Symphonies of Infrastructures: From City Films to Political Fiction

The city and its reflection play a special role in interwar avant-garde cinema. For the wave of city symphonies of the 1920s and 1930s, urbanity represents an emblem of modernity, an almost ultimate form in which the vision of modern life is fulfilled. Cities serve as collectors of various aspects of the modern world, they are its highest forms, while accelerating it at the same time. City films reveal connection between, movement, energy, rhythms, light, products, architecture and inhabitants. But is it possible to observe these characteristics of the modern era outside of urbanity itself? After all, there are a number of interwar films that use the same visual vocabulary to depict the modern world, but instead of cities, they capture factory operations, dams, energy production, transportation, and travel – in other words, infrastructures. It could be perhaps possible to interpret these films as a distinct genre. Similarly to later city symphonies, these works were often made to specific industrial commissions or as part of a social engagement, such as films associated with various state programs. They could therefore be seen as a tools of infrastructure policy. Although they may be just simple instructional or educational films, they are recognized for their cinematic quality, using the methods of developed film language, or they are directly commissioned to artistically acclaimed filmmakers of their time. This text suggests the term “infrastructure symphony” as a label for this type of film and will examine them as a specific communication tool in the 1930s and 1940s, following their transformation into documentary and educational genres at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, and their conclusion in the specific form of Eastern Bloc dystopian symphonies in the 1980s.

From City Films to Infrastructure Symphonies

As Yuk Hui recently pointed, the technology of modernity was not only a tool for the spread of knowledge, but also an instrument of political change.¹ The ideas of European modernity as an intellectual concept would have been nothing without its new architecture, machines, electrical grids and media. On the one hand, these are the outcomes of the new ideology, but at the same time the vessel for its dissemination. For Hui, modernity is rather a promise, or more accurately a trajectory towards a destination that is undoubtedly going to be fulfilled in the indefinite future.² And the same applies for the avant-garde film, its main media project. While it establishes an exclusive aesthetic position around the central notion of photogénie, it also acts as an instrument for the dissemination of modern infrastructures.³ The first urban films such as Manhatta (Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, 1921), Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse (Play with Reflections and Speed, Henri Chomette, 1925) and Twenty-Four Dollar Island (Robert Flaherty, 1927) are stylistic experiments with the cityscapes, but at least since Ruttmann’s founding symphony Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großtadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, 1927) the ideal genre form for strategic communication is established. From the beginning, avant-garde film was established on symbiotic relationships with industry and advertising, and after the success of Berlin, a particular style of visual storytelling was also adopted to communicate infrastructural themes that other genres struggled to communicate. In addition to films commissioned by municipalities, such as De stad die nooit rust (The City That Never Rests, Friedrich von Maydell and Andor von Barsy, 1928) made for the city of Rotterdam, films promoting infrastructure agendas began to appear, such as Praha v záři světel (Prague by Night, Svatopluk Innemann, 1928) for the Prague Electricity Company, or political commissions such as Ruttmann’s Metall des Himmels (Metal of the Sky, 1935) and Deutsche Panzer (German Tank, 1940).⁴

Infrastructural symphonies share with urban films an emphasis on mechanical elements, the movement of machines, new materials and surfaces, or a certain monumentality of technical architecture, such as cranes, factory buildings, dams, ships, or melting furnaces, and optical effects of omnipresent smoke. In these films, the infrastructures themselves are the ultimate object of value, usually not capturing the journey of a single product, but rather the potential for its creation. As modern technologies become more complex, relying on a single tool to achieve an effect is no longer enough. There are instead entire chains that combine technology with transportation, manufacturing and raw material extraction in which each plays a supporting and synergic role. Here, the enforcement of infrastructure policies is inevitable at any cost, while often depicting “human fight against nature” from which minerals and resources are forcibly extracted.⁵ They also illustrate the “struggle for optimisation”, with the element of time being essential. These films operate in the space of Fordist economy, where the temporal schedule controls the behaviour of human actors who form an anonymously working organism in perfect harmony with the surrounding machines. Occasionally, they use the borrowed schema of the narrative of a single day, or a single shift, or a production cycle.

