the notion of aesthetics as formulated by Jacques Rancière, for whom “there is an aesthetics at 35 Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood; Slide, Lois Weber. 36 Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, 91. 37 Oxford Dictionary of English.

118 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

the core of politics,” where aesthetics means “the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience.”38 For Rancière, politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak. In such a conceptualization, the term “aesthetics” is inextricably bound up with politics. From this perspective, it may be possible to shed light on how cinematic aesthetics function as an activist endeavour aimed at achieving social change. In light of the discussion so far, my tentative hypothesis is that Shoes investigates the economic and social problems encountered by the emergent working class of young women in the early twentieth-century American metropolis. In addition to representing underpaid women workers, the film tackles the middle-class ethics imposed on lower-class women and how their increasing visibility in the public space challenged those ethics. Shoes includes many exterior scenes showing streets, parks, and pavements crowded with a mix of richer and poorer women. Eva’s walks to and from work, and the focus on her inability to afford a new pair of shoes, counterpoises her to another widespread culture of pedestrianism closely associated with commercialism, involving shopping, window-shopping, and the exhibitionist stride disseminated by fashion newsreels. Going back to Rancière, it can be argued that in the early twentiethcentury American metropolis the aesthetics that politically limit what can be seen, said, or heard in public space were being strongly challenged by working-class women like Eva.39 Consequently, the middle class responded by attempting to reform, educate, or save these women from their unethical, unwelcome, and allegedly corrupt culture. A strong area of contention was women’s appropriation of public space, such as promenading, rambling, or hanging around on the streets and parks to chat with their friends and neighbours, or flirt with admirers. Their manners, language, and fashion in public space were strongly criticized by middle and upper-middle class observers. Hence, this was a moment when the visibility of women in public space had both an aesthetic and political impact. The main character in Shoes, Eva, is one such young worker, although she is far from “putting on style” or “seeking admirers,” because she is mostly downhearted because of her dire financial conditions and those of her 38 See Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 13. 39 See for example Peiss, Cheap Amusements; Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure.

The Fl âneuse and the Aesthe tics of the Female Gaze

119

family. Thus, this film shows a woman character from the lowest segment of society. Through her long walks to and from work, her lunchtime rambling in the park, and her yearning for a new pair of shoes that she sees in a shop window, the film shows her engagement with public space. The storyline runs as follows: The only full-time wage-earner in her family, Eva is a store clerk working at a dime store. Her siblings are too young to work, her father is lazy and self-absorbed, lounging at home and reading the whole day, while her mother is doing her best to support the family by doing laundry work at home. After giving all her earnings to her family, Eva cannot buy a new pair of shoes to replace her terribly deteriorating footwear. Although the condition of her shoes damages her physical health, a new pair is completely unaffordable. Every week, her mother promises to save Eva a few nickels more from her salary so that she can buy a new pair. However, this promise is repeatedly broken since the tight budget prioritizes maintenance of the family. One day, however, Eva is caught in a downpour and falls seriously ill due to her drenched feet. Feeling hopeless, she eventually agrees to hang out with a well-off sexual predator in order to obtain new shoes. Even though the storyline can be seen as straightforwardly moralistic, the film is intricately structured to present various facets of a socioeconomic problem, which I believe enables it to avoid making any moral judgments.40 Weber, quoted in an early article by Stamp, once made this clear to an interviewer when she explained that she wanted to be “the editorial page of the Universal Company.” She said, “I feel that like them, I can, in this motion picture field, also deliver a message to the world.”41 Stamp notes that “Weber’s interest in the fate of underpaid retail clerks echoed many sociological studies of the era that investigated the ‘problem’ of young wage earners, often raising questions about desires unleashed by commercial recreation culture.”42 Even though Lois Weber expressly targets middle-class reformers—the “better elements of society” as she once said—the issue is not reduced to a simple call for reform. Instead, according to Stamp, Weber used 40 Although in the opening credits of the restored copy that we have today, a series of intertitles claims that the f ilm was made to provide “deep and honest insight into the causes that too often bring these girls to their moral ruin,” such an announcement does not exist in the original continuity script that was recently discovered in the Universal archives. Similarly, one of the re-edited copies of the f ilm from 1934, The Unshod Maiden, puts the blame on Eva, who is represented as a young woman seeking upward social mobility. The narrative in the original script substantially differs from these versions. 41 Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, 91. 42 Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, 101.

120 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

her arsenal of cinematic techniques, not to offer Victorian moralizing and anti-feminism, but rather to critique the very institutions on which cinema’s imagined bourgeois viewers depended, such as heterosexual marriage, feminine propriety and—in the case of Shoes—class privilege. Stamp shows how, at the height of her renown, Weber still cloaked the bourgeois propriety of a happily married Mrs. Smalley and took on “the Progressive Era’s most vexing questions, placing popular cinema at the forefront of the nation’s cultural landscape.”43 Weber recognized that her films might intervene in contemporary debates, “not only through on-screen stories depicting social problems like poverty, criminality, addiction, but also by featuring female characters in complex leading parts that resisted two-dimensional stereotypes.”44 Similarly, with Shoes, we step into the world of poverty represented by an underpaid store clerk, Eva, another female character that resists stereotyping.

Working-Class Women and Their Shoes Shoes opens with the close-up image of an open book: A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil by Jane Addams. Instead of the pages of the book, however, we see its cover as if we’re watching someone reading it—yet there is no reader as the book is isolated in a black, empty space. The next shot shows a single page of the book from which we read: “One girl said that she had first yielded to temptation when she had become utterly discouraged because she had tried in vain for some months to get enough money for a pair of shoes. She habitually spent two dollars a week for a room…” Then we see the next page: “… old shoes worn twice. When the shoes became too worn to endure a third soling she possessed but ninety cents towards a new pair. She gave up the struggle and to use her own contemptuous phrase, ‘She sold herself for a pair of shoes.’” After this page, we are introduced to our protagonist, Eva Meyer. We see Eva’s face fading in, and then the following intertitle appears: “Eva Meyer earned five dollars a week in the five-and-ten cent store.” In this sequence of images, Eva is directly associated with the case study in Addams’s book. Since the screen is construed as a reader who has been reading the book, the film unrolling before our eyes becomes almost a narrator who starts retelling us the story after having read the book. Interestingly, Shoes is not an adaptation of a sociological case 43 Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, 67. 44 Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, 5.

The Fl âneuse and the Aesthe tics of the Female Gaze

121

from this book; instead, the film tells a parallel story that almost provides evidence for the case. Thus, the film evokes cinema’s capacity to visualize sociological observations. In fact, Shoes was actually adapted from a short story by Stella Wynne Herron, published in Collier’s magazine. Judging from these inspirations, it’s possible to argue that Weber saw filmmaking as an alternative mode of storytelling, alongside sociological studies and short stories. According to Stamp, Weber preferred to point to Addams’s case history as its source foregrounds an alliance between filmmaking and sociological impulse. 45 Premising Eva’s story on these two forms of literature, Weber drew on sociological evidence of the period. Stamp writes, “The fact that Weber was known to be ‘particular about the correctness of details’ was a fact that Universal chose to emphasize in its publicity for the film.”46 In the publicity, the studio claimed that the entire contents of a five-and-dime store had been transported to the studio for the retail scenes, and that the sets in the Meyer household had been equipped with furniture “specially bought from just such people as the Meyers were.”47 Echoing other reviews, the Los Angeles Examiner praised “exact portraiture of the appalling currency of poverty, with several reviewers describing the film as a ‘sociological study’.”48 In light of this, I would like to extend the analysis from these two main axes of the story to a third one: Peiss’s detailed study of the emergent leisure activities of working women. 49 Peiss’s book provides valuable insights into the economic dimension depicted in Shoes, offering an extremely useful perspective since the main crisis of the film’s plot is economic. As an underpaid worker who has to support her family, Eva cannot afford to buy a new pair of shoes. And, like many wage-earning young women of her time, she saves money by walking to work rather than using transportation to minimize the waste of her meagre earnings. Eva is accurately based on the realities for young working-class women living in a turn-of-the-century American urban setting. Peiss notes that young unmarried working-class women dominated the female labour force from 1880 to 1920, adding that, “In 1900, four fifths of the 343,000 wageearning women in New York were single, and almost one third were aged 16 to 20. Whether supporting themselves or, more usually, contributing to the 45 Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, 103. 46 Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, 104. 47 Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, 104. 48 Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, 104. 49 See Peiss, Cheap Amusements.

122 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

family economy, most girls expected to work at some time in their teens.”50 Most of these working daughters “contributed all or a substantial part of their earnings to the family.” According to Peiss, “In 1888, 75% of female factory workers interviewed gave all their earnings and this figure remained relatively unchanged into the 1910s, when three quarters to four-fifths handed their pay envelopes over to their parents unopened.”51 In Shoes, a major scene depicts Eva handing over her wages to her mother in an unopened envelope. We watch Eva leaving work exhausted in the evening, walking back home before climbing the stairs, dead on her feet. When she enters her home, she is exasperated by her lazy father lounging in bed, enjoying a penny dreadful. In the kitchen, she finds her mother preparing cabbage and meat—“mostly cabbage.” In contrast with the angry looks she directs towards her father, Eva affectionately approaches her mother and hands over her wages. The film devotes a substantial moment to this scene, where the mother explicitly opens the envelope at the proscenium, takes out the money, and, after counting it, says: “This will only cover the rent, and the butcher will have to wait for another week.”52 Eva is saddened and enraged when her mother refuses to save for her the three dollars she needs for the new pair of shoes. Her mother tells her to wait for next week, and until then she must make do with her disintegrating footwear. However, from the opening scene, the audiences know that no money will be left for Eva’s shoes the following week either. According to Stamp, the button-up boots are the focus of the f ilm’s emphasis on female desire, and condense many of heroine Eva Meyer’s aspirations and longings.53 Despite interpreting the shoes as “the most visible index of her exploitative working conditions,” Stamp analyses Eva’s longing for a new pair in terms of a consumerist desire fuelled by the department store and commodified forms of walking in public space.54 According to Stamp, the film devotes substantial energy to the moments between home and work, when Eva is poised in front of the shop window. In this scene, since we do not yet know that “Eva’s shoes are deteriorating badly, a fact not revealed until the following scene, the emphasis here falls solely upon Eva’s desire for the boots as stylish commodities.”55 I would like to extend Stamp’s analysis of the scene to argue that it in fact depicts a non-commercial form 50 Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 34. 51 Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 34. 52 Quoted from the intertitles. 53 Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, 107. 54 Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, 101–109. 55 Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, 109.

The Fl âneuse and the Aesthe tics of the Female Gaze

123

Figure 13: Eva’s shoes—still from Shoes (Courtesy of Milestone Films and Eye Filmmuseum).

of female pedestrianism and female gaze. That is, the scene contains clues that frame Eva’s longing for a new pair of shoes as a basic necessity rather than a luxurious desire. It is important to consider this particular scene in relation to several shots that precede it. We see Eva leaving work with her co-workers, this time at a different angle that earlier showed them entering the five-and-dime store in the morning. Whereas in the former scene the camera was placed inside the store, in the latter it is placed on the street, as if waiting for the women to come out. The women leave the store gleefully: we can clearly see them smiling, chatting, and laughing, which might be suggestive of their enthusiasm for after-work leisure. After this scene, we see Eva and her friend Lil walking down the street. We later come to understand that they are walking back home, but from their light-hearted gestures (like laughing and chatting), we can feel this is a pleasant, leisurely walk, perhaps a flânerie, rather than a hurried one. They flow into the fixed frame from the left while a shop window is shown on the right-hand side of the frame. Her friend passes the window without stopping, but Eva is attracted to a pair of shoes on display. The flow of their walk is interrupted by a cut, which gives us a close-up of the shop window with an eye-line match that leaves Eva’s hand reaching out to the shoes but prevented by the transparent barrier. Lil also halts and remains in the frame on the left-hand side. Just as Eva looks down at her own shoes, a man (whose

124 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

name we later learn is Charlie) leaves the store, gazing at Eva mischievously, as shown in close-up. The next shot shows Eva glaring at him infuriatedly for no other reason than becoming an object of the gaze. This disposition of the gaze recalls Buck-Morss’s claim that when women roamed the streets in this era, they became carnal commodities. Hereinbefore, I used Buck-Morss’s idea in connection with Friedberg’s argument that although “women were objects for consumption, objects for the gaze of the flâneur,” they were also empowered as bearers of the gaze as part of consumer culture. I contended that in this transition from the “object for the gaze of the flâneur” to the “bearer of the gaze” as a consumer, there is no engagement with masculine and feminine positions of looking. This scene from Shoes seems to harbour just such an engagement in the strong dissimilarity between Eva’s desire for the shoes and Charlie’s desire for Eva. Because she is an underpaid store clerk, Eva’s gaze holds no power over the object. On the contrary, the invisible barrier that symbolizes her inability to obtain the shoes indicates the limits of her power over them. In contrast, Charlie’s gaze strongly interpellates Eva as an object of desire. It is through seeing Eva’s gaze that we know she feels harassed by Charlie’s look. It is also important to remember the gaze of the f ilmmaker. As a female filmmaker, Weber expressly distances herself from the male gaze, which is represented in the film as abominable and harassing. She instead devotes more energy to the moment when Eva returns the gaze with glaring anger. In light of the dominance-submission pattern that I mentioned before, it is possible to argue that, since he is the holder of the male gaze, Charlie’s dominance is not supported or promoted in this scene but seriously undermined. By portraying him in a tight close-up with his gaze directed out of the frame, this image implies that his gaze has limits—that he is not the dominant beholder. Furthermore, the eye-line match right after this scene does not portray Eva as the object of his desire. On the contrary, the relation between these images focusing on an exchange of gazes is constructed almost like a duel: Eva loathes the look from Charlie, and her own infuriated stare seems to mark her as rebellious, and clearly unwilling to submit to his desire, rather than a submissive object of the male gaze. Hence, it can be claimed that this scene subverts the dominance-submission pattern in the way described by Kaplan. Eva is not constructed through the male gaze; instead, the scene offers a critical perspective on how it feels to be seen as an object of desire, which indicates that the film’s director, Weber, provides an example of the female gaze. Furthermore, this gaze is shared by the spectators, both male and female, because through the mise-en-scène and editing, Charlie is presented as a contemptable character to all spectators.

The Fl âneuse and the Aesthe tics of the Female Gaze

125

The second clue contained in the scene is the clearly visible price of the shoes, which cost $3 compared to children’s boots at $2.50. According to a United States Department of Labor’s Bureau of Statistics’ bulletin of the time, the downtown price for a loaf of bread was 8¢ while a gallon of milk was 36¢. In the film, the case study cited from Jane Addams quoted the weekly room rent at $2. We are also told that Eva earns $5 a week. A survey of mail-order catalogues from leading department stores like Eaton’s and Sears indicates that $3 for button-up shoes was an average price for this period. For instance, Eaton’s catalogue for 1916 offers “stylish” button-up shoes, ranging in price from $3.50 to $5 (Figure 14), although cheaper versions of button boots are also available at Eaton’s. A model similar to what we see in the film stands out in the catalogue with a special discount price of $2.25. In the Sears catalogue from 1916, prices for button boots range from $1.75 to $2. The cheaper shoes, as seen in both catalogues, mostly have cloth or linen tops, making them unsuitable for year-round wear. The pair of shoes that Eva desires are also clearly shown to have leather rather than cloth tops. Such button boots, with a cow-skin vamp, are the pricier models in the catalogue. From this information, it is possible to understand that Eva wishes to buy durable shoes so that they will last longer. That is, the information indicates that the shoes Eva desires are neither overpriced nor luxurious but simply a sensible choice for a woman worker in Eva’s situation. The film therefore does not construe Eva’s wish for a new pair of shoes as mere consumerist desire; it suggests instead that a pair of decent shoes is a basic prerequisite for Eva to perform her work at the dime store simply in order to survive and earn a living for her family. We learn from Stamp that studies of department store employees in 1910s found evidence that “standing for periods of up to fourteen hours a day caused physical strain.”56 In the film, Eva’s deteriorating footwear is shown to be the reason for her physical ill health.57 From this perspective, it is possible to argue that her shoes stand for the Marxian concept of ‘the means of subsistence’, which denotes all means required for the performance and reproduction of labour. The film further reinforces this need for durable all-weather shoes in the scene where Eva has to walk to and from work in a downpour. In addition to Eva’s usual exhaustion every day, this scene includes an extraordinarily striking tracking shot that traces her footsteps in close-up in the pouring rain. In this sequence, the tension is built up through Eva’s shoes; 56 Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, 107. 57 Eva regularly has a footbath to relax her feet every night; in one scene, she even removes a nail from her foot.

126 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Figure 14: Latest fashion from Eaton’s mail-order catalogue, 1916.

Figure 15: Comparing prices: Detail from Eaton’s catalogue on the left, detail from Shoes on the right (Courtesy of Milestone Films and Eye Filmmuseum).

with each footfall in the rain, the affect grows stronger. The cinematography is unusual for its time and seems to be one of the bold experimental scenes that Weber was well known for. She was praised for her remarkable attention to visual detail and for experimenting with cinematic narration, seeing it as a

The Fl âneuse and the Aesthe tics of the Female Gaze

127

Figure 16: Still from Shoes (Courtesy of Milestone Films and Eye Filmmuseum).

voiceless language. Here, instead of showing Eva’s face in close-up as a visual sign of her plight, the audience is given a six-second tracking shot focusing on the shoes. This encourages the audience to imagine the sensations of wetness, cold, and pain in Eva’s feet, and the anger, desperation, fatigue, and frailty building up inside her. Weber’s preference for this viewpoint, along with her camera movement, is unusual when compared to, for instance, the conventional grammatical choice for a close-up of the face to convey powerful human emotions. Instead, Weber focuses on the feet and shoes to foster affective alignment with the protagonist. This unusual scene powerfully portrays Eva’s condition and strongly demonstrates that a pair of new shoes is a basic necessity for her wellbeing. Three days of pouring rain make Eva terribly sick since she also has to stand the whole day at the store. It is this turmoil that drives her to decide to meet Charlie to escape poverty. Thus, these scenes clearly show the audience that Eva was not tempted by a consumerist desire to “sell herself for a pair of shoes.”58 In a way, the audiences are misguided by the opening intertitles, which suggest that the protagonist will yield to ‘temptation’ to buy a pair of shoes. Weber tricks her audience by reconstructing the situation in a different way. That is, 58 Quoted from the intertitles.

128 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

if working-class women were at risk of behaving ‘immorally’, it was poverty to blame not, as widely believed, their frivolity. Weber thus makes a stronger point about the destitute conditions of the working class. In light of these scenes, it is possible to conclude that Eva’s pedestrianism between home and work is not a commodified activity driven by consumerist desires. Contrary to Friedberg’s class-biased description of female flânerie, which I discussed previously, Shoes depicts a non-commercial form of female pedestrianism through a protagonist modelled on the socio-economic realities facing female workers in an early twentieth-century American urban setting. While Friedberg diminishes the agency of the female stroller or reduces it to the purchasing power of upper-class women, Shoes demonstrates the many ways in which working-class women walked the city streets.

Changing Streetscapes and Women’s Pedestrian Acts In addition to Eva’s pedestrianism between home and work, Shoes also draws from the public visibility of working women in other parts of the city, such as parks. Like other young working-class women, who “commonly saved their allowances for lunch by skipping the meal altogether,”59 Eva is shown rambling to the park during the lunch break to enjoy her home-made sandwich in the free public space. However, the day depicted in the film is not a joyous day for Eva to relish the park—she is sick, weakened, and withdrawn after many days of influenza. It is possible to guess that she might have preferred to stay in if she could on this day since she can hardly stand on her feet. From her face, we can tell she is desperate and weary of the poverty that has made her this ill. In the park, she encounters other lives that are so different from hers, which helps to situate Eva within a larger social picture. The park is depicted in the film as a leisurely place where many people, men and women from diverse backgrounds and social classes, hang about. In these off-hours, Eva comes into contact with other women who similarly spend their leisure time in the park. These minor characters shed light on other types of leisure culture, pedestrianism, and commodity culture, especially those of better-off women. The scene in question here is the most crowded one in the f ilm and includes the longest take, which portrays both the leisurely rhythms and varied velocities of movement in the park. Eva walks into the frame and sits on a crowded bench. She occupies a small spot on the left-hand side 59 Quoted from the intertitles.

The Fl âneuse and the Aesthe tics of the Female Gaze

129

of the frame while on the right-hand side we have a medium to long-shot view of the park. The camera is positioned so that we can see many people walking into and out of the frame. In this sense, the porosity of the frame increases the impression of a crowded, buzzing, and vibrant public space in a visual style that borrows from Lumière’s city views. We see groups of men and women, or lonely men and women trotting across the visual f ield. After a short while, a crowded group of young women enter from the farthest point in perspective before approaching the camera as well as Eva. They are chatting and laughing, enjoying a leisurely and light-hearted ramble in the park, in contrast to Eva’s loneliness and desperation. They are all well dressed and as Eva sees them, she becomes embarrassed by her shoes and hides them under her skirt. She looks at their shoes enviously, and to increase the effect of her longing, we cut to a close-up of their shoes. After the women have passed by, she looks down at her own shoes again. In the other women’s diverse shoes, we can see almost all the fashionable styles advertised in the Eaton’s or Sears catalogues. This shot mimics several conventional viewpoints and framing from fashion newsreels. Weber’s aesthetic choice to depict the rich women’s shoes in the style of fashion newsreels establishes a connection between their dressing and commodity culture. Thus, these women could correspond to Friedberg’s narrow description of the flâneuse, whose freedom of movement (and in this example, healthy posture and gait) is linked to their purchasing power. As opposed to these brand-new, spotlessly clean shoes, Eva’s footwear is worn out, dirty, and disintegrating. A little later, Eva watches the same women get into a car. This scene encapsulates financial inequality by counterpoising similarly aged women living totally different lives. The rich women do not have to walk, so their shoes are always clean, whereas Eva, unable to afford a cab fare, has to walk between home and work, and stand on her feet the whole day at the department store. Her shoes are workers’ shoes—a synecdoche for her impoverished body. From this perspective, the close-up image of Eva’s shoes recalls a well-known image of a toiler’s footwear, Oude Schoenen (A Pair of Shoes), painted by Van Gogh in 1886. Martin Heidegger offers a pertinent interpretation of this painting: From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes, there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie

130 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Figure 17: Oude Schoenen (Van Gogh, 1886).

the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrate the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. The equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death.60

Heidegger’s emphasis on walking,61 hard work, loneliness, poverty, silent anxiety, and poor health are equally applicable to the image of Eva’s shoes. Throughout the film, but especially in this sequence, the shoes speak for themselves as very strong and powerful signs of working-class conditions. The close-ups of the shoes in the film almost always function as what Deleuze calls affect-images.62 60 Quoted in Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age, 250. My emphases. 61 Heidegger’s reading has been contested by art historians and by Derrida; for a general discussion see Payne, “Derrida, Heidegger, and Van Gogh’s ‘Old Shoes’.” 62 See Deleuze, Cinema 1.

The Fl âneuse and the Aesthe tics of the Female Gaze

131

In the park scene, the encounter with the passers-by further intensifies empathy for Eva through the use of close-up images of different shoes. Even after the wealthier women have passed the bench that Eva is sitting on, the image of their brand-new shoes lingers on in her mind, just as it continues to occupy the screen. We next see Eva shedding tears of desperation. She unwraps her sandwich but cannot eat it. These moments are emotionally tied to another earlier scene where Eva, lying sick in bed, has a nightmare about being captured by the giant hand of poverty. A similar sense of entrapment emanates from her posture. Downcast and unwell, she is stranded on the bench. Her sense of entrapment is symbolized by a close-up shot where we see Eva looking down at her shoes again. Here, Weber shows Eva’s imagination by superimposing new shoes in place of old ones. In Shoe Reels: The History and Philosophy of Footwear in Film, Pamela Hutchinson emphasizes how Weber encodes footwear as “a signifier of status that delineates class and economic boundaries rather than crossing them.”63 As such, Eva’s shoes become a marker of her economic vulnerability. They represent a hidden problem that “the audience is uniquely privileged to view, especially in those excruciating close- ups of her sore feet.”64 There are multiple moments when Eva tries to hide her shoes from view, a reflex to conceal her vulnerability—specifically her economic precarity. Finally, as the most crowded scene in the film, the park scene highlights the diversity of women’s clothing, behaviours, and presence in social space. By contrasting Eva with upper-class women through their shoes, the scene also depicts the diverse pedestrian acts of women from different social classes. Weber thereby contributes to the aesthetics and politics of cinematic pedestrianism by rendering visible women’s experience and performance of walking in the American metropolis.

Conclusion: Many Apparitions of the Flâneuse In this chapter, I have analysed Lois Weber’s film Shoes as the product of an era marked by women’s increasing visibility in urban public streetscapes. While this phenomenon has mostly been investigated through the perspective of consumerism, which focuses on a commodity-oriented female 63 Hutchinson, “‘An Intensive Study of—Feet!’ in Two Films by Lois Weber: Shoes and The Blot,” 40. 64 Hutchinson, “‘An Intensive Study of—Feet!’ in Two Films by Lois Weber: Shoes and The Blot,” 41.

132 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

flânerie, various researchers, notably Wolff and Wilson, have called for an investigation into other forms of women’s experience in public space. Through the story of its working-class protagonist, Eva, a character modelled on the era’s socioeconomic facts, Shoes depicts non-commercial forms of women’s presence on streets and pavements, and in parks. In addition to these experiences of working-class women, the film portrays the social situation and behaviours of better-off women—such as Eva’s friend Lil or other women whom Eva encounters on her walks. The film uses pedestrianism as an aesthetic tool to represent and explore diverse forms of women’s existence in the everyday spaces of major American cities. The outside scenes are always crowded with women walking in the street: some are elegantly dressed to reflect the era’s fashion madness; some walk into the frame before stopping to look at a shop window; some just flow in and out of the frame; some exit a store while some others enter; young girls run along the pavements. In short, the streets, parks, and pavements are buzzing with women. This diversity proves that Weber does not make any judgements regarding the ways in which this new visibility is asserted on the streets. Although many women, especially working-class youth, had long been targets of public commentary for their supposed immorality and wanton behaviour, it is reasonable, following Peiss’s research, to argue that Weber takes an affirmative approach to their presence and the new aesthetics brought about by this presence of young women. Their rambling, loitering, and strolling transformed the city’s cultural landscape—a transformation which was largely regarded with disapproval by contemporary middle-class observers. Thus, using Rancière’s definition of aesthetics, I suggest that workingclass women strongly challenged that which could be presented as sense experience in the public arenas of the early twentieth-century urban United States. In addition to streets, parks, social clubs, and dance halls, cinemas were new locations for working-class leisure. Additionally, women were fast becoming prominent in the workforce of the cinema industry itself. At Universal Studios, during the period when Shoes was produced, “170 titles were directed by women between 1912 and 1919.”65 In this landscape, “Weber joined a host of voices insisting that filmmakers must be guaranteed artistic freedom.”66 Also challenging the aesthetic register of cinema production, she made ambitious claims about what “mature cinema” might look like: “not the highbrow literary, biblical and historical adaptations favoured 65 Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, 70. 66 Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, 68.

The Fl âneuse and the Aesthe tics of the Female Gaze

133

by her contemporaries Griff ith and [Cecil B.] DeMille, but an activist cinema that could engage in substantial political and social issues of the moment.”67 Shoes and Weber’s other films offered moviegoers a space in which to ponder the cinema’s and spectators’ own role in public debates. In a way, Weber used her own advantage as an intruder into the public space of movie theatres to transport audiences to the world of a working-class girl in a buzzing, filled with women from diverse social classes. Shoes, with its claim to portray the everyday life of a working-class woman from the lowest segment of society realistically, urges the audience to put themselves in Eva’s shoes.68 Consequently, the cinematic pedestrianism of Eva makes visible such forms of female perambulation that remained invisible, or were mainly eclipsed by reductive conceptualizations of the flâneuse that limited female flânerie to consumerism and the commodified gaze. In light of this argument, it can be suggested that Shoes represents an aesthetic challenge for audiences, for the motion picture industry at large and for the cultural historiography surrounding women’s mobility experiences in public space in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Works Cited N.A “50 Pair of Old Ragged Shoes Wanted,” Chronicle-Telegram [Elyria, OH] (16 September 1916): 6. https://chronicletelegram.newspaperarchive.com/ elyria-evening-telegram/1916-09-16/page-6/. Accessed 17 March 2022. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Buck-Morss, Susan. “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering.” New German Critique 39 (1986): 99–140. Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. California: University of California Press, 1994. Hutchinson, Pamela. “‘An Intensive Study of—Feet!’ in Two Films by Lois Weber: Shoes and The Blot.” In Shoe Reels: The History and Philosophy of Footwear in Film. Ed. Elizabeth Ezra and Catherine Wheatley. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. 38–48. Kaplan, Ann E. Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera. London: Methuen, 1983. 67 Stamp, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, 68. 68 Some screenings were aimed at people like Eva, offering free admission to those who brought a pair of deteriorating shoes like hers in the film. For example, Dreamland Theatre in Elyria, Ohio, put out an advertisement that “every child who will bring a pair of old ragged shoes (the more ragged and old the better) to the Dreamland Theatre” will be given “a ticket good for admission to the theatre” See N.A. “50 Pair of Old Ragged Shoes Wanted,” Chronicle-Telegram.

134 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Payne, Michael. “Derrida, Heidegger, and Van Gogh’s ‘Old Shoes.’” Textual Practice 6.1 (1992): 87–100. Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986. Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art. New York: Routledge, 1988. Rabinovitz, Lauren. For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turnof-the-Century Chicago. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London: Continuum, 2004. Schaeffer, Jean Marie. Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Slide, Anthony. Lois Weber: The Director Who Lost Her Way in History. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1996. Stamp, Shelley. Lois Weber in Early Hollywood. California: California University Press, 2015. Stamp, Shelley. “Lois Weber.” Women Film Pioneers Project. https://wfpp.cdrs. columbia.edu/pioneer/ccp-lois-weber/. Accessed 4 May 2021. Tester, Keith, ed., The Flâneur. New York: Routledge, 1994. Wilson, Elizabeth. “The Invisible Flâneur.” New Left Review 191 (January–February 1992: 90–110. Wolff, Janet. “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity.” Theory, Culture & Society 2.3 (1985): 37–46.

Filmography Fine Feathers, dir. Lois Weber, 1912. A Japanese Idyll, dir. Lois Weber, 1912. Suspense, dir. Lois Weber, 1913. Shoes, dir. Lois Weber, 1916. The Unshod Maiden, dir. Albert de Mond, 1934.

4. A Wandering Eye: The Kino-Pedestrian Abstract This chapter focuses on the function of pedestrianism as a key component of Soviet Montage aesthetics, specifically coming to the fore in the film theory and practice of Dziga Vertov. The key function attributed by Vertov to the act of walking in film production is emphasized in his montage theory and his magnum opus Man with a Movie Camera. Contextualizing the images of walking in this film within the director’s theoretical writings, this chapter provides an in-depth study of how Vertov envisioned the camera operators (kinoks) as ambulant observers and archivers of everyday life. Imagining cinematographic labour as such, Vertov positioned the filmmaker as one worker among many that built Soviet society. Keywords: Soviet Montage, walking, pedestrianism, realism, Dziga Vertov

This chapter continues my interest in the urban pedestrian acts of the working class by shifting the focus to Soviet avant-garde filmmaker Dziga Vertov and his seminal documentary Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929). Although today Vertov is considered a major auteur and belongs to the mainstream of film history, his work was systematically neglected and avoided for a long time under the Stalinist climate in the Soviet Russia and beyond. Annette Michelson reminds us that until 1970, Man with a Movie Camera was unavailable for all practical and critical purposes in the West.1 Adelheid Heftberger stresses that the systematic studies on Vertov first appeared in Russia in the 1960s,2 in the era following Stalin’s death. The growing accessibility and spread of Vertov’s work stimulated interest in his documentary theory and practice, especially in activist filmmaking movements. The radical film aesthetics of groups as varied as the Workers 1 Michelson, “Introduction,” 22. 2 Heftberger’s examples include Abramov, Dziga Vertov; Sergei Drobashenko, ed. Vertov, Statii, dnevniki, zamysly. See Heftberger, Digital Humanities and Film Studies, 75.

Özgen, A., The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism: Walking in Films. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724753_ch04

136 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Film and Photo League in the United States, cinema verité (the French translation of Kino-Pravda) in 1960s France, and the French Dziga Vertov Group in the 1970s all took inspiration from his film theory and praxis.3 Vertov and his contemporary Soviet avant-gardists have also been a major influence on the new waves such as Cinema Novo and Third Cinema.4 Taking the camera to the streets to achieve a direct observation of everyday life, and the use of montage to reveal the hidden economic, social, and political structures that underlie the everyday, were common techniques of the radical film aesthetics of these movements, which sprouted up in the context of zeitgeist of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist liberation movements in the 1960s. Below, I examine how walking functioned in Vertov’s documentary practice and theory to achieve a revolutionary aesthetics of the street. Vertov’s filmmaking and writings on cinema have never before been analysed from the perspective of walking. This gap in the literature is especially striking because his theoretical work clearly references bodily movement as one stage in filmmaking. For example, he insisted that “(t)he cameraman must avoid shooting ‘life-facts’ with a stationary camera, he must be ready to move through reality as of in ‘a canoe lost in a stormy sea’.”5 Based on a close reading of Vertov’s writings and diaries, I argue in this chapter that walking has a primarily analytical function in Vertov’s filmmaking; its purpose is to observe everyday life in its uninterrupted flow—in a similar fashion to Lumière’s flânerie, which I explained in Chapter Two. First, ambulant observation is a key pre-filmic stage whereby the filmmaker watches the ordinary flow of life “to obtain various choices before he decides when to shoot […] with his camera.”6 The moment the filmmaker decides to shoot, he [sic] is expected to remain “unnoticed […] not to bother other people at their work just as he would expect them not to disturb him during shooting.”7 Being an incognito pedestrian provides an ethical disposition to film life as it is. As such, the ambulant observation of everyday life and actions is a key process in the production of film footage. In a way, footage requires footwork. Second, the everyday shots thus collected by the ambulant camera operators formed the basis for Vertov’s revelationist aesthetics. These snippets of the everyday would later be edited with a specific strategy—one that would 3 Stam, Keywords in Subversive Film / Media Aesthetics, 109. 4 Stam, Keywords in Subversive Film / Media Aesthetics, 109. 5 Dziga Vertov cited in Petric, “Dziga Vertov as Theorist,” 41. 6 Petric, “Dziga Vertov as Theorist,” 41. 7 Petric, “Dziga Vertov as Theorist,” 41.

