Journal of Film Preservation - FIAF

Four City Films
Donald McWilliams
Historical Column
Chronique historique
Columna histórica
We carry our human ghosts around with us.
As we grow we face the mirrors, and see
The spectre of a great-aunt, a vague look
Known only from sepia snapshots. The hands we’re used to –
Yes, these – their contours came by way of a long retinue
Of dust. We are photofits of the past,
And the future eyes us evasively as we eye ourselves.
We are the ghosts of great-aunts and grand-nephews.
Le “city film”, un presque genre, a encore
de beaux jours devant lui, si l’on en
croit le texte que le cinéaste Donald
McWilliams consacre à quatre films
récents se réclamant de cette étiquette.
Mais si Berlin, symphonie d’une grande
ville (1927) de Ruttman, considéré, sans
doute à tort, comme le premier film du
genre, fait le portrait d’une ville telle
qu’elle était au moment où le film fut
tourné, les films dont il est ici question
font le portrait aujourd’hui d’une ville
telle qu’elle fut autrefois.
Faisant lui-même fréquemment usage
d’archives dans ses films, l’auteur
examine les œuvres en question avec
un œil intéressé autant que critique.
Et il définit ainsi le défi qu’affronte
le cinéaste : dépasser la surface des
choses pour nous faire comprendre la
réalité qui se cache dans ces images
d’une autre époque.
Les trois premiers films dont nous parle
McWilliams utilisent le cinéma en tant
qu’histoire, non pas, comme le fait
couramment la télévision, pour illustrer
l’histoire. Qui plus est, ces trois films,
exploration éminemment personnelle
de l’histoire, sont l’œuvre de cinéastes
sensibles et talentueux.
La Mémoire des anges (Luc Bourdon,
Québec 2008) a été bâti à partir de
120 films (plus du matériel d’archives)
produits par l’Office national du film
du Canada dans les années 50 et 60.
Savamment montés (avec alternance
presque imperceptible du noir et blanc
et de la couleur), sans commentaire,
mais utilisant la bande sonore originale,
ces films constituent un récit, à savoir :
20 ans de la vie de Montréal. La
musique, notamment les chansons,
We are the ghosts of what is dead and not yet born.
From Seven Types of Shadow - Seven poems by U.A. Fanthorpe
Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927) is the most celebrated of the
genre “the city film”, although it is far from being the first. Recently, part of a
45-minute film, Living London (1904), has been found. In the past year, three
new city films have been released on DVD, and a fourth release features one
that has long been unavailable. The first three are La Mémoire des anges, on
Montréal, Of Time and the City, on Liverpool, and Helsinki Forever; and the
fourth, The London Nobody Knows. The first three films share one important
difference from those early city films. They were films made then on the city
as it was then. These new films are films made now on the city as it was then
– reflections by 21st-century filmmakers. Perhaps one impulse for these
films is the greater accessibility of archives in recent years. That has been
engendered in part by digital developments and the possibility of restoring
and presenting old footage in greater fidelity.
I use a lot of archival material in my own films, and I do it nervously. I
wonder if there is a certain “easiness” in the use of archives. Susan Sontag
once wrote that “aesthetic distance seems built into the very experience of
looking at photographs, if not right away, then certainly with the passage
of time. Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most
amateurish, at the level of art.” I think this also applies to old film footage.
Removed from its context by many years, it becomes something else. In
addition, one is often seized with an inexplicable nostalgia in the face of
footage and images from the past; and then, there is the feeling, as Johan
van der Keuken pointed out, that although these events were recorded in
the past, the movement brings these events and people into the present –
and so are happening now.
There is therefore the challenge to the filmmaker to get below the surface
and give us insights into the events within that old footage. He must give
us a reason for watching the footage that is not simply nostalgic (although
that is not to be sneezed at!). What I see in these three films is something
important. Film being used as history, not film being used to illustrate
history as one might get from a conventional TV documentary. And this
57 Journal of Film Preservation / 81 / 2009