Infrastructure symphonies is not an established term, nor this tradition rely on an iconic work in the way that urban films rely on Berlin. But their fixation on the structural relationships between production, man and the environment creates a clearly recognizable international style. This includes films that extend the concept of the city film, such as Melodie der Welt (Melody of the World, Walter Ruttmann, 1929), a commission from the transatlantic logistics corporation HAPAG with the layout of a classical symphony framed by a ship’s journey through exotic business destinations.⁶ Other emblematic examples would include films like Komsomol (Joris Ivens, 1933), a commission from the Moscow state production Mezhrabpomfilm about the construction of a giant steel plant and a new city in Magnitogorsk, and Power for the Land (Joris Ivens, 1944), a film about the electrification of rural America commissioned by the United States Film Services. The electrification of the Soviet Union in the 1930s is the topic of Komsomol – shef elektrifikatsii (Komsomol: Leader of Electrification, Esfir Shub, 1932), which build upon the tradition of the Soviet montage school. It can also include much of the British GPO’s production in the 1930s and 1940s, which covers the mail (Night Mail, Harry Watt, Basil Wright, 1936), telecommunications (Cable Ship, Alexander Shaw and Stuart Legg, 1933), London’s transport system (The City, Ralph Elton, 1939), coal mining (Coal Face, Alberto Cavalcanti, 1935) and colonial trade (The Song of Ceylon, Basil Wright, 1934). In the American context, there were films produced by the Office of War Information, such as The Valley of the Tennessee (Alexander Hammid, 1944), or Northwest U.S.A. (Willard Van Dyke, 1944), explaining the importance of building dams in rural areas.

These films are also related by a new mode of distribution. Although they utilize the cinematic language of the avant-garde, they are no longer a marginal genre intended for film clubs. They are seen as promotional materials with a wide reach, often outside film distribution, for example in schools and cultural centres. If city films were originally a laboratory experiments, infrastructural symphonies are part of state programmes of education or consolidation of national identity.

Interwoven chain of extraction, materials, and transportation for resources to finally reach the European consumer market. Still from The Song of Ceylon.

Infrastructural Power

As previously described, infrastructure symphonies served in the 1930s and 1940s as media instruments of infrastructure policy, which is a core design tool of both states and private actors.⁷ How the exercise of infrastructural power looks like in concrete terms is shown in Joris Ivens’ Power and the Land (1940) a film made to promote the policy of Roosevelt’s New Deal, a program that was intended to limit the effects of the Depression through the use of structural interventions. The film depicts a poor family farm that is not connected to the electricity grid, despite being near a major power line. However, it is not profitable for a private energy distributor to connect all the small customers. But everything changes when farmers in the area form a cooperative and build a transformer on their own. The availability of the power will radically change their way of life, introducing new types of farm machinery and appliances and providing access to running water. In typical manner for infrastructure symphonies, the film has a “before and after” schema in which the new modernist technologies replace elements of the old world and create new temporal and social relations. Meanwhile the countryside is the usual site where this struggle between the traditional and the modern world is performed and is conducted through infrastructural interventions. As can be seen, for example, in the famous montage sequence of Dovzhenko’s Zemlya (Earth, Olexandr Dovzhenko, 1930) promoting Stalin’s programme of collectivisation and the transition to a central controlled agriculture.

From rural landscape to modern infrastructure: horsepower replaced by electricity. Two stills from Power and the Land.