A Wandering Eye: The Kino -Pedestrian

137

make visible the hidden structures that are invisible to the naked eye and to the consciousness of the masses. Vertov calls this “cinematic decoding”8 and sometimes “a communist decoding of the world.”9 Usually achieved through parallel editing, this approach is informed by Marxist political economy and aims to make the labour—or the productive process that underlies the everyday—visible. As such, Vertov’s documentary filmmaking was also aimed at educating the masses and leading them to ideological transformation. All these levels powerfully stand out in Man with a Movie Camera. Yuri Tsivian calls this film “a manifesto written in celluloid.”10 In many ways, this film contains the key ideas of Vertov’s documentary theory. Below, I analyse a specific sequence which I will call ‘the kino-pedestrian’ to explain the key functions of pedestrianism in Vertov’s documentary aesthetics. I propose this novel concept to address the industrialist fantasy of an inexhaustible ambulant camera operator, which unites the anthropomorphic ability to walk with the machinic capacity to record ceaselessly. As such, the kinopedestrian provides uncut and natural (as in, non-acted) footage of the everyday. This forms the raw material to be edited into the final product in a revelationist fashion aiming to show the production of society, every day (which is then the “film-truth,” or kino-pravda).11 As I will show in my close analysis of the said sequence below, the kino-pedestrian is envisioned as a collective subject of many camera operators who are constantly on the move to observe and record. As an ambulant onlooker, the kino-pedestrian thus keeps the collective memory of the Soviet society. The kino-pedestrian thus enables us to think about a cinematic aesthetics of the everyday produced by a collective of filmmakers constantly on the move. One potential for this concept, for example, would be to approach the activist filmmaking practices at times of urban revolt. This is one of the many ways in which Vertov’s theory and practice of filmmaking continue to inspire the art of radical cinema. My analysis of Man with a Movie Camera in this chapter is based on the Dutch Filmliga copy that is kept by the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. It is the only known 35mm full-frame nitrate positive print, which has been preserved well.12 It was the basis for the restoration carried out by the 8 Vertov, “From Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye,” 87. 9 Vertov, “The Birth of Kino-Eye,” 42. 10 Tsivian, “Introduction,” 33. 11 Vertov, “The Birth of Kino-Eye,” 40. 12 Heftberger, Digital Humanities and Film Studies, 110.

138 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

museum in 2010, in collaboration with the Austrian Film Museum, which holds “probably the largest Vertov collection” among European archives.13 Eye’s preservation of the documentary is a consequence of the history of early cinema activism in Western Europe and its links to Soviet filmmaking. In the 1920s, a collective of Dutch cinephiles had the aim of screening “what people cannot see in movie theatres,”14 by which they meant censorship and the bad taste of commercial cinema. The former was due to a conservative discourse on the alleged negative effects of cinema, both morally and politically, which crystallized after the passage of the Cinema Act (Bioscoopwet) in 1926, leading to the establishment of a ‘film certification’ commission (Centrale Commissie voor de Filmkeuring), for the examination of all films to be shown publicly.15 At the same time, however, there was a growing interest in the potential of the medium in literary and artistic circles, such as the one around De Stijl, a magazine founded by artist Theo van Doesburg, who also wrote in it about film.16 In such circles, Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1926) was enthusiastically received.17 However, Pudovkin’s Mother (1926) was subsequently banned by the authorities as communist propaganda. Eduard Pelster, who had imported the film, subsequently organized a screening, together with Joris Ivens, at the artistic society De Kring in Amsterdam, on 13 May 1927. Officially, this was not a public screening, as one had access through membership. These members-only events eventually resulted in the establishment of the Nederlandsche Filmliga by a group of young literary critics and journalists, together with ‘technical advisers’ Pelster and Ivens (who was not yet a filmmaker, like others who would become filmmakers later on).18 The group was soon joined by other journalists, artists, and architects, among others, who established in total seven branches in cities across the country.19 This network was coordinated by the central board, which was based in Amsterdam (1927–1931) and subsequently Rotterdam (1931–1933), which were the largest branches, with hundreds of members each.20 The Filmliga presented a programme every month, with avantgarde films from various countries, including France, Germany, and the Soviet 13 Heftberger, Digital Humanities and Film Studies, 75. 14 Linssen and Schoots, “Film is geen lolletje.” 15 Dibbets, “Het taboe van de Nederlandse filmcultuur: Neutraal in een verzuild land.” 16 Paalman, Cinematic Rotterdam, 68. 17 Heijs, “Inleiding,” 10. 18 Linssen, et al., Het Gaat Om De Film!, 19–21. 19 Linssen et al., Het Gaat Om De Film!, 183–85. 20 Linssen et al., Het Gaat Om De Film!, 294.

A Wandering Eye: The Kino -Pedestrian

139

Union. They often acquired their films through their representatives in Paris and Berlin,21 who were part of a quickly emerging avant-garde network across Europe.22 In this way, starting in the second season (1928–1929), the Filmliga also invited filmmakers to the screenings, first of all Germaine Dulac, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and René Clair.23 The next year, Eisenstein was among their guests,24 and in December 1931 Dziga Vertov was invited as well, to present his newly made sound film Enthusiasm (1931). The Filmliga had already shown Man with a Movie Camera in the months before his visit.25 From 6 to 10 December Vertov stayed in the Netherlands, more precisely in Hotel Atlanta in Rotterdam,26 a popular meeting place among artists.27 On the 9th he gave a lecture at Luxor Palast, Rotterdam’s largest cinema,28 followed by the screening of Enthusiasm. A similar event was repeated the next day at Corso Cinema in Amsterdam.29 Because of its particular organizational structure, the Filmliga did not rent the films but bought them—in collaboration with distributor and avantgarde theatre De Uitkijk in Amsterdam,30 which continued its operations after the Filmliga had been dissolved. After World War II, a new generation of cinephiles established Het Nederlands Historisch Film Archief (1946), which took care of the socalled Uitkijk Collection, becoming one of its main pillars.31 In 1952 the archive was renamed as Nederlands Filmmuseum, before being renamed the Eye Filmmuseum in 2012. Thus the Filmliga copy of Man with a Movie Camera has been at the core of the museum’s history. This copy of Vertov’s documentary—which is the only known 35mm full-frame nitrate positive print version32—has been quite well preserved. This print of the film stands out as an invaluable source for a close reading for a few reasons. First, made directly from the camera negative, it has an exceptionally good photographic quality. Second, it differs significantly from all other extant prints in terms of its image format. For a long time, Man with a Movie Camera was known only in a “trimmed” version, which 21 Linssen et al., Het Gaat Om De Film!, 79. 22 Hagener, Moving Forward, Looking Back. 23 Linssen et al., Het Gaat Om De Film!, 13. 24 See the newsreel Russische regisseur bezoekt ons land. 25 Linssen et al., Het Gaat Om De Film!, 296. 26 Linssen et al., Het Gaat Om De Film!, 133. 27 Struyvenberg, “Een oase op het dak van Hotel Atlanta.” 28 Paalman, Cinematic Rotterdam, 63. 29 Linssen et al., Het Gaat Om De Film!, 296. 30 Linssen et al., Het Gaat Om De Film!, 116. 31 Lameris, Film Museum Practice and Film Historiography, 22, 40. 32 Heftberger, Digital Humanities and Film Studies, 110.

140 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

means one section of its frame was lost because of a widespread copying mispractice.33 However, the print preserved in the Netherlands survived untouched in its original full-frame version. Third, the structure of the film’s action is slightly different in this version. Originally, Vertov divided the film into six acts, which he marked with animated silver numerals. Over the years, the numbers were removed from almost all prints, leaving the transitions between the reels seamless. This removal could lead to a misinterpretation and misreading of the film’s montage aesthetics. The restoration and subsequent release of the Eye version of Man with a Movie Camera can be seen as part of a renewed interest in Vertov’s filmmaking since the early 2000s, largely due to increasing access to his work. This has allowed for fresh perspectives on Vertov, but more importantly, thanks to the digitization work and launch of digital archives, it has become possible to get a fuller picture of the context in which Vertov produced his landmark film. One decisive moment in the reestablishment of Vertov’s reputation as a key early film director occurred in 2004, when Giornate del Cinema Muto hosted the first extensive screening of Vertov’s oeuvre in Europe. In the catalogue, Tsivian pointed to the glaring lack in the scholarship on Vertov: “Let’s face it: Most of us only know Vertov from three or four films.”34 In order to achieve a fuller understanding of the Soviet director’s work, the 2004 programme consisted of three important pillars: the screening of as many films as possible (not only by Vertov but also by his Soviet contemporaries); a compilation of Vertov’s manifestoes and other writings (what Tsivian calls “the verbal side” of the kino-eye movement), which should be read alongside the films; and finally, an exhibition of Vertov-related objects, selected from the Austrian Film Museum’s renowned collection.35 Two years later, in 2006, the Austrian Film Museum curated an extensive programme which screened Vertov’s lesser-known works, such as his Kinonedelja (Cinema-Week, 1918) newsreels and Kino-Pravda newsreel series (Cinema-Truth, 1922–1925). In 2017 and 2018, the Austrian museum restored and digitized both these series and made them accessible on their website. This was another important moment that opened up new horizons, especially in the study of the development of Vertov’s film language, as well as his documentary theory and practice. 33 Heftberger, Digital Humanities and Film Studies, 110. 34 Tsivian, “Dziga Vertov.” 35 Tsivian, “Dziga Vertov.” It’s worthwhile noting here the archival labour by Elizaveta Svilova, thanks to whom this collection survived.

A Wandering Eye: The Kino -Pedestrian

141

However, the two feature-length documentaries that Vertov made between Kinonedelja and Kino-Pravda were considered to be lost. Vertov’s directorial debut, Godovshchina revolyutsii (The Anniversary of the Revolution, 1918) was a feature-length documentary, compiled from existing or found footage and made to mark the anniversary of the October Revolution. After years of archival research, film historian Nikolai Izvolov discovered that the film had been stored in fragments.36 The restoration and screening of the film at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2018 marked its hundredth anniversary. Following the success of this project, Izvolov embarked on another round of extensive archival research to track down Istoriya grazhdanskoi voiny (The History of the Civil War, 1921). Compiled by Vertov over a short period of ten days to be screened during the Third World Congress of the Comintern convened in Moscow, this documentary was never properly released or circulated. Its only copy was considered lost or cut into pieces by Vertov himself to use in other films. Based on a detailed list and description of the newsreels used in this documentary, Izvolov hunted down the bits and pieces of the original.37 The reconstruction of The History of the Civil War was screened at IDFA in 2021. The experience of watching these newly restored documentaries undoubtedly expands our knowledge of Vertov. But something else happens. With each viewing I remember the question that was once asked by a Vertov scholar: “Is this the beginning of the Vertov that we know today?” In what follows, I limit my focus to Man with a Movie Camera. But I recognize that cinematic pedestrianism provides a productive lens through which to examine these other works by the Soviet director. Since the act of walking and its importance in achieving the cinematic language and structure that Vertov envisioned has never been studied in depth, it is my hope that future scholarship will examine further connections across Vertov’s filmic oeuvre.

Man ‘Walking’ with a Movie Camera Intended as a visual manifesto of his film theory and “an experiment in film transmission,” to quote from the opening titles, Man with a Movie Camera opens with the images of an empty film theatre. When the spectators fill the seats and the orchestra starts playing, the screen becomes alive, presenting audiences with snippets of everyday life, edited in a constructivist 36 Izvolov, From Vertov to Medvevkin, 27. 37 Ozgen and Paalman, “Vertov’un Kayıp Filmi.”

142 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

avant-garde style to create the impression of a single day—from morning to evening—in an urban setting. The film weaves thus an impressionistic view of urban daily life from a purely cinematic perspective. The camera operator, played by Mikhail Kaufman, carries a lightweight camera in all impossible settings, which then highlights the production process of all the images that are presented to the spectators on the screen. The daily activities of a camera operator and the film editor are thus presented as being equal with the other forms of labour. The key function that Vertov attributed to pedestrianism in film production is most evident in a specific sequence. Towards the end of the film, a camera mounted on a tripod walks into the frame, just like a pedestrian. Achieved through stop-motion techniques, this fantasy unification between the camera-tripod (hereafter, kino-apparatus) and the camera operator represents the importance that Vertov attributed to walking. As such, this hybrid character creates an imagined pedestrian with camera vision and photographic memory, inexhaustibly recording everyday life as a constant observer on the move. This activity formed a significant part of what Vertov called “a communist decoding of the world.”38 At the most basic level, this ‘decoding’ corresponded to making visible the hidden political, economic, social constructions that make up everyday life. In his analysis of Vertov’s filmmaking, Philip Rosen argues that “the normal moving image directly and immediately conveys ordinary socioeconomic actions such as buying food and the labour of producing that food,” for example.39 As such, the guiding principle of Vertov’s decoding is a Marxist analysis of political economy. Writing on the essence of his kino-eye theory in 1925, Vertov declared that it aimed to “aid each oppressed individual and the proletariat as a whole in their effort to understand the phenomena around them.” Led by “newsreel workers,” the kino-eye movement targeted “decoding life as it is” and “using facts to influence the workers’ consciousness,”40 particularly through “facts, carefully selected, recorded, and organized” from the “life of the workers themselves,”41 to produce the final filmic product. The main theme that preoccupied Vertov throughout his filmmaking was thus the notion of the everyday as the very bearer of social facts. This is where Vertov’s denunciation of artistic drama lies. While artistic drama “clouds the eye and the brain,” he argued that the kino-eye “opens the 38 39 40 41

Vertov, “The Essence of Kino-Eye,” 50. Rosen, “Now and Then,” 196. Vertov, “The Essence of Kino-Eye,” 49. Vertov, “The Essence of Kino-Eye,” 50.

A Wandering Eye: The Kino -Pedestrian

143

eyes and clears the vision.”42 Furthermore, while the facts are glossed over in artistic drama, Vertov spoke proudly of the heavy work of the kino-eye in capturing the facts as closely as possible. Making such labour visible was a signif icant component of Vertov’s Marxist aesthetics. Michelson sees here the traces of The German Ideology by Marx and Engels: “It’s the real process of production, starting out from the material production of life itself, the form of intercourse connected with this and created by this mode of production [which renders this history intelligible].”43 In Man with a Movie Camera, which for Michelson is the synthetic articulation of the Marxist project, the “material production of life” is explored through ambulant camera operators and revealed through the work of montage. The basic knowledge that all members of Soviet society actively contribute to the production of life becomes the subject matter of the film. In the wide spectrum of industrial production represented on the screen—ranging from mining, steel production, communications, construction, hydroelectric power installation, and the textile industry—filmmaking as labour is also emphasized. While artistic drama was built on the principle of ignoring such labour, including the labour of the cinema workers who produced the film, Vertov’s ideal vision of the cinema strived to make that labour visible. In Vertov’s documentaries, the productive process is made visible through two aesthetic preferences. First, the labour would become the subject matter of the film. Instead of individual stories of the bourgeoisie, the facts shared by the masses would be the main focus. Perhaps for this reason rich interiors or homes never really appear in Vertov’s documentaries. Rather, images of vibrant streets, crowded squares, shopfloors pulsating with activity fill the screen. Second, contrary to the engrossing storytelling aesthetics in artistic drama, based on an uninterrupted flow of narration and seamless editing techniques, Vertov’s documentaries are self-reflexive in their emphasis on their own productive process. Filmmakers’ creative and technical labour is not hidden but made visible. In addition to the recording of footage, the usually hidden editing process is strongly emphasized as a significant stage in producing the very final product, which audiences are now enjoying. Man with a Movie Camera is not only the practical result of this approach; it is also its “theoretical manifestation on the screen.”44

42 Vertov, “Artistic Drama and Kino-Eye,” 48. 43 Michelson, “Introduction,” xxxvi. 44 Vertov, “The Man with a Movie Camera,” 84.

144 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Man with a Movie Camera represents pedestrianism as both subject matter and an activity that pervades many levels of filmmaking. The film opens with still images of empty city streets, edited together with still images of men, women, homeless people, workers, and poor people sleeping. The stillness in this sequence functions in almost the same way as the opening of René Clair’s Paris qui dort, which was outlined in the Introduction. 45 Similarly to Clair’s film, without any movement it is hard to discern whether what we are looking at is moving images or the reproduction of freeze frames. However, these general views also include very subtle movements: wires swinging, curtains swaying, or leaves softly shaking in the breeze. Like Lumière’s early experiments with the motion picture (such as Repas de Bébé, C.L. No. 88), where a fascination with the medium’s ability to film the delicate movements of nature was most evident, 46 in Man with a Movie Camera, these scenes flaunt the medium’s superiority to still photography. In a way, they differentiate these images from still photography and ensure that they are moving images. Thus, movement becomes the defining quality of the art of cinema. The true awakening of the city happens when the camera operator steps onto the street. Early in the morning, just like all the other people who are waking up in order to go to work, the camera operator goes out to collect footage. However, his workplace is not the factory or the field. It is all places: streets, mines, shopfloors, factories, railways, cranes, etc. He travels from one point to another on foot, or occasionally by car. While driving allows the operator to travel from place to place more quickly, 47 walking enables him to explore the areas that are inaccessible by car, move closer to his 45 On 12 April 1926, Vertov wrote in his diary that he saw Paris qui dort, and he was deeply impressed by its technical design. He saw the ideas and aesthetics of the film as being closely related to the kino-eye: “Two years ago, I drew up a plan, whose technical design coincided exactly with this picture. I tried continually to f ind a chance to implement it. I was never given the opportunity. And now—they have done it abroad. Kino-Eye has lost one of its attack positions.” See Vertov, “12 April 1926,” 163. 46 Bertrand Tavernier mentions contemporary audiences’ impressions of the gentle movement of the leaves in Repas de Bébé at 4’57’’ to 5’00’’ of Lumière Brothers’ First Films (1996). 47 Vertov demanded “automobiles for screening” modelled on “fire brigades” that would ensure the availability of “swift technical staff.” He also suggested that the same car could “go out on call” in order “to shoot an urgent film.” Vertov, “Advertising Films,” 30. Elsewhere, among the essential needs of the kino-eye, Vertov lists “quick means of transport” (See “Kino-Eye,” 74). The automobile functions as another type of velocity alongside pedestrianism and all other velocities. Vertov writes, for example, “I am in constant motion, I draw near, then away from objects. I crawl under, I climb onto them. I move apace with the muzzle of a galloping horse, I plunge full speed into a crowd, I outstrip running soldiers, I fall on my back, I ascend with an airplane, I plunge and soar together with plunging and soaring bodies. Now I, a camera, fling myself along with

A Wandering Eye: The Kino -Pedestrian

145

Figure 18: Still from Man with a Movie Camera (Courtesy of Eye Filmmuseum).

subjects, zoom in on machines and faces, and achieve unusual framings to exhibit the worker’s hard labour. Going in and out of all these different places, the protagonist of the film, the man with a movie camera, is an ambulant operator. Furthermore, the shots taken by the camera operator highlight pedestrianism as an activity that unites all members of society, practiced by all types of workers in the film. Just as in Shoes, in Man with a Movie Camera we see men and women walking to their workplaces or wandering around in their leisure time. In the early hours of the morning, the streets are teeming with pedestrians, with the masses walking briskly in time to the rapid rhythm of urban streets. Intercutting the workers’ walking with that of the camera operator, Vertov presents pedestrianism as a shared activity practised by all workers. The camera operator sometimes walks with the crowds or watches them from above; sometimes merges with them or remains apart from them. This constant negotiation of the diegetic camera operator’s position is reflected in the ambiguous position of the true camera operator of the film itself, in that their resultant, manoeuvring in the chaos of movement, recording movement, starting with movements composed of the most complex combinations.” Vertov, “Kinoks: A Revolution,” 17.

146 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

these doubles are sometimes merged but are at other times differentiated from one another. I return to this negotiation in Chapter Five, as it shares quite a lot with the technique of “shadowing” (pedinamento) in Italian Neorealist film theory. Once all the city has woken up and gone outside onto the streets, the stillness that characterizes the first moments of Man with a Movie Camera gradually disappears. Unlike the tranquillity of the sleeping city, a range of velocities and types of motion starts to fill the frame. Just like in Lumière’s street views, the city streets and squares are teeming with movement—of trams, cars, and pedestrians. In a similar way to the flânerie in Paris qui dort, pedestrianism functions in this sequence as an activity that warrants cinematographic movement. Filming all this coming and going, Vertov’s man with a movie camera is a pedestrian who loiters and saunters, or sometimes runs or jumps on a vehicle for faster filming. These different velocities, which are introduced gradually in the film, also function to flaunt the medium’s abilities to organize and re-configure the visible world’s time (rhythm) and space (framing and content). This brings us to Vertov’s theory of montage. In what follows, I will discuss the functions of pedestrianism in the director’s film theory through the iconic image of the animated kino-apparatus, starting with a detailed description and analysis of the sequence.

The Walking Kino-Apparatus, or the Kino-Pedestrian The sequence from Man with a Movie Camera that I want to analyze in detail shows the kino-apparatus walking into the frame, 48 a fluid movement characteristic of pedestrians in street views, as I have explained elsewhere. Straddling on its three feet (namely the tripod) and turning its head around (almost nothing more than a gigantic ‘eye’ in the middle), the kino-apparatus acts like a human being walking around with a desire to see and watch, and to register the world in its own memory, the filmstrip. 49 It drifts right and 48 Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera (1929), 59’30’’. 49 A conception of the f ilmstrip as memory draws on a Bergsonian notion of memory as a conglomerate of images. See Bergson, Matter and Memory, Chapter Three. Even though Vertov was strongly inspired by Marxism, his cinema contains certain Bergsonian aspects, especially regarding memory and the mental organization of images. For example, in “The Birth of Kino-Eye” he describes some inspirational mental images as follows: “And one day in the spring of 1918 … returning from a train station. There lingered in my ears the sighs and rumble of the departing train… someone’s swearing…a kiss…someone’s exclamation…laughter, a whistle, voices, the

A Wandering Eye: The Kino -Pedestrian

147

left as if dancing, looks up and down as if curious, and turns its head around, occasionally zooming in on certain objects within or out of the frame. The sequence is intercut with images of spectators watching this robotic creature in awe. In addition to their amazement at the abilities of the machine, the viewers seem to be equally fascinated by the art of cinema, which can produce the illusion of an inanimate object becoming animate, thanks to the technique of stop-motion.50 The act of walking, similarly to the discussions in the previous chapters, is here again perceived as the key act that separates still image from moving image, or the act that enhances and enriches the movement within the image. More importantly, however, the act of walking is conceived as the key ability added to a machine in order to anthropomorphize it. Hence, the sequence presents us with the image of an anthropomorphized camera machine that acts (walks and looks) according to its own will. It is equally possible to suggest that the sequence presents us with the image of a mechanized camera-operator with superhuman powers (e.g., zooming in, continuously recording). One could even claim, with Lumière’s aesthetics of flânerie in mind, that we are watching a perfect flâneur/flâneuse camera-operator who can film while moving and without getting tired. Due to its hybrid quality, the image of the walking kino-apparatus has been described as “an early protocyborgian image”51 or “a cyborg combination.”52 While both are accurate conceptualizations, they are inadequate to explain the theoretical significance of this image in Vertov’s film theory. I therefore propose to call this image the ‘kino-pedestrian’, a concept that simultaneously encapsulates the kinetic enhancement of the camera and the optical enhancement of human vision. Such a union of man and machine appears several times in Vertov’s f ilm theory, and ringing of the station bell, the puffing of the locomotive…whispers, cries, farewells. And thoughts while walking: I must get a piece of equipment that won’t describe but will record, photograph these sounds […] They rush past, like time. But the movie camera perhaps? Record the visible… Organize not the audible, but the visible world. Perhaps that’s the way out?” Vertov, “The Birth of Kino-Eye,” 40. 50 Quite interestingly, this sequence stands out in the filmography of Vertov for its illusionistic tricks, a debated issue in his writings. Vertov repeatedly denounced the deceptive use of cinema as “the opium of people,” forthrightly attacking drama (“Kino-Eye,” 71). In this sequence, he uses stop-motion tricks in the style of Méliès in order to get across his kino-eye theory without any recourse to intertitles or other kind of explicatory text. Therefore, it should be approached and analysed as a manifestation of theory rather than as a regular practice of Soviet montage techniques. 51 Tomas, Vertov, Snow, Farocki, 5. 52 Schaub, “Presenting the Cyborg’s Futurist Past.”

148 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

he emphasizes it as a crucial means of realizing the fullest potential of cinema. The kino-pedestrian exalts the camera over the camera operator by celebrating its mechanic abilities to record what human visual perception cannot,53 to zoom in on what would otherwise remain unrecognizable to the eye because of distance, and to perform precise movements without error or exhaustion.54 Yet, the kino-pedestrian is not a machine per se; it also contains what Vertov would describe as perfected human senses. It therefore retains select human abilities. The vision of fostering a “new man” through the close kinship between humans and machines underlies Vertov’s constructivist aesthetics. In “WE: Variant of a Manifesto” he writes, “the new man, free of unwieldiness and clumsiness, will have the light, precise movements of machines.”55 Itself the product of a unification between human and mechanical abilities, the cinema can see and show some hidden truth that escapes human perception. As Malcolm Turvey explains regarding this variant of revelationism, “the techniques of slow and fast motion […] along with reverse motion, extreme close-ups or long shots, and editing” are celebrated “with cinema’s capacity to mechanically record reality, because they supposedly better enable filmmakers to reproduce reality as it is and not as it appears to humans with their flawed sense of sight.”56 It is in this sense that the image of the kino-pedestrian with its perfected human senses embodies Vertov’s entire vision of cinema.57 53 It is worthwhile remembering that Walter Benjamin similarly celebrated the abilities of photography and cinema to reveal what escapes human vision. In Chapter One of this book, I quoted Benjamin’s example of walking: “Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride […] Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions.” Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 237. Several years later, when writing on Italian Neorealism and the long take, André Bazin similarly praises the camera’s ability to record reality, unrestricted by the limitations of human vision. “Objective reality” for Bazin is the reality perceived by the “lens of the camera,” termed objectif in French. It may even be argued that Bazin seeks a realism that springs from the relationality between object and lens without any subjective factor. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 13. 54 For example, Vertov writes, “the position of our bodies while observing or our perception of a certain number of features of a visual phenomenon in a given instant are by no means obligatory limitations for the camera.” See “Kinoks: A Revolution,” 15. 55 Vertov, “WE: Variant of a Manifesto,” 8. 56 Turvey, Doubting Vision, 11. 57 It is worthwhile noting here that the union of man and machine to form a superior being was also one of the aims of Taylorism. It is no coincidence that Vertov wrote extensively on the

A Wandering Eye: The Kino -Pedestrian

149

Pedestrianism as Pre-Filmic Montage The drift of the camera was particularly important for Vertov. In “On the Organization of Creative Laboratory” he argued that in order to attain the fullest potential of cinema, a “flexible, highly-mobile” system of recording was needed. Among its other qualities, the image of the kino-pedestrian can be seen as one early manifestation of such a mobile system of recording, which was crucial for a non-interventionist and spontaneous recording of everyday life as it is. Vertov’s instructions for dialectic montage58 shed light on the role of pedestrianism in his theory of montage, as envisioned in the image of the kino-pedestrian. In his editing theory, Vertov mentions four levels of montage, which are clearly depicted in Man with a Movie Camera: the first stage concerns observation; the second, shooting with a movie camera; the third, choosing the shots filmed; and the fourth, the organization of the selected footage.59 For Vertov, editing begins with “initial observation” and ends with “the finished film-object.”60 In the first stage, Vertov advises “kinok-obervers” to “closely [watch] the environment and the people around” and try to connect “separate, isolated phenomena according to generalized or distinctive characteristics.”61 At this stage of montage, which mostly involves “orienting the unaided eye at any place, any time,” the camera is not yet operated. This approach clearly echoes the flânerie-like activity performed by Lumière cinematograph operators, who would spend some time on the site they would film and try to read into its rhythm, its politics of space, and its movements. However, while for Lumière this principle sometimes served ethnographic purposes62 by making images of faraway worlds available, for Vertov it meant wresting the underlying truth from everyday life. Deleuze scholar Ulus Baker rationalization of cinema at a time when rationalization of the whole industrial sector was on the agenda of the Soviet state, and cinema was no exception. However, it would be misleading to claim that the kino-pedestrian encapsulates the Taylorist dream, because it cannot account for the drifting movement, the most significant human quality retained in the image. 58 Vertov’s theory of montage is mainly scattered across three texts: “Kino-Eye,” “History of the Kinoks,” and “From Radio-Eye to Kino-Eye” Deleuze provides a summary of the three stages in Cinema I as follows: montage precedes filming (life as it is); it enters into filming (the cameraman who observes, follows, runs); it comes after the filming where the sets are evaluated against one another (life of film) and in the audience, who compare life in the film and life as it is. Cinema I, 41. 59 Vertov, “History of the Kinoks,” 99–100. 60 Vertov, “Kino-Eye,” 72. 61 Vertov, “Kino-Eye,” 69. 62 See, for example, Russell, Experimental Ethnography.

150 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Figure 19: Still from Man with a Movie Camera (Courtesy of Eye Filmmuseum).

contends that the cinema of Lumière and of Vertov belong to the same thread of documentary realism, even though their styles were completely different.63 Such a lineage becomes more discernible if we bear in mind the discussion in Chapter Two, in which I emphasized the sociological aspect of the Lumière vision. Lumière’s ability to read into the working of space, time, and movement at a given site parallels Vertov’s instructions to observe the environment closely to decipher the connections between supposedly separate, isolated phenomena. It is therefore equally possible to extend the argument put forward in that chapter to Vertovian cinema and suggest that flânerie continued to serve as a significant tool in the Soviet filmmaker’s work. Hence, one of Vertov’s contributions to the cinematic aesthetics of pedestrianism was to acknowledge this pre-filmic flânerie-like activity as one stage of montage in film theory. That is, with Vertov it becomes possible to talk about pedestrianism as pre-filmic montage. The second stage of editing is “when you arrive on location with a movie camera.” It concerns an exploration of “surroundings,” not from the “viewpoint of the human eye, but from that of the kino-eye.” As presented in Man with a Movie Camera, the camera operator not only observes but follows, runs, 63 Baker, “Between the Images.”

A Wandering Eye: The Kino -Pedestrian

151

and even rides in a car to record everyday life in action. In order to implement this stage efficiently, Vertov asked for “quick means of transport.”64 It was equally important to have “more sensitive film” and “small, lightweight, hand-held cameras” in order to film anything anywhere at any time. Man with a Movie Camera includes a number of sequences where the camera operator films from the top of a train, a car, or the bustling streets. The pace of movement in each case creates a different aesthetic outcome; in other words, there is a certain level of experimentation with extracting movement. At certain points, Vertov even freezes the frame to include a maximum number of variables. The sequence of the walking kino-apparatus features walking as one variable of movement among others. Yet, by envisioning a union of the camera operator and the movie camera, it implicitly suggests a superior model. The walking kino-apparatus, it can be argued, embodies these steps: it can walk around, observe, and record on its own. In the third stage of editing, “the shots that are most expedient,” those which best express the observational theme, are selected from the footage or “film-documents.” At this stage, the footage is organized according to the characteristic features of each shot. Vertov elsewhere expands this stage to include “hunting for montage fragments,” which involves “instantaneous orienting in any visual environment so as to capture the essential link shots.”65 The final stage of editing involves “reorganising all the footage into the best sequence” to bring out “the core of the film-object.”66 This organization included coordinating similar elements and numerically calculating the montage groupings. Vertov writes that “the collection of the raw material for f ilm-objects during the act of f ilming, and the organization of this material in the editing room, cannot be predetermined.” He explains that the kinok-editor combines related pieces,67 continuously shifting “until they are placed in a rhythmical order such that all links of meaning coincide with visual linkage.” He adds: As the final result of all these mixings, shifts, cancellations, we obtain a visual equation, a visual formula, as it were. This formula, this equation, obtained as a result of the general montage of the recorded film-documents is a 100 per cent film-object.68 64 Vertov, “Kino-Eye,” 74. 65 Vertov, “Kino-Eye,” 72. 66 Vertov, “Kino-Eye,” 72. 67 It is worthwhile noting here that Lev Manovich calls Vertov a “database film maker.” The Language of New Media, 209. 68 Vertov, “From Radio-Eye to Kino-Eye,” 90.

152 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

In light of these comments, it is possible to argue that the f ilm-object consists of an aggregate of images harnessed in the service of revealing the underlying truth through the process of montage, “the organization of the visible world.”69 According to Tsivian, a certain grasp of Marxist political economy helps shed light on the revelationist structure of Vertov’s films. In Lines of Resistance, published to coincide with the first comprehensive screening of Vertov’s oeuvre in Giornate del Cinema Muto in 2004, Tsivian argues that “some sequences in [Vertov’s] films demand to be viewed in the context of Marx’s book [Das Kapital] and its specific style of economic analysis.” Through a few examples from Vertov’s filmmaking, Tsivian shows Vertov’s attempts to implant Marx’s train of thought as a “brief public lecture,” delivered by means of silent film. For example, in Man with a Movie Camera there is a section where the trams are edited rhythmically to evoke the vibrant aesthetics of the city symphony. In this section, the footage of trams running on electricity, a signature of industrial urbanism, are spliced together with the footage of miners working in a coal mine in Ukraine. What this sequence tells us is that the electricity of the trams that citizens use is produced at the thermoelectric plants fuelled by coal extracted by workers in Ukraine.70 The truth that underlies everyday life is thus revealed through the process of montage. According to Tsivian, this sequence connects three facts: “the fact that all these trams in the city [are] running happily, the fact of coal being burned somewhere to generate electricity from heat, and thirdly, the fact that somewhere else—thousands of miles away—a Ukrainian miner is working a seam of coal to make all this happen.”71 To this, it is possible to add another layer in light of the self-reflexivity of the film: “if it were not for the Ukrainian miners, the film we are watching could not be projected.” The ambition of Vertov’s cinema, thus, is not to show, but to make people think—that is, “to disclose invisible connections between things.”72 A second example that Tsivian gives is from Kino-Eye (1924). A young group from a revolutionary “pioneer unit”73 arrive at the marketplace to 69 Vertov, “Kino-Eye,” 72. 70 Tsivian, “Introduction,” 12. 71 Tsivian, “Introduction,” 13. 72 Tsivian, “Introduction,” 13. 73 The Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization, abbreviated as the Young Pioneers, was a mass youth organization in the Soviet Union for children and adolescents aged age 9–15 that existed between 1922 and 1991. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin_AllUnion_Pioneer_Organization. Accessed 15 March 2022.

A Wandering Eye: The Kino -Pedestrian

153

perform checks. In a lengthy tracking shot (which is unusually long in the rapid rhythmic editing style of Vertov’s documentaries), a woman is walking to the market to buy meat. The camera follows her, and at one point, it tilts slightly down to focus on her shoes and footsteps. She is walking up and down in the market, approaching the stalls to shop for meat. In her stroll, she encounters a poster which reads, “Don’t buy from the private sector, buy from the cooperative.” Next, we see her walking backwards, again in a longer take than usual. The scene ends with the intertitle: “The cooperative.” Here, the act of walking is clearly used to represent a “wrong move,” a misstep. Walking backwards not only reverses cinematic time; it also corrects aberrancy. For Tsivian, the woman’s reverse tread thus transforms into a Marxist object lesson: “The true nature of meat, as any commodity (Marxism teaches us), is defined not by qualities inherent in the end-product, but by the character of the labour involved in its production.”74 This is how kino-eye could enact a communist decoding of the world—at the level of observing, filming, and editing. It is possible to add another layer here: such aesthetics not only demystified the production of film, but also aimed to collectivize it among ordinary people. The footage that allows such connections to be made, and that thus make up the documentary, is collected from the various kino-apparatuses of various kinok filmmakers. Filming was thus imagined as a collective process. The kino-eye is envisioned as including many perspectives, many ‘eyes’ and ‘I’s’—designed to transcend the limits of the individual and form a collective subject instead. It is possible to argue, therefore, that kino-pedestrian stands for pedestrianism and the vision of many camera workers coexisting in Soviet society. In other words, the perfect camera operator, which is a blend of a perfected sense of vision and inexhaustible movement, is not one individual but a collective subject. Such collective subjectivity stands in contrast to the practice of crediting the director as the sole auteur of a film. The kinoks, in Vertov’s theory, were a group of documentary filmmakers who declared it their aim to abolish non-documentary filmmaking as such. Once this aim was achieved and film drama was abolished, the kinoks were supposed to hand over their tools to the people and melt into the background. In their “truly anarchist” theoretical agenda, kinoks were dedicated to “de-professionalize film-making and to dismantle the film industry.” Making the ordinary people on the street and in the factories the producer and the topic of the film, Vertov’s film theory abolishes the myth of the auteur. 74 Tsivian, “Introduction,” 11.

