Megacities

Megacities, 1998 by Michael Glawogger

A couple of things brought me out of my assumption that I was going to watch a vérité documentary –which I think tends to be clear about the hand held camera yet attempts to deny the effects of the camera and filmmaker’s involvement with the subject.

In the opening sequence in Mumbai the camera is above street level and follows the bioscope man and the crowd of children until they stop walking. Then the frame widens a little and settles on the action below. I do not think that this scene is spontaneously set-up. I was wondering where the camera even was and how it got there. It looked cinematic –as in fiction cinema. It also reminded me of the camera work of Bollywood musical scenes on the streets.

The movie becomes increasingly darker and grittier. Perhaps the scenes in Mumbai and Mexico City are a mixture of desperate poverty and static unhappiness and also some playfulness –with the bioscope man, the fisherman who’s reason for living is going to the cinema and the Mexican street vendor couple who does slow but agile ballroom dancing in their spare time.

With the introduction of Moscow and New York City, two comparatively colder and darker (literally less sunny and colorful than Mumbai and Mexico, D.F.) I found beautiful images in atypical places. Either despite or because of the pervasive bleak sadness of Moscow and NYC, there are at least two poetic sequences of combined sounds –speech and city noises- and images. In the Moscow sequence, which uses trains repeatedly, there are shots of people reading books on a nighttime train ride from work to home. The sounds are people, not shown, reading excerpts from different texts –fiction and nonfiction, some about the worker and industry, others about internal life and questions of the human spirit, newspapers and erotic fiction. These lighthearted contrasts of serious and not texts made me feel a departure from the strife of a factory workday. The life of the mind is a form of escapism. This sequence also makes me think about post-Soviet Russia and the lifting of many cultural censors. I wondered if the opportunity to read whatever one wants in public was a new right?

The second sequence of sound-image in New York City highlighted the city’s roughness and individualistic survival while also showing a connection among all of the city’s inhabitants. This comparison between the Moscow and NYC sequences suggests that the Moscow one also represents a common spirit of the people through their reading. In NYC a radio host asks the question, “What do you do to survive in the city?” We see the radio host for a few shots and also people listening to this radio show in their apartments. Most unnaturally for my idea of a regular documentary (whatever that is now… I have no idea!), we enter a liquor store and a woman buys some beer. The radio show is being played there and she hears the host say, “We haven’t heard from any women yet. What does a woman think about this questions?” She exits the store and goes to a pay phone outside. She calls the radio show and answers the question. Now, this had to be planned to be captured on film. But for me, that did not make the actions in this sequence less “real”. It illustrates through editing sound and image what seems to be a nearly universal feeling of love and hate for the city –a feeling of isolation and entrapment along with “the world at one’s finger tips” (for only the few…).