The aim of infrastructure policies is usually dominance, which allows for more efficient extraction. Developed infrastructures allow faster production, productive farming and the improved use of human labour. Infrastructures are not only technical but also biopolitical instruments. In addition to technologies, through modernist fictions they establish social, cultural and economic agreements. With their emphasis on efficiency and performance, they open up the potential for dehumanization and can be the foundation of infrastructural violence, a mechanism that incorporates political domination into material structures.⁸ After all, Power and The Land is an example of infrastructural violence in which residents in remote rural areas are denied access to electricity for economic reasons. Komsomol, another film by Ivens, demonstrates this much more explicitly. The film is set against the backdrop of a massive landscaping operation in Stalinist Russia, where the goal is to transform a remote rural area into the thriving steel city of Magnitogorsk.⁹ In the inhospitable conditions of the southern Urals, the Soviet administration attempted to replicate the successful model of a large American steel mills, literally on a greenfield, but in close proximity to an iron ore deposit. The first sequence of Komsomol captures a Kyrgyz shepherd calmly watching the gigantic mining explosion of the mountain range. The iron ore is then transported to the emerging city, where 35,000 inhabitants work to build a steel mill in extreme conditions, where temperatures reach 40 degrees Celsius both above and below zero. Ivens portrays workers from rural areas as they enthusiastically report for work, but the reality was more of a forced relocation leading to a form of forced labour. The original residents of Chelyabinsk who worked on the site also refused to inhabit the newly built modernist city and they insisted on living in traditional tents among the prefabricated houses. The steelworks project brought environmental and social disruption to the local community. After only seven years of operation, the town was closed and the population evicted. Ivens’ film describes the construction of the steelworks as a harmoniously growing modern infrastructure, seemingly detached from its political dimensions. His film emphasizes the monumentality of the construction, the beauty of the details of the structural elements, and the light and visual effects of smoke and shine. Although the film briefly portrays some of the workers, the workforce is more often a nearly shapeless material. Ivens was, in his own words, aware of the inequality that accompanied the operation, but simply chose to prioritise the immersive power of the gigantic infrastructure, which also served as an antithesis to the ongoing economic crisis, unemployment and workers’ protests in pre-war Western Europe.¹⁰ In the following years, the film was shown in wide distribution in Russia with considerable success as a major work of social art and earned the appreciation of the filmmakers of the montage school.

The Magnitogorsk factory complex photographed from Magnitnaya mountain. Still from Komsomol.

A particular type of infrastructural symphonies are films focusing on colonial trade and production. In the late 1920s, special film units were created in European colonies to produce a particular kind of film targeted at colonial audiences.¹¹ In the British context, this was the Colonial Film Unit, which existed as a separate section of the British GPO after 1940,¹² involving William Sellers and George Pearson; in the case of the Belgian administration of the Congo Louis Van Bever played a similar role. The Colonial Film Units promoted new concepts such as “Specialized Technique” (Sellers)¹³ and “Cinema for Africans” (Van Bever),¹⁴ aiming to translate infrastructural agendas for uneducated African audiences in a way they would be able to understand.¹⁵ Films produced under this doctrine were often formally simplified, using limited composition and footage with the idea that untrained audiences would more easily relate to them. They are thus formally different from the infrastructural symphonies that derived from avant-garde urban films, but their agenda and discourse are identical. Their aim was to communicate in a supportive way the productive and commercial exchange between the colonies and Europe and to emphasize the benefits of colonial trade for both parties. Whereas in European films the rural and the urban are contrasted, here the world of the colonies and Europe are in opposition. The hard manual labour is shown here as a natural part of a harmoniously interwoven chain of extraction, materials, and transportation, where resources travel through a series of production steps before finally reaching the European consumer market. Unlike European films, “before-and-after” patterns are generally not established, as the aim of colonial infrastructures was not to improve life in the colonies but to speed up the movement and extraction of raw materials towards Europe. Yet again, the human actors in this chain act in their places in a spirit of inevitable and predestined agency, which is reinforced, for example, by the characters of the emancipated local narrators. The topic of infrastructures resonates most strongly in films about the supply of particular raw materials, such as From Cane to Cube (David Villiers, 1950), which is about sugar production from Jamaican cane, and Consoling Weed (G. F. Noble, 1937), about tobacco harvesting in Rhodesia under the supervision of Europe. In some examples, there were specific commercial interests at stake, as in We Want Rubber (George Pearson, 1944), which aimed to increase rubber imports after a critical shortage of the raw material due to wartime developments in Southeast Asia. Finally, some of them deal with the development of entire large infrastructures, such as They Planted a Stone (Robin Carruthers, 1953), about a series of dams on the river Nile, which is an interesting parallel to the films discussed earlier here. Through the vehicles of idealised representations of extraction, labour, logistics and production, colonial films thus represent strategic tools for maintaining the geopolitical status quo.