154 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Many ‘I’s’ and Many ‘Eyes’: Vertov’s Factory of Facts In Vertov’s f ilm theory and practice, the collective production of images was crucial to freeing the narration from the perspective of one individual and positioning it instead amongst the masses, which for Vertov meant the young Soviet society. In the kino-eye, he contrasted the collection of everyday life images produced by “an army of kinokobservers” to the “hackneyed” images of artistic drama produced by the “director-as-magician.”75 For Vertov, the images recorded by the kinok-operators wandering in the streets and observing everyday life enable a class bond to be established “between the proletariats of all nations and lands on a platform of the communist decoding of world relations.”76 He wrote: We engage directly in the study of the phenomena of life that surround us. We hold the ability to show and elucidate life as it is, considerably higher than the occasionally diverting doll games that people call theatre, cinema, etc. […] To see and hear life, to note its turns and turning points, to catch the crunch of the old bones of everyday existence beneath the press of the Revolution; to follow the growth of the young Soviet organism, to record and organize the individual characteristics of life’s phenomena into a whole, an essence, a conclusion—this is our immediate objective.77

The attention of cinema is thus displaced from studio to streets, particularly the urban streets of industrial Russia inhabited by proletarians. This is also how Vertov denounced the inclusion of professional actors, since their appearance in a film brings certain connotations. For example, an actor who has previously played a wealthy bourgeois woman cannot suddenly appear as a worker as this would harm the consciousness of the masses and individualize that certain character. In contrast, in a film like Man with a Movie Camera, all workers are seen as united, regardless of their labour, workplace, age, or gender. They are all part of the young Soviet society in the making. Thus, the film not only consists of footage recorded by many camera operators, but also takes as its subject the multitude of individuals that make up the society. 75 Vertov, “Kino-Eye,” 60–79. 76 Vertov, “Kino-Eye,” 66. 77 Vertov, “Artistic Drama and Kino-Eye,” 47.

A Wandering Eye: The Kino -Pedestrian

155

In the film, the montage process, where collected images are grouped into certain themes, and the spectator’s encounter with the edited images, are seen as resembling the functioning of a brain. An image that superimposes a head on a weaving machine suggests a similarity between textile manufacturing and film editing. In a recent study entitled Vertov, Snow, Farocki: Machine Vision and the Posthuman, David Tomas also suggests that it is possible to consider Man with a Movie Camera as “a collective socio-political ecology of ‘Mind’.”78 Vertov wrote that human perceptions are disorganized and confusing, and that cinema has the ability to overcome such confusion by “bringing clarity into the worker’s awareness of the phenomena concerning him and surrounding him.”79 Unlike artistic drama, editing can be structured so as to organize recorded everyday phenomena into harmonious patterns. Such organization of patterns presents a communist decoding of the world from a collective perspective through which the relativity of limited individual perspectives is overcome to attain an organized, and therefore intelligible, view of the world. These characteristics of the three stages of production, editing, and presentation of images ensure that the subject of the film is not one individual in a certain place at a certain time but a collective one, standing for all members of society, in various places and at various times. According to David Tomas, the entire film not only links individual minds on the basis of common themes but also functions overall as a “rite of passage” to the collective Soviet socio-political consciousness.80 To prove this point, Tomas finds key evidence in the kino-pedestrian sequence. He suggests that the way this sequence is presented in the film—with almost all the “ritualistic” elements of film watching—testifies to the power of cinema to effect a change in its audience: [The audience is] introduced to an animated, anthropomorphized movie camera who, in performing in front of the audience and in taking its bow, seems to be claiming a central role in the staging of this kinomatic “event”—a claim that is apparently confirmed by the ensuing recapitulation of major themes, punctuated by copious references to the mechanics of cinema and cinematic representation that are dynamized by a constant montage of audience, screen, cameraman, and editor.81 78 Tomas, Vertov, Snow, Farocki, 58. 79 Vertov, “Kino-Eye,” 73. 80 See Tomas, Vertov, Snow, Farocki, 13–75. 81 Tomas, Vertov, Snow, Farocki, 40.

156 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

According to Tomas, “the anthropomorphized movie camera,” uniting all three levels—production, editing, and preservation—mentioned above, is thus presented as the supreme author of the entire process. He continues: This montage ensures that film and audience cross over into each other’s domain, an exchange and fusion that is celebrated in a spectacular perceptual mise-en-abyme in which the audience becomes spectator to an audience watching a film which turns out to be The Man with a Movie Camera, a connection that had not been directly made during the opening separation sequence. The film ends with the Camera/Eye staring at the audience, its diaphragm closing into darkness: a process mediated, however, by what appears to be a brief interval of pure light.

The way Tomas describes the film in this quote gives rise to the image of an encounter. On the one hand, there is the film on the screen, which is a constructivist assemblage of everyday images obtained from many kinok-operators; on the other hand, there is the audience, which is affected or moved by the flow of images on the screen. In Tomas’s description, the film and audience cross over into each other’s domain. In the walking kino-apparatus sequence, this crossing over is not only represented but also encouraged via intercutting close-up shots of spectators’ faces watching this very sequence. The intercut close-ups of spectators marvelling at this robotic creature on the screen show them to be fascinated by the art of cinema, which can produce the illusion of an inanimate object becoming animate thanks to the technique of stop-motion. The camera thus not only records movement, but also produces it with the help of a trick that anthropomorphizes an inanimate object on screen through the powers of the apparatus. It is thus possible to conclude that the image of the kino-pedestrian embodies an extended mobility, an enhanced ability of vision, and an ecology of mind that links (collective) human and machine intelligence.

The Aesthetics of the Kino-Pedestrian From the above discussion, it is possible to single out three aesthetic elements that are implicated in the kino-pedestrian sequence in Man with a Movie Camera. First, the kino-pedestrian unites the human-like ability of drift with the machine-like ability of enhanced vision or the potentials brought by the cinematic medium. Such unification not only increases the mobility

A Wandering Eye: The Kino -Pedestrian

157

of the camera but also increases its powers of observation and ability to witness everyday life. It can be argued that, through this unification, the camera functions as a prosthesis that extends the limits of human vision through the camera’s lens as well as human memory through image recording and storage.82 I therefore suggest viewing the kino-pedestrian as an early manifestation of the drifting prosthetic camera, which was achieved using recently developed technologies that allowed the camera operator to wear the camera and recording equipment. For instance, the embodied eye-level framings used to shadow the perambulatory anti-heroes of Italian Neorealism, which is considered in the following chapter, shares certain characteristics with the cinematic aesthetics envisioned in the image of the kino-pedestrian. While being able to observe and record everyday life in its natural flow produces “separate little documents” for Vertov, for the Italian Neorealists this produces an “image-fact.” Similarly, the extra-long tracking shots in contemporary cinema, made possible by the advent of digital recording technologies, such as the 90-minute uncut feature Russkij Kovcheg (Russian Ark, 2002), included a kinetic union of man and machine. Second, the kino-pedestrian is not presented as a single, supreme, and omniscient gaze but as a component of collective image production in Vertov’s “factory of facts.” The kino-apparatus not only surpasses human vision in its machine-like abilities, “more perfect than the human eye,” but also establishes a trans-subjective perspective by editing together collectively produced images, which helps free narration from the perspective of one individual. The aesthetics achieved by the collective production of images was thus crucial for Vertov’s revelationist cinema. As Turvey aptly notes, the cinema is “more perfect than the human eye”; it perceives more and better. It enables “the communist decoding of the world,” the revelation of “the truth” about social reality “on the screen.”83 Vertov referred to shots as “documents” since each shot produced by the kinok-operators carries a snippet of reality from the daily life of Soviet society, mostly the lives of workers. These snippets or parts are linked in the film through “visual linkages”: strategies of visual analogy and rhyme, rhythmic patterning, parallel editing, superimposition, accelerated and decelerated motion, and 82 Here it’s worthwhile mentioning that Efsir Shub, a prominent film editor who also cameos in Man with a Movie Camera, saw an intimate relationship between the reel (the recorded footage) and the visual memory (of the film editor). Shub wrote: “Industrious organization, sharpness of vision, formidable visual memory, an agility and quickness of the hands—these qualities distinguish montazhnitsy, who perform a major, important, scarcely noticed and little-recognized part in the making of a picture.” Shub, “The Work of Montazhnitsy (1927),” n.p. 83 Turvey, Doubting Vision, 32.

158 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

camera movement. These editing techniques interweave the multiplicity of “separate little documents” into a whole: the finished film-object. By visually correlating this process with manufacturing processes in Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov equates cinematographic labour with other forms of labour in post-revolutionary Soviet society. The labour of editing, which remained largely invisible and uncredited, is also made visible in the film. In Soviet filmmaking, film editing was a gendered task, mostly carried out by women. Montazhnitsa, which Alla Gadassik translates as “montagess,” was the widely accepted term used to describe the position of a female editing assistant from the 1910s to the 1930s.84 Man with a Movie Camera portrays the editing room and Elizaveta Svilova, the film’s editor, at work carefully handling film strips, going through them, and splicing them together—eventually bringing the images alive. Considering the importance the film gives to ‘movement’ as a distinctive characteristic of filmic medium, the editor’s task in setting the still images in motion is represented as a key stage in the production of film. A close-up of notable film editor and later filmmaker Efsir Shub complements the film’s own editor Svilova, who is shown surveying the footage with a stern, evaluative gaze.85 In an article she penned for International Women’s Day in 1927, Shub points to the invisible yet substantial labour of editing assistants as a well-organized workforce: “Nowhere, not in any other department at the film-factory, would you find the same organization and planning as in the department of negative editing.” The corporeal as well as mental labour that is implicated in the process is also underlined: Eyes and scissors work with great intensity, since we still have no devices for reviewing negatives, nor machines for splicing. Industrious organization, sharpness of vision, formidable visual memory, an agility and quickness of the hands—these qualities distinguish montazhnitsy, who perform a major, important, scarcely noticed and little-recognized part in the making of a picture.86

This article, written shortly before Man with a Movie Camera was released, has many overlaps and perhaps provided inspiration for the representation of editing as a key process in filmmaking. This is again in line with the Marxist representation of the productive processes in the film. Furthermore, the 84 Gadassik, “A Skillful Isis,” 175. 85 Gadassik, “A Skillful Isis,” 183. 86 Shub, “The Work of Montazhnitsy (1927)” n.p.

A Wandering Eye: The Kino -Pedestrian

159

film makes visible a gendered form of labour that largely goes unnoticed and remains invisible. The film constantly reminds the spectators that they are watching a film, an end product produced by the same effort, work, and handicraft that is involved in other forms of labour. By making the film’s production, editing, and presentation visible on screen, Vertov contests the cinematographic apparatus of classical narrative cinema. The self-reflexive aesthetics thus produced is most obvious in the kino-pedestrian sequence, which intercuts the pedestrianism of the kino-apparatus with the spectators watching it on the screen.

Conclusion: Pedestrianism as Cinematographic Labour In this chapter, I have explored how Vertov formulated and represented pedestrianism as cinematographic work in his montage theory and in Man with a Movie Camera. From a f ilm historical perspective, Vertov’s visualization of a walking kino-apparatus in Man with a Movie Camera in 1929 makes a ground-breaking contribution to the aesthetics of cinematic pedestrianism. The image of the walking kino-apparatus primarily envisions a union of a drifting human body and recording camera machine, which brings into being an aesthetic element that can be called the ‘drifting prosthetic camera’. Such a union blends human and machine qualities in a proto-cyborgian combination that can move around, observe, record, and recollect. Hence, through the abstraction of drift, an emancipation of viewpoint is achieved on the screen. The drifting prosthetic camera has its roots in Lumière’s aesthetics of flânerie, and is further enriched in the long tracking shots that perambulate the streets in Italian Neorealist films, or the uncut long takes of the digital era. Following from the first element, such a union of camera and body surpasses human vision and frees the narrative from the perspective of one individual. Vertov’s kino-eye theory encourages the collective production of footage and an emergent editing structure based on what has been recorded on the filmstrip itself. Finally, the kino-apparatus sequence is a reflection on the cinematographic apparatus. The self-reflexive aesthetics in this sequence constantly remind audiences of their film-watching experience, displacing them from their dreamlike experience as induced by the continuity-based classical narrative cinema. It can be argued that Vertov’s constructivist aesthetics and dialectical montage are rooted in Marx’s description of the dialectical perspective:

160 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

“the actual, corporeal human being standing on firm and well-rounded earth, inhaling and exhaling all natural forces.”87 From this perspective, the kino-pedestrian embodies Vertov’s film theory in a “sensory exploration of the world through film.”88 It incorporates an ambulant and an analytical observation of everyday life to reveal underlying political, social, and cultural forces. As a concept, the kino-pedestrian thus allows us to analyze such cinematic aesthetics produced by an ambulant camera operator (or, a collective of ambulant camera operators) recording and observing the everyday with a sensitivity to untangle the political, social, and cultural construction of the public space. As such, the kino-pedestrian is a witness to the ordinary life, keeping an inexhaustible collective memory.

Works Cited Abramov, Nikolaj. Dziga Vertov. Moscow: Akademija nauk SSSR, 1962. Anderson, Kevin. Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Baker, Ulus. “Between the Images.” http://www.korotonomedya.net/kor/index. php?id=21,165,0,0,1,0 Accessed 4 May 2021. Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” In What is Cinema? Volume 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. 9–16. Bazin, André. What is Cinema? Volume 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217–52. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books, 1992. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema I: Movement-Image. London: Continuum, 2004. Dibbets, Karel. “Het taboe van de Nederlandse filmcultuur: Neutraal in een verzuild land.” TMG Journal for Media History 21 (2018): 136–55. Gadassik, Alla. “A Skillful Isis: Esfir Shub and the Documentarian as Caretaker.” In A Companion to Documentary Film History. Ed. Joshua Malitsky. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2021. 165–86. Hagener, Malte. Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919–1939. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007. 87 Quoted in Anderson, Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism, 9. 88 Vertov, “Kinoks: A Revolution,” 14.

A Wandering Eye: The Kino -Pedestrian

161

Heftberger, Adelheid. Digital Humanities and Film Studies: Visualising Dziga Vertov’s Work. Cham: Springer, 2016. Heijs, Jans. “Inleiding.” In Filmliga. Nijmegen: SUN, 1982. 9–24. Izvolov, Nikolai. From Vertov to Medvevkin: Unknown Pages of Russian Avant-Garde Film History. Israel: Grinberg Bros Inc., 2021. Lameris, Bregt. Film Museum Practice and Film Historiography: The Case of the Nederlands Filmmuseum (1946–2000). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. Linssen, Céline and Hans Schoots. “Film is geen lolletje.” Interview in De Filmkrant 209 (September 1999), n.p. Available to view at https://www.filmkrant.nl/av/ org/filmkran/archief/fk203/filmliga.html. Accessed 18 March 2022. Linssen, Céline et al. Het Gaat Om De Film! Een Nieuwe Geschiedenis van de Nederlandsche Filmliga, 1927–1933. Amsterdam: Bas Lubberhuizen / Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1999. Malitsky, Joshua, ed. A Companion to Documentary Film History. West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2021. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Mayne, Judith. “Kino-Truth and Kino-Praxis: Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera.” Cine-Tracts 1.2 (Summer 1997): 81–92. Michelson, Annette. “Introduction.” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. xv–lxi. Ozgen, Asli and Floris Paalman, “Vertov’un Kayıp Filmi: İç Savaş’ın Tarihi.” Altyazı Fasikül (9 December 2021). https://fasikul.altyazi.net/dunya/vertovun-kayipfilmi-ic-savasin-tarihi/. Accessed 16 March 2022. Paalman, Floris. Cinematic Rotterdam: The Times and Tides of a Modern City. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011. Petric, Vlada. “Dziga Vertov as Theorist.” Cinema Journal 18.1 (Autumn 1978): 29–44. Rosen, Philip. “Now and Then: On the Documentary Regime, Vertov, and History.” In A Companion to Documentary Film History. Ed. Joshua Malitsky. West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2021. 187–206. Russell, Catherine. Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Schaub, Joseph. “Presenting the Cyborg’s Futurist Past: An Analysis of Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye.” Postmodern Culture 8.2 (January 1998): 40–53. Shub, Esfir. “The Work of Montazhnitsy (1927).” Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe 6 (August 2018): n.p. https://www. apparatusjournal.net/index.php/apparatus/article/view/125/304. Accessed 16 March 2022. Stam, Robert. Keywords in Subversive Film / Media Aesthetics. West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2015.

162 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Struyvenberg, Willemijn. “Een oase op het dak van Hotel Atlanta.” In Interbellum Rotterdam. Ed. Marlite Halbertsma and Patricia van Ulzen. Rotterdam: NAi, 2001. 69–92. Tomas, David. Vertov, Snow, Farocki: Vision and the Posthuman. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013. Tsivian, Yuri. “Introduction.” In Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties. Ed. Yuri Tsivian. Sacile/Pordenone: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 23, 2004. 1–28. Tsivian, Yuri, ed. Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties. Sacile/Pordenone: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 23, 2004. Tsivian, Yuri. “Dziga Vertov: The Factories of Facts,” Le Giornate del Cinema Muto Official Website http://www.cinetecadelfriuli.org/gcm/ed_precedenti/edizione2004/ edizione2004_frameset.html. Accessed 16 March 2022. Turvey, Malcolm. Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Vertov, Dziga. “12 April 1926,” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 163. Vertov, Dziga. “Advertising Films,” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 25–32. Vertov, Dziga. “Artistic Drama and Kino-Eye.” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 47–48. Vertov, Dziga. “The Birth of Kino-Eye.” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 40–41. Vertov, Dziga. “The Essence of Kino-Eye.” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 49–50. Vertov, Dziga. “History of the Kinoks.” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 92–100. Vertov, Dziga. “From Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye.” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 85–92. Vertov, Dziga. “Kino-Eye.” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 60–79. Vertov, Dziga. “Kinoks: A Revolution.” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 11–21. Vertov, Dziga. “The Man with a Movie Camera.” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 82–85. Vertov, Dziga. “WE: Variant of a Manifesto.” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 5–9.

A Wandering Eye: The Kino -Pedestrian

163

Filmography Russische regisseur bezoekt ons land. N.A. Polygoon-Profilti, 1930. https://commons. wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3ARussische_regisseur_bezoekt_ons_ land.ogv. Accessed 18 March 2022. Kinonedelja, dir. Dziga Vertov, 1918–1919. The Anniversary of the Revolution, dir. Dziga Vertov, 1918. The History of the Civil War, dir. Dziga Vertov, 1921. Kino-Pravda, dir. Dziga Vertov, 1922–1925. Kino-Eye, dir. Dziga Vertov, 1924. Man with a Movie Camera, dir. Dziga Vertov, 1929. Russian Ark, dir. Alexander Sokurov, 2002.

5.

Walking amidst Ruins: A Pedestrian Cinema Abstract This chapter explores the conceptions of the city and everyday life in the writings of filmmakers from Fascist-era and post-Fascist Italy. Going out on the street with a camera to observe everyday life in its uninterrupted flow and to shoot without intervention was a recurrent urge voiced by many filmmakers. Taking inspiration from Zavattini’s concept of pedinamento, I analyse cinematographic images of pedestrian acts in three films—Roma, Città Aperta (Rome, Open City), Germania Anno Zero (Germany, Year Zero), and Ladri di Biciclette (The Bicycle Thieves)—which I have selected for comparison in order to explore the transformation of the social and political background, and its effect on the aesthetics of the city and the cinematic image of walking. Keywords: Pedestrianism, walking, Italian Neorealism, postwar cinema, cinematic city

“Reality breaks all the rules, as can be discovered if you walk out with a camera to meet it.” ‒ Cesare Zavattini “When history is made in the streets, the streets tend to move onto the screen.” ‒ Siegfried Kracauer

In Italy under Fascism, “much of the battle for the hearts and minds of Italians took place in the public arena, in the streets and squares of the peninsula’s cities.”1 In a detailed study on the restructuring and refashioning of the street under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, Diane Yvonne 1

Ghirardo, “Citta Fascista,” 347.

Özgen, A., The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism: Walking in Films. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724753_ch05

166 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Ghirardo explores increasing surveillance and spectacle in the public realm as a method to ensure consent and consensus.2 Similarly, David Atkinson explains how the streets became key sites where the regime, from its earliest days, articulated its authority. By its final months, streets and other public spaces were recognized by both local authorities and dissidents as an “incontrovertible sphere of dictatorship.” Atkinson mentions, for example, that during the 1943 factory strikes, the workers’ leaders decided to confine their resistance to the industrial action within the walls of Turin’s factories because taking it onto the streets was deemed too dangerous—“pure suicide,” in the words of one of the strike’s leaders. In turn, Atkinson writes, the local police chief’s main concern was to confine the strikers to the factories, which were deemed private spaces, and above all to prevent any public demonstrations of dissent: “maintaining public order and preventing the strikers from getting out onto the streets” was a major concern aimed at sustaining the symbolic strength of the regime.3 Mastering the streets was a major concern for the Fascist Party from its first days. “I could not forget that I was also Chief of that Party that for three years had fought in the squares and streets of Italy—not only to gain power, but above all for the supreme task and the supreme necessity of infusing into the nation a new spirit,” wrote Mussolini. 4 From the urban violence of the Squadristi, the fascist militia, to mass demonstrations, rallies, and parades, Mussolini and his Fascist Party carried fascism’s messages onto the streets in order to gain and maintain public support.5 The March on Rome (1922), which signified the transfer of prime ministerial power to Mussolini, was a public show of strength of enormous signif icance. As the regime gained strength, so was amplified its concern to appropriate public spaces, including the streets where everyday life continued, if not escalated. The working class continued to be a major preoccupation for the regime, since it was reported to be “the most disdainful of fascism” in police and intelligence reports.6 In addition to the crackdown on unions, National Afterwork Organizations (OND-Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro) were designed to control workers’ leisure activities. Working-class bars were closed in 1927 while street-side tables were only allowed for fascist socializing in 2 Ghirardo, “Citta Fascista,” 347. 3 Atkinson, “Totalitarianism and the Street in Fascist Rome.” 4 Mussolini, My Autobiography, 195. 5 Ghirardo, “Citta Fascista,” 347–72. 6 Ghirardo, “Citta Fascista,” 365.

Walking amidst Ruins: A Pedestrian Cinema

167

upper-class neighbourhoods. Some working-class neighbourhoods, which were seen as the loci of corrupt moral values, unhygienic conditions and, more importantly, Bolshevism, were demolished entirely. This displaced large numbers of residents, who were sent to the city’s outskirts—borgate—cut off from their everyday urban space, which broke up communities and created difficulties in finding work. In place of these demolished neighbourhoods, large boulevards were built that were designed to glorify Italy’s Roman past and set the stage for fascist parades, ceremonies, and other public spectacles. Women, seen fit only for reproduction and rearing new fascist generations, were confined to the domestic space. They were not supposed to enjoy the freedom of the streets. In 1923, sex workers were subjected to new regulations, and three years later all sex workers were evicted from the streets. Public spaces were increasingly marked as the domain of an idealized fascist male: heroic, strong, disciplined, and militaristic. Jaywalking was outlawed, and one-way walking was imposed by the police on central Rome’s narrow pavements. As one journalist depicted Rome in 1943, “It was forbidden to ride a bicycle, walk on certain pavements, cross certain streets […] It was dangerous to walk with a parcel under your arm, to appear to be hurrying.”7 In the face of such appropriation of the streets, Atkinson concludes, the tradition of workers’ sovversivismo (subversion) retreated to the interior spaces of factories and homes. The example of the 1943 Fiat strike is telling because it shows how the streets had become entirely the domain of the Fascist dictatorship, while resistance was further confined to the private spaces of homes or non-visible spaces such as rooftops, obscure spots under the bridges, and basement shops, as evocatively represented in Roma, Città Aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945).8 Below I examine cinematographic articulations of walking in the street in the neorealist cinema of post-Fascist Italy. I will analyse how walking functioned as a political tool to reclaim the streets following the fall of Mussolini and Italy’s Liberation in 1945, as well as creating a new aesthetics of urban space in cinema. Italian Neorealism, in its resistance to the cultural and aesthetic production of fascism, used wandering as a tool to encounter and represent the everyday life of the oppressed. These wanderings articulated an ethical duty of the artist-intellectual to explore and reflect social reality, and thereby forged a unique cinematic trope: an embodied travelling shot, or a long eye-level, on-the-move take that gave

7 Monelli, Roma 1943, 284. 8 See Forgacs, “Space, Rhetoric, and the Divided City.”

168 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

the impression of embodied tailing or following a character, who is similarly usually walking, wandering, or rambling. There is an overwhelmingly rich literature on neorealism’s aesthetics of space, ranging across city streets, rural landscapes, urban wastelands, and uninhabited peripheries. However, surprisingly little attention has been given to the neorealist image of walking. André Bazin, for example, writes extensively on the travelling shot but does not specifically dwell on walking in his writings on the Italian School of Liberation.9 Siegfried Kracauer, however, highlights the significance of the street for the cinema of this period: “The street is in the extended sense of the word not only the arena of fleeting impressions and chance encounters but a place where the flow of life is bound to assert itself.”10 He emphasizes that, “From Open City to Cabiria, The Bicycle Thief to La Strada, [Italian films] are literally soaked in the street world; they not only begin and end in it but are transparent to it throughout.”11 Yet, although Kracauer mentions “permeability,” “flow of life,” or “encounters” in the urban public spaces of Italian cinema, he does not specifically write about pedestrianism, despite its strong presence in all his examples. Probably the most substantial account of wanderers in Italian Neorealism is offered by Gilles Deleuze in the second volume of his treatise on cinema, Time-Image.12 He dwells heavily on the tropes of voyage and wanderers that, according to him, first appeared in post-war Italian cinema. However, he does not establish a sound distinction between the pedestrianism of early neorealist films of the immediate post-fascist period and the modernist cinema of the late 1950s and 1960s. As explained below, the image of walking also changes from the 1940s to the 1960s in Italian cinema before being taken up by the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers in France. Giuliana Bruno, for example, focuses on examples like Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy, 1954) to argue for a reconceptualization of the film viewer as a voyageuse instead of a voyeur. Exploring the ways in which “travelling with motion pictures” is possible, Bruno traces the links between film and travel culture, focusing on images of pedestrianism.13 However, despite offering an immensely rich survey of visual images across disciplines and history, Bruno’s analysis lacks any discussion of early neorealist films or how the tropes of voyage changed between the post-fascist and modern 9 See Cardullo, André Bazin and Italian Neorealism. 10 Kracauer, Theory of Film, 72. 11 Kracauer, Theory of Film, 255. 12 Deleuze, Cinema 2. 13 Bruno, Atlas of Emotion.

Walking amidst Ruins: A Pedestrian Cinema

169

eras. Made immediately after the Liberation and before the implementation of the Marshall Plan, the three films I examine in this chapter showcase this change very clearly. In the theoretical or historical accounts of post-fascist Italian cinema, the neorealist filmmakers’ decision to go out onto the street has been explained largely as an ethical duty, sometimes as an economic constraint (e.g., studios had been bombed, destroyed, or taken over as shelter by the homeless) or as an aesthetic preference. However, given the previous appropriation of streets and public space in general by fascist rule, going out onto the street was also a political act. In my analysis, I aim to show how a neorealist image of walking came into being as a result of quotidian urban pedestrian practices. I will describe how a realist articulation of post-war urban space in cinema was predominantly a political practice that created neorealist aesthetics. Following David Brancaleone’s suggestion to consider neorealism in terms of an “urban cinematic spatial practice, and most significantly, a political one,”14 I will analyse the neorealist image of walking in light of Henri Lefebvre’s theory of urban space. I will take Cesare Zavattini’s theory of pedinamento as a starting point, and from there I will explore the political and aesthetic aspects of a neorealist image of walking. In so doing, I will focus on the walking-shot—an embodied long, on-the-move take that shadows wandering characters across urban space.

Pedinamento: Walking as Filmmaking A highly influential ideologue of neorealism,15 scriptwriter and director Cesare Zavattini suggested pedinare, the Italian word for stalking or shadowing, as a technique for filmmaking. Pedinare in cinema entailed “tailing 14 Brancaleone, “Framing the Real,” 3. 15 The term ‘neorealism’ stirred intense debate among the filmmakers and critics of Europe throughout 1940s and 1950s. André Bazin, who wrote extensively on the Italian cinema of those decades, noted that “the word neorealist was thrown like a fishing net over the postwar Italian cinema.” For him, “Neorealism as such does not exist” (Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume 2, 66). In the face of the diversity of styles within neorealism, Bazin took the concept in his writing as just a departure point from which to excavate and investigate further deviations and commonalities. In this sense, Bazin’s theoretical venture echoes the cinematic venture of Cesare Zavattini, the most influential ideologue of neorealism, who conceived of film as inquiry. Bazin’s theoretical explorations of the main veins, aberrations, connections or intersections in neorealism’s cinematic universe coincides with Zavattini’s wanderings in the city to excavate reality. In this chapter, following Bazin’s theoretical method, I take the term neorealism as a departure point rather than a unifying concept that isolates the associated filmmakers as a group.

170 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

someone like a detective, not determining what the character does but seeking to find out what is about to ensue.”16 The etymology of the word in Italian suggests “legwork,” as it is derived from the Italian word for foot, piede.17 It is possible to suggest that the proliferation of images of walking in Italian Neorealism is closely linked to the technique of pedinamento, not because all neorealist filmmakers were followers of Zavattini, but because going out onto the street to encounter the everyday life of post-war Italian cities and creating cinematic tools to articulate these encounters were major concerns for the filmmakers of that era. As early as 1941, Giuseppe De Santis emphasized the significance of understanding the quotidian elements that shape a character.18 In 1948, the long-time collaborator of Zavattini, Vittorio De Sica, wrote that the aim of cinema is “to trace the ‘dramatic’ in every-day [sic] situations, the wonderful in small events.”19 In 1955, Roberto Rossellini stated that “neorealism consisted of following someone with love and watching all his discoveries and impressions,” emphasizing the importance of waiting before following the characters. As he noted, “The movement of the character determines the movement of the camera.”20 In the face of fascism’s domination of public space, neorealist filmmakers understood the significance of space in producing and reproducing subjectivities. The neorealist vocation of going out onto the streets and gathering documentary-like footage of everyday life was largely influenced by the Soviet montage school. It is thus possible to draw connections between Zavattini’s pedinamento technique and Vertov’s theory of “walking as montage,” explained in the previous chapter. Zavattini’s method of filmmaking—“Reality breaks all the rules, as can be discovered if you walk out with a camera to meet it”21—is reminiscent of Vertov’s formula, “walk out with a camera.” Historical studies of cultural and cinematic exchanges between Italy and Soviet Russia indicate that such an understanding of cinematic realism was probably a direct inspiration.22 For both perspectives, quotidian practices contained the kernel of what structures a society, and cinema had the tools to make that kernel visible and intelligible. For Rossellini, “cinema is a microscope, in that it can take us by the hand and lead us to the discovery of 16 Wagstaff, Italian Neorealist Cinema, 78. 17 “Pedinamento” in Treccani: La Cultura Italiana. 18 De Santis. “Towards an Italian Landscape.” 19 De Sica, “Why Ladri di Biciclette?,” 87. 20 Rossellini, “Ten Years of Cinema,” 97–98. 21 Zavattini, “Some Ideas on Cinema,” 58. 22 See for example Salazkina, “Moscow-Rome-Havana.”

Walking amidst Ruins: A Pedestrian Cinema

171

things that eye [sic] alone could never perceive (be it close-up, small details, and so on).”23 Even though post-war Italian filmmakers had a very different conception of montage, cinema as a tool to ‘excavate’ everyday life and reveal the ‘underlying’ truth was common. Bazin links the Italian School of Liberation with the Soviet Montage school, especially Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Dovzhenko for their search of realism,24 while Masha Salazkina, in her article in October, offers a detailed account of Soviet-Italian cinematic exchanges. She finds that, in addition to the large body of translated texts and filmmaking classes given at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia by Umberto Barbaro, theoretical polemics centring on the questions of “what form a revolutionary art should take and what ‘realism’ meant” in the context of progressive art were similar in both Soviet and Italian contexts.25 In addition to Vertov and the Soviet School, Lumière filmography was also a common reference point for neorealist filmmakers. In 1950, Luigi Chiarini wrote, “with Italian Neorealism, film returns to its origins,” and he pointed to Lumière, emphasizing the documentary quality of their films: “The small films made by the brothers Lumière are, in fact, brief and simple documentaries: workers leaving their factories, a train arriving in a station, movement through a city street.” For Chiarini, “the return to origins” means that the “screen again becomes a mirror of life, caught not naturalistically in its external aspects, but in its concrete dialectic.” Abandoning its aberrant storytelling, the cinema now “discovers the reality of its historical fulfilment; it no longer isolates man in the abstract situation of an abstract character, but links him to the ideals, aspirations, and sufferings of a social structure … No longer following a mere story, but history, the audience saw life reflected from the screen.”26 These inspirations from the Lumière view and Soviet Montage, especially the work of Vertov, also shed light on the genealogy and transformation of cinematic pedestrianism in line with social, cultural, and political changes, and advances in cinematic tools and techniques. Lumière’s aesthetics of flânerie as a tool to observe, record, and exhibit daily life were in many ways inspired by modernity’s travel culture, concept of movement, and urban rhythm. Vertov’s kino-pedestrian as a collective post-human subjectivity that could observe, record, and reveal the truth of daily life was inspired by the communist ideal to educate and provoke the masses towards revolution. Even though their cinematic aesthetics were very different from each other, 23 24 25 26

Rossellini, “Ten Years of Cinema,” 100. Bazin, “Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of the Liberation,” 29. Salazkina, “Moscow-Rome-Havana,” 99. Chiarini, “A Discourse on Neo-Realism,” 139–45.

172 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

they looked for the hidden structures of public space on foot with a camera in hand; they formulated their cinematic aesthetics in direct contact with everyday urban street life.

Pedinamento from Pre-Filmic to Filmic As a technique for filmmaking, pedinamento consists of two phases: rambling around the city to explore quotidian practices or common people in post-war everyday life (pre-filmic) and re-enacting these explorations for the film with non-professional actors (filmic).27 Zavattini coined neorealism as a “cinema of enquiry”: “We must leave our rooms and go, in body and mind, to meet other people, to see, and to understand them.”28 Such inquiry is articulated in early neorealist films as strollers, wanderers, tramps, or wandering eyewitnesses to post-war society. In Ossessione (Obsession, 1943), we follow a penniless drifter who becomes increasingly uneasy as he becomes entangled in a love affair at a roadside trattoria. In Roma, Città Aperta, we follow Resistance members around obscure corners of the city under the siege and surveillance of German troops. In Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), a father and child are forced to wander the city searching for a stolen bicycle, traversing post-war Rome’s diverse neighbourhoods: the borgate, a posh trattoria, a fortune-teller’s lodge, and an unsafe lower-class district are all part of their spontaneous itinerary. In Europa ‘51 (1951), Irene frequently wanders around poor neighbourhoods, encounters war-stricken women and children, and observes their everyday lives up close. In Umberto D. (1952), we accompany an old vagrant’s walk around the city. In all these films, the camera closely haunts the wanderers along the streets as they walk through the city’s diverse urban spaces. With the spectral camera shadowing these characters, the pre-filmic pedestrianism of the filmmaker is re-enacted to articulate his encounters with everyday urban life in all its unorganized reality. “The Italian camera,” writes André Bazin, is “almost a living part of the operator, instantly in tune with his awareness.”29 The travelling shots that follow these wanderers remain distinctively at eye-level, which gives them a human presence, and distinguishes neorealist travelling shots from the “god-like character” of their Hollywood counterparts. 27 At the pre-f ilmic phase, going out onto the streets to explore everyday life in the poor neighbourhoods and dwellings of oppressed communities was a key component of neorealism. 28 Zavattini, “Some Ideas on Cinema,” 60. 29 Bazin, “Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of the Liberation,” 44.

