Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week DOUBLE FEATURE: Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis! and Melody of the World!

Article theme: Speed of Life - David Bowie

Every list of "great films" features Soviet propaganda staple Man with a Movie Camera as its token silent, and it still makes for impressive viewing if, like an absolute pleb, you've never seen a city symphony before. Too bad it's a complete ripoff of experimental genius Walther Ruttmann's German kino Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, which dropped two years earlier and deserves all the credit for the template. Not that Berlin was the first city symphony of the silent era: 1921 short Manhatta mixed documentary footage of Manhattan with lame poetry, and Berlin itself was profiled in 1925's Die Stadt der Millionen. But Ruttmann's opus ditched intertitles altogether and took on the structure of a day, building from isolated trains at empty stations through the bleary mornings of street sweepers and paper deliverers through the explosive, swirling nightlife of a decadent metropolis.

We even drop in to the Tiergarten where this elephant siestas in the afternoon.

While Man with a Movie Camera features laughably clunky propaganda of young comrades shooting at cutouts labelled things like "UNCLE FASHISM", Berlin spells out no agenda, passes no didactic judgement on any particular subject. You can read into it whatever bullshit has been programmed into you, or simply view it as a frozen moment in history. Ruttmann followed up Berlin with the more wildly ambitious Melody of the World, which likewise sequenced clips as movements in a symphony without taking any particular stance toward its multifarious subjects. Melody combines footage from as far afield as "Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy, the United States of America, Holland, Greece, India, Siam, China, Japan, Panama, and Cuba", and packs in some kino match cuts beside its startling, intriguing and exotic depictions of recreations, fashions, religions, customs, conflicts, architecture and languages around the globe.

In fact, the only wholesome messagerino to slap you hard in the face is an earnest lament against the ugliness of war. Ruttmann would later serve as a frontline combat photographer and died tragically in the worst war of all, whose only purpose was to give today's warpigs rhetorical cover for their murderous crimes.

If it's so trite and unsubtle, how come you still haven't got the message?

But violence is only presented as one frayed thread marring the complex tapestry of life. The juxtaposition of images of comparable routines and rituals from different countries highlights as many differences as similarities, and renders the familiar as novel as the alien. The whole thing only further demonstrates how much more profoundly the love of humanity and curiosity about the world runs in problematic shitlords than in shitlib NPCs for whom travel pays off in status points among their bougie social cliques, to say nothing of how many wildly distinctive authentic cultures were still practiced less than a century ago, even in Europe.

I have no idea who these guys are but their Wayne's World headbanging routine is on point.

What does this guy write on his umbrella, and why? I don't know, and no voiceover or intertitle interrupts the moment to explain it.

Ruttmann has fun with the Kuleshov effect, splicing blatantly unrelated clips together to make it seem like the Monopoly guy was watching Southeast Asian Lordi rock the stage. The Kuleshov effect is understood intuitively by all template meme poasters, but clearly Kuleshov was so convinced it was his master breakthrough that it bears his name to this day, which is endearingly like if I dubbed 2+2=4 "Pat Bastard's Formula" or some shit.

And if Berlin and Melody constitute the perfection of montage cinéma, Ruttmann's early experiments like Lichtspiel Opus I-IV confidently blazed trails down which still other poseurs strolled, taking credit that was never theirs. Sure, they sort of look like screensavers now, but Ruttmann was so far ahead of the curve that everyone from his contemporary absolute-film dickriders to Stan Brakhage belong in a footnote to his bio. Use this knowledge to them-apples would-be hipster blowhards in your next /film/ flame war.

Moar phun with travel.

Many years ago I wrote a piece about how travel broadens the mind (and Warrington kills it). Looking back through my travel pix I noticed more unusual things worth sharing, so here it is.

This is literally the equivalent of show and tell, using the stuff you find in your pockets. I'm so burnt out :(

Sideways DVDs on sale in Spain.

So far as I can tell (after literally some research) this is only happening in Spain, and perhaps Spanish speaking countries. Why make sideways DVDs? Well, why make vertical ones? And for that matter, why put the North Pole at the top of the map? Why not the bottom, or even the side? And then it hits you: in the whole wide universe, which way is up? The way our magnetic north faces? But why? And then you picture rotating the universe on its head, just because of a weird promotion in a Spanish mall. When I said travelling expands your mind, I meant it in the drugs way.

Things I learned from Berlin:

-Their little green crossing man wears a hat

-At least one mall has a toilet that rotates and cleans the seat

-There's a man dressed as the Predator (or the Predator himself) outside the Brandenburg Gate:

The best clock in the world: as the man's sword arm drops, the globe rotates, leaving the monkey pointing to the current hour.

See that strip of green in the distance? That's the fabled Green River melon fields.

Every year in September Green River, Utah, hosts a Melon Days festival, during which the town swells to literally thousands of people. Highlights include a large carved effigy of a melon slice being carted through the town as a float. I was so sad I couldn't make it this year that I went to the movies instead.

The toilets in Sun Studio are shaped like guitars.

This is so cool, it makes me want to spend even more time on the crapper, preferably reading Tim Gautreux and listening to "Walk the Line" or "Mystery Train". Goddamn I love America (srs).

Travel broadens the mind (Warrington kills it).

Ever since the womb, I've hated flying. Flying is when you wait twelve hours to get shoved into less space than a bus, between a great big fat person and the one window seat that doesn't have a window, only after getting molested by jackbooted throwbacks who used to beat you up in school. I'd rather travel by Cuban refugee boat: seventeen twigs held together with rubber bands and prayer and a crew of wild-eyed desperadoes paddling with their dicks. The good news is, flying can take you to places in other countries, specifically that aren't Warrington.

Vans around the world: New York and Barcelona. Note that in Spain, Garfield bears the eight-pointed Star of Chaos.

Everywhere I've been around the world has had something interesting to show, except Warrington. Some have thought-provoking art and history, others beautiful scenery, or unique culture, or wildlife, or even inexplicable craziness like this:

Berlin statues, left to right: Boy staring melancholically at armadillo; holy shit!

Dicks on sale in Barcelona.

Even cool things can be found in unexpected places: Green River, Utah, which is basically a truck stop, five houses and two joggers (source) has a sweet cool museum about John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Confederate Civil War veteran who mapped the Colorado River, losing nearly all his crew in the process. This is exactly the kind of thing you could drive past and never know.

Pictured: Green River + entire population.

The great mad bastard himself.

Warrington is the worst place on Planet Earth. In a survey of over 100 squirrels, not one person recommended Warrington as a tourist destination. The only recognisable picture of Warrington you'll ever see is of these big gates:

Looks impressive...until you go there, and there's nothing to either side of them. Spread the word: Warrington crops.

Warrington's top attraction.