A Symphonic Program for National Identity

Infrastructural symphonies exhausted their potential in the late 1940s, when their stylistic elements were adopted by other documentary genres. The city films were occasionally revisited by the post-war avant-garde, but films as Bridges-Go-Round (Shirley Clark, 1958), Wonder Ring (Stan Brakhage, 1955), N.Y., N.Y. (Francis Thompson, 1957), and Castro Street (Bruce Baillie, 1966) were more aimed at experimenting with the visual potential of the cityscape than its political dimension.¹⁶ Infrastructure symphonies as political tools found their natural extension in a new type of films designed for the World Expo, notably in Brussels 1958 and Montreal 1967. Much like the interwar period, this is an international style that has in many aspects evolved through a variety of innovations. These are no longer films with a clearly detectable political agenda, or films of an appealing type, as was the case in the war years. International exhibitions have brought a demand for a new type of communication of national values that integrates elements of culture, industry and commerce, without being didactic in effect. These films were not intended to promote specific products, but rather to manifest successful infrastructural development that was aligned with the idea of nation or national culture. In 1958, the World’s Fairs were seen as an ideological battlefield of conflict between the countries of the West and the Soviet bloc. Thus, the commissioning of the Expo programme was the result of complex negotiations between many protagonists, and its final form reflected balance of power and political aspirations.¹⁷ The Brussels Expo also showed that the agitational style was no longer viable, and that it was more than desirable to replace it with a more subtle form of promotion, not based on simple symbols, but rather on a sophisticated network of relationships between architecture, industrial and cultural objects and various media. This is why the Expo programs are sometimes referred to as “moderate modernity.” On the one hand, it absorbs modernist forms but tries to avoid the radicality of its message and the ethos of urgency. Cinematic content was only one element of the exhibition in which was not so much a question of what exactly would be exhibited as how spectacular and innovative the method of presentation would be. The cinemas at the Expo were therefore featured across the pavilions with innovative approaches to (multiscreen) projection. The Italian pavilion introduced the Aviorama immersive system, the Belgian Congo exhibit featured the Congorama scenic pavilion, the US displayed multi-screen projection Disney Circarama. The Soviet Union showed its own copy of the American Cinerama and the internationally acclaimed Czechoslovak Pavilion showed the Polyekran installation and the Laterna Magika.

The screening pavilions were generally designed to accommodate films that promoted national values informally through the successful fusion of industry and culture. Although this was to be a “soft” form of propaganda, everyone was aware that it was primarily a political assignment. For example, Adolf Hoffmeister, the librettist of the Czech exposition at Expo 58, on the one hand emphasised the political dimension of the exhibition, but at the same time stressed the synthetic effect of the whole pavilion, where each component should have its own symbolic value.¹⁸ As documented by correspondence, the negotiations included the requirements of individual departments and governmental authorities as to what specific products the exposition should or should not promote.¹⁹ The Expo represented a major political contract, which was consequently intended to appear non-political. The importance that the Czechoslovak government attributed to this cultural and diplomatic project is demonstrated by the ultimately unrealised plan to create a residence for industrial espionage within Expo 67.²⁰

The Laterna magika, a multi-screen set designed by set designer Josef Svoboda for the cinematographic section in Brussels, combined projection with live stage action. It featured a number of different films which shared an emphasis on the harmony of industrial production, dance and music, such as Obrázky z Československa (Pictures from Czechoslovakia, Ludvík Toman and A. F. Šulc, 1959). The following Expo 67 in Montreal, in a similar spirit, featured a pavilion called Symphony of Czechoslovak Industry, again designed by Svoboda.²¹ The projection environments of Diapolykran and Polyvision presented a series of films and hundreds of slides, focusing on the presentation of national cultural values in connection with industry and commerce. The major program was the multiscreen film Polyvize (Polyvison, Josef Svoboda, 1967) and Stvoření světa (The Creation of the World, Alfred Radok, 1967), depicting the creation of the world from an abstract matter to modern civilization, culminating in the interconnection of industry and nature. As Martin Bernátek points out, the subject of control and precision was crucial for Svoboda.²² His installations represent state politics as a complex phenomenon linking tradition and innovation. At the same time, it creates the very same effect through its technical form, a spectacle of complexity and elaborate interplay while the title of the pavilion refers directly to symphonic forms. Its purpose was to create a sense of harmonised texture by interweaving images, sounds and motion. In order to overcome the significant gap between heavy industry and ordinary life, Svoboda uses sometimes extremely contradictory staging practices involving images of children’s faces and female bodies, linking dancers and images of the chemical industry and heavy engineering, or attempting to transform images of industry into visual analogies to classical music pieces. In either case, this was a fictional world that had little basis in the real life of Czechoslovakia, as evidenced by correspondence from the production of the exhibition, which points to the fact that some of the proposed objects in the exhibition could not actually be produced.²³

Bodies and machines in Jaroslav Svoboda’s Diapolyekran.