Walking amidst Ruins: A Pedestrian Cinema

173

Tropes of Voyage and the New Realism For Gilles Deleuze, the wanderings in Italian Neorealism, which are one instance of what he calls “tropes of voyage,”30 are linked to the emergence of a new social reality in post-war Europe that is “dispersive” and “lacunary.” For Deleuze, films de bal(l)ade, or ‘walking-films’,31 articulate this social reality and give birth to a new image, characterized by a dispersive situation and deliberately weak narrative links.32 The perambulations in Italian Neorealism represent a key stage in the emancipation of cinematic narration from the cause-and-effect logic that is crucial in Hollywood-style narration. Deleuze contends that “the sensory-motor action, or situation, has been replaced by the stroll, the voyage, and the continual return journey.”33 For Deleuze, “The great crisis of the action-image” starts in Italy: [On] the one hand, Italy had at its disposal a cinematographic institution which had escaped fascism relatively successfully, on the other hand it could point to a resistance and a popular life underlying oppression, although one without illusion. To grasp these, all that was necessary 30 Coming from the Greek word for ‘turn’ or ‘way’, trope indicates a certain movement; hence, its present meaning: “a figurative use of a word or expression” connotes a ‘turn’ in the meaning, ‘taking way’ from one meaning to another, perhaps an aberration. Similarly, Michel de Certeau notes that, in Greece, public buses are called metaphorai—metaphors being vehicles one takes to get to another meaning. Tropes of voyage, therefore, denotes the following: a metaphor, or an image of a journey that is characterized by difference. In the later years of neorealism and the time-image, the journey becomes virtual: “Bicycle-less neorealism replaces the last questing movement (the trip) with a specific weight of time operating inside the characters and excavating them from within (the chronicle).” Deleuze, Cinema 2, 23. 31 The wordplay could be explained as follows: balader in French means ‘taking a walk’, while ‘ballad’ is a narrative poem revived by English romantic poets like Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Lord Byron. 32 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 214. 33 Considered to be the earliest example of neorealism, Ossessione, for instance, consists of one such continual journey. The film opens with a view of the road, shot from the windshield of a moving car. Gino is returning from the war but not going anywhere particular. A penniless vagrant, he picks up temporary jobs and is entangled in a love affair in a roadside trattoria, seduced by Giovanna, the wife of the owner, who is also a war veteran. The film analyses the tension between settling forces (owning a business, in this case running a trattoria, getting married into a settled life) and nomadic forces (wandering around, travelling without a destination). The film, in fact, focuses on an interruption to Gino’s continual return journey. The mobility of the main character, Gino, has many similarities with Jean Renoir’s migrant protagonist, Toni, the eponymous character of the 1935 film of the same name, which is widely cited as an inspiration for neorealism. Visconti worked as an assistant director on Toni and Renoir reportedly gave Visconti a copy of the novel from which Ossessione was adapted.

174 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

was a new type of tale [récit] capable of including the elliptical and the unorganized, as if the cinema had to begin again from zero, questioning afresh all the accepted facts of the American tradition.34

Deleuze’s brief emphasis on the post-war sociocultural conditions that led the era’s filmmakers to imagine this new aesthetics is crucial. It also partially answers his question, “Why Italy first?”35 For the leading public intellectuals of the time, such as Benedetto Croce, Italy’s liberation from fascism was envisioned as a new beginning, an eradication of an aberrant disease, a significant rupture in history.36 The fall of Mussolini in 1943 and, to some, his killing by the Resistance in 1945, were perceived as representing Italian history’s “year zero.”37 Writing on Italian Neorealism in 1948, André Bazin also remarked that the war was not felt as an interlude in Italy but as the end of an era: “In one sense, Italy is only three years old.”38 Filmmakers of that epoch also considered Italy’s year zero as a pure new beginning for cinema. Rossellini wrote in 1955: In 1944, immediately after the war, everything was destroyed in Italy. The cinema was no exception. Almost all the producers had disappeared […] Therefore one enjoyed an immense liberty; the absence of an organized industry favoured the least routine enterprises and all initiative was good.39

Chiarini wrote in 1951 that the position of neorealist filmmakers was “determined in confrontation with the historical and social reality that they were 34 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 216. 35 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 211. 36 See also Minghelli, Landscape and Memory in Post-Fascist Italian Film and Brunetta, Storia del Cinema Italiano. Brunetta’s emphasis on neorealism being a regression to cinema’s origins also sheds light on the genealogy of cinematic pedestrianism. It was explained in Chapter Two that walking in the city functioned as a tool to explore and register everyday life for Lumière cinematographers. It was also explained that walking shaped the aesthetics of the Lumière view. 37 It is worth mentioning that the fall of Mussolini and the decline of fascism was not as rapid as indicated by the term ‘year zero’, since Mussolini’s death was followed by an “uneasy interlude” of 45 days, which included popular demonstrations celebrating the end of fascism, and the tearing down of all fascist symbols and inscriptions from public buildings and monuments, which were met by the King’s brutal military crackdown. Furthermore, 1943 to 1945 was a tumultuous period, with occupations, bombardments, mass strikes, and insurrections (for further information, see Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy). Neorealism was born under such social and political conditions. 38 Bazin, “Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of the Liberation,” 33. 39 Rossellini, “Ten Years of Cinema,” 93.

Walking amidst Ruins: A Pedestrian Cinema

175

discovering with the camera.”40 Bazin observes that the neorealist aesthetics embody the potentially revolutionary environment of the year-zero feeling. A good example of the cinematic aesthetics which would later be called neorealism, which emerged from this sense of starting from year zero, is Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il Gente del Po (People of the Po Valley). Reflecting the daily life of f ishermen who work and live in the Po Valley, this documentary was filmed in 1943 but could not be released until 1947. “Before People of the Po Valley in 1943, Italian cinema did not portray the poor lower classes in such a harsh way,” says Antonioni in an interview. 41 As part of the strict control of film production under fascist rule, documentaries were not allowed to show any signs of the daily hardships experienced by the lower classes. Nevertheless, Antonioni risked travelling to the mouth of the Po River to wander or row around, and film the fishermen’s everyday lives, which were filled with difficulties and challenges. “Our cinema had carefully avoided representing those situations, as the fascist government prohibited them,” he states.42 All the film material was confiscated and kept in a storage in northern Italy by the fascists, “who had remained faithful to Mussolini.”43 The film was therefore not seen by any audience in 1943. After the war ended, Antonioni tried to get his footage back, only to discover it in a warehouse, half ruined by the humidity. The surviving part was not released until 1947. Shot shortly after Antonioni’s documentary and also set in the Po Valley, Ossessione similarly faced censorship under fascist rule. The result of a collaboration of co-writers and the director Visconti, all active in the underground communist movement, Ossessione, like Il Gente del Po, was made under the fascist government with anti-fascist sentiment. Even though the script was passed by the censors, the film was withdrawn from many cinemas or banned audiences below the age of 16 under censorship imposed by local parishes of the Catholic Church and local government officials. According to Forgacs, the writers of the script certainly exercised self-censorship in not making the politics too explicit, hence the central government did not perceive the film as directly anti-fascist in a political sense but rather as immoral—“an attack on the morality and sanctity of the family and marriage.”44 Since these values were also upheld by the fascist 40 Chiarini, “A Discourse on Neo-Realism,” 142. 41 Antonioni, The Architecture of Vision, 194. 42 Antonioni, The Architecture of Vision, 194. 43 Antonioni, The Architecture of Vision, 194. 44 Forgacs, “Ossessione DVD Commentary,” 01:16:05–01:21:56.

176 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

regime and were crucial for the reproduction of fascist identity, the film faced various forms of censorship after its release and could not find audiences. Both Ossessione, which is widely considered to be the precursor to neorealism, and Il Gente del Po contain cinematographic elements that later formed the kernel of neorealism, such as portraying the lower classes’ daily life, focusing on the micro-actions that contain the crux of reality, travelling with characters, and scrutinizing the politics hidden in everyday situations. The power of their anti-fascist aesthetics is evidenced by the various forms of censorship that both films experienced, as outlined above. In that sense, these films, as precursors to neorealist aesthetics, embodied the potentially revolutionary environment during the last days of fascist rule. Thus, if there is any year-zero moment for Italian cinema, it could be located in the emergent everyday aesthetics that investigated unrepresented reality. Below, I will explain the cinematographic articulations of walking in post-fascist European cities as a significant tool to explore, historicize, and negotiate the lacunary reality in post-fascist Italy. For Deleuze, it was Rossellini who discovered a dispersive and lacunary reality with Roma, Città Aperta, but above all with Paisà, “a series of fragmentary, chopped up encounters.”45 I will particularly focus on Roma, Città Aperta and Germania Anno Zero—the first and the third film in Rossellini’s War Trilogy. The images of walking in these films reveal actual practices of walking in the city yet also give birth to new aesthetic tools. Although also very relevant, Paisà includes tropes of voyage that are different to walking. In this film, wandering is abstracted into a narrative technique, the analysis of which is beyond the analytical focus of this chapter. Instead, I would like to expand my analysis to Ladri di Biciclette, which marks a significant stage in neorealism’s evolution of the walking-shot. In Ladri di Biciclette, cinematic pedestrianism across the city is not a form of resistance, as in Roma, Città Aperta, or a freedom to wander across all spaces, as in Germania Anno Zero. It is rather a form of perpetual displacement, which articulates the insecure condition of Italy’s working class around the 1948 elections, when the Resistance lost power and Christian Democrat rule began.

Walking as Resistance in Roma, Città Aperta Roma, Città Aperta, filmed and set in Nazi-occupied Rome in 1945, opens with marching soldiers, whose rhythmic footsteps grow louder as they 45 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 216.

Walking amidst Ruins: A Pedestrian Cinema

177

approach from out-of-field before eventually filling the frame. The German military song “Märkische Heide, Märkischer Sand” dominates the audio field as the static camera pans left to right to follow their movement. We then cut to a military truck entering the frame with a roar from the same point and performing the same movement. Through this duplication, the scene demonstrates how the occupiers dominate the streets both on foot and in vehicles. The sounds of marching steps, chanting, and roaring vehicle engines symbolize their invasive control over all the city’s space. The occupiers’ domination over the city is next represented by an abstract visualization of the city under invasion. On a physical map of Rome, military sectors are marked with black rigid lines and circles, which graphically illustrate the military construction of space, imposed on the city. The heart of the city is marked by a circle that resembles a web—metaphorically connoting the restriction of movement. In his review of the premiere of the film in 1945, Alberto Moravia described the title as “slightly sarcastic” while, in the words of another reviewer, the film reconstructs “the harsh and tragic life lived during the imprisonment of Rome, when the irony of words defined the capital as an ‘open city’.”46 The film concerns the attempts of a Nazi general, named Bergmann, to stalk and capture a Resistance leader, Giorgio Manfredi. He boasts of his powers of surveillance over the streets of Rome without ever having to leave his office: “Every night I stroll through Rome without leaving this room,” he says. “I am very fond of this kind of photography that captures people almost by surprise. You meet some very interesting people.” The camera(man) that strolls the streets functions as an extension of Bergmann’s body, which is confined to the interior space of the Nazi headquarters for safety reasons. Symbolically, this encapsulates the paradox of Bergmann’s power: “Bergmann’s use of photographs epitomizes both the intrusive power of his surveillance and its limitations,” observes Forgacs. “The controlling view of the city from above, as seen on a map, or from a distance, as through camera lens, is the key to Bergmann’s particular form of power, but also its limitation.”47 Thus, Bergmann is never seen strolling the streets; on the contrary, he seems confined to his headquarters. It is possible to observe an almost spectral dimension here. In addition to the camera working as an extension of Bergmann’s body, enabling him to stroll the streets without being corporeally present, the high contrast of light and imposing shadows of the Nazi headquarters (quoting German 46 Cited in Forgacs, “Space, Rhetoric, and the Divided City,” 128. 47 Forgacs, “Space, Rhetoric, and the Divided City,” 114.

178 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Figure 20: Virtual flânerie—still from Roma, Città Aperta (Roberto Rossellini, 1945).

expressionist cinematography) symbolize how the occupying troops haunt the city. 48 Besides surveillance, the film articulates the Nazis’ domination over urban public space through the obtrusive movement and presence of the commanders, as in the opening scenes. Here, German troops march and sing as part of a public display of their power, noisily drive their trucks, raid buildings and living quarters, or stop citizens at random in street patrols. The ability to move about the streets therefore becomes almost an exclusive privilege of the occupiers, who impose curfews and other restrictions to impede the citizens’ movements. In his article, “Space, Rhetoric, and the Divided City in Roma, Città Aperta,” Forgacs counterpoises the macroscopic cartography of the city (seen from above through the occupier’s gaze) with the micro-practices of its inhabitants and Resistance activists, i.e., appropriations of space from below by means of walking and other kinds of movement along hidden routes. After the opening sequence, which presents a claustrophobic image of an oppressed city under the gloom of Nazi occupation, these clandestine 48 This spectral dimension of surveillance is further extended with control over the invisible space of “penetrating yet intangible new media,” such as telephone, telegram, and radio. This has a historical truth behind it as the journalist Paolo Monelli writes that, in 1943, it was forbidden to “wire or telephone outside Rome” while “listening to Radio Bari or Radio Palermo were punishable by death. In the film, the telephone, only found in Nazi headquarters and Marina’s bourgeois home, “is a means of hidden communication able to thwart the communications networks of the Resistance,” since it was a rarity, only found in upper-class households. See Forgacs “Space, Rhetoric, and the Divided City,” 119. Also see Del Pilar Blanco and Peeren, “Introduction.”

Walking amidst Ruins: A Pedestrian Cinema

179

movements, such as walks, escapes, or hidden travels, start eroding the domination from below. Adriano Aprà describes this other city in the film as a dispersed or “decentralized” city, in opposition to the centralized city of the authorities. 49 It is also an articulation of the “lacunary” everyday reality of Rome under occupation. Forgacs describes how the action of the film zigzags between various parts of Rome, tracing out both a social geography of the city and a set of symbolic oppositions. The clandestine acts of walking connect all these various parts of Rome: the working-class district of San Lorenzo or the borgate as new working-class settlements housing the displaced population after the fascist “gutting” of the city centre.50 It could be claimed that Rossellini’s camera, by shadowing Resistance members along their hidden routes and alleys across the city, testifies to the existence of an alternative social space, decipherable only by members of the Resistance. The militants use all kinds of routes, from rooftops to gutters: Manfredi escapes through a basement, Don Pietro sings “Mattinata Fiorentina” on the street to meet another partisan. For the Germans and the fascists, these are places under their control and surveillance, whereas for the Resistance activists, they are places from which or into which they may escape. Rossellini’s camera, following them along all these dark street corners, side streets, or secret routes, not only records this alternative social space from a documentarian perspective, but also articulates it cinematically using images of walking to interweave them. In the film, walking means resisting the occupier’s formation of space, appropriating its production of space and creating an alternative social space. Regarding the way this alternative social space becomes increasingly visible, Mark Shiel notes that the darkness and oppression of the opening sequence is gradually cancelled out by neorealist light and air. Yet, despite the contrast between the highly structured interiors of Nazi headquarters and the breathing images of the street, the neorealist flexibility of movement across various spaces is not very strong in this film. The images of walking are not yet extended on-the-move takes, mainly because the characters’ movements remain very clandestine and restricted to narrow, dim, obscure, and tiny spaces. The streets have not yet been reclaimed by the citizens, partisans, or activists. A strong example of this is the scene where Pina is shot dead as she bursts onto the street and runs after her fiancé Francesco, who is being taken away by soldiers. The scene of her lying lifeless on the 49 Aprà, “Rossellini Beyond Neo-Realism,” 44. 50 Forgacs, “Space, Rhetoric, and the Divided City,” 121.

180 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

street with her son crying by her side is not only one of the most powerful images in the history of Italian cinema, but also a symbol of the domination of public space. Although the images of walking in Roma, Città Aperta are mostly composed of multiple shots and interrupted movement, in tracing this clandestine mobility of Resistance members, the neorealist images of walking gradually loosen the imposed restrictions on space. The film’s closing scene, with a group of militant children walking down a hill towards Rome, signals a new construction of space from zero. The affective quality of the image has been transformed: “the city appears no longer as a zone of authoritarian control but as a source of inspiration for people in revolt.”51

Walking as Historicity in Germania Anno Zero In a direct reference to the shared history of fascism between Italy and Germany,52 Germania Anno Zero follows the endless wanderings of a child amidst the ruins of war-stricken Berlin. Rossellini filmed in Berlin in 1947 with special permission, and his description of how he arrived in the city sheds light on the condition of public space after the war: It was necessary to cross the entire city to get to the French sector. The city was deserted. The grey of the sky flowed back into the streets, and from about the height of a man one could look over fallen roofs. To find the streets again under the ruins, people had cleared away the rubble and piled it up.53

Like Rome in Roma, Città Aperta, Berlin was under occupation and divided into four occupation sectors: French, British, American, and Russian. Rossellini found that “the four occupying nations were very hospitable and permitted me to wander everywhere.”54 He had the privilege of unimpeded movement across the city, which gave him the opportunity for pedinamento—wandering about the city to encounter and film daily life. After this first visit, Rossellini went back to France with some footage to work on 51 Shiel, Italian Neorealism, 52. 52 Rossellini echoes Benedetto Croce’s perspective of Italian fascism as an aberration when he writes, “What was it that could have carried [the Germans] to this disaster? A false philosophy, the essence of Nazism […]” “Ten Years of Cinema,” 99. 53 Rossellini, “Ten Years of Cinema,” 99. 54 Rossellini, “Ten Years of Cinema,” 99.

Walking amidst Ruins: A Pedestrian Cinema

181

the script. He had come to Berlin with a story in mind. He wanted to tell the tale of a child in order to show how an innocent being eventually commits a crime under the influence of a Nazi schoolmaster. Echoing Benedetto Croce’s claim that fascism is a disease, Rossellini believes that “a false philosophy” has carried the German to this disaster. The years of Nazism are therefore construed as an aberration in Germany’s history. Cinema, for Rossellini, can help discover such “reactions and motives for actions”: “the cinema is also a microscope” and “it is also this microscopic aspect of cinema which has made neorealism; it is a moral approach which becomes an aesthetic fact.”55 In his film, he scrutinizes the personalities and the landscape of post-war Berlin through such a microscopic lens, probing into the psychological reasons behind everyday micro-actions. For Rossellini, the kernel of politics at large, which shapes society and history, becomes visible in these small quotidian activities. The case of the boy, Edmund, committing a deplorable crime under the influence of a Nazi schoolmaster, perfectly exemplifies this neorealist vocation of following up close the everyday actions of characters in order to reveal the politics implicated in them. In Germania Anno Zero, Rossellini’s camera closely haunts the little boy along the streets as he walks through diverse urban spaces. In this film, Rossellini devises a walking-shot that is aesthetically different from that in Roma, Città Aperta: a long, embodied, eye-level, on-the-move take that follows the character wandering about the city or across a landscape. In contrast with Roma, Città Aperta, which depicted the gloom of a highly controlled public space, the streets in Germania Anno Zero are relatively open for citizens now that the war is over. The camera can follow little Edmund walking across the city at length without any need to hide from the gaze of occupiers. Therefore, in this film, unlike in Roma, Città Aperta, the editing is slow: long takes leisurely record the movement of the protagonist and the post-war urban landscape without much interruption. The space is also larger: instead of obscure corners and tight close or medium shots, he uses long shots to depict larger landscapes. Following Edmund throughout, Rossellini’s camera takes a walk, offering us a snippet of reality from warstricken everyday life. Rooted in the present and in the local, the camera enters deeper into various spaces, from shabby rooms in a boarding house to the Nazi school teacher’s apartment, or evacuated ruins and dark corners inhabited by urchins. With each space visited, we encounter different aspects of everyday life in post-war Berlin. Walking, therefore, functions to weave these diverse urban spaces together without the risk of losing their reality 55 See Rossellini, “Ten Years of Cinema,” 100–101.

182 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

to conventional storytelling. It makes it possible to reflect urban everyday life in all its unorganized reality. In one of his articles, Bazin refers to the images of Rossellini (and of neorealism generally) as “image-facts”: each image being on its own just a fragment of reality existing before any meanings.56 Long, on-the-move takes or walking-shots, it could be argued, give Rossellini the aesthetic means to create broader, further extended image-facts without interruption. This accords with Rossellini’s understanding of cinema as a microscope: a metaphor for an analysis of what motivates an action in a character. It could be suggested that the walking-shot enables such an analysis since, throughout, variations in the camera’s distance from its subject (from extreme wide to medium shots) frame the individual within the surrounding historical time and space. The scenes where Edmund’s feeble body is almost engrossed by the ominous ruins that pervade the visual field perfectly exemplify this analytical regard of neorealist aesthetics. These scenes testify to neorealism’s documentary drive to register historical circumstances and explore the affective relationship between individual and space. Thus, in Germania Anno Zero, the walking-shots are not only blocs of movement but also blocs of history.57 Implicated in this urge to encounter, register, discover, and analyse postwar conditions, including human agency, is an attempt to historicize those conditions. Neorealism’s investigation into the close relationship between the subject and the space was largely inspired by the thinker and political activist Antonio Gramsci, a prominent figure imprisoned by Italy’s fascist regime. In Roma, Città Aperta, we see a direct reference to Gramsci: Francesco and others run off copies of L’Unità, the newspaper that he founded. Neorealist filmmakers were strongly influenced by Gramsci, whose work was banned under fascism but started to be circulated more freely after the fall of Mussolini. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony became particularly useful for analyzing what induces the widespread practice of and demand for violence in a society. Central to the Gramscian concept of hegemony is the production of consent, which is analysed in his work through the role that institutional practices—such as religious, educational, or forms of entertainment—play in shaping the consent of individuals and groups. Gramsci conceived of social 56 See Bazin, “Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of the Liberation” and “In Defense of Rossellini.” 57 Deleuze refers to Bazin when he f irst uses the term ‘bloc’ as an aesthetic component of neorealism. A bloc is an elliptical section of reality, which is construed to have deliberately weak connections to the other sections of reality depicted in the film. See Deleuze, Cinema 2.

Walking amidst Ruins: A Pedestrian Cinema

183

Figure 21: Subject as a fact among others—still from Germania Anno Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948).

structures as a source of lived social relations. Social practices, therefore, provide the evidence and data to analyse the production of consent and the production of change.58 Therefore, analyzing the everyday practices of social life sheds light on the material conditions that shape subjects. Echoing Marx’s image of the dialectical method, “Gramsci’s starting point was the concrete subject situated in a particular historical environment.”59 The Gramscian method of historicizing focuses on such an investigation into the relationship between individuals and their surroundings. Rossellini’s neorealist aesthetics, which highlight the conditions in which its characters act, carry the influence of this Gramscian method. Throughout the walking-shots in Germania Anno Zero, the variation in the distance of the camera to its subject (from extreme long to medium shots) frames the individual within the surrounding historical time and space. The gaze of the camera in these embodied walking-shots acts almost as a public intellectual’s analytical look (the microscope), zooming into and out of the social reality, observing everyday conditions but pointing to a wider political question regarding the individual’s relation to space. The walking shots in this film are thus “the bearer[s] of historicity,” as Giuliana 58 Landy, “Culture and Politics in the Work of Antonio Gramsci.” 59 Landy, “Culture and Politics in the Work of Antonio Gramsci,” 54. Marx’s metaphor of dialectic materialism, “the actual, corporeal human being standing on f irm and well-rounded earth, inhaling and exhaling all natural forces” was analysed in connection with Vertov’s cinematic pedestrianism in the previous chapter. See Anderson, Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism, 9.

184 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Minghelli puts it.60 The walking-shot, always rooted in the present and always on the move, probes into the historicity encapsulated in the wider social and physical landscape. At this point, it is worthwhile mentioning the contestations of public space in Berlin around the time Germania Anno Zero was f ilmed. The literature on the Nazi Party’s influence on urban public space and its urban policies is strikingly limited compared to the expansive scholarship on Mussolini’s politics of public space. For instance, Bernhard Sauer, in his recent study about the history of the Storm Troopers (SA) in the Brandenburg district of Berlin, observes that historians have until now paid little attention to National Socialism in Berlin and, above all, to the history of the SA in the city. Brian Ladd notes that in Berlin, “the Third Reich built mostly government offices, and buildings that displayed the power and authority of the Nazi state had to meet a different standard.”61 Yet, there is still no comprehensive account of the National Socialists’ influence on the social space in Berlin, “the very city that had to be subjugated by the party” before it could extend its murderous dictatorship to the remainder of Germany.62 In fact, Hitler considered his home to be Munich, where he had strong support, whereas Berlin needed to be “conquered.” Whereas he could address thousands of listeners at one gathering in Munich, the gatherings in Berlin were small and his party was banned while local Berlin newspapers continuously mocked him as a “miniature Mussolini” or “a pitiful street demagogue.” When, in 1924, a journal depicted him entering Berlin on horseback, Hitler is said to have responded, “That might still happen,” and this is not the only evidence that Hitler envisioned conquering Berlin. His bodyguard, Ulrich Graf, recalled Hitler pointing to Berlin and saying, “When our swastika flag flies over these wonderful buildings, I shall be the leader of our whole nation.”63 By 1923, shortly after Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922, Hitler was already preparing for a March on Berlin, although this plan was later abandoned. Friedrich mentions that “following the National Socialists’ assumption of power, Berlin had been ‘occupied by brown-shirted provincials’, implying that the local variant of National Socialism, far from emerging from within the city itself, had somehow been imposed on it from the outside.”64 Therefore, “the twelve years of National Socialism represent 60 Minghelli, Landscape and Memory, 10. 61 Ladd, Ghosts of Berlin, 141. 62 Friedrich, Hitler’s Berlin, x. 63 Friedrich, Hitler’s Berlin, 49. 64 Friedrich, Hitler’s Berlin, xi.

Walking amidst Ruins: A Pedestrian Cinema

185

not just an episode in its history but also a break in its more authentic past.”65 From this perspective, the shared memory of authoritarian and nationalistic rule, occupation, and liberation brings Berlin and Rome closer to each other. Strong evidence for such a shared memory can be found in the description of liberation in both countries: while the ultimate fall of Mussolini in 1945 is construed as “the year zero” in Italy, May 1945 is envisioned as “Stunde Null” (the zero hour) in Germany’s history. Despite substantial differences between the particular experiences of war in the two cities, various historical moments permit a degree of parallelism. For example, it is known that Hitler looked up to Mussolini as a leader while the two corresponded with each other often. In 1937, Mussolini’s visit to Berlin left a mark on Berlin’s history as an unprecedented display, as much as Hitler’s visit to Rome. In 1943, the Nazi Party occupied Rome to save Mussolini. Although few studies have analysed the influence of Nazism on public space, it is still possible to draw such connections of shared memory and traumas of war between Rome and Berlin, and also with regard to Rossellini’s neorealist treatment of Berlin. In his seminal essay, “The Voids of Berlin,” Andreas Huyssen claims that the notion of Berlin as a void after the war is more than a metaphor, given the city’s discontinuous and ruptured history. After the Allies occupied Berlin, May 1945 was envisioned as a Stunde Null, with the ruins becoming the actual sites, images, symbols, and memoranda of it. Huyssen notes that forgetting is a significant part of rebuilding the city, and he even sees this discourse carried into the present: It has been equally privileged in an official ad campaign of 1996, literally written all over the city: ‘Berlin wird’ (Berlin becomes). Becomes what? Instead of a proper predicate, we get a verbal void.66

The will to erase the Nazi past through forgetting leaves behind a void in both history and in the public space. In Rossellini’s film, such erasure from public space is strongly represented through Edmund’s brother-in-law: Karl-Heinz. An ex-Nazi soldier, Karl-Heinz is enclosed within the private space of his living quarters—he cannot go out to the streets for fear of getting caught. As with Bergmann’s confinement in Roma, Città Aperta, Karl-Heinz is deprived of his powers. But in contrast to Bergmann’s extended ‘spectral’

65 Friedrich, Hitler’s Berlin, xi. 66 Huyssen, “The Voids of Berlin.”

186 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

presence in the public space through surveillance, Karl-Heinz’s existence is reduced to zero, a void.67 In Germania Anno Zero, it is also possible to see a contrast between KarlHeinz and Edmund. With the former refusing to work, Edmund fills the void left by his retreat from the social space. However, it could be claimed that Edmund also represents a void, remembering Rossellini’s emphasis on his innocence. Edmund is shaped by the emergent social space in the post-war city as much as he partakes in the production of this social space through his quotidian activities. Therefore, the ruinous urban landscape, as much as being an image of the void of ‘the zero hour’, is also a site of the production of a new space.68 Rossellini’s f ilm, reminiscent of Gramscian analysis, records this emerging social space at the level of everyday life through the wanderings of Edmund, with a special attention to the surroundings that affect his actions. From this perspective, Edmund, as Bazin has noted, becomes one fact among others. Even though 1945 was envisioned as Stunde Null, which implied a new start emerging out of the rubble, Brian Ladd explains that it was more a hope than a fact. As he notes, “the desire to break with the past is most evident in the first and most ambitious of the immediate postwar plans.” Ladd explains the immediate post-war period as follows: In the municipal government set up in 1945 under Soviet auspices, which comprised a broad coalition of antifascists, the prominent architect Hans Scharoun took charge of building and planning. He gathered a group of architects and planners whose “collective plan” of 1946 applied principles of urban modernism to the design of Berlin. For these planners, the destruction of the war offered the opportunity to cast off the shackles of the past and to create a new city adapted to the natural landscape of the Spree River valley in place of the haphazard historical accumulation of streets and buildings. The planners sought a decentralization and functional division of the city. […] The “collective plan’s” visionary urban design was intended to be democratic rather than hierarchical and thus to break with the German past in politics as well as planning. 67 Brian Ladd notes that the reformist impulse was powerfully reinforced by the widespread desire to suppress all possible links to the capital of the Third Reich, whether that desire was motivated by revulsion at the Nazis or by a sense of guilt. Ghosts of Berlin, 176. 68 From this perspective, the urban landscape of Berlin could be described as a ‘holey space’, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s concept from A Thousand Plateaus. The power structures of the past are already in ruins and a new social space is being constructed through the lived quotidian practices of the citizens.

Walking amidst Ruins: A Pedestrian Cinema

187

However, the “collective plan” remained on paper and ultimately forgotten, especially following the division of the city into two and the building of the Berlin Wall. With new political actors exerting their domination over the public space in the emerging Cold War, the meaning of cinematic pedestrianism was transformed once again with post-war Europe’s changing everyday landscape and spatial practices. The images of walking in Ladri di Biciclette evocatively portray the conditions of the working class during such a shift in politics.

Walking as Displacement in Ladri di Biciclette A collaboration between Zavattini and de Sica, Ladri di Biciclette contains all phases of the pedinamento technique. In preparation for the screenplay, the film crew, headed by de Sica and Zavattini, took several walks across Rome to observe the daily life of the city’s working class. In these pre-filmic perambulations, the crew visited a charitable service for the poorest citizens in the Church of Saints Nereo and Achilleo, where they—just as Antonio and Bruno—stumbled upon a weekly mass shaving before the mass. Having observed “the beliefs of the working class,” they decided to visit a fortune teller. During these visits, Zavattini listened carefully to the problems expressed by the working-class visitors and even sometimes pretended to be one of the advice-seekers.69 All of these encounters not only provided snippets of Roman everyday life but also shaped the film’s itinerary. In other words, Antonio and Bruno’s perambulations in the film itself are re-enactments of Zavattini and de Sica’s pre-filmic pedinamento across Roman spaces to observe working-class everyday life. Zavattini and de Sica made most of these walks in the winter of 1947 and the first months of 1948. The script was completed in April 1948, shortly after the elections, which were seen as a “watershed in the history of Italy.” The filming took place in the spring, “after witnessing the marginalization of the very forces that earned Italy, emerging from the ruins of fascism.”70 The film was released in the same year. 1948 was a defining moment for the new-born Republic and for fledgling Cold War geopolitics. Unemployment peaked, a veritable boom of miracles was reported to the Vatican, and fierce political and ideological

69 See Minghelli, Landscape and Memory, 93. 70 Minghelli, Landscape and Memory, 95.

188 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

confrontations took place. Whereas the Christian Democrats and the United States71 focused on the employing classes, the Communists, backed by the Soviet Union, focused on the working-class movement.72 According to Andrea di Michele, 1943–1947 was a transition phase independent of both the preceding fascist period and the subsequent Republican era. In many ways, 1948 was also the end of the revolutionary season that began in 1943. As Paul Ginsborg put it, a “restoration” era commenced in 1948, through which power was restored to the dominant classes. Minghelli argues that a feeling of defeat must have weighed oppressively on Ladri di Biciclette, which would be the expression of a new cinema. “It is in such an atmosphere of disenchantment and defeat that the film was shot,” observes Minghelli. Such a feeling of defeat finds expression in Ladri di Biciclette in many ways, but most significantly in the walking-shot. Most of the cinematic pedestrianism in the film is based on one lost object—the stolen bicycle, which can be considered to symbolize the Marxian concept of the means of production, the thievery of which implies the dispossession of the working class in the rising anti-communist and anti-socialist political sentiment of the time. Minghelli also observes that the bicycle is “a basic tool granting a livelihood to an unemployed worker.” From this perspective, it is possible to read the film as representing the struggle for abducted power, evoking Ginsborg’s identification of the era as one that restored power to the employing classes. However, Ladri di Biciclette is not entirely defeatist since the bicycle is in a “suspended state of presence/absence,” as Minghelli notes: The bike is there (he does own one) and it’s not there (it is at the pawn shop). “Ce l’ho e non ce l’ho” (I have it and I don’t have it) declares Antonio to the employment agent […] “O la trovi subito o non la trovi più” (Either you find it now, or you’ll never find it) later recites the fortune teller La Santona to the question of the whereabouts of the stolen bicycle.73 71 Ginsborg writes that the American intervention was breathtaking in its size, with an “Interim Aid” package of $176 million in the first three months of 1948. The arrival of aid was turned into a special celebration, with ships and trains welcomed by crowds. On 20 March 1948, George Marshall, the designer of the Marshall Plan, explicitly warned that all help to Italy would immediately cease in the event of a Communist victory. See Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy. 72 Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 72. On 17 March, Cardinal Spellman, in the presence of President Truman, declared: “And one month from tomorrow as Italy must make her choice of government, I cannot believe that the Italian people […] will chose Stalinism against God, Soviet Russia against America.” 73 Minghelli, Landscape and Memory, 100.

Walking amidst Ruins: A Pedestrian Cinema

189

The film is pervaded by this dialectic of presence/absence as an element of suspense, even in the first segment where Antonio still has the bicycle. The title of the film already foreshadows the “huge event,” in Zavattini’s words, and the bicycle’s exaggerated presence always signals its foreshadowed absence: The bicycle is there, and it’s not there. This dialectic of presence/absence also represents Antonio’s employment: he has a job and then he doesn’t have it. It is possible to read these dualities in light of the uncertainties encapsulated in the politics of the time. The working class would either struggle for its ideals or it would lose its power to the elite. The former could be considered as the struggle to own the means of production, which is symbolized in Antonio’s quest for the bicycle. In this line of thought, such a struggle resonates with the massive strikes of the post-war years and the power obtained by the working class. On the other hand, the latter stands for the usurpation of the means of production by the elite in restoring power to employing classes within the framework of the European Recovery Programme. Finally, the dialectic of absence and presence plays out in the rising element of chance and faith in a socially and economically unjust society. During the film, the Ricci family is repeatedly presented as a victim of a wider social crisis. The encounters of Antonio and Bruno in their perambulations across the city depict this social crisis in diverse ways. In the restaurant scene, for example, the inequality between the rich and the poor is represented strongly through intercut images of food consumption. When Antonio and Bruno lose all their hope of finding the bicycle, they visit La Santona, which is represented with a certain touch of irony as the last resort of the hopeless poor and rich alike since no real solution is offered. Furthermore, the struggle, which has been carried out on the streets and in the workplaces by the workers, is handed over to an absent force that is out of this world. In the end, Antonio is tempted to steal a bicycle, which puts the fixed notions of protagonist and antagonist in motion through a dialectical method. As Shiel notes, “The tracing of Antonio’s evolution from worker to thief suggests that all crime may be socially caused by poverty.”74 The walking-shot is a significant tool for revealing such social facts. The film embodies Zavattini’s emphasis on walking as an exploratory tool in filmmaking: “We will make a film with whichever conclusions, when—walking walking walking—we will find the true meaning of sadness and happiness.75 74 Shiel, Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City, 58. 75 Minghelli, Landscape and Memory, 127.

190 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Ladri di Biciclette thus marks a turning point in the aesthetics of the neorealist walking-shot in its evolution into modern cinema in the face of the masses’ disappointment and loss of faith in shaping politics.76 However, as a spatial practice, the walking-shot persists in later works by Rossellini, Antonioni, and Fellini as a political act against the dominant structures of space, albeit in different ways, which Giuliana Bruno and Gilles Deleuze have explained, as briefly mentioned at the beginning of this chapter.

Conclusion: Walking-Shot as Spatial Practice Urban landscapes in neorealism excavated, recorded, and conveyed, through walking-shots, the point that shadow wandering characters are sites of political action against repressive spatial politics that control the movement of citizens. The neorealist filmmakers’ decision to go out onto the street and encounter everyday life was, in many ways, a rebellion against the manufactured reality within the confined spaces of Cinecittà, one of the biggest cultural hegemony projects of Mussolini’s fascist establishment. With a general codex that ordered the depiction of the present and the future social order as fascist, cinema in the interwar years contributed to the way society was organized and regulated. It can be claimed that, in response to Cinecittà, the neorealist filmmakers set out to create their true cinematic 76 Antonioni, upon being asked in 1958 whether neorealism was dead, responded, “Not exactly. It is more correct to say that neorealism is evolving, because whenever a movement or a current ends, it gives life to what comes after it […] Neorealism of the post-war period, when realist was what it was, so intensely present, focused on the relationship between characters and reality. What was important was that very relationship. Today, instead, since that reality has—more or less, for better or for worse—been normalized, it seems important to me to look for what is left inside the characters of all their past experiences. That’s why, nowadays, it’s no longer important to make a film about a man whose bicycle has been stolen—that is, a film about a character who is important because his bicycle has been stolen, and just for this […] Today, once the problem with the bicycle has been eliminated—I am speaking metaphorically, try to see beyond my words—it is important to see what is inside this man whose bicycle was stolen, what are his thoughts, what are his feelings, how much is left inside of him of his past experiences, of the war, or the period after the war, of everything that has happened to our country.” In the same interview, Antonioni again cites pedinare as a significant tool, which shows that even though the neorealist style was evolving, pedinare maintained an exploratory and revelatory tool. He says, “One of my concerns in filming is to follow the characters until I feel it is time to stop. To follow them not for the sake of it, but because I think it is important to establish, to capture the moments in the life of a character that appear to be less important.” From “My Experience” in The Architecture of Vision, 8–9.

Walking amidst Ruins: A Pedestrian Cinema

191

city by wandering the streets, registering the realities, making “any hour of the day, any place, and any person,”77 and any-space-whatever the subject of their films. This is the core of pedinamento, formulated by Zavattini in the cultural context of post-war filmmaking in Italy. Of course, it would be naive to consider the streets to be entirely free of fascist hegemony or as the sole carriers of resistance. Henri Lefebvre reminds us that the exercise of hegemony never leaves the urban space untouched, and that the space is never only the passive locus of social relations. Rather, it is active in the reproduction of the existing mode of production yet never thoroughly purged of contradictions.78 Roma, Città Aperta portrays these dynamics without any reductive binary between the interior and exterior urban spaces, or between stability and movement. In the film, the practices of walking produce a social space from below, eroding the oppressive domination designed to control, capture, or impede movement. Rossellini’s cinematic pedestrianism is a similar act of resistance. He achieves this not only through creating alternative spaces or articulating them on the screen, but also by producing aesthetic tools modelled upon the lacunary and dispersive reality of the post-war. The reason that the walking-shot becomes increasingly prevalent in neorealism, and later in the modernist cinema of Antonioni and Fellini, is because walking is a spatial practice that can articulate, challenge, and erode the dominant production of space. Situating himself within such a Lefebvrian notion of social space, Michel de Certeau formulates walking as a spatial practice that is a multiform, resisting, tricky, and stubborn procedure that eludes discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised.79 Even though practiced within the hegemonic structures of the urban space, elusive and unpredictable movement gives walking the advantage of being multiform, resisting, tricky, and stubborn. For Certeau, To walk is to lack a place. It is the indef inite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place—an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine 77 Zavattini, “Some Ideas on Cinema,” 52. 78 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 11. 79 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 96.

192 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City.80

The dual quality expressed in this quote, e.g., the image of the city as a fabric interwoven with the relations and intersections of walkers, each continuously taking leave of the place that they occupy with each step, corresponds to the year-zero discourse that prevailed in post-war Italy and Germany. In Rossellini’s Germania Anno Zero, as Certeau says, there is both displacement and void at the heart of the city. The same could be said for Ladri di Biciclette, which is built upon an absent item, or in Umberto D., which portrays a lack. In the early Italian neorealist films, what produces the urban fabric of post-fascist European cities is the endless wanderings of the characters. In their walks, these characters lack a place, in the sense that Certeau describes. Their perambulations also signify a figurative displacement, or aberration, in an age of massive migrations and mobility. The perpetual wanderers in neorealism, if not constructing the city from zero, provide an intimate analysis of space in post-war Italy. They are shaped and affected by their surroundings, perhaps even more than they are themselves able to shape or affect them. This led Deleuze to conclude that neorealist characters were “seers,” not “agents,” and that they are floating in “purely optical situations” to which they have no response or reaction.81 Nevertheless, the pedestrianism of neorealist characters is not always a floating wandering; it also portrays an intimate analysis of space as ‘lived’ experience (landscape, city, trattoria or family, factory, neighbourhood, and other institutions as social spaces). This is reminiscent of Gramsci’s analytical perspective of historicizing and his notion of cultural hegemony, which sheds light on how institutions shape human will. Contrary to the general conviction that neorealist characters are passive, I have tried to show here how neorealism combined pedestrianism as a political spatial practice with a cinematic practice. After the defeat of fascism, the streets belonged to the people again, so going out onto the streets with a camera meant simultaneously rebuilding and reclaiming the urban space. The neorealist walking shot can therefore be considered as an aesthetic-political spatial practice that simultaneously revealed the workings of social space while producing spaces of resistance.82 In the next chapter, I will further explore how the Italian neorealist walking-shot was taken up 80 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 103. 81 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 2. 82 See Bazin, “Bicycle Thieves,” 67.

Walking amidst Ruins: A Pedestrian Cinema

193

in French Nouvelle Vague. Again, in contrast to the general conviction that the stroll, wandering, or flânerie in Nouvelle Vague was a trope that tied together “pure optical and sound situations,” constantly mixing the dream (imagination) and the real,83 I will focus on a marginal Nouvelle Vague filmmaker: Agnès Varda. Given that pedestrianism constantly appears in her work, Varda’s filmography can shed light on pedestrianism as a political (specifically feminist) spatial practice.

Works Cited N. A. “Pedinamento” in Treccani: La Cultura Italiana, http://www.treccani.it/ vocabolario/pedinare. Accessed 1 October 2021. Anderson, Kevin. Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Antonioni, Michelangelo. The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Aprà, Adriano. “Rossellini Beyond Neo-Realism.” In Roberto Rossellini. Ed. Don Ranvaud. London: BFI, 1981. Atkinson, David. “Totalitarianism and the Street in Fascist Rome.” In Images of the Street: Planning, Identity, and Control in Public Space. Ed. Nicholas Fyfe. London: Routledge, 1998. 13–30. Bazin, André. “Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of the Liberation.” In André Bazin and Italian Neorealism. Ed. Bert Cardullo. London: Continuum, 2011. 29–50. Bazin, André “In Defense of Rossellini.” In André Bazin and Italian Neorealism. Ed. Bert Cardullo. London: Continuum, 2011. 63–171. Brancaleone, David. “Framing the Real: Lefebvre and Neo-Realist Cinematic Space as Practice.” Architecture_MPS 5 (2014): 1–22. Brunetta, Gian Piero. Storia del Cinema Italiano: Dal Neorealismo al Miracolo Economico, 1945–1959, Vol 3. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2001. Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film. New York: Verso, 2007. Cardullo, Bert, ed. André Bazin and Italian Neorealism. London: Continuum, 2011. Chiarini, Luigi. “A Discourse on Neo-Realism.” In Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-realism. Ed. David Overbey. Hamden: Archon Books, 1979. 139–45.

83 In Cinema 2, Deleuze argues that L’Année dernière à Marienbad is the last of the great neorealist films. See Deleuze, Cinema 2, 7.

194 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. De Santis, Giuseppe. “Towards an Italian Landscape.” In Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-realism. Ed. David Overbey. Hamden: Archon Books, 1979. 125–30. De Sica, Vittorio. “Why Ladri di Biciclette?” In Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-realism. Ed. David Overbey. Hamden: Archon Books, 1979. 87–88. Del Pilar Blanco, Maria and Esther Peeren, eds., “Introduction: Conceptualizing Spectralities.” In The Spectralities Reader. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 1–28. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. London: Continuum, 2004. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: Time-Image. London: Continuum, 2005. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum, 2004. Forgacs, David. “Ossessione DVD Commentary.” Ossessione. London: BFI. 2003. Forgacs, David. “Space, Rhetoric, and the Divided City in Roma Città Aperta.” In Roberto Rossellini’s Roma, Città Aperta. Ed. Sidney Gottlieb. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 106–30. Friedrich, Thomas. Hitler’s Berlin: Abused City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. Ghirardo, Diane Yvonne. “Città Fascista: Surveillance and Spectacle.” Journal of Contemporary History 31.2 (1996): 347–72. Ginsborg, Paul. A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1988. London: Penguin, 1990. Huyssen, Andreas. “The Voids of Berlin.” Critical Inquiry 24.1 (Autumn 1997): 57–81. Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960. Ladd, Brian. Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Landy, Marcia. “Culture and Politics in the Work of Antonio Gramsci.” boundary 2 14.3 (Spring 1986): 49–70. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Malden: Blackwell, 1991. Minghelli, Giuliana. Landscape and Memory in Post-Fascist Italian Film: Cinema Year Zero. New York: Routledge, 2013. Monelli, Paolo. Roma 1943. Turin: Einaudi, 1993. Mussolini, Benito. My Autobiography. London: Paternoster, 1936. Ranvaud, Don, ed. Roberto Rossellini. London: BFI, 1981. Rossellini, Roberto. “Ten Years of Cinema.” In Springtime in Italy. Ed. David Overbey. Hamden: Archon Books, 1979. 93–102. Salazkina, Masha. “Moscow-Rome-Havana: A Film-Theory Road Map.” October 139 (Winter 2012): 97–116.

Walking amidst Ruins: A Pedestrian Cinema

195

Shiel, Mark. Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City. London: Wallflower, 2006. Wagstaff, Christopher. Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach. Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Zavattini, Cesare. “Some Ideas on Cinema,” Sight and Sound 23.2 (1953): 58–69.

Filmography Ossessione, dir. Luchino Visconti, 1943. Roma, Città Aperta, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1945. Paisà, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1946. Il Gente del Po, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1947. Germania Anno Zero, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1948. Ladri di Biciclette, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1948. Europa ’51, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1951. Umberto D., dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1952. Viaggio in Italia, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1954. La Strada, dir. Federico Fellini, 1954.

6. Feminist Nomads: The Politics of Walking in Agnès Varda Abstract Moving the focus to the insurgent social movements of May ’68, this chapter investigates how walking, wandering, or marching changed its on-screen meaning in the French Nouvelle Vague. Arguing against the male-dominant historiography of this period, it analyses the articulation of dissent through walking in Agnès Varda’s filmography. Through the analysis of three films—Cleo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7, 1962), Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond, 1985), and Les plages d’Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès, 2008)—the chapter explores feminist aesthetics and cinematic pedestrianism as a dissentient tactic. The chapter argues that the cinematic pedestrianism of women protagonists in these films embodies the feminist intersectional repertoire of activism, such as walking and marching in the city, to challenge gendered and heteronormative constructions of space. Keywords: Nouvelle Vague, walking, nomadology, feminism, Agnès Varda

“[Nomadism] is the intense desire to go on trespassing, transgressing.” ‒ Rosi Braidotti

In the final pages of Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Gilles Deleuze detects a continuity in the voyage form from Italian Neorealism to the French Nouvelle Vague. He writes, “It is here that the voyage-form is freed from the spatiotemporal coordinates which were left over from the old Social Realism and begins to have value for itself, or as the expression of a new society, of a new pure present.”1 Among the examples Deleuze gives are: “the return journey from Paris to the provinces and from the provinces to Paris in Chabrol (Le beau Serge and Les cousins)”; the “wanderings which have become analytical 1 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 217.

Özgen, A., The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism: Walking in Films. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724753_ch06

198 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

instruments of an analysis of the soul,” such as in Rohmer’s Contes Moreaux (Six Moral Tales, 1963–1972); Rivette’s “investigation-outing” in Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to Us, 1961); and the “flight-outing”2 of Truffaut in Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960), and Godard in À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960) and Pierrot le fou (1965).3 In these films, Deleuze sees the birth of a new line of characters on the move, barely concerned by the events that happen to them, and who “experience and act out obscure events which are as poorly linked as the portion of any-space-whatever that they traverse.”4 As a continuation of his theory of neorealism, Deleuze contends here that the voyage-form in French Nouvelle Vague takes on an autonomous value as the expression of a new society, and the stroll sometimes functions as the analysis of the souls of the protagonists, carried away by conditions and events without actively acting on them. As I have argued in the previous chapter, Deleuze’s analysis of neorealism fails to make a distinction between the walking-shot in early neorealist films and in later ones from the 1950s and 1960s. He justifies the continuity he sees from neorealism to Nouvelle Vague based on his argument that the perambulatory characters in neorealism are no longer agents but seers, caught in purely optical situations, to which they do not, or cannot, react. For Deleuze, just like in neorealism, the perambulations in Nouvelle Vague are neither active nor consequential; instead, they float in the present. “Here again,” he argues, “the cinema of seeing replaces the action.”5 Even though he makes a slight distinction between acts of wandering and looking in Godard and Rivette, for example, he contends that the perambulatory protagonists of the Nouvelle Vague are caught in purely optical and sound situations; this blurs the distinction between subjective and objective realism further than in neorealism.6 In his argument, Deleuze cites Labarthe’s contention that L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961) appears to be the final great neorealist film,7 blurring cinematographic boundaries between past and present, memory and the real.8 In this chapter, I take Deleuze’s argument on the links between Italian Neorealism and French Nouvelle Vague as the starting point for an 2 The French term Deleuze uses is promenade-fuite, which connotes ligne-de-fuite or line of flight. 3 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 217. 4 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 217. 5 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 9. 6 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 7–9. 7 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 7. 8 Labarthe, “Marienbad, Year Zero.”

Feminist Nomads: The Politics of Walking in Agnès Varda

199

exploration of pedestrianism as a spatial act that reveals and acts on the political structuring of public space. As I have shown in the previous chapter, the Italian neorealist walking-shot was a political act of reclaiming the streets in the post-fascist period rather than a passive observation of everyday life. Here, I will similarly investigate pedestrian acts that politically claimed and transformed everyday urban spaces in French Nouvelle Vague. I argued in the previous chapter that the socio-political and cultural effects of the Marshall Plan brought about a change in the aesthetics of the walking-shot, transforming it into an expression of displacement against a background of massive unemployment, the restoration of power to the dominant classes, and thus a downturn of post-fascist revolutionary activism. However, I also contended that the walking-shot nevertheless retained its quality as a spatial practice that revealed and acted on the dominant structures of space in the works of Rossellini and Antonioni in the second half of the 1950s and 1960s. Kristin Ross argues that in France, the Marshall Plan triggered a modification and redefinition of everyday spaces. According to Ross, it primarily brought about a transformation of everyday spaces in both cities and the countryside—streets, workplaces, and homes—with the acceleration of Fordist production and French modernization. As a result, displacement finds strong political expression in the French films set in Paris around the 1960s—the years leading to May ’68. According to Ross: The newly arrived Parisians of the postwar era are likely to be provincial French women come to work as shopgirls as in Chabrol’s Les Bonnes Femmes, or Elsa Triolet’s Roses à crédit; village boys such as Charles who come to take an advanced degree at the moment when higher education is no longer the prerogative of a tiny elite; or Algerian immigrants seeking work at the car factories on the outskirts of Paris as in Claire Etcherelli’s Élise ou la vraie vie.9

This influx of immigrants to Paris resulted from accelerated Fordism, according to Ross. She argues that “the consolidation of a Fordist regime in France in the decade or so before 1968” was a period of “growth without precedent of capitalism in France,” occurring at the cost of a “relentless dismantling of earlier spatial arrangements, particularly in Paris, where the city underwent demolitions and renovations equivalent in scale to

9 Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, 2.

200 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

those Haussman oversaw a hundred years earlier.”10 This reconstruction of urban space depleted the countryside, which resulted in wave of domestic migration of rural dwellers to cities in search of employment. Thus, there is a parallel to the context captured in Shoes, which I analysed in Chapter Three, which highlighted the influx of young women workers into the city in early twentieth century. From the standpoint of Deleuze, it can be argued that Paris in these films functions as a spectacular background, as the displaced subjects turn into ambulant seers floating through purely optical and sound situations. However, this reading fails to account for the pedestrian acts of the displaced as a spatial practice in certain Nouvelle Vague films, or to acknowledge the political function of such pedestrian acts in 1960s France, leading up to the street riots of 1968. Thus, cinematic pedestrian acts that reclaimed, subverted, and reinvented the public space demand academic scrutiny. While images of walking are abundant in Nouvelle Vague films, they have not been the focus of substantial academic research. Furthermore, within the large body of scholarly work on French Nouvelle Vague, the absence of consideration of women as both pedestrians and filmmakers is striking, especially given the rise of feminist activism and politics around that time in France.11 From this perspective, it is important to examine female pedestrian acts through a gender-sensitive approach for two reasons. First, as Genevieve Sellier shows in her book Masculine Singular: The French New Wave Cinema, women characters of the Nouvelle Vague are mostly masculine creations, embodying the fantasy of the male gaze. Sellier argues that this was also observed by Pierre Kast in an article he penned for the “Women and Cinema” issue of Cahiers du Cinéma in 1953. Kast claims that “Cinema is exclusively made by men. Woman, in cinema, is thus very precisely woman as she is seen by men,” adding, “Women in the cinema are not only made by men, they are women made for men.”12 According to Sellier, with the departure of Kast and Doniol-Volcroze from the editorial group, Cahiers du Cinéma’s political sensitivity to gender relations also tended to disappear; instead, along with an all-male editorial team, a fetishistic and voyeuristic perspective prevailed in the journal’s analysis of women 10 Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, 2. For Kristin Ross, May ’68 marks the end of this accelerated transition into Fordism: “a protest against the Fordist hierarchies of the factories and the exaggerated statism that had controlled French modernization,” 3. 11 Exceptional instances are Nicoleta Bazgan’s “Female Bodies in Paris,” Susan Hayward’s “The City as Narrative” and Sellier, Masculine Singular. 12 Sellier, Masculine Singular, 29.

Feminist Nomads: The Politics of Walking in Agnès Varda

201

characters in French cinema.13 Second, even though it is widely acknowledged in both contemporaneous and recent writings that the Nouvelle Vague introduced a new woman figure,14 the film historiography of French Cinema has largely privileged male auteurs. Therefore, a gender-sensitive approach that investigates the corporeal engagement of women with the public space as represented by women could reveal overlooked aspects of French filmmaking of the era. It was against this social and cultural background of male dominance in both filmmaking and the urban public sphere that Agnès Varda made her f irst feature length, La pointe courte in 1954, completely outside commercial circuits. Her second feature, Cléo de 5 á 7, filmed in 1962, is one of the few f ilms that constructs the female character as a subject, an active consciousness, and not as an object of the story.15 Because its young starlet protagonist goes out for a walk in the streets of Paris, it is possible to see this f ilm as a response to the connection established by the contemporary media between French female stars and the city of Paris. Nicoleta Bazgan shows in her article “Female Bodies in Paris: Iconic Urban Femininity and Parisian Journeys” that on- and off-screen stories about French female stars, such as Brigitte Bardot, Jeanne Moreau, and Catherine Deneuve, are “tightly woven into the scenery to the point that they become icons of the city, in a type of urban femininity intimately connected to the f ilmic metropolis.”16 Susan Hayward demonstrates that since the Haussman-led restructuring of the city in the nineteenth century, Paris has been typified as female. Against the backdrop of rapid urban change and the increasing participation of women in the public space, Hayward sees here a reassertion of masculine identity, control, and looking.17 In light of the discussion so far, the filmography of Varda offers a strong counterpoint and object of analysis within Nouvelle Vague for its feminist contemplation of the forces that shape the everyday experience of women in various spaces, such as city streets, the domestic realm, and the countryside. Varda’s filmography constantly enriches this feminist perspective with its diversity of genres and timespan, which includes decades of filmmaking from nitrate-based film to digital, and, more recently, to mobile-phone 13 Sellier, Masculine Singular, 31. 14 See Sellier, Masculine Singular, 145 for further discussion. 15 Sellier, Masculine Singular, 150. 16 Sellier, Masculine Singular, 96. 17 Hayward, “The City as Narrative,” 25.

202 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

technologies, such as Instagram. Furthermore, through her signature selfreflexive style, Varda’s commentary as a female filmmaker on the changing practices of filmmaking within the wider sociocultural and political context becomes visible in her work. I will focus below on three films to analyse how pedestrianism functions on these levels in Varda’s cinematic aesthetics. A fiction film that shares many resemblances with other Nouvelle Vague films of the era, Cléo de 5 á 7 contests normative definitions of flânerie and the male gaze, shattering the fetishized image of the female body through its protagonist’s endless walks across Paris streets. Sans toit ni loi, on the other hand, focuses on a nomadic traveller, Mona, driven to die in the French countryside. A Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) in the feminine, Sans toit ni loi comprises interviews with the people who have come into contact with Mona during her endless wandering. Actively engaging with different mobilities both conceptually and aesthetically—such as immigrant workers, goatherds, ambulatory scientists, or vagrants—the cinematography of Sans toit ni loi is a manifestation of Varda’s cinécriture, which constantly experiments with cinematic aesthetics to reinvent a cinematic language in the feminine. Finally, Les plages d’Agnès a recent documentary or self-portrait of Varda, includes pedestrianism as a practice that interweaves various spaces and times, enhancing the signification of pedestrianism as a metaphor for the filmic medium, the art of filmmaking, and remembering. In this film, Varda complicates the cinematographic boundaries of the past and the present, of subjective and objective experiences of space. Both the political and philosophical dimensions of pedestrianism in these films can best be discussed through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of nomadology in A Thousand Plateaus. To understand nomadology and its relevance for an examination of cinematic pedestrianism (or walking as an analytical and political practice), two notions are key: smooth space and striated space. In very basic terms, striated spaces could be considered as constructed, delineated spaces to control movements, flows, and velocities. Among examples that Deleuze and Guattari give are streets and ways, but also more abstract notions such as the idea of history as linear progress, hierarchical patterns of militaristic organization, and transnational flows of capital. Journeying from one point to another is moving along a striated space.18 Smooth spaces, on the other hand, are rhizomatic. Characterized by the absence of striations, they are open to movements, flows, velocities in all directions. They do not prescribe or delineate movement. In that, 18 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 426.

Feminist Nomads: The Politics of Walking in Agnès Varda

203

they are open to corporeal and sensory inspection: they can be explored, navigated, or even activated, through tactile, auditory, or olfactory desires. If striated spaces are about controlling and limiting, smooth spaces are about multiplicity of unrealized potentials waiting to be activated. For Deleuze and Guattari, smooth spaces are wedded to a very particular type of multiplicity, one that “can be explored only by legwork.”19 The emphasis on corporeality and mobility here is important for two main reasons. First, it follows that bodily contact is a precondition to getting to know the multiplicity of a smooth space. Second, mobility underscores the process of striating and smoothing forces, which, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is more interesting to probe into: “What interests us in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the passages or combinations: how the forces at work within space continually striate it, and how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces.”20 The three films I analyse here contemplate various passages and combinations whereby striation and smoothing slide into each other. Furthermore, the films posit the peripatetic body as the site of these passages and combinations. The effects of place on social relations and characters have been a recurrent thread in Varda’s work, and she mostly reflects upon a dynamic between stasis and mobility, as well as the interaction between character and environment.21 When Deleuze and Guattari counterpoint nomad space (smooth space) and sedentary space (one form of striated space) in their writing, they point to such a corporeal mobility. Even though they posit that nomadology does not require physical movement, in their writing walking appears as a significant activity that not only connects striated and smooth spaces, but also possesses an advantage of elusiveness by virtue of which the body flows within striated spaces, smoothing them out. Given its powers to construe diverse spaces and fluid bodily movement, cinema is the most eloquent field for philosophizing smooth and striated spaces as well as the ways they slide into each other through the body. When Deleuze writes that “it is through the body (and no longer through the intermediary of the body) that cinema forms its alliance with the spirit, with thought,” he refers to the power of the body to stand as a figure that has reflections on the thought, and in particular creative thought, that reinstates multiplicities suppressed by the striations.22 It is along this line of thought that the cinema of Varda construes 19 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 409. 20 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 551. 21 Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently, 224–37. 22 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 182.

204 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

the stroll as a way of resisting the fixating tendencies of striations. With its feminist agenda, Varda’s cinema explores the smoothing forces of rebellious female bodies in movement that walk without a pre-determined, targeted territory: “Voyaging smoothly is a becoming, and a difficult, uncertain becoming at that.”23 Varda’s three f ilms involve walking in striated spaces such as the city of Paris in Cléo de 5 à 7, and smoother spaces such as the Southern French countryside in Sans toit ni loi and a Belgian beach in Les Plages d’Agnès. In light of Deleuze and Guattari’s proposition that the city is the striated space par excellence, while the sea is the quintessential smooth space,24 this invites an investigation into how, in Varda’s cinema, striated space opens itself to being smoothed and smooth space allows itself to be striated. Yet, Deleuze and Guattari also emphasize that smooth and striated spaces should not be considered as a straightforward binary opposition: “Nothing is ever done with: smooth space allows itself to be striated, and striated space reimparts a smooth space.”25 The process is never simply the clash or conflict of two binary opposites. In Varda’s films, this dynamic is eloquently narrated. I will show the ways in which such smoothing and striating forces are articulated cinematographically, particularly in Varda’s own cinécriture. Through close readings of these f ilms, I will explain how women’s pedestrianism functions as a gender-sensitive analytical tool to observe, demonstrate, and subvert the dominant politics of space (‘striated spaces’). In many ways, the female body on the move, or feminist pedestrian acts, function as ‘smoothing forces’ that reinvent the space on the screen. As such, the three f ilms that I analyse here stand out for their innovative feminist cinematics that depict women’s experience of walking through a subtle lens that conveys the affective dimension of pedestrianism, such as feelings of threat, danger, or insecurity on the one hand, and emancipation, empowerment, or solidarity on the other.

Defining Varda’s Nomadic Filmmaking In an interview on the cinema of Varda, f ilm critic Jonathan Romney underlines a major trait of her filmmaking: 23 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 532. 24 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 529, 531. 25 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 537.

Feminist Nomads: The Politics of Walking in Agnès Varda

205

She is re-inventing herself all the time. She seems a thousand different filmmakers but one filmmaker at the same time. Whether working on a document or fiction, there is a sense that she is going out into the world to find something new. There is always a readiness to invent.26

Varda’s continual becoming as a filmmaker is most evident in her filmography, which comprises an immense variety of films, from documentary to experimental shorts, from video manifestos to auto-portraits, and some others that hardly fit any definition. Varda’s nomadism in re-inventing both her cinematic style and language resonates with her feminist activism by innovatively challenging dominant paradigms of feminine identity. Exploring the intersections of feminist activism and nomadism, Rosi Braidotti—the key feminist interlocutor of Deleuze and Guattari—posits political resistance to the illusion of unity as a key point. She def ines nomadism as “vertiginous progression toward deconstructing identity; molecularization of the self.”27 In many ways, the protagonists of the three films I’m analysing here perform such vertiginous progression. Cléo sheds her public image as the young, beautiful star, Mona constantly transforms with every encounter. In Les Plages, Varda dissects her own identity—as a filmmaker, young photographer, lover, mother, cat lady, ageing woman. If Varda cultivates a new visual aesthetics in her films on an artistic level, this undertaking is always in line with discursively questioning the dominant paradigms of identity. Nomadism here is a political attitude that implies resistance to settling into socially coded modes of thought and behaviour. Linked to this, Braidotti’s concept of “nomadic consciousness” connotes “a sense of identity that rests not on fixity but on contingency.”28 Nomadic consciousness is a form of political resistance to hegemonic, exclusionary, and fixed views of subjectivity that freeze identity into categories of nationality and sexuality, among others. For Braidotti, such nomadic consciousness is intrinsic to (intersectional) feminist political activism as well as creative practices. She writes: “For me, feminism is a practice, as well as a creative drive, that aims at asserting sexual difference as a positive force.”29 It is possible to see such nomadic consciousness in Varda’s protagonists. On many levels, the main characters in Varda’s cinema transgress border(s). The screen becomes a cartography of their nomadic voyages, encounters, 26 Romney, “Jonathan Romney on Agnès Varda (video conversation).” 27 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 16. 28 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 31. 29 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 30.

206 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

and transformations. Such transformations triggered by encounters are called “nomadic shifts” as they designate “a creative sort of becoming.”30 For Braidotti, nomadic shift is “a performative metaphor that allows for otherwise unlikely encounters and unsuspected sources of interaction of experience and of knowledge.”31 Nomadic becoming involves emphatic proximity thus provoked. In many ways, the screen can evoke such emphatic proximity through articulating nomadic consciousness, depicting nomadic cartographies, and enabling otherwise unlikely encounters. This enables explorations of new forms of political subjectivity. From this standpoint, Varda’s cinema could be seen as “a vector of deterritorialization”32 in its derouting of cinematic language and expression to depict feminist nomadism. The established notions (of femininity, social order, and cinematographic language) are thus levelled at every step to give way to new ones: a new narrative of the self, a new language of cinema, a new (temporary) identity, a new politics of disagreement, and a new politics of aesthetics. One of the ways Varda achieves such nomadism is through the embodiment of a female character on the move. For Varda, the mobility of the woman protagonist is a perfect lens through which to convey the nomadic consciousness of feminist activism and filmmaking as sites of resistance to fixating and sedentary tendencies. Hence, Varda brings about a politics of walking in her cinema. From this standpoint, Cléo de 5 à 7, Sans toit ni loi, and Les plages d’Agnès deserve particular attention in an analysis of the different forms of walking Varda has created. If the urban flânerie of Cléo, the circular travelling of Mona in Sans toit ni loi, and Varda’s own walking backwards in Les plages d’Agnès share a common trait, it is that the very activity of walking in these films not only connects striated spaces to smooth ones but also smoothes out striations to re-invent the lost, or suppressed, multiplicities of spaces.

Cléo de 5 à 7: A Newfound Flânerie Cléo de 5 à 7 takes place in Paris on 21 June 1961, and specifically from 5 pm to 6:30 pm. The film concerns a young aspiring actor, Cléo, who is waiting for the results of a biopsy that will tell her whether her abdominal tumour is malignant or not. We follow Cléo from the apartment of a tarot-reader 30 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 6. 31 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 6. My emphasis. 32 See Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 85–91.

Feminist Nomads: The Politics of Walking in Agnès Varda

207

through the streets of Paris to a café, to a hat shop, to her apartment, and then along a lonely walk through the city with a number of spontaneous stops and ‘otherwise unlikely’ encounters. Varda structures the film on a number of oppositions, such as superstition and medical science, documentary reality and fiction, objective time and Bergsonian duration.33 One can also add gaze and look, life and death, a healthy body and a sick body. All these oppositions are unknotted, further complicated, and destroyed via the peripatetic body of Cléo. Constantly on the move, Cléo’s body becomes the site where corporeal, spatial, and temporal striations are smoothed. One of the major oppositions listed above, gaze and look, points to the primary striation taken up in the film, which, according to Janice Mouton, is mainly structured on the transition from “being looked at” to “learning to look.”34 This transformation from the gaze to the look, according to Mouton, also underlines Cléo’s passage from an object to a subject. Yet, by taking Mouton’s argument to another level, one can also argue that Cléo actually sheds the striations imposed on her fetishized starlet’s body through the society of the spectacle. By opening her body up to outside interactions, she discovers a long-lost or even never-possessed multiplicity within herself. This is why many critics and scholars interpret Cléo’s flânerie as a journey of self-discovery.35 However, the main point about Cléo’s flânerie is that it has no defined end; nor does it aim to unveil a supposed hidden self. On the contrary, Cléo’s flânerie leads to a further fragmentation of her self. With respect to these dynamics, the most important element that the film employs is the mirror; the first forty minutes are dominated by mirrors and other reflecting surfaces, as well as reflections of Cléo in random spaces.36 The spectators are made aware of the constructedness of Cléo’s image in the opening sequence, which begins with pieces of the body. A close-up of hands moving in and out of frame on the tarot table present a fragmented body, while the characters in the f ilm are introduced via close-up shots of tarot cards. Before we even see the real Cléo, we see an image on a tarot card associated with her. The framed, unif ied image contrasted with bits of body establishes the discourse of mirrors as early as the prologue. Similarly, the very f irst takes of Cléo are far from establishing 33 Nelson, “Reflections in a Broken Mirror,” 735. 34 Mouton, “From Feminine Masquerade to Flâneuse,” 3. 35 See for instance, Morrissey, “Paris and Voyages of Self-Discovery in Cléo de 5 à 7 and Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain.” For the f igure of the flâneuse in cinema, see Friedberg, Window Shopping and Bruno, The Atlas of Emotion. 36 Mouton, “From Feminine Masquerade to Flâneuse,” 3–6 and Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently, 268–83.

208 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

the perfect image of a star. Instead, she is shattered by what the cards reveal: a series of close-ups show her face ridden with fear. As she leaves the tarot reader’s apartment, we shift from a close-up of Cléo’s face in a series of jump-cuts to subjective shots that flow unsteadily down the stairs. She descends the last set of steps only to face a huge wall mirror where she pulls herself together. Cléo then ceremonially passes the mirror, pauses elegantly, and reveals an endless mise-en-abyme of her reflection. The camera then zooms into her face accompanied by the following internal monologue: “Being ugly, that’s what death is. As long as I am beautiful, I am alive.” The scene marks a threshold: aware as we are of Cléo’s fragmented being, we witness her transformation into a complete fetishized object of the gaze. Here we see an instance of striation which, intentionally or unintentionally, recalls Lacan’s Mirror Stage. In this scene, “she becomes the woman she is not,” writes Mouton, “a fantasy, a fetishized object, someone to be looked at.”37 It can be argued that Varda’s cinema of the body here shows a striated form of a ceremonial body, as described by Deleuze: It is no longer a matter of following and trailing the everyday body, but of making it pass through a ceremony, of introducing it into a glass cage or crystal, of imposing a carnival or masquerade on it which makes it into a grotesque body, but also brings out of it a gracious and glorious body, until at last the disappearance of the visible body is achieved.38

From this moment on, the image of Cléo’s body takes on an adventure precisely in the way that Deleuze here formulates the cinema-body-thought link. Varda firstly presents us with the ceremonial procession of Cléo’s body from the hallway of the fortune teller to the café. She is tall and bright, wearing a floaty dress and with a highly stylized coiffure. By placing her body against darker backgrounds and contrasting her image with the modest attire of her secretary, Angèle, Varda ensures that Cléo catches the eye. At the same time, however, the masquerade imposed on her as a striation becomes grotesque with her excessively stylized outfit. Indeed, after singing Cri d’amour, the first thing Cléo sheds is this look, along with her flashy garments and coiffure. Until the moment she bursts onto the street in a simple black gown and undone hair, Cléo has to look into almost every reflecting surface she can find to reassure herself about her image. Among 37 Mouton, “From Feminine Masquerade to Flâneuse,” 4. 38 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 183.

Feminist Nomads: The Politics of Walking in Agnès Varda

209

these, the hat shop sequence deserves particular attention with regard to Deleuze’s body-thought link. On the way home with Angèle from the fortune teller, Cléo stumbles on a millinery. Allured by the goods on display, Cléo wanders around the shop trying on unusual hats, like a feline stalking her prey. We see various reflections of her in multiple mirrors, sometimes superimposed with reflections of the street. With its massive shop windows, the store recalls an aquarium—a milieu designed to be looked into from the outside. The scene, with all its elements and components to reflect or be displayed, becomes a huge mirror or a multi-faceted voluminous crystal, symbolic of Cléo’s self-absorption. Varda’s formula in the script for this scene is l’eau + le cristal = le mirroir.39 This formula, as well as the aesthetics of the sequence, point to the main striation the film addresses: consumerism and the spectacle. Cléo’s fluid desire from one commodity to another, her dependency on the image of her own body as both a capital and a fetishized object, 40 and the surrounding mirrors maintain the continuity of the spectacle. The mirrors and reflecting surfaces gradually disappear in the last 45 minutes of the film, which is marked by Cléo’s flânerie around Paris. The pivotal moment that triggers Cléo’s transformation is a singing rehearsal, where she performs the love song Cri d’amour. 41 The sequence is an intermezzo with respect to its cinematography, in which the camera mimics the music and travels between territories, ultimately bringing about a ‘deterritorialization’—that is, a transcendence occurs that deroutes Cléo’s being and identity. From this standpoint, the scene with all its cinematic elements smooths out the stratifications of the society of spectacle. After singing, Cléo no longer maintains her doll-like look and questions the meaning of the song’s success (“What is a song? How long does it last?!”). Through an allegory of lack and extinction with symbols of loneliness, ageing, and death, Cri d’amour carries Cléo away or, in more Deleuzian terms, she experiences an uncalled-for line of flight provoked by the music. 42 This line of flight and deterritorialization are embodied in the unsettling 90-degree pan of the camera whereby various levels—such as diegetic, non-diegetic, and meta-diegetic—are folded into one another. Slowly zooming in and isolating Cléo’s face against black, the camera shifts to the non-diegetic level as a full orchestra joins Cléo’s voice. In this “glossy studio effect,” in 39 Ungar, Cléo de 5 à 7, 49. 40 See Jean Baudrillard, “The Finest Consumer Object.” 41 See also Gorbman, “Cléo from 5 to 7.” 42 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 329–41.

210 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Gorbman’s terms, we see Cléo’s stage persona;43 however, when the song ends with tears flowing from her eyes, the camera makes a vertiginously quick zoom-out from the close-up of her face, which embodies the song’s deterritorializing effect. We fall back into the diegetic, yet the world of the film is now completely altered—it is a different territory. The transformation is triggered by Cléo’s (as well as the camera’s) becoming-music. 44 The next moment Cléo revolts, takes off all the accessories that constructed her doll-like image and rushes out onto the streets of Paris. If the first half of the film is dedicated to how the striae impose a spectacle on Cléo’s body, the second half is dedicated to desecrating the gracious body. While walking, Cléo gradually sheds the masquerade imposed on her, further smoothing out these striae. Mirrors begin to distort, break, and fragment their reflections before gradually disappearing from the narrative as tokens of f ixating tendencies. Simultaneously, smoothing forces start to appear as Cléo chances on them during her flânerie. On the streets, Cléo encounters three peculiar images of the body that are emblematic of smoothing forces. These images attack the striae internalized by Cléo and trigger a mutation in her subjectivity. The first instance that marks the desecration of her body is a public performance Cléo comes upon: a man swallowing frogs. The figure of the frog is encountered many times in the film: Cléo wears a ring which has a small frog clutching a pearl, she is called a pearl several times, and the handsome soldier Antoine later associates himself with the frog. One may therefore claim that Varda uses this animal figure to indicate the outside forces that transform Cléo’s subjectivity. The second image is again a public spectacle: a man is sticking a sword into his arm. Once again contributing to the desecration of the body, this image is soon followed by an incident where a man is shot dead. His body then disappears only to be reborn. The third special image Cléo encounters is that of a premature baby in an incubator, which can be seen as a metaphor for the fragility of Cléo’s newfound corporeality. The striations on her body are smoothed (there are no more mirrors after this scene) and the body returns to a stage of new beginnings. This image also smooths out the metaphorical meaning of glass cage established in the first half of the film. It was used to indicate the restrictions imposed on the body by 43 Gorbman, “Music as Mirror,” 46. 44 Here I use Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-music to point to the unusual cinematic language that is modelled on the musical rhythm to signal a pivotal shift on multiple levels: a shift in the diegesis, depth of storytelling (objective to mental subjectivity), and narrative structure. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Pleateaus, 342–86.

Feminist Nomads: The Politics of Walking in Agnès Varda

211

the society of the spectacle but now it becomes a symbol of re-birth. At the end of the film, still walking, Cléo is no longer afraid for her diseased body. In light of the analysis up to here, it is possible to conclude that female flânerie in the film functions as a pedestrian act that contravenes and subverts the aesthetic striations imposed on women’s bodies. In her improvised amble across Paris, Cléo gradually overturns the gaze and look-oriented paradigms of commodif ied spectacle. The f ilm thus re-def ines female flânerie as an emancipatory pedestrian act that subverts the commodified definitions of it. Reading Varda’s cinematic aesthetics in Cléo de 5 á 7 through Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of nomadology and Braidotti’s feminist nomadism opened new perspectives through which analyse the feminist postructuralist politics that underlie images of walking.

Sans toit ni loi: Nomadic Wandering Walking as a metaphor for continual resistance and transformation is portrayed in Sans toit ni loi in closer contact with nomadology than flânerie. The original French title translates literally as “without a roof or law,” which connote fixating striae such as sedentary living and the State. Reading Varda’s masterpiece through Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology as described in A Thousand Plateaus brings about several insights regarding a highly political conceptualization of the activity of walking in cinema. In this film, Varda again works through oppositional pairs, but this time with a deeper complexity on a multitude of levels. Documentary and fiction, absence and presence, nomadic and sedentary living are interweaved and smoothed by the character of Mona. In many ways, Varda envisions Mona as a mythical feminine character (she emerges from the sea like Venus in the beginning of her story) and creates a nomadic persona out of her that allows us to “think through and move across established categories,” as Braidotti puts it. 45 Mona constantly eludes capture throughout the film, thereby becoming a token of the nomadic existence. The film starts with the discovery of Mona’s dead body in a ditch before proceeding to present the testimonies of those who encountered her in the last few weeks before her tragic death. Comparable to Citizen Kane, but in the feminine, the film follows (and subverts) the style of a documentary, where the direct accounts of several people reveal their encounters with Mona. While each narrative strives to define Mona, the spectators are well 45 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 5.

212 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

aware that she has never stayed long in any of these people’s territories, so the accounts actually reveal their internalized stratifications. However, what these narratives share is the fact that Mona, as a force of the outside, has brought a change in the witnesses’ territories. What Varda calls the “Mona Effect” is a transformation in the striated territory triggered by the nomad.46 Therefore, Mona is never a part of the striated territories concerned but instead is always a smoothing force entering from elsewhere. She is sent back out several times when the State cannot tame her into the territorial striae. Thus, her smelliness and uncleanliness, which are referred to multiple times in the film, become sensuous tokens of her resistance to being appropriated and internalized by the sovereignty of the State. This is in keeping with the theory of Deleuze and Guattari, who write, “From the standpoint of the State, the originality of the [wo]man of war, his [/her] eccentricity, necessarily appears in a negative form: stupidity, deformity, madness, illegitimacy, usurpation, sin.”47 Almost all of these allegedly negative qualities, as well as others, are pronounced by those whom Mona encountered. However, Varda’s dialectic is not at all simple in Sans toit ni loi because she complicates almost every concept, matter, and medium that structures the film. Mona’s mobility is contrasted not only to stasis (for example, the mansion of Tante Lydie) but also to striated forms of mobility. For example, among those Mona encounters are included a goatherd, an immigrant worker, and an ambulatory palaeontology professor. It is possible to read these figures of mobility through the social types that Deleuze and Guattari counterpoint with nomadology, in a similar fashion to Varda. The first instance is the episode with the goatherd. This character, who is later revealed to hold a Master’s degree in philosophy, picks Mona up on the road and offers her accommodation. In their first dialogue, in which they discuss ways of existing in the world and agree on the position of pursuing an alternative lifestyle, Mona and the goatherd seem to share a revolt. The goatherd gives Mona a piece of land to grow potatoes on and a caravan to manage her own living. However, Mona is unwilling to take up farming; she hardly leaves the caravan, where she spends all her time reading. The two have a long dialogue where the difference between the striated goatherd and the smoothing nomad come to the surface. As Deleuze and Guattari note, “the sedentary’s relation with the earth is mediatized by something else, a property regime, a State apparatus.”48 Similarly, the itinerancy of a goatherd 46 Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently, 314. 47 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 390. 48 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 421.

Feminist Nomads: The Politics of Walking in Agnès Varda

213

or animal-raiser is only secondary: “Transhumants only secondarily follow a land flow […] [They change] land after it is worn out, or else seasonally.”49 Highlighting the distinction between itinerant and nomad, Deleuze and Guattari stress that “the primary determination of nomads is to occupy and hold a smooth space: it is this aspect that determines them as nomad.”50 Mona’s nomadism is contrasted with another mobile figure, a migrant worker named Assoun. As a reterritorialized inhabitant, Assoun is an itinerant figure whose labour power has been settled, sedentarized, and restricted. Mona, however, rejects any sedentarizing tendencies: she is on the move and is not beguiled by a piece of land. After leaving the goat shed, Mona is taken up by the ambulatory palaeontology professor, Madame Landier, who is researching a contagious disease that is killing the plane trees. The two women’s similar attitudes regarding the trees recall what Deleuze and Guattari name “royal science” in A Thousand Plateaus. In their chapter on nomadology, they associate the retreat of the forest with the emergence of smooth space: the trees disappear and the rhizome spreads.51 However, Mona fails to defeat the arborescent striae in the end since she is (quite literally) attacked by tree-people—villagers in tree costumes for a traditional festival, a burlesque attack on somebody who does not fit into the community, and which leads to Mona’s death. Mona’s nomadism is further enhanced at the level of the filmic medium by Varda’s cinécriture. Varda states that “the whole film is one long tracking shot” and, according to Susan Hayward, “the tracking shot is Mona’s sign.”52 Yet Varda complicates the tracking shot as a straightforward epitome of wandering through several techniques. First, she subverts the conventional spatial logic of the tracking shot by moving from right to left, which also subverts the shot’s temporal logic. That is, the camera’s sliding backwards signals going back in time and keeps the motif of death alive at all times. In short, the camera not only glides spatially but also temporally. Secondly, Varda allows an unsettling dynamic to occur between the movement of the camera and the movement of Mona, who mostly eludes framing. Either she walks out of the frame or the camera continues tracking after accompanying her for a while. According to Hayward, this style points to her contingency.53 It also accentuates Mona’s ephemerality as a force of the 49 50 51 52 53

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 452. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 452. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 420. Hayward, “The City as Narrative,” 272. Hayward, “The City as Narrative,” 273.

214 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

outside, as a nomadic war machine, and her unfixability by striations. The fluidity of the tracking shots is contrasted with the stasis of scenes where Varda interviews the people who encountered Mona. Varda counterpoints mobility and stasis on the level of the medium by allowing Mona’s body to flow smoothly in and out of the striations of cinema. On the level of the story, she achieves a similar smoothing effect by denying information and subverting conventional storytelling techniques through discontinuity, non-linearity, and causality. Sans toit ni loi, and its protagonist Mona, thus become epitomes of nomadology, both aesthetically and politically. It is worthwhile noting at this point Varda’s decision to set the story in the French countryside, which symbolically functions as the image of a smooth space that is infinite, open, and unlimited in every direction. While Mona encounters and moves in and out of striated territories in this vast landscape (farmland, roads, vineyards, estates, small villages, roadside diners, etc.), the film’s long shots and fluid long takes construct the larger expansive fields as a signifier for the underlying smoothing forces. Deleuze and Guattari remind us that a smooth space is occupied by “intensities, wind and noise, forces, and sonorous and tactile qualities, as in the desert, steppe, or ice.”54 In Sans toit ni loi, the nomadic pedestrianism of Mona is complemented by the infinite desert-like countryside to signify smoothing forces and the smooth space vis à vis the striations at play and the striated territories. Thus, Mona’s nomadism is articulated as a pedestrian act that constantly transgresses, transforms, and shatters these striations.

Les plages d’Agnès: Walking Backwards From the body of Cléo to the body of Mona, we have travelled from flânerie to nomadology and considered both forms of mobility with regard to their powers of resistance, transgression, and transformation. In her book Nomadic Subjects, Braidotti writes, “Nomadic consciousness is a form of political resistance to hegemonic and exclusionary views of subjectivity.”55 In line with Braidotti’s standpoint to “take the nomad as the prototype of the man or woman of ideas,”56 I shall focus on the body of Agnès Varda herself in her quasi-documentary auto-portrait, Les plages d’Agnès. In this film, Varda’s body becomes a multi-faceted crystal, which blends the smooth 54 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 529. 55 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 23. 56 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 22.

Feminist Nomads: The Politics of Walking in Agnès Varda

215

and striated spaces of subjectivity (the self), cinema, history, and memory through an immense multiplicity of folds. As the setting for this self-reflexive meta-narrative, Varda chooses the beach: “If you opened people, you would find landscapes; if you opened me, you would find beaches,” she says. The beach becomes a crystal image which reappears between episodes and includes deterritorialized objects from Varda’s other films or her memories. The beach also serves as a milieu for musings on cinema to take place. Thus, the beach is created on the screen as a scene of creativity and multiplicity. Varda films herself walking backwards, creating herself as a wanderer on the beach. This is the first trope that allows her to contemplate the smooth and striated through her own body and cinematic aesthetics. The film opens with a tracking shot from left to right, reminiscent of the travelling Varda used in Sans toit ni loi. After panning across an empty beach, the camera catches and starts following Varda herself, walking backwards. Her hair has several inches of white in the roots, with the dye remaining only at the tips—an embodiment or image of time. In her auto-portrait, she associates walking backwards with remembering, delving into her own history, hence travelling back in time. Varda here complicates once again several binaries, such as past and present, procession and retrocession, extensive and intensive movement. However, the activity of walking backwards here is not the opposition of process or of a line of flight but a movement that smooths the conventional distinctions of past, present, and future, as well as the conventional sense of movement as an extensive act that occurs in an extensive space. Varda’s backward march expresses an intensive movement that delves into the present in search of time passed. The second most important contemplation on the smooth and striated concerns the striations and smoothing forces of cinema itself. In the opening sequence, Varda sets up a maze of mirrors at different angles to reflect fragments of the beachscape. This play of a proliferation of frames is, first of all, a way to contemplate the unavoidable striations in filmmaking. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the sea is the archetype of smooth space but also the archetype of all the striations imposed upon the smooth space.57 From this standpoint, all of Varda’s experiments with travelling shots and the sense of space that have been analysed previously are taken to another self-reflexive level through multiple explorations of time and space. Second, the multiplicity of mirrors is also a metaphor to reflect on the fragments of identity. The multiple memory pieces, personal connections, spatial fragments, and lost objects that are reflected, reproduced, and re-enacted 57 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 427.

216 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

in the film are the bits and pieces that make up Agnès Varda: her image dispersed in “a plurality of ways of being present in the world, of belonging to sets, all incompatible yet coexistent.”58 The cinema of Varda proposes a political agenda through the figure of walking in favour of nomadic consciousness. In Varda’s films analysed in this chapter, the image of walking is a multi-layered one that resonates at both the level of the story and the level of aesthetics and politics. By being on the move, Varda’s female protagonists not only constantly elude fixating and sedentarizing powers but also trigger a transformation in the territories they travel. Remembering Braidotti’s definition of nomadism as “vertiginous progression towards deconstructing identity,”59 challenging sedimented systems may be emancipatory but also painful. The nomad, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is deterritorialized on the deterritorialization itself. Her line of flight, as in Cléo de 5 à 7, Sans toit ni loi, and Les plages d’Agnès, is rhizomatic, without a def ined itinerary or end. The smooth space and the smoothing forces of the moving body are the site of revolution against the sedentarizing powers of the State. If the State operates by controlling the pace and movement of bodies (via public ways, gates, barriers, borders, filters, etc.), these sites of movement can be claimed to give birth to a nomadic potential, which in turn occupies them as if they were smooth. While discussing this potential, Deleuze and Guattari refer to Paul Virilio, who indicates the importance of the revolutionary theme of holding the street.60 From this standpoint, one can also locate Varda’s nomadic personae within feminist struggles and the women’s movement, in which Varda actively participates. Regarding the revolutionary potential of smooth spaces, Deleuze and Guattari claim that “smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life constitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries. Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us.”61 In Varda’s cinema, we see a similar political awareness. Her cinécriture, however, is a form of striation dedicated to showing how the smooth may transform the striated, and how the striated may allow smoothing forces. The smoothing forces she brings to our attention are those of her cinematic aesthetics and the philosophy of movement embodied by her female protagonists. 58 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 196. 59 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 16. 60 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 426. 61 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 551.

Feminist Nomads: The Politics of Walking in Agnès Varda

217

Conclusion: The Persistence of the Nouvelle Vague In this chapter, I have explored the transformation of cinematic pedestrianism from a gender-sensitive approach, through the lens of Braidotti’s feminist interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of nomadology. Beginning with Cleo de 5 à 7, I investigated how female pedestrian acts have evolved from the height of French Nouvelle Vague to more recent images of walking that reveal women’s experience of public spaces. In Sans toit ni loi, Mona’s nomadic wanderings are counterpoised with both the settled life and other forms of mobility, such as a migrant worker, a goatherd, and a wandering palaeontology professor, through interviews with people that have come into contact with her. This also enriches our understanding of the various forces that shape women’s experience in public spaces, such as streets, roadsides, cafes, train stations, and diners. Finally, scrutinizing the image of walking in Les plages d’Agnès reveals the use of pedestrianism as a self-reflexive tool in a documentary that ruminates on the limits of the self. In a fashion similar to the pedestrianism in early Nouvelle Vague films, such as Alain Resnais’s L’Année Dernière á Marienbad and Hiroshima Mon Amour, pedestrianism in Varda’s self-portrait blurs the boundaries between past and present, memory and history, personal and political. Walking takes on here a metaphorical dimension to set the memory of the self and the memory of the place in motion. This resonates with the following words from Braidotti: “nomadic consciousness is akin to what Foucault called counter-memory; it’s a form of resisting assimilation or homologation into dominant ways of representing the self.”62 In many ways, Varda’s cinematic images of feminist pedestrian acts resonate diachronically and synchronically with other screen presences in women’s filmmaking. One example is Eva in Lois Weber’s Shoes, which I analysed in Chapter Three. Tracing the feminist affinities in the cinematic pedestrianism of women further can reveal further cross-connections among female filmmakers. Braidotti’s feminist nomadism becomes key here to shedding light on the dynamism of such affinities and connections across the history of feminist activist filmmaking. At its core, cinema can be read as a space for otherwise unlikely encounters that create passages to emotions, experiences, and journeys. As such, it can enact nomadic politics—“a matter of bonding, of coalitions, of interconnections” on the street, screen, and beyond.63 62 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 25. 63 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 35.

218 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Works Cited Baudrillard, Jean. “The Finest Consumer Object: The Body.” In The Body: A Reader. Ed. Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco. New York: Routlegde, 2005. 277–82. Bazgan, Nicoleta. “Female Bodies in Paris: Iconic Urban Femininity and Parisian Journeys.” Studies in French Cinema 10.2 (2010): 95–109. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Bruno, Giuliana. The Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. London: Verso, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. London: Continuum, 2004. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: Time-Image. London: Continuum, 2005. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum, 2007. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum, 2004. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy?. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. To Desire Differently: Feminism and French Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. California: University of California Press, 1994. Gorbman, Claudia. “Cléo from 5 to 7: Music as Mirror,” Wide Angle 4.4 (1981): 38–49. Hayward, Susan. “The City as Narrative: Corporeal Paris in Contemporary French Cinema.” In Spaces in European Cinema. Ed. Myrto Konstantarakos. Exeter: Intellect Books, 2000. 23–35. Labarthe, Andre S. “Marienbad, Year Zero.” In Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1960s. New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Holywoood. Ed. Jim Hillier. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. 54–58. Morrissey, Jim. “Paris and Voyages of Self-Discovery in Cléo de 5 à 7 and Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain.” Studies in French Cinema 8.2 (2008). 99–110. Mouton, Janice. “From Feminine Masquerade to Flâneuse: Agnès Varda’s Cleo in the City.” Cinema Journal 40.2 (2001). 3–16. Nelson, Roy Jay. “Reflections in a Broken Mirror: Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7.” The French Review 56.5 (1983): 735–43. Romney, Jonathan. BFI Live: Jonathan Romney on Agnès Varda (2010). www.bfi.org/ live/video/333 Accessed 21 May 2016. Ross, Kristin. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.

Feminist Nomads: The Politics of Walking in Agnès Varda

219

Sellier, Genevieve. Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema, trans. Kristin Ross. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Ungar, Steven. Cléo de 5 à 7. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008.

Filmography Citizen Kane, dir. Orson Welles, 1941. La Pointe Courte, dir. Agnès Varda, 1955. Le Beau Serge, dir. Claude Chabrol, 1958. Les Cousins, dir. Claude Chabrol, 1959. Tirez sur le Pianiste, dir. François Truffaut, 1960. A Bout de Souffle, dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1960. Les Bonnes Femmes, dir. Claude Chabrol, 1960. Paris Nous Appartient, dir. Jacques Rivette, 1961. L’Année Dernière à Marienbad, dir. Alain Resnais, 1961. Cléo de 5 à 7, dir. Agnès Varda, 1962. Pierrot le Fou, dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1965. Sans Toit Ni Loi, dir. Agnès Varda, 1985. Les Plages d’Agnès, dir. Agnès Varda, 2008.



Cinematic Pedestrianism Afoot: A Conclusion

In Rebel Cities, anthropologist and critical geographer David Harvey points to the role the street and urban activism play in the formation of ideas: What we so often forget is “the role played by the sensibility that arises out of the streets around us, the inevitable feelings of loss provoked by the demolitions, what happens when whole quarters […] get re-engineered.”1 Turning to contemporary Paris, Harvey reflects that the unrest caused by the rapid urban transformation of the city was probably a major component of the revolts that led to the massive protests in May 1968. According to Harvey, this unrest is felt the artistic and the intellectual creativity of the time, for example in Jean Luc Godard’s film Deux out trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967) as well as Henri Lefebvre’s essay of the same year The Right to the City. He wrote: “Just walking out of his apartment in the Rue Rambuteau,” Lefebvre must have been able to sense the inevitable eruption in the streets.2 It is no coincidence that Harvey was writing this book on urban insurrections in 2011 in the wake of the Occupy movement and anti-government uprisings in the SWANA region.3 Across the globe, the streets were pulsating. Rebel Cities came out in 2013, the year we were demonstrating massively on the streets of Istanbul. In the background of these demonstrations, many protesters read and discussed Lefebvre’s work in the reading groups or emergent collectives. Urban transformation was the topic of everyday conversations, and ‘right to the city’ was a concept you’d hear and read increasingly often. The activist repertoire, political grammar, and intellectual legacy of May 1968 and the Paris Commune were haunting the streets of the city as well as the minds and the hearts of the protesters. The writing of this book on cinema and pedestrianism coincided with this turbulent time in the recent history of Turkey, where the streets became 1 Harvey, Rebel Cities, xi. 2 Harvey, Rebel Cities, xi. 3 SWANA is the acronym for South West Asian and North African region.

Özgen, A., The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism: Walking in Films. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 doi 10.5117/9789463724753_concl

222 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Figure 22: Graffito on a wall in 2013. Not credited. (From the author’s own collection)

the locus of many struggles. These moments of eruption have been crucial in sharpening my study of walking as a political act. Echoing Harvey’s emphasis, these moments of collective struggle on the streets have played an undeniable role in this research into the cinematic articulations of pedestrianism and their relation to the construction of (cinematic and urban) space. Mark Shiel reminds us that the histories of cinema and of the city have been closely intertwined. 4 At times of revolt in the urban landscape and spatial practices, filmmakers invent new ways of making motion pictures because of the distinctive technical and artistic challenges of shooting on location in real urban environments, while encouraging many—myself included—to rethink the line between filmmaker and activist.5 In this Conclusion, I want to reflect more closely on the origins of this book in my own and others’ experiences of urban protest in those years, and on the wider relationship between street protests, pedestrianism, and cinema. One of the key events that triggered my thinking about the reciprocal relationship between the city and the cinema concerning the production of space was the Gezi Park Protests in May 2013, “one of the largest and most widespread mass revolts in the history of Turkey.”6 In the context of accelerating urban transformation, a group of activists resisted the demolition of Gezi Park, a public garden at the heart of Istanbul’s Taksim 4 Shiel, Architectures of Revolt, 1. 5 Shiel, Architectures of Revolt, 1. 6 Ismet Akca et al. “A Postscript: #resistturkey,” 552–83.

Cinematic Pedestrianism Afoot: A Conclusion

223

Square. When the resistance was met by brutal police violence, the protests grew and spread across the country, reaching an unprecedented scale. Tens of thousands of people took it to the streets over the course of roughly three weeks. Both the park and the square were cut off by barricades and turned into a public space, playfully dubbed as the Taksim Commune. The activists, or communards, cleaned the streets every day and held public forums, which collectivized decision-making. In a clear protest against the accelerated commercialization of the streets and public spaces, the Gezi encampment provided free services such as a gratis bookstore, veterinarian clinic, health services, and grocery corner, among others. In many ways, the clear and rapid change of the organization of social/public space at Gezi Park made visible the otherwise invisible politics of space. The street protests triggered by claiming the right to the city achieved a reconstruction of public space, a redistribution of the sensible. After about two weeks, a brutal police attack evacuated the square and the park.7 The protests then spread to many other parks across Istanbul and other cities, with daily forums where, among numerous other topics, neighbourhood agendas were discussed collectively. Many neighbourhood support collectives as well as ecological cooperatives emerged. Film screenings and discussions were a significant part of these forum gatherings. Simultaneously, there was growing interest in the intersections of cinema and activism. The cinematic memory of revolts, resistance, and dissent was widely evoked. The role of the filmmaker in registering the present was a common point of discussion, as was the enticing power of guerrilla film screenings and collective film-watching. The film critic Firat Yücel wrote that, for a large group of young precariat who were taking part in the protests for the first time in their lives, the cinematic representations of revolt provided a collective memory of an event that had not yet happened.8 Yücel remembers overhearing “Just like in that movie!” as he walked across the park and the streets at the height of the demonstrations.9 As the events were recorded on cameras every day, a collective audiovisual archive of the street was created by protesters. These images, according to Yücel, had a discernible aesthetics. Furthermore, in their portrayal of the event from the perspective of the ordinary citizen, these images functioned as 7 “Turkey Protests Spread after Violence in Istanbul over Park Demolition.” https://www. theguardian.com/world/2013/may/31/istanbul-protesters-violent-clashes-police. Accessed 21 March 2022. 8 Yücel, “Zihinsel Gezi Sinemasi.” 9 Yücel, “Zihinsel Gezi Sinemasi.”

224 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Figure 23: Graffito on a police vehicle in 2013: “Let’s demolish the State and build a cinema instead.” Non-credited. (From the author’s own collection)

a counter-archive that challenged the images and the narratives spread by the State.10 They not only enriched the cinematographic articulation of revolt, but also kept a collective counter-memory of the events. The Gezi Protests interacted with cinema—cinematographic articulation, cinematic memory, collective film-viewing, and cinematic imagination—on many levels. The Gezi uprising was a moment in a sequence of similarly eruptive moments of massive protests in the face of increasing collaboration between the state and capital to exert dominance over public space. In its special Gezithemed issue dedicated to the relationship between cinema and resistance, Altyazi film magazine pointed to the struggle over Emek Theatre, a historic cinema, as one of the precursory protests against the rapid commercialization and arbitrary transformation of the public space.11 In order to give some background to growing protests in the context of accelerated urban transformation, I will consult Erbatur Çavuşoğlu and Julia Strutz’s article “‘We’ll Come and Demolish Your House!’,” where they explain how a new spatial politics as a hegemonic tool has come to prominence in domestic politics in Turkey.12 A series of laws passed in the early 2010s opened noncommodified public spaces to demolition for so-called development aims. In line with this policy, the government announced its plans to evict six million households nationwide. The frantic exploitation of non-commodified spaces, coupled with a new vigour for re-producing spaces integral to capitalist hegemony, prompted the enormous growth in the construction sector in late 10 Yücel, “Zihinsel Gezi Sinemasi.” 11 See Altyazi 130 (July/August 2013). 12 Çavuşoğlu and Strutz, “‘We’ll Come and Demolish Your House!’”

Cinematic Pedestrianism Afoot: A Conclusion

225

2010s.13 Primarily Istanbul, but also other cities, saw massive displacement of, specifically, the urban poor. What was euphemistically called ‘urban renewal’ contained arbitrary practices of confiscating homes, emptying entire neighbourhoods, and forcing inhabitants out of their dwellings—with the aim of make space for new construction projects. These new projects, carried out mostly by companies close to the government, were beyond the financial reach of the previous inhabitants of the neighbourhood. By forcing the poor out of their homes and thus attracting the rich, these policies drastically changed the urban fabric. It was in such a context that the plans to demolish the historic Emek Theatre, and subsequently Gezi Park, sparked anger and the widescale demand for the right to the city. The plans to demolish the Emek Theatre and build a shopping mall first surfaced in 2010 and were immediately condemned. For cinephiles, filmmakers, and film exhibitors, this was seen as another step to cleanse the city of independent movie theatres. In the context of redesigning the entire neighbourhood as an attractive playground for international capital, the cinema scene was fully opened to transnational distributor companies and movieplex chains. In a series of protests of varying scales, activists (composed of film critics, filmmakers, and cinephiles) organized film screenings in front of the Emek Theatre. The street screenings offered alternative spaces for a non-commodified film culture, where spectatorship is envisioned in terms of a collective and not as a paying individual. One of the key messages in the Emek Theatre struggle was to make the following point: Where we watch films determines which films we watch, and eventually produces the desire for cinematic consumption, i.e., which films get to be made and thus distributed. “The doors of a movie theatre must open to the street, not to the consumerist interior of a shopping mall,” was one of the slogans of the movement. While the Gezi Uprising was a definitive moment, it was not the first protest against the accelerating rate of urban transformation and increasing authoritarianism that manifested itself on many fronts of everyday life. Together with the Emek Theatre protests, these popular demonstrations opened up new questions and practices around the interrelationship between the cinema and the streets as loci of revolt. Another example I must mention are the Feminist Night Marches that take place every 8 March, which attract masses of attendees every year. The feminist movement in Turkey has been growing steadily, and its resilience against the police violence trying to ban

13 Çavuşoğlu and Strutz, “‘We’ll Come Demolish Your House!’”

226 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Figure 24: Screening of Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera in front of Emek Theatre. Still from Audience Emancipated: The Struggle for the Emek Movie Theater. (Courtesy of the Emek Bizim İstanbul Bizim initiative).

the Night March has been seen as a hope-inducing form of activism in a country in the grip of increasing authoritarianism. Among the many forms that women’s urban activism takes across the globe, walking and collective marches have played a central role. Taking it to the streets speaks strongly to the long history of women’s marches, for example, from Suffragette rallies and female textile workers’ protests in 1917 Russia to Take Back the Night (known in Turkey as Feminist Night March). By walking the streets together, women exhibit our existence, solidarity, and determination for change. While walking alone might feel vulnerable, walking together on the streets feels empowering, especially after dark. In Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World, Leslie Kern points to the long history of how women have viewed the city as both the site and the stakes of struggle. “The city is the place to be heard,” writes Kern, “it’s also the place we’re fighting for. Fighting to belong, to be safe, to earn a living, to represent our communities, and so much more.”14 For Kern, the outbursts of women’s activism in the present resonate strongly with a history of struggles on the streets. Participating in these marches strengthened my desire to research how feminist pedestrianism has been articulated cinematically, especially at the intersections of cinema and urban activism that I explained earlier. 14 Kern, Feminist City, 118.

Cinematic Pedestrianism Afoot: A Conclusion

227

The final event that had a clear impact on some of the ideas in this book was the march of the Kurdish political leader Selahattin Demirtaş to the Kurdish town of Cizre in 2015. This was a key moment attesting to the power of walking as a political act of dissent. Amidst military operations targeting Kurdish cities in Turkey, the town of Cizre was cut off for many days under a strict curfew. With the flow of information and news was interrupted, the concerns over the safety of Cizre’s citizens increased, as fears of a deepening humanitarian crisis grew. Every attempt to reach and receive updates about the citizens of Cizre was denied. It was in this context that Demirtaş just started walking. If the roads were closed by the military, he would take a path through the mountains. If he was stopped by the gendarmerie, he would take a detour. The resilience of Demirtaş in walking through cities, towns, mountains, and valleys made the news, breaking the imposed silence in the media about the clashes in Cizre. It was a key moment of how powerful walking can be as a transgressive act.15 These actual events resonated with some of the pedestrian acts in the history of cinema. Walking as protest, walking for social justice, walking to disrupt the dominant politics of space… Below I give an overview of this book’s journey, and mention some of the untravelled routes on the map, paths for future research. The central aim of this book has been to explore how walking—as an everyday act of engagement with and resistance against the dominant politics of space—has informed, changed, and inspired cinematic aesthetics. To this end, I have investigated the reciprocal relationships between the experience of the city on foot, its transposition into cinematic aesthetics, and the function of these images of walking within a larger cultural, social and political context. Through a cultural analysis of six historical film moments, I demonstrated that it is possible to approach the history of cinema from the perspective of the urban walking experience. My approach was primarily informed by three theories. First was Henri Lefebvre’s contention that all spaces, including the public space of cities, are constructions shaped by certain ideologies that determine and control how these constructed spaces function. The second influence was Michel de Certeau’s focus on the pedestrian as an everyday practitioner of the city, and on the everyday pedestrian acts that elude, subvert, or disrupt the city’s dominant spatial order. And finally, I drew on Jacques Rancière’s notion of the distribution of the sensible, which sheds light on the political 15 “Turkey Kurds,” BBC News, 10 September 2015.

228 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

structures implicated in all constructed spaces (the city, the film industry, etc.) and shapes all sensible experience (what is allowed or not allowed to be said, seen, shown, etc.). A standpoint informed by these three perspectives also allowed me to see pedestrianism as a constructed aesthetic experience in the city and pedestrian acts as dissenting practices that transgress the established aesthetic order of the public space by walking unwalkable trajectories, saying the unsayable, or showing the unshowable. Researching how the cinematic medium evolved in conversation with such experiences sheds light on the new images, styles, and techniques that emerged to articulate such dissent. Before I propose some further perspectives for the study of walking in cinema and in visual media generally, I will briefly sketch some steps in my journey through film history to investigate cinematic pedestrian acts. The first step was to explain the relationship between the scientific study of pedestrianism and the nascent aesthetics of the filmic medium in the late nineteenth century. In order to do this, the first chapter offered a critical comparative analysis of Eadweard Muybridge’s instantaneous photography plates of human locomotion and the chronophotographic method of Étienne-Jules Marey. In canonical film history, the scientific experiments of Muybridge and Marey are both considered as precursors of cinema. However, they are rarely differentiated in terms of their understanding of movement, motivations to record human locomotion, and the aesthetics of motion that they sought. Investigating the conception of movement that underlay their methods, some affinities between Marey’s notion of movement and Bergson’s philosophy became visible. Recording the act of walking in its completeness, without any loss of information, was a major motivation in the development of the photographic medium and the emergence of cinematic movement. Shifting the focus from scientific experiments to the cultural context of the late nineteenth century, Chapter Two analysed how two major discourses on bodily movement gave rise to certain cinematic tools and formed a cinematic aesthetics of pedestrianism. The use of photography and motion pictures by Frederick Winslow Taylor, and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, was primarily concerned with analysing and prescribing the ideal movement of workers’ bodies to maximize the efficiency of production. The collection of short motion pictures produced by Taylor and the Gilbreths, known as Time and Motion Studies, aimed to eliminate unproductive movement from the system: the system of human locomotion (the body) but also the industrial system, such as factory space and the city. Untamed movement was vilified as idleness and a primary means of resisting work. Flânerie

Cinematic Pedestrianism Afoot: A Conclusion

229

was thus constructed as antithetical to industrial capitalism’s objective of maximizing productivity. In this chapter, I discussed how flânerie can be read as an early form of pedestrian acts that dissent from the dominant structures of time, movement, and space. My investigation of the cinematic articulations of flânerie, a popular theme of the time in literature and painting, revealed significant connections between the practice of flânerie (wandering around the city) and filming everyday life. At the intersection of this rich correspondence the filmography of the Lumière brothers stood out because it provided a chance to revisit canonical film history from the perspective of the aesthetic interaction between wandering in the city and filming everyday urban life on the streets. My analysis of the aesthetic forms common to urban scenes in Lumière views pointed to a rich conceptual understanding of flânerie within its cultural context, which has been impoverished in the scholarship on flânerie because of the repetitive focus on certain aspects. For this reason, I revisited and re-emphasized the conceptions of flânerie in the work of such writers as Charles Baudelaire, Franz Hessel, and Walter Benjamin. An important conclusion to draw with regard to practices of flânerie and filming is that both include an analysis (reading into) or observation of the city space for Lumière operators. Therefore, the transposition of a city scene into cinematic aesthetics should reflect that analysis as effectively as possible. Flânerie was strongly contested in the 1990s by women scholars, and this contestation was the starting point for Chapter Three. Feminist scholars argued that flânerie at the turn of the century was exclusively a male activity, and that women experienced public space rather differently from men. The flâneuse did not exist. This argument inspired me to analyse how women’s experiences of the city differed and what kind of cinematic aesthetics of pedestrianism was created by these different experiences. One of the ground-breaking arguments in the discussion in the 1990s was by Janet Wolff. Contrary to the general belief created by partially quoting her argument, Wolff did not argue that the flâneuse did not exist. She contended that the flâneuse did not exist in the historiography of modernity, especially in the public world of work, politics, and city life. The title of Wolff’s essay is “The Invisible Flâneuse,” not “The Impossible Flâneuse.” Even though there were several attempts to recover the “invisible flâneuse” in the literature and art of the nineteenth century, these studies tended to look for the flâneuse in commodified forms of pedestrianism. Quite ironically, these attempts only further disguised the different forms of women’s pedestrianism. The leisurely presence and pedestrian acts of working-class, immigrant, or precarious women on the street remained invisible.

230 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Studies on the leisure cultures of working women at the turn of the century inspired me to research early cinematographic images of women walking to work or hanging around in public spaces to experience a pleasant leisure time. Alongside certain works of non-fiction or documentary footage that show women’s experience of public space, or the conventional behavioural patterns that are expected of women with regard to their posture and walking in the city, Lois Weber’s Shoes from 1916 provided a new perspective from which to discuss the film’s working-class female protagonist’s pedestrian acts and its female director’s filmmaking practices. This chapter thus also pointed to a parallelism between women’s pedestrian acts and women’s filmmaking: both created a rupture in the distribution of the sensible and both were therefore inherently political. Extending my focus on the pedestrian acts of the working class, in Chapter Four I analysed Dziga Vertov’s theory and practice of filmmaking to investigate the function of pedestrianism. An in-depth examination of Vertov’s writings and of Man with a Movie Camera, a film that is in many ways a manifestation of his film theory, revealed pedestrianism to be primarily an analytical activity for observing the everyday life of the city, and to film it as it is in its uninterrupted flow. Here, pedestrianism had a function similar to the Lumière operators’ flânerie, which again included an analysis of urban space and its transposition to film in the best way to reflect its rhythm and movement. In contrast to Lumière views, however, pedestrianism was a significant component of Vertov’s revelationist cinema. I analysed a particular stop-motion sequence from Man with a Movie Camera, where the revelationist aspirations of Vertov’s cinema are manifested through the image of what I call a ‘kino-pedestrian’: a camera which is mounted on a tripod, and which can walk, observe, and record autonomously. In many ways, the kino-pedestrian signified a collective subject that can observe, move, and film tirelessly. The combination of the camera’s machine-like qualities—which are superior to human vision and which can show what remains invisible to the human eye—and the anthropomorphic qualities of walking—which allow the camera to be constantly on the move—can be seen as a prototype of a drifting prosthetic camera, which characterizes the realistic and documentary-like aesthetic of uncut long takes in more recent film history. The cinematographic image of walking in post-war Italian cinema has been the focus of much academic scrutiny. However, its transformation in filmmaking practices and in cinematographic aesthetics from the fascist era to post-war political conditions has not been analysed. With this aim in mind, in Chapter Five I primarily investigated the social and political

Cinematic Pedestrianism Afoot: A Conclusion

231

background of Italian Neorealism and its effects on walking in the city and on filmmaking. Going out on the street with a camera to observe everyday life in its uninterrupted flow without intervention was a recurrent urge widely voiced by many f ilmmakers of the era, but primarily Cesare Zavattini. Starting from Zavattini’s concept of pedinamento, I analysed cinematographic images of pedestrian acts in three f ilms, which I selected to investigate the changing interrelationship between the politics of public space, pedestrian acts, and f ilmmaking praxis from the fascist era to post-war Italy. As a f ilm made under occupation, Roma, Città Aperta’s treatment of pedestrian acts was substantially different from that of Germania Anno Zero, f ilmed immediately after the war in a liberated, albeit completely ruined, Berlin. Pedestrian acts, their transposition to cinematic aesthetics and the meaning attached to these images of walking changed dramatically in the early 1950s, following the disillusionment that came with Italy’s 1948 elections, which reinstated the power of the dominant classes and rapidly diminished the revolutionary aspirations that had emerged in 1943. Ladri di Biciclette, f ilmed in the wake of the 1948 election campaign, strongly embodied the political atmosphere of that era in that pedestrianism primarily functioned as a signifier for enforced displacement, which I explained within its larger socio-political context. Overall, my analysis of the transformation of the walking-shot in these three films reveals various features that have been overlooked in academic scholarship on the image of walking in Italian Neorealism, including Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the “time-image.” Continuing my research into the articulations of pedestrian acts, in Chapter Six I analysed Agnès Varda’s filmography and practice of cinécriture, which demanded a more philosophical approach to her female characters’ experiences of public space. It was possible to observe significant parallelisms between their experiences and Varda’s journey as a woman filmmaker in a male-dominated industry. In Varda’s own filmmaking, being constantly on the move equals an insistence on transgressing the limits of established conventions, experimenting in order constantly to open up new paradigms, and following creative strategies to re-invent the cinematic language persistently. Here, Rosi Braidotti’s conceptualization of the “feminist nomad”—as an encounter between feminist political activism and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theory of nomadology—emerged as an effective lens through which to explore the transgressive, subversive, and emancipatory politics that underlie women’s acts of walking on the screen. In Varda’s films, walking primarily functions

232 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

as a signifier for tirelessly eluding, resisting, and subverting the dominant politics of space—in the streets, on the screen, and beyond. In conclusion, my exploration of pedestrian acts in the history of cinema has revealed an aesthetic connection between the corporeal experience of the city on foot and the transposition of that experience into cinematic aesthetics. The influence of the changing aesthetic experience of pedestrianism—not only in the history of cities but also in the specific experience of certain social groups, such as working-class people, underground political resistance groups, lower-class women, or immigrants—on cinematic aesthetics has been significant, as I have demonstrated in the preceding chapters. As a historical revisionist venture in which the primary aim was to reinterpret and re-explain certain moments in canonical and noncanonical film history through the transposition of pedestrian acts into cinematic aesthetics, this study has positioned itself between film history and film theory to explore and critically analyse the function of cinematic images of walking within larger socio-cultural and artistic contexts. In the particular socio-cultural contexts analysed in each chapter, the aesthetic connection between walking and filming differed to some extent, making this research relevant to other social, cultural, and political contexts that remain beyond its scope.

Walking into the Future: Possible New Research Trajectories As I indicated in the Introduction, there is increasing scholarly and popular interest in pedestrianism and its various forms, such as flânerie, wandering, and hitchhiking. With the growing popularity of walking during the Coronavirus pandemic, the topic is likely to draw more attention from all fields of academic and creative work. In this context, and most importantly, I still see a need for raising awareness of how pedestrianism is culturally, politically, and spatially constructed. Such an awareness would help to eliminate romanticized accounts of walking in the city and shed light on the intersectional constructions (such as discourses, architectures, produced desires) that shape walking. From this point, it would be possible to discern certain dissenting pedestrian acts that elude, disrupt, or subvert these constructions in space. In this study, I used Lefebvre’s theory of production of space and Certeau’s notion of pedestrian acts to investigate these dimensions. Rancière’s theory of aesthetics has been particularly crucial for analysing the transposition of the aesthetic experience of the city on foot to cinematic aesthetics.

Cinematic Pedestrianism Afoot: A Conclusion

233

Second, this research could be expanded diachronically and synchronically. Concerning the former, there is an increasing need to study and formulate the transposition of the urban walking experience to new media forms that retain or recycle certain aspects of earlier forms of media. These include a large variety of apps from touristic walking routes to Google maps, wearable video production tools such as GoCams, everyday video-sharing platforms such as Instagram, GPS Art or new media-aided forms of landscape art, and VR technology. These technologies provide very interesting material regarding the research questions investigated in this study. A diachronic analysis could also be performed on earlier forms of media, such as magic lantern shows, where flânerie and travel were significant underlying themes connecting multiple still images to one another, similar to the way flânerie was connecting the photographs by Eugène Atget, or the moving images recorded by Lumière operators. While investigating pedestrian acts within the spatiotemporal paradigms of modernity, I encountered rich material that demands further scrutiny. A synchronic study could usefully extend the samples analysed in each of the time periods that I covered in this research to provide a better understanding of the social and cultural context that produced these cinematographic images of pedestrianism. For example, I still see a significant need to investigate further female pedestrian acts and their articulation in cinematic aesthetics. Given the growing field of feminist media histories, I see an increasing and exciting potential that can illuminate new dimensions of women’s history in media. On this front, such an investigation may not be limited to moving images but may expand beyond them to include other visual media practices. The final stages of this study coincided with an increased interest on my part in the metaphorical meanings of shoes on many levels to encapsulate certain factors that shape walking. As I explain in Chapter Three and in a recent article,16 footwear has a rich history in (political) philosophy, arts, and collective memory: from the image of the cobbler in Marx’s theory of economics, to the index of bodily labour in Van Gogh, the lure of commodification in Warhol, the semiotic play of concealment and display in Magritte, the haunting images of Holocaust shoes as evidence of genocidal murder and economic plunder 17—to name a few. Recently, the publication of an edited volume, Shoe Reels: The History and Philosophy of Footwear in Film, dedicated to the footwear in cinema is a welcome contribution to exploring this complexity in the history of the screen media. With the rising interest of 16 See Ozgen, “Walking in Women’s Shoes: Precarity and Feminist Pedestrian Acts in Cinema.” 17 On this topic, see Oster, “Holocaust Shoes: Metonymy, Matter, Memory.”

234 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

the contemporary film and television in narratives of intersectionality, one possible research direction could explore the cinematographic articulations of walking and symbolism of shoes, for example, in screen portrayals of long-haul journeys on foot, especially in the context of forced displacement, migration, exile, or escape. Another direction for potential future research could explore the pedestrian acts of the working class and their cinematic aesthetics. Although there is a rich literature on travelling workers or mobilities of labour, the subject remains under-researched within the film discipline, especially from an intersectional perspective that would explore the screen personages of travelling workers at the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race. For example, a recent project entitled Cinema’s First Nasty Women researches rarely-seen silent films about feminist protest, anarchic slapstick destruction, and suggestive gender play.18 The women comédiennes in these films organize labour strikes, bake (and weaponize) inedible desserts, electrocute the police force, and assume a range of identities that gleefully dismantle traditional gender norms and sexual constraints.19 Given the conservative gender politics that these films protest, it would be interesting to look for representations of female tramps, vagabonds, or other precarious women that were constantly on the move. I hope the framework of this book and the trajectories that I explored while researching the cinematic articulations of pedestrian acts can provide a starting point for the exploration of these further perspectives to study cinematic pedestrian acts at the intersections of gender, class, and race. There is more legwork to be done. But now, the streets are calling.

Works Cited N.A. “Cinema’s First Nasty Women” Women Film Pioneers Project. N.d. https://wfpp. columbia.edu/cinemas-first-nasty-women. Accessed 22 March 2022. N.A. “Turkey Protests Spread after Violence in Istanbul over Park Demolition.” The Guardian, 1 June 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/31/ istanbul-protesters-violent-clashes-police. Accessed 21 March 2022.

18 “Cinema’s First Nasty Women.” https://wfpp.columbia.edu/cinemas-first-nasty-women/. Accessed 22 March 2022. 19 “Cinema’s First Nasty Women.” https://wfpp.columbia.edu/cinemas-first-nasty-women/. Accessed 22 March 2022.

Cinematic Pedestrianism Afoot: A Conclusion

235

N.A “Turkey Kurds.” BBC News, 10 September 2015. https://www.bbc.com/news/ world-europe-34206924. Accessed 22 March 2022. Akca, Ismet et al. “A Postscript: #resistturkey.” In Turkey Reframed: Constituting Neoliberal Hegemony. Ed. Ismet Akca et al. London: Pluto Press. 2014. 247–60. Çavuşoğlu, Erbatur and Julia Strutz. “‘We’ll Come and Demolish Your House!’ The Role of Spatial (Re-)Production in the Neoliberal Hegemonic Politics of Turkey.” In Turkey Reframed: Constituting Neoliberal Hegemony. Ed. Ismet Akca et al. London: Pluto Press. 2014. 141–54. Ezra, Elizabeth and Catherine Wheatley, ed. Shoe Reels: The History and Philosophy of Footwear in Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2020. Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to Urban Revolution. London: Verso. 2013. Kern, Leslie. Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World. London: Verso, 2020. Oster, Sharon B. “Holocaust Shoes: Metonymy, Matter, Memory.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture. Ed. Victoria Aarons and Phyllis Lassner. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 761–84. Ozgen, Asli. “Walking in Women’s Shoes: Precarity and Feminist Pedestrian Acts in Cinema.” Feminist Media Histories 7.3 (2021): 135–53. Shiel, Mark, ed. Architectures of Revolt: The Cinematic City Circa 1968. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2018. Yücel, Firat. “Zihinsel Gezi Sinemasi.” Altyazi 130 (July/August 2013): 24–38.

Bibliography N. A. “Les trottoirs roulants de l’Exposition.” La Revue Scientifique 4e série, Tome XIV: No: 21–26 (May 1900). http://sciences.gloubik.info//spip.php?article334. Accessed 4 May 2021. N. A. “Many Inventions.” The Outlook (29 March 1913). 736–37. N.A “50 Pair of Old Ragged Shoes Wanted,” Chronicle-Telegram [Elyria, OH] (16 September 1916): 6. https://chronicletelegram.newspaperarchive.com/ elyria-evening-telegram/1916-09-16/page-6/. Accessed 17 March 2022. N. A. “Magic Lantern Shows.” In The Encyclopaedia of Early Cinema. Ed. Richard Abel. London: Routledge, 2005. 582. N.A. “Turkey Protests Spread after Violence in Istanbul over Park Demolition.” The Guardian, 1 June 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/31/ istanbul-protesters-violent-clashes-police. Accessed 21 March 2022. N.A “Turkey Kurds.” BBC News, 10 September 2015. https://www.bbc.com/news/ world-europe-34206924. Accessed 22 March 2022. N.A. “Cinema’s First Nasty Women.” Women Film Pioneers Project. N.d. https://wfpp. columbia.edu/cinemas-first-nasty-women. Accessed 22 March 2022. N. A. “Pedinamento.” In Treccani: La Cultura Italiana, http://www.treccani.it/ vocabolario/pedinare. N.d. Accessed 1 October 2021. Abramov, Nikolaj. Dziga Vertov. Moscow: Akademija nauk SSSR, 1962. Akca, Ismet et al. “A Postscript: #resistturkey.” In Turkey Reframed: Constituting Neoliberal Hegemony. Ed. Ismet Akca et al. London: Pluto Press. 2014. 247–60. Anderson, Kevin. Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Andriacchi, Thomas and Eugene J. Alexander. “Studies of Human Locomotion: Past, Present, and Future.” Journal of Biomechanics 33 (2000): 1217–24. Antonioni, Michelangelo. The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Aprà, Adriano. “Rossellini Beyond Neo-Realism.” In Roberto Rossellini. Ed. Don Ranvaud. London: BFI, 1981. Atkinson, David. “Totalitarianism and the Street in Fascist Rome.” In Images of the Street: Planning, Identity, and Control in Public Space. Ed. Nicholas Fyfe. London: Routledge, 1998. 13–30. Aumont, Jacques. “Lumière Revisited.” Film History 8 (1996): 416–430. Baker, Ulus. “Between the Images.” http://www.korotonomedya.net/kor/index. php?id=21,165,0,0,1,0 Accessed 4 May 2021. Barthez, Paul-Joseph. Nouvelle Méchanique des mouvements de l’homme et des animaux. Carcassonne: De l’imprimerie de Pierre Polere, 1798.

238 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Baudelaire, Charles. “The Painter of Modern Life.” In Selected Writings on Art and Artists. Ed. P.E. Charvet. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. 390–435. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Finest Consumer Object: The Body.” In The Body: A Reader. Ed. Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco. New York: Routledge, 2005. 277–82. Bazgan, Nicoleta. “Female Bodies in Paris: Iconic Urban Femininity and Parisian Journeys.” Studies in French Cinema 10.2 (2010): 95–109. Bazin, André. What is Cinema? Volume 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” In What is Cinema? Volume 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. 9–16. Bazin, André. “Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of the Liberation.” In André Bazin and Italian Neorealism. Ed. Bert Cardullo. London: Continuum, 2011. 29–50. Bazin, André. “In Defense of Rossellini.” In André Bazin and Italian Neorealism. Ed. Bert Cardullo. London: Continuum, 2011. 63–171. Beaumont, Matthew. Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London. London: Verso, 2016. Belloi, Livio. “Lumière and His View: The Cameraman’s Eye in Early Cinema.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television, 15.4 (October 1995): 461–74. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217–52. Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London: Verso, 1997. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Belknap Harvard, 1999. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. New York: Random House. 1944. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books. 1992. Bois-Reymond, Emil du. “Science and Fine Art.” The Popular Science Monthly (April 1892): 751–63. Bois-Reymond, Emil du. “Science and Fine Art II.” The Popular Science Monthly (May 1892): 16–27. Bonitzer, Pascal. Le champ aveugle: Essais sur le realisme au cinéma. Quetigny: Cahièrs du Cinéma, 1999. Bonitzer, Pascal et al. “The Brain is the Screen: An Interview with Gilles Deleuze.” In Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema. Ed. Gregory Flaxman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 365–74. Borelli, Giovanni Alfonso. De Motu Animalium. Lugdunum Batavorum: Petrum vander Aa, Cornelium Boutesteyn, Johannem de Vivie, Danielem à Gaesbeeck, 1682.

Bibliogr aphy

239

Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Brancaleone, David. “Framing the Real: Lefebvre and Neo-Realist Cinematic Space as Practice.” Architecture_MPS 5 (2014): 1–22. Braun, Marta. Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Brunetta, Gian Piero. Storia del Cinema Italiano: Dal Neorealismo al Miracolo Economico, 1945–1959, Vol 3. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2001. Bruno, Giuliana. Streetwalking on a Ruined Map. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. London: Verso. 2007. Buck-Morss, Susan. “Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk: Redeeming Mass Culture for the Revolution.” New German Critique 29 (Spring/Summer, 1983): 211–40. Buck-Morss, Susan. “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering.” New German Critique 39 (1986): 99–140. Cardullo, Bert, ed. André Bazin and Italian Neorealism. London: Continuum, 2011. Castle, Terry. “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie.” Critical Inquiry 15.1 (Autumn 1988): 26–61. Çavuşoğlu, Erbatur and Julia Strutz. “‘We’ll Come and Demolish Your House!’ The Role of Spatial (Re-)Production in the Neoliberal Hegemonic Politics of Turkey.” In Turkey Reframed: Constituting Neoliberal Hegemony. Ed. Ismet Akca et al. London: Pluto Press. 2014. 141–54. Chardère, Bernard. Lumières sur Lumière. Lyon: Institut Lumière, 1987. Charney, Leo. Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity, and Drift. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Chiarini, Luigi. “A Discourse on Neo-Realism.” In Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-realism. Ed. David Overbey. Hamden: Archon Books, 1979. 139–45. Cohen, Margaret. “Walter Benjamin’s Phantasmagoria.” New German Critique 48 (Autumn: 1989): 87–107. Curtis, Scott. “Images of Efficiency: The Films of Frank B. Gilbreth.” In Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media. Ed. Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. 85–100. D’Souza, Aruna and Tom McDonough, ed. The Invisible Flâneuse: Gender, Public Space and Visual Culture in Nineteenth Century Paris. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Dagognet, François. Étienne-Jules Marey: A Passion for the Trace. New York: Zone Books, 1992. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

240 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

De Santis, Giuseppe. “Towards an Italian Landscape.” In Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-realism. Ed. David Overbey. Hamden: Archon Books, 1979. 125–30. De Sica, Vittorio. “Why Ladri di Biciclette?” In Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-realism. Ed. David Overbey. Hamden: Archon Books, 1979. 87–88. Debord, Guy. “Theory of the Dérive,” Les Lèvres Nues 9 (November 1956). Also available on Situationist International Online. http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/ si/theory.html. Accessed 6 May 2021. Del Pilar Blanco, Maria and Esther Peeren, ed. The Spectralities Reader. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Deleuze, Gilles. Le Bergsonisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966. Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (Winter 1992): 3–7. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. London: Continuum, 2004. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London: Continuum, 2005. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy?. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum, 2004. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum, 2004. Dibbets, Karel. “Het taboe van de Nederlandse filmcultuur: Neutraal in een verzuild land.” TMG Journal for Media History 21 (2018): 136–55. Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Elkin, Lauren. Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. Elsaesser, Thomas. Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016. Ezra, Elizabeth and Catherine Wheatley, ed. Shoe Reels: The History and Philosophy of Footwear in Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2020. Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. To Desire Differently: Feminism and French Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. California: University of California Press, 1994. Friedrich, Thomas. Hitler’s Berlin: Abused City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. Forgacs, David. “Ossessione DVD Commentary.” Ossessione. London: BFI. 2003. Forgacs, David. “Space, Rhetoric, and the Divided City in Roma Città Aperta.” In Roberto Rossellini’s Roma, Città Aperta. Ed. Sidney Gottlieb. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 106–30.

Bibliogr aphy

241

Gadassik, Alla. “A Skillful Isis: Esfir Shub and the Documentarian as Caretaker.” In A Companion to Documentary Film History. Ed. Joshua Malitsky. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2021. 165–86. Gaines, Jane M. “Film History and the Two Presents of Feminist Film Theory,” Cinema Journal 44: 1 (Autumn 2004): 113–19. Gaines, Jane M. “What Happened to the Philosophy of Film History?,” Film History 25. 1–2 (2013): 70–80. Galloway, Lee. Organization and Management. New York: Alexander Hamilton Institute, 1916. Ghirardo, Diane Yvonne. “Città Fascista: Surveillance and Spectacle.” Journal of Contemporary History 31.2 (1996): 347–72. Gilloch, Graeme. “Urban Optics: Film, Phantasmagoria and the City in Benjamin and Kracauer.” New Formations 61 (2007):115–32. Ginsborg, Paul. A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1988. London: Penguin, 1990. Gleber, Anke. The Art of Taking a Walk: Flânerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Goldberg, Vicki. The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives. New York: Abeville Press, 1991. Gorbman, Claudia. “Cléo from 5 to 7: Music as Mirror,” Wide Angle 4.4 (1981): 38–49. Gros, Frédéric. A Philosophy of Walking. London: Verso, 2014. Gunning, Tom. “Never Seen This Picture Before: Muybridge in Multiplicity.” In Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement. Ed. Phillip Prodger and Tom Gunning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. 222–72. Gunning, Tom. “Phantasmagoria and the Manufacturing of Illusions and Wonder: Towards a Cultural Optics of the Cinematic Apparatus.” In The Cinema, A New Technology for the 20th Century. Ed. André Gaudreault et al. Lausanne: Editions Payot, 2004. 31–44. Hagener, Malte. Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919–1939. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007. Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to Urban Revolution. London: Verso. 2013. Hayward, Susan. “The City as Narrative: Corporeal Paris in Contemporary French Cinema.” In Spaces in European Cinema. Ed. Myrto Konstantarakos. Exeter: Intellect Books, 2000. 23–35. Hediger, Vinzenz and Patrick Vondreau, ed. Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. Heftberger, Adelheid. Digital Humanities and Film Studies: Visualising Dziga Vertov’s Work. Cham: Springer, 2016.

242 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Heijs, Jans. “Inleiding.” In Filmliga. Nijmegen: SUN, 1982. 9–24. Hessel, Franz. Spazieren in Berlin. Berlin: Verlag, 2013. Hopewell, John. “Thierry Frémaux on Lumière, the World’s First Film, the Artistry of Louis Lumière.” Variety (15 January 2017) http://variety.com/2017/film/global/ thierry-fremaux-lumiere-artistry-louis-lumiere-unifrance-1201960812/ Accessed 4 May 2021. Huhtamo, Erkki. “Global Glimpses for Local Realities: The Moving Panorama, A Forgotten Mass Medium of the 19th Century.” Art Inquiry 4.13 (2002): 193–223. Huhtamo, Erkki. “(Un)walking at the Fair: About Mobile Visualities at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1900.” Journal of Visual Culture 12.1 (2013): 61–88. Hutchinson, Pamela. “‘An Intensive Study of—Feet!’ in Two Films by Lois Weber: Shoes and The Blot.” In Shoe Reels: The History and Philosophy of Footwear in Film. Ed. Elizabeth Ezra and Catherine Wheatley. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. 38–48. Huyssen, Andreas. “The Voids of Berlin.” Critical Inquiry 24.1 (Autumn 1997): 57–81. Izvolov, Nikolai. From Vertov to Medvevkin: Unknown Pages of Russian Avant-Garde Film History. Israel: Grinberg Bros Inc., 2021. Kaplan, Ann E. Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera. London: Methuen, 1983. Kern, Leslie. Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World. London: Verso, 2020. Kessler, Frank. “Comment cadrer la rue?” In Lo Stile Cinematografico/Film Style. Ed. Enrico Biasin et al. Udine: Forum, 2007. 95–101. Kessler, Frank and Sabine Lenk “Quelles perspectives pour l’historiographie du cinéma?” In At the Borders of (Film) History, Temporality, Archaeology, Theories. Ed. Alberto Beltrame et al. Udine: Università degli Studi Udine, 2014. 127–37. Kirkup, John. “Mechanics of the Human Walking Apparatus.” Medical History 37.4 (Oct. 1993): 458. Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960. Labarthe, Andre S. “Marienbad, Year Zero.” In Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1960s. New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Holywoood. Ed. Jim Hillier. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. 54–58. Ladd, Brian. Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) Lameris, Bregt. Film Museum Practice and Film Historiography: The Case of the Nederlands Filmmuseum (1946–2000). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. Landy, Marcia. “Culture and Politics in the Work of Antonio Gramsci.” boundary 2 14.3 (Spring 1986): 49–70.

Bibliogr aphy

243

Lavater, Johann Caspar. Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe. Leipzig: Weidman und Reich, 1775–1778. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1991. Lefebvre, Henri. Writings on Cities. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1996. Lenin, Vladimir. “The Taylor System—Man’s Enslavement by the Machine.” Marxists Internet Archive. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/mar/13. htm. Accessed 4 May 2021. Linssen, Céline and Hans Schoots. “Film is geen lolletje.” Interview in De Filmkrant 209 (September 1999), n.p. Available to view at https://www.filmkrant.nl/av/ org/filmkran/archief/fk203/filmliga.html. Accessed 18 March 2022. Linssen, Céline et al. Het Gaat Om De Film! Een Nieuwe Geschiedenis van de Nederlandsche Filmliga, 1927–1933. Amsterdam: Bas Lubberhuizen / Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1999. Loiperdinger, Martin. “Lumière’s Arrival of the Train: Cinema’s Founding Myth.” Moving Image 4.1 (Spring 2004): 89–118. Malitsky, Joshua, ed. A Companion to Documentary Film History. West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2021. Mannoni, Laurent. Étienne-Jules Marey: La memoire de l’œil. Milano: Mazotta, 1999. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Marey, Étienne-Jules. “Natural History of Organized Bodies.” Annual Report of the Board of the Smithsonian Institution for the year 1867: 278–304. www.bium. univ-paris5.fr/histmed/medica/cote?marey200. Accessed 4 May 2021. Marey, Étienne-Jules. Animal Mechanism: A Treatise on Terrestrial and Aerial Locomotion. New York: D. Appleton, 1874. Marey, Étienne-Jules. Movement. New York: D. Appleton, 1895. Marey, Étienne-Jules. “The History of Chronophotography.” Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for the Year Ending June 30, 1901, 1902: 317–40. http://www.bium.univ-paris5.fr/histmed/medica/cote?marey067. Accessed 4 May 2021. Mayer, Andreas. Wissenschaft vom Gehen. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2013. Mayne, Judith. “Kino-Truth and Kino-Praxis: Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera.” Cine-Tracts 1.2 (Summer 1997): 81–92. Michelson, Annette. “Dr. Crase and Mr. Clair,” October 11 (Winter 1979): 30–53. Michelson, Annette. “Introduction.” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. xv–lxi. Middleton, Jennie. “The Socialities of Everyday Urban Walking and the ‘Right to the City’,” Urban Studies 55.2 (2018): 296–315. Minghelli, Giuliana. Landscape and Memory in Post-Fascist Italian Film: Cinema Year Zero. New York: Routledge, 2013. Monelli, Paolo. Roma 1943. Turin: Einaudi, 1993.

244 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Morrissey, Jim. “Paris and Voyages of Self-Discovery in Cléo de 5 à 7 and Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain.” Studies in French Cinema 8.2 (2008). 99–110. Mouton, Janice. “From Feminine Masquerade to Flâneuse: Agnès Varda’s Cleo in the City.” Cinema Journal 40.2 (2001). 3–16. Mussolini, Benito. My Autobiography. London: Paternoster, 1936. Muybridge, Eadweard. Animal Locomotion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1887. Nelson, Roy Jay. “Reflections in a Broken Mirror: Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7.” The French Review 56.5 (1983): 735–43. Nicholson, Geoff. The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, Literature, Theory and Practice of Pedestrianism. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008. Oster, Sharon B. “Holocaust Shoes: Metonymy, Matter, Memory.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture. Ed. Victoria Aarons and Phyllis Lassner. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 761–84. Ozgen, Asli. “Walking in Women’s Shoes: Precarity and Feminist Pedestrian Acts in Cinema.” Feminist Media Histories 7.3 (2021): 135–53. Ozgen, Asli and Floris Paalman, “Vertov’un Kayıp Filmi: İç Savaş’ın Tarihi.” Altyazı Fasikül (9 December 2021). https://fasikul.altyazi.net/dunya/vertovun-kayipfilmi-ic-savasin-tarihi/. Accessed 16 March 2022. Paalman, Floris. Cinematic Rotterdam: The Times and Tides of a Modern City. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011. Parsons, Deborah L. Streetwalking in the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Payne, Michael. “Derrida, Heidegger, and Van Gogh’s ‘Old Shoes.’” Textual Practice 6.1 (1992): 87–100. Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986. Petric, Vlada. “Dziga Vertov as Theorist.” Cinema Journal 18.1 (Autumn 1978): 29–44. Pisters, Patricia. The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art. New York: Routledge, 1988. Pons, Jordi and Daniel Pitarch. “History of a Fantascope: A Device for Education in Nineteenth-Century Girona.” Early Popular Visual Culture 15.1 (2017): 83–99. Purvis, June. ““DEEDS, NOT WORDS” The Daily Lives of Militant Suffragettes in Edwardian Britain,” Women’s Studies International Forum 18.2 (1995): 91–101. Purvis, June. “Remembering Emily Wilding Davison (1872–1913),” Women’s History Review 22.3 (2013): 353–62. Rabinbach, Anson. The Human Motor. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Bibliogr aphy

245

Rabinovitz, Lauren. For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in the Turn-of-the-Century Chicago. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. London: University of Minneapolis Press, 1999. Rancière, Jacques. Le partage du sensible: esthétique et politique. Paris: La Fabriqueéditions, 2000. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. London: Continuum, 2004. Ranvaud, Don, ed. Roberto Rossellini. London: BFI, 1981. Rimbaud, Arthur. A Season in Hell and Illuminations. New York: Random House, 2005. Romney, Jonathan. BFI Live: Jonathan Romney on Agnès Varda (2010). www.bfi.org/ live/video/333 Accessed 21 May 2016. Rony, Fatimah Tobing. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Rosen, Philip. “Now and Then: On the Documentary Regime, Vertov, and History.” In A Companion to Documentary Film History. Ed. Joshua Malitsky. West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2021. 187–206. Ross, Kristin. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Rossellini, Roberto. “Ten Years of Cinema.” In Springtime in Italy. Ed. David Overbey. Hamden: Archon Books, 1979. 93–102. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Russell, Catherine. Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. USA: Duke University Press, 1999. Salazkina, Masha. “Moscow-Rome-Havana: A Film-Theory Road Map.” October 139 (Winter 2012): 97–116. Sayer, Derek. Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Schaeffer, Jean Marie. Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Schaub, Joseph. “Presenting the Cyborg’s Futurist Past: An Analysis of Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye.” Postmodern Culture 8.2 (January 1998): 40–53. Schwarz, Lois-Georges “‘Henri Bergson Talks to Us About Cinema’ by Michel Georges-Michel from Le Journal, February 20, 1914,” Cinema Journal 50.3 (Spring 2011): 79–82. Sellier, Genevieve. Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema, trans. Kristin Ross. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Shiel, Mark. Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City. London: Wallflower, 2006.

246 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Shiel, Mark, ed. Architectures of Revolt: The Cinematic City Circa 1968. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2018. Shub, Esfir. “The Work of Montazhnitsy (1927).” Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe 6 (August 2018): n.p. https://www. apparatusjournal.net/index.php/apparatus/article/view/125/304. Accessed 16 March 2022. Slide, Anthony. Lois Weber: The Director Who Lost Her Way in History. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1996. Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Penguin, 2001. Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. London: Penguin, 2006. Souriau, Paul. The Aesthetics of Movement. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1889. Stam, Robert. Keywords in Subversive Film / Media Aesthetics. West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2015. Stamp, Shelley. “Lois Weber.” Women Film Pioneers Project. https://wfpp.cdrs. columbia.edu/pioneer/ccp-lois-weber/. Accessed 4 May 2021. Stamp, Shelley. Lois Weber in Early Hollywood. California: California University Press, 2015. Stead, Lisa. Off to the Pictures: Cinema-Going, Women’s Writing and Movie Culture in the Interwar Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Steindler, Arthur. “A Historical Review of the Studies and Investigations Made in Relation to Human Gait.” The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery 35.3 (July 1953): 540–42. Strauven, Wanda. “Media Archaeology: Where Film History, Media Art, and New Media (Can) Meet.” In Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art: Challenges and Perspectives. Ed. Julia Noordegraaf et al. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013. 59–80. Struyvenberg, Willemijn. “Een oase op het dak van Hotel Atlanta.” In Interbellum Rotterdam. Ed. Marlite Halbertsma and Patricia van Ulzen. Rotterdam: NAi, 2001. 69–92. Taylor, Frederick Winslow. Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1911. Tester, Keith, ed. The Flâneur. New York: Routledge, 1994. Thompson, Edward P. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past & Present 38 (Dec. 1967): 56–97. Thorpe, Vanessa. “Truth behind the Death of Suffragette Emily Davison is Finally Revealed” The Guardian (16 May 2013). https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/ may/26/emily-davison-suffragette-death-derby-1913. Accessed 6 May 2021. Tomas, David. Vertov, Snow, Farocki: Vision and the Posthuman. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013.

Bibliogr aphy

247

Tortajada, Maria. “Évaluation, mesure, mouvement: la philosophie contre la science et le concepts du cinéma (Bergson, Marey).” Revue européene des sciences sociales XLVI-141 (2008): 95–111. Tsivian, Yuri. “Introduction.” In Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties. Ed. Yuri Tsivian. Sacile/Pordenone: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 23, 2004. 1–28. Tsivian, Yuri, ed. Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties. Sacile/Pordenone: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 23, 2004. Tsivian, Yuri. “Dziga Vertov: The Factories of Facts,” Le Giornate del Cinema Muto Official Website. http://www.cinetecadelfriuli.org/gcm/ed_precedenti/ edizione2004/edizione2004_frameset.html. Accessed 16 March 2022. Tucker, Thomas Deane. Peripatetic Frame: Images of Walking in Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. Turvey, Malcolm. Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Ungar, Steven. Cléo de 5 à 7. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. Uricchio, William. “A ‘Proper Point of View’: The Panorama and Some of Its Early Media Iterations.” Early Popular Visual Culture 9.3 (2011): 225–38. Väliaho, Pasi. Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema Circa 1900. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010. Vertov, Dziga. “12 April 1926,” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 163. Vertov, Dziga. “Advertising Films,” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 25–32. Vertov, Dziga. “Artistic Drama and Kino-Eye.” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 47–48. Vertov, Dziga. “The Birth of Kino-Eye.” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 40–41. Vertov, Dziga. “The Essence of Kino-Eye.” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 49–50. Vertov, Dziga. “History of the Kinoks.” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 92–100. Vertov, Dziga. “Kino-Eye.” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 60–79. Vertov, Dziga. “From Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye.” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 85–92. Vertov, Dziga. “Kinoks: A Revolution.” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 11–21.

248 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Vertov, Dziga. “The Man with a Movie Camera.” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 82–85. Vertov, Dziga. “WE: Variant of a Manifesto.” In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 5–9. Vierordt, Hermann. Das Gehen des Menschen in Gesunden und Kranken Zuständen. Tuebingen: 1887. Von Haller, Albrecht. Elementa Physiologiae Corporis Humani. Lausanne: Julium Henricum Pott, & Socios, 1757–1766. Wagstaff, Christopher. Italian Neorealist Cinema: An Aesthetic Approach. Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Weber, Wilhelm and Eduard. Die Mechanik der Gehwerkzeuge. Göttingen: Dieterichschen Buchhandlung, 1836. Wilson, Elizabeth. “The Invisible Flâneur.” New Left Review 191 (January–February 1992: 90–110. Wolff, Janet. “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity.” Theory, Culture & Society 2.3 (1985): 37–46. Yücel, Firat. “Zihinsel Gezi Sinemasi.” Altyazi 130 (July/August 2013): 24–38. Zavattini, Cesare. “Some Ideas on Cinema,” Sight and Sound 23.2 (1953): 58–69. Zhang, Xiang. “Muybridge, Motion Analysis and Art.” Arts Biomechanics 1.2 (2012): 105–13.

Filmography This filmography is in a chronological order in line with the flow of the book. La Sortie d’Usine Lumière (C. L. No: 91,1), 1895. Place des Cordeliers (C. L. No: 128), 1895. Course en sacs (C.L. No: 109), 1896. Place Bellecour (C. L. No:129), 1896. Rue Bab-Azoun (C.L. No: 201), 1896. Londres: danseuse des rues (C.L. No: 249), 1896. Piccadilly Circus (C.L. No: 255), 1896. Transport de la cloche de l’Indépendance (C.L. No: 346), 1896. Lyon: Debarquement d’une mouche (C.L. No: 424), 1896. Bicycliste (C.L. No: 17), 1896/1897. Le Pont Neuf (C. L. No: 688), 1896/1897. Mi-Carême: Char de la reine des reines (C. L. No: 156), 1897 L’arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat (C. L. No: 653), 1897. Church Street (C.L. No: 700), 1897. Football (C.L. No: 699), 1897/1898. Jeu de la poêle (C.L. No: 955), 1897/1898. Panorama pris d’un ballon captif (C.L. No: 997), 1897/1898. Panorama pendant l’ascension de la Tour Eiffel (C.L. No: 992), 1898. Vue de l’avant d’un transatlantique par un gros temps (C.L. No: 1039), 1898/1899. Char et batailles de confettis (C. L. No: 1010), 1899. Vue prise d’un baleiniere en marche (C.L. No: 1241), 1900. Vue prise d’un plate-forme mobile I (C.L. No: 1155), 1900. Vue prise d’un plate-forme mobile II (C.L. No: 1156), 1900. Vue prise d’un plate-forme mobile III (C.L. No: 1157), 1900. Vue prise d’un plate-forme mobile IV (C.L. No: 1158), 1900. Panorama pris du trottoir roulant, dir. Georges Méliès, 1900. Les Visiteurs sur le trottoir roulant, dir. Georges Méliès, 1900. Panorama from the Moving Boardwalk, in Thomas A. Edison, Inc, and Paper Print Collection (United States: Edison Manufacturing Co), 1900. Fine Feathers, dir. Lois Weber, 1912. A Japanese Idyll, dir. Lois Weber, 1912. Suspense, dir. Lois Weber, 1913. Shoes, dir. Lois Weber, 1916. Kinonedelja, dir. Dziga Vertov, 1918–1919. The Anniversary of the Revolution, dir. Dziga Vertov, 1918.

250 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

The History of the Civil War, dir. Dziga Vertov, 1921. Kino-Pravda, dir. Dziga Vertov, 1922–1925. Kino-Eye, dir. Dziga Vertov, 1924. Man with a Movie Camera, dir. Dziga Vertov, 1929. Russische regisseur bezoekt ons land. N.A. Polygoon-Profilti, 1930. https://commons. wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3ARussische_regisseur_bezoekt_ons_ land.ogv. Accessed 18 March 2022. The Unshod Maiden, dir. Albert de Mond, 1934. Citizen Kane, dir. Orson Welles, 1941. Ossessione, dir. Luchino Visconti, 1943. Roma, Città Aperta, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1945. The Quest of the One Best Way, dir. James Perkins, 1945. Paisà, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1946. Il Gente del Po, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1947. Germania Anno Zero, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1948. Ladri di Biciclette, dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1948. Europa ’51, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1951. Umberto D., dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1952. Viaggio in Italia, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1954. La Strada, dir. Federico Fellini, 1954. La Pointe Courte, dir. Agnès Varda, 1955. Le Beau Serge, dir. Claude Chabrol, 1958. Les Cousins, dir. Claude Chabrol, 1959. Tirez sur le Pianiste, dir. François Truffaut, 1960. A Bout de Souffle, dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1960. Les Bonnes Femmes, dir. Claude Chabrol, 1960. Paris Nous Appartient, dir. Jacques Rivette, 1961. L’Année Dernière à Marienbad, dir. Alain Resnais, 1961. Cléo de 5 à 7, dir. Agnès Varda, 1962. Pierrot le Fou, dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1965. Sans Toit Ni Loi, dir. Agnès Varda, 1985. The Lumière Brothers’ First Films, 1996. Russian Ark, dir. Alexander Sokurov, 2002. Les Plages d’Agnès, dir. Agnès Varda, 2008.



Index

Note: page numbers followed by f refer to figures. Addams, Jane 120-21, 125 aesthetics 26, 28, 174, 223, 228; of actuality f ilm 77; of cinematic pedestrianism 33, 41, 131, 159; ­c inematographic 230; Deleuze’s 36; of drift 92, 96-97; of everyday spaces 102; female gaze and 113; of feminist pedestrianism 18; human locomotion and 44; Lumière’s 147, 171, 174n36 (see also flânerie); montage 140; movement and 41; neorealist 168-69, 175-76, 182-83, 190; of pedestrianism 48; of public space 34; radical f ilm 135-36; Rancière’s conception/theory of 29, 31-32, 117-18, 132, 232; science and 44; Varda’s 205-6, 209, 216; Vertov’s 136-37, 143, 144n45, 148, 152-53, 157, 159; of urban space in cinema 167; of walking 18; of the walking-shot 190, 199. See also cinematic aesthetics L’Année derniere a Marienbad (Resnais) 193n83, 198, 217 Antonioni, Michelangelo 35, 190-91, 199; Il Gente del Po 175-76 any-instants-whatever 47-48, 64-65, 67 Aristotle 29, 42 Atkinson, David 166-67 Aumont, Jacques 83, 96, 98 avant-champ (forefield) 84, 96 avant-garde: European 14, 139; Soviet 35, 135, 142 Baudelaire, Charles 74, 83-85, 88-89, 99, 101, 109, 112, 229 Bazgan, Nicoleta 200n11, 201 Bazin, André 60, 148n53, 168, 169n15, 171-72, 174-75, 182, 186 Beaumont, Matthew 21, 31-32 Belloi, Livio 34, 83-85, 88-89, 97-99 Benjamin, Walter 17, 19, 79-82, 148n53, 229; The Arcades Project 79, 90, 92, 102, 109-10; on Baudelaire 99, 109; on flânerie 18, 74, 101, 109. See also phantasmagoria Bergson, Henri 46-48, 54, 66-69, 228. See also Deleuze, Gilles; Marey, Étienne-Jules Bois-Reymond, Emil du 44-45 Braidotti, Rosi 36, 205-6, 211, 214, 216-17, 231. See also nomadism; nomadology Braun, Marta 51-52, 55, 58, 61 Bruno, Giuliana 17-18, 168, 187, 189-90 Buck-Morss, Susan 18-19, 34, 112, 124. See also walking: urban

capitalism 199; industrial/industrialist 15, 22, 78, 229 champ (on-screen space) 84, 92, 96-97 Chiarini, Luigi 171, 174 Christian Democrats 176, 188 chronophotography 33, 40, 44, 62-65, 68 cinécriture 202, 213, 216, 231 cinema 20, 73, 91, 96, 102, 114, 138, 144, 156, 170-71, 217; activism and 223-26; ­activist 133; Bergson on 69; city and 14, 16-17, 28, 34, 222; classical narrative 159; contemporary 157; Deleuze on 46-48, 168, 203; early 27, 86n48; engaged 116-17; of e­ nquiry 172; female imagery in 113; flânerie and 75, 89; flâneuse in 207n35; footwear in 233; French 201; French New Wave 36; history of 26-28, 227, 232 (see also film history); industry 111, 132; Italian 168-69, 174-76, 180, 230; as ­microscope 181-82; modern/­modernist 190-91; Muybridge’s technique and 52; neorealist 35, 167; new 188; pedestrian acts in 227, 232; pedestrianism and 17-18, 85, 221-22; as ­phantasmagoria 84; popular 120; ­projection in 90; race and 40; radical 137; of seeing 198; urban space and 28, 167, 169; Varda’s 203-6, 208, 214-16; Vertov’s 35, 136, 143, 146n49, 147-50, 152, 154-55, 157, 230; walking in 211, 228; Weber’s 109 (see also Shoes); women and 200 cinematic aesthetics 16, 26, 34, 73-75, 171-72; as activist endeavor 118; Bergson’s philosophy of movement 69; female pedestrian acts and 108; flânerie and 101; flâneur/flâneuse and 109; kino-pedestrian and 157, 160; of ­neorealism 175; pedestrian acts and 23134; of pedestrianism 48, 150, 228-29; Lumière 74, 83-85, 91; Varda’s 202, 211, 215-16; of walking 18, 20, 227 cinematograph 46-47, 67, 69, 77, 83; Lumière 34, 61, 73-74, 84-85, 89, 93, 95, 97-100, 149 circular travelling 36, 206 city, the 16-18, 22-25, 226, 228; cinema and 14, 16-17, 28, 34, 222; displacement and 192; female flânerie and 107; flânerie and 229; flâneur and 79, 89, 109, 112; flâneuse and 111, 116; pedinamento and 172; politics of space of 26; public space and 83; right to (Lefebvre) 25n25, 221, 223, 225; as striated space 204;

252 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Taylorism and 101; walking in 16, 19-20, 24, 32, 70, 74, 174n36, 176, 191-92, 227, 230-32; women and 110, 226, 229-30; working-class women and 128, 132. See also Germania Anno Zero; Roma, Città Aperta; Shoes Clair, René 14, 139; Paris qui dort 13-15, 19, 21-22, 70, 144, 146 class 98, 115, 234; bias 114, 128; bond 154; privilege 120 Cléo de 5 à 7 (Varda) 36, 201-2, 205-11, 214, 216-17 consent 166, 182-83 consumerism 35, 111, 209; female flânerie and 112, 131-33 contingency 15-16, 52, 70, 205, 213 Coronavirus pandemic: lockdowns 17; walking during 232 Croce, Benedetto 174, 180-81 Dagognet, François 55, 58, 60 De Certeau, Michel 23, 31, 74, 173n30, 232; everyday pedestrianism of 14, 227; The Practice of Everyday Life 21, 74; on ­walking 21-22, 24-25, 191-92. See also flânerie; pedestrian acts Deleuze, Gilles 32n51, 36, 45-48, 54, 69, 130, 149n58, 190, 202-5; on L’Année dernière à Marienbad 193n83, 198; becoming-music 210n44; bloc 182n57; on the body 208-9; holey space 186n68; on Italian Neorealism 168, 173-74, 192, 197-98; on Nouvelle Vague 197-98, 200; on Rosselini 176; time-image 231. See also any-instants-whatever; Bergson, Henri; nomadology Demenÿ, Georges 62-64 De Sica, Vittorio 170, 187; Umberto D., 172, 192. See also Ladri di Biciclette diagonal perspective/framing 85-87, 91-93, 95-99, 101 dialectical image 19, 82 displacement 22, 234; city and 192; Istanbul and 225; Italian Neorealism and 35, 176; Lumière filmography and 101; May ’68 and 35, 199; pedestrianism and 231; walking and 191; walking-shot and 199 distribution of the sensible (Rancière) 29-32, 35, 223, 227, 230 Doane, Mary Anne 15-16, 52, 58n56 drift 78-79, 84, 87, 92, 101, 156; abstraction of 159; aesthetics of 96-97 drifting prosthetic camera 157, 159, 230 editing 148; of Germania Anno Zero 181; parallel 137; of Shoes 124; Vertov and 143, 149-51, 153, 155-59 Eisenstein, Sergei 139, 171; Battleship Potemkin 138 Elsaesser, Thomas 27-28

emancipation 204; purchasing power and 114; of viewpoint 159; walking as 22, 24 Emek Theatre 224-25, 226f ethics 31; bourgeois 34, 115; middleclass 35, 116, 118 Eye Filmmuseum 116, 137, 139 fascism 165-67, 170, 173-74, 180-82, 192; ruins of 187 Fellini, Federico 35, 190-91 Feminist Night Marches 18, 225-26 film history 26-28, 101, 113, 135, 228-30, 232 Filmliga 137-39 film theory 17, 232; Italian Neorealist 146; montage in 150; psychoanalytical 18; Vertov’s 35, 136, 141, 146-47, 153-54, 160, 230; walking and 26 flânerie 18-21, 73-75, 78n18, 79, 88-89, 107, 107, 211, 214, 228-30, 232-33; Benjamin on 83, 109-10; in Cléo de 5 á 7, 202, 206-7, 209-11; female 18, 107, 109-12, 114-15, 128, 131-33, 211; as filmmaking practice 33-34; Hessel on 82; Lumière’s 35, 84-85, 87, 90, 98, 136, 147, 149, 159, 171; as method 88; in ­Nouvelle Vague films 193, 202; in Paris qui dort 14-15, 146; in Shoes 123; urban 36; Vertov and 150. See also Baudelaire, Charles; walking; wandering flâneur 33, 35, 79, 81, 89, 92, 101, 111, 147; Belloi on 83-84; Benjamin on 17, 19, 82-83, 102, 109-10; gaze of 112, 124; Lumière operators and 85, 98, 100; Lumière view and 99 flâneuse 19, 83n38, 109-11, 113-16, 129, 133, 147, 229; in cinema 207n35 Forgacs, David 175, 177-79 Friedberg, Anne 111-15, 124, 128-29, 207n35 Gaines, Jane M., 27 gaze 83, 90-91, 111, 207-8, 211; of ­cinema audience 100; commodified 133; embodied 90, 101, 109; female 112-13, 123-24; flânerie and 84, 101, 109; of the flâneur 112, 124; male 40, 112-14, 124, 200, 202; panoptic 22; virtual mobile 18, 114 gender 36, 117, 200-201, 234; Man with a Movie Camera and 154; representations of 116; segregation 108-9, 112; walking and 19-20, 25; women’s pedestrianism and 204, 217 Germania Anno Zero (Rossellini) 176, 180-86, 192, 231 Gezi Park 222-23, 225 Gilbreth, Frank and Lillian (Gilbreths) 76-78, 228 Godard, Jean-Luc 198, 221 Gramsci, Antonio 182-83, 192 Guattari, Félix 36, 186n68, 202-5, 210n44, 211-17, 231 Gunning, Tom 80-82

Index

Harvey, David 221-22 Hayward, Susan 200n11, 201, 213 hegemony 182; capitalist 224; ­cultural 190, 192; fascist 191 Heidegger, Martin 129-30 Hessel, Franz 74, 82, 229 historiography: cultural 133; feminist film 117; film 26-27; of French Cinema 201; of Hollywood 108; of ­modernity 110, 229; social 107, 111 Hitler, Adolf 184-85 hors-champ (off-screen space) 84, 92, 96-97 Huhtamo, Erkki 28, 41, 90-91, 94, 95n67 human body 39-41; as machine 35; in motion 59 human locomotion 33, 41-44, 48, 54, 56, 58n55, 77-78, 228 idling 15, 20 immigrants 232; in Italian Neorealism 35; in Paris 199 industrialism 76, 101; capitalist 16; modern 75 Italian Neorealism 167; wanderers in 35, 168, 172, 192 Italian School of Liberation 168, 171 Kaplan, E. Ann 112-13, 124 Kern, Leslie 18, 226 Kessler, Frank 26n26, 85n45 kino-apparatus 142, 146-47, 151, 153, 156-57, 159 kino-pedestrian 137, 147-49, 153, 155-57, 159-60, 171, 230 kino-pravda 136-37 Ladd, Brian 184, 186 Ladri di Biciclette (De Sica) 172, 176, 187-90, 192, 231 Langlois, Henri 89, 98 Lefebvre, Henri 16-17, 21, 24-25, 191, 221, 227, 232; theory of urban space 169. See also city, the; right to; space: production of legwork 170, 203, 234 Lenin, Vladimir 75-76, 78 Liberation (Italy) 167, 169, 174, 185. See also Italian School of Liberation liberation movements 17, 136 locomotion 43n13, 44, 78; anatomy of 41; animal 42, 69; human body and 40, 59; photographic images of 45. See also human locomotion loitering 19-20, 34, 132 lower-class women 34, 118, 232 Lumière: aesthetics of drift 96; L’arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat 85-87, 91, 93, 95; brothers (August and Louis) 34, 73-74, 91, 97; catalogue 33-34, 73-74, 86n48, 88-90, 92-93, 95, 97-98; city views 129; filmography,74-75, 101-2, 171; flânerie

253 and 90, 136, 147, 159, 171; Repas de Bébé 144; La Sortie d’Usine Lumière 88, 91; Vue prise d’un baleinere en marche 92, 93f 95-97; vues 90-92, 95, 101. See also cinematograph: Lumière; panoramas Lumière films 100-102; cinematic aesthetics of 74; flânerie and 84, 90; masses in 99; space in 96 Lumière operators 73-74, 83, 85, 88-89, 92-93, 95, 97, 143; ethnography and 102; flânerie and 34, 84, 229-30, 233; as flâneurs 85, 98-99; pedestrianism and 20 Lumière view 74, 84, 90, 98-101, 171, 229-30; diagonal framing of 87, 92; walking and 174n36 Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov) 35, 135, 137, 139-46, 149-52, 154-59, 226f 230 Marey, Étienne-Jules 33, 40-45, 47-48, 51, 54-69, 74, 77-78, 228; Animal ­Mechanism: A Treatise on Terrestrial and Aerial ­Locomotion 56, 57f 59f; Movement 44, 60, 62f 63n78, 64, 69; photographic gun 61, 62f. See also ­a ny-instants-­whatever; chronophotography Marshall Plan 169, 188n71, 199 Marx, Karl 143, 152, 159, 183, 233 May ’68, 35, 199, 200n10, 221 media archaeology 26, 28, 40-41 Méliès, Georges 95, 147n50 Michelson, Annette 14, 135, 143 Minghelli, Giuliana 184, 188 mobility 94, 101, 203, 214, 217; habits 25; ­Italian Neorealism and 192; kino-­pedestrian and 156; in ­Ossessione 173n33; in Roma, Città Aperta 180; in Sans toit ni loi 212, 214; ­social 119n40; spatial 75; ­structures of 74; urban 77; virtual 114; of women 108-9, 133, 206 modernity 16, 28, 171; capitalist 15, 52; consumerism and 111; flânerie and 79; historiography of 229; industrial 14, 17, 31, 70; pedestrian acts and 233; pedestrianism and 26; urban 14; women and 109-10 montage: Man with a Movie Camera and 140, 143, 155-56; Muybridge’s method of 48, 50; Soviet 20, 136, 147n50, 170; Vertov’s theory of 146, 149-52, 159, 170-71 Mouton, Janice 207-8 movement 15-16, 33, 41-52, 54-56, 58-70, 75-77, 79, 144, 145n47, 149n57, 156, 178; Bergson’s philosophy of 46, 48, 66-69, 228; bodily 44, 74-75, 78, 84, 136, 203, 228; cinematic 14; flânerie and 229-30; flâneuse and 129; Germania Anno Zero and 182; kino-eye 140, 142; lost interval of 51, 54; Lumière films and 85-87, 91-92, 95-96, 98-100, 102, 150, 171; Man with a Movie

254 

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism

Camera and 146-47, 151, 158; neorealist ­f lexibility of 179; optical reproduction of 43; of public space 25n25, 34, 74; real 66-68; restriction of 177, 190; Roma, Città Aperta and 180, 191; Sans toit ni loi and 215; smooth spaces and 202; study of 40-41, 51, 60, 63n78; Taylorism and 100101; unproductive 78, 100-101, 228; in urban space 21; Varda’s films and 216; women and 34, 36, 110, 204. See also Bergson, Henri; Deleuze, Gilles; Marey, Étienne-Jules; Muybridge, Eadweard; Weber brothers Mussolini, Benito 165-67, 175, 185, 190; fall of 174, 182; politics of public space 184 Muybridge, Eadweard 33, 40-42, 44-45, 47, 50-55, 59, 65-66; Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of ­Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements 49, 50f 53f-54f; human locomotion and 49, 54, 77; instantaneous photography of 45, 67, 228; Sallie Gardner at a Gallop 48; zoopraxiscope 45, 49, 64 neorealism. See Italian Neorealism nomadism 205-6, 213-14, 216; feminist 211, 217 nomadology 36, 202-3, 211-14, 217, 231 Nouvelle Vague/New Wave 36, 168, 193, 197-202, 217 Ossessione (Visconti) 172, 173n33, 175-76 panoramas 81, 90-91, 94-95, 101, 114 pedestrian acts (de Certeau) 23, 25-26, 28-29, 31, 35, 74, 227-29, 231-34; cinematic 17, 36, 200, 228, 234; double specificity of 24; female 107-8, 200, 217, 233; feminist 204, 217; in French Nouvelle Vague films 199200; in Shoes 230; urban 135; women’s 131 pedestrians 22-24; in Lumière films 84, 92, 94, 97, 99; in Man with a Movie Camera 145-46; in The Quest of the One Best Way (Gilbreths) 77; women as 200 pedestrianism 17, 19-20, 23-24, 26, 41, 49, 85, 110, 168, 172, 221-22, 228, 231-33; cinematic aesthetics of 34, 48; double specificity of 24-25; female 108, 111, 115-16, 123, 128; feminist 226; images of 18, 41, 168, 233; kino-pedestrian and 153; in Man with a Movie Camera 137, 141-42, 144-46, 159, 230; of neorealist characters 192; in Paris qui dort 15-16, 70; right to the city and 25n25; in Shoes 108, 118, 128, 132; as spatial act 199; urban 21; Varda’s filmography and 193, 202, 214, 217; Vertov’s montage theory and 149-50; women’s 18, 204, 229 pedinamento (Zavattini) 35, 146, 169-70, 172, 191, 231; in Ladri di Biciclette 187; Rosselini and 180

Peiss, Kathy 20, 116, 121-22, 132 phenakistoscope 61, 64 photography 60-61, 63n78, 76, 144, 148n53; ­instantaneous 33, 44-45, 48, 66-67, 228 (see also Bois-Reymond, Emil du; ­Muybridge, Eadweard); virtual gaze of 114. See also chronophotography; Gilbreth, Frank and Lillian physiology 43, 54 phantasmagoria 75, 79-84 political economy 32, 81; Marxist 137, 142, 152 politics of space 25n25, 26, 36, 84, 149, 204, 223, 227, 232 Pollock, Griselda 110, 112 production 16, 75-78, 143, 153, 228; of consent 182-83; of film 132, 136, 142, 153, 155-56, 158-59, 175; Fordist 199; ­industrialist model of 39; means of 18889; of social space 186; of society 137; of space 24, 81, 179, 191, 222, 232; Taylorism and 100-101; video 233; of woman as commodity 113 public space 74, 128-29, 167, 227-29; cinematic pedestrian acts and 200; Cold War and 187; construction of 160; fascism and 169-70; gendered segregation of 108-9, 112; Germania Anno Zero and 180, 184; Gezi Park uprising and 223-24; hidden structures of 162; Nazism and 185; pedestrianism and 23; political structuring of 199; Roma, Città Aperta and 181; urban 28, 35, 178; walking in 122; women in 18, 34, 108, 114-15, 118, 132-33, 201, 230-31 Pudovkin, Vsevolod 139, 171; Mother 138 race 25, 40, 234 Rancière, Jacques 16-17, 29-32, 117-18, 132, 227, 232. See also distribution of the sensible Regnault, Félix 40, 86 resistance 16, 24, 25n25, 166-67, 191, 206, 223; cinema and 224; drift as 79; ­political 205, 214, 232; spaces of 192; walking as 21-22, 211, 227 Roma, Città Aperta (Rosselini) 167, 172, 176-82, 185, 191, 231 Ross, Kristin 199, 200n10 Rossellini, Roberto 35, 170, 174, 176, 179-83, 185-86, 190-91, 199; Europa ’51, 172; Viaggio in Italia 168. See also Germania Anno Zero; Roma, Città Aperta; walking-shot rationalization 15-16, 22, 74, 76, 78, 149n57 Sans toit ni loi (Varda) 36, 202, 204, 206, 211-17 sex workers 19, 110, 167 Shiel, Mark 179, 189, 222 Shoes (Weber) 18, 107-9, 111, 113-29, 131-33, 145, 200, 217, 230; underpaid female labour and 32, 34, 118, 121

255

Index

shopping 34, 111-12, 114, 118 Shub, Esfir 157n82, 158 Slide, Anthony 108n1, 117 smooth space 36, 202-4, 213-16 social space 36, 131, 186; alternative 179; Nazi influence on 184; urban 107; walking and 191; walking-shot and 192 spatiality 33, 40-41, 54, 59-60, 63, 65, 70, 79 spatiotemporality: corporeal 70, 78-79; external 65 Stamp, Shelley 107, 108n1, 116-17, 119-22, 125 striated space 202-4, 206, 215 strolling 74, 89, 101, 108-9, 177; Baudelaire and 83; cinematic aesthetics of 73; purposeless 111-12; women and 110, 132 Stanford, Leland 44, 48 Stunde Null 185-86 Svilova, Elizaveta 140n35, 158 Tavernier, Bertrand 85, 144n46 Taylor, Frederick Winslow 76-79, 228 Taylorism 76, 100-101, 148-49n57 temporality 33, 40-41, 59-60, 63, 65-66, 70, 76, 78; abstract 52, 54, 65; in modernity 16 Tester, Keith 19, 83, 89 Thompson, E. P., 15, 76, 101 time 14-15, 75-76, 91, 95, 101, 147n49, 150, 229; abstract 47-48, 77, 79; cinematic 153 (see also walking backward); distribution of the sensible and 30; historical 18283; leisure 128, 145, 230; movement and 41-42, 51-52, 54-56, 60, 63, 76-79; objective 207; Rancière’s aesthetics and 31; rationalization of 15-16, 22; spatialization of 66; standardized 70; topoi and 41; in Varda’s f ilms 215; weight of 173n30. See also Gilbreth, Frank and Lillian; Marey; Étienne-Jean; Muybridge, Eadweard time-image (Deleuze) 69, 173n30, 231 time and motion studies: by the Gilbreth’s 7778, 228; by Taylor 76 Tomas, David 155-56 tracking shots 90; in contemporary cinema 157; in Italian Neorealist films 159; in Kino-Eye (Vertov) 153; in Les plages d’Agnes (Varda) 215; in Sans toit ni loi 213-14; in Shoes 125, 127 tramps: female 234; in Italian ­Neorealism 35, 172 tropes of voyage 168, 173, 176 Tsivian, Yuri 137, 140, 152-53 Turvey, Malcolm 148, 157 urbanism 17, 22, 152 urban renewal 22, 225 urban space 17, 21-24, 25n25, 28, 100, 200; in Germania Anno Zero 181; Italian Neorealism and 167, 169, 172, 192; in Nouvelle

Vague films 199; in Paris qui dort 14; pedestrianism and 222, 230; politics of 85; walking and 191; wandering in 107; women and 36 urban walking 18-19, 25n24, 28, 227, 233 Van Gogh, Vincent 129, 130f 233 Varda, Agnès 193, 201-17, 231; feminist cinematics of 20; Les plages d’Agnes 36, 202, 206, 214, 216-17. See also cinécriture; Cléo de 5 a 7; Sans toit ni loi Vertov, Dziga 20, 35, 135-55, 157-60, 170-71; ­aesthetics of 136-37, 143, 144n45, 148, 152-53, 157, 159; camera/kinok operators 136-37, 149, 153-54, 156-57, 160; cinema of 35, 136, 143, 146n49, 147-50, 152, 154-55, 157, 230; editing and 143, 149-51, 153, 155-59; film theory of 35, 136, 141, 146-47, 153-54, 160, 230; flânerie and 150; Kinonedelja 140-41; Kino-Eye 152-53; kino-eye theory 140, 142-43, 144n45, 144n47, 147n50, 150, 153-54, 159; Kino-Pravda newsreel series 140-41; pedestrianism and 159, 171, 183n59, 230; theory of montage 146, 149-52, 159, 170-71. See also kino-apparatus; Man with a Movie Camera walking backwards 36, 153, 206, 215 walking-shot 169; in Germania Anno Zero 181-84, 231; Italian Neorealism and 35, 176, 190-92, 198-99; in Ladri di Biciclette 188-90, 231; in Shoes 18 wandering 15-16, 21, 74, 101, 190-91, 197-98, 232; camera operators and 34, 89, 154; flânerie and 73, 107, 229; flâneur and 33; in French New Wave/Nouvelle Vague cinema 36, 193; in Germania Anno Zero 180-81, 186; Italian Neorealism and 167-68, 172-73, 192; in Man with a Movie Camera 145; in Paisà (Rossellini) 176; in Sans toit ni loi 202, 213, 217; walking-shot and 169; women and 34. See also Italian Neorealism: wanderers in Weber, Lois 108-9, 111, 115, 117, 119-21, 124, 133; activist filmmaking of 35, 116; feminist cinematics of 20; The Unshod Maiden 116-17, 119n40. See also Shoes Weber, Wilhelm and Edouard (Weber brothers) 43, 45 Wilson, Elizabeth 112, 115-16, 132 Wolff, Janet 34, 110-12, 115, 132, 229 working-class women 20, 113, 115-16, 118, 121, 128, 132 World Trade Center 21-22 Zavattini, Cesare 20, 35, 169-70, 172, 187, 189, 191, 231. See also Ladri di Biciclette; pedinamento