In the context of the Expo, the Czechoslovak pavilion was not the only one where the form of infrastructural symphonies was applied. Inside the 1958 American pavilion ran a multiscreen series of short films, each embodying an aspect of American life. The producer of the series, Willard Van Dyke, commissioned Shirley Clarke, who filmed the footage together with Donn Pennebaker, Richard Leacock and Wheaton Valentine, and also edited the series known as Brussels Loops (1957). Each of the films has covered a topic of life in the USA, such as transportation, commerce, mail, construction, aviation and leisure and Clarke herself described the design of the films as a dynamic, jazz-like musical score.²⁴ The “soft” style, which organically combines images of “American life,” history, and nature, is found in other displays, such as America is Beautiful (1957) for Disney’s 360° Circarama, featuring a drive through American cities and countryside in various forms of transportation. Finally, a highlight of American trade fair film is To Be Alive! (Francis Thompson and Alexander Hammid, 1964) created for the S.C. Johnson Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Its story unfolds around a broadly stated “story of humanity” that, just like Melodie der Welt, shows the identical activities of life in different cultures around the globe. Johnson’s original intention was to make a film that would show the leisure activities in America after consumers began using their chemical products. Although the film finally did not feature any particular product, it brought the company significant cultural capital, the importance of which overshadowed the potential effect of mainstream advertising.²⁵

If the World’s Fairs were an extended Cold War battleground, the films made for them contrasted in their non-confrontational and harmonizing nature, centred around infrastructures as platforms for constructing a fictional world. Producing images of activities, national (or generally human) values that rely on tradition and culture and embody a particular lifestyle. While making use of the symphonic forms of the 1930s, they insert new and sometimes extreme stylistic figures of tropes, such as Svoboda’s juxtapositions of industry and the body. The symbolic language of these works may evoke the depiction of work and the body in socialist realism, or on the contrary in American scene painting, with both artistic movements characterized by the connection of realistic style and romantic nationalism. In these works, technological infrastructures are not depicted as agents of progress, but rather as support structures for the ideals of humanism, although at their core they communicate extremely political agendas. 

Dystopian Symphonies of the 1980s

If any film is generally considered to be the successor to the city film phenomenon, it would be Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1982).²⁶ Depicting an “America out of balance,” the film captures “one day in the American world” through various views of the cultural and natural landscape in a visually striking backward motion. While Reggio emphasized the film’s ecological appeal, contemporary critics initially received it with ambivalence, precisely with reference to the photogenic effect of the images, approaching popular nature photographs. The question is, however, what type of infrastructure does this film depict? Unlike the fair films of the 1960s, in which infrastructures serve as the support network of utopia, Koyaanisqatsi comes to a different era. Reggio started making the film in the mid-1970s, a time of deep economic crisis that escalated into the high inflation of the late 1970s and early 1980s, with accompanying effects including the decline of major American cities. Paradoxically, Reggio does not capture much of the crisis itself. His film arrives in cinemas in 1983, when, by contrast, a moderate economic upturn under the influence of Regan’s neoliberal policy started. This policy introduced a series of reforms leading to economic growth, but at the same time it removed a number of social and environmental regulations, leading to an accelerated extraction of natural resources. The ambivalence of Koyaanisqatsi thus lies in its both utopian and dystopian conception of infrastructures. Reggio aimed for an appealing film in which man and the environment opposed, he also stressed that it should be a work liberated from any commercial pressures.²⁷ On the other hand, the film portrays the American way of life in a highly aesthetic mode, including its technological dominance and high level of consumerism, which was unparalleled in many other countries. This comes also at a time of the ongoing decline of auteur films and growing audience interest in exploitative genres, which makes it an exclusive film not fitting into mainstream cinema distribution. Thanks to all these factors, the film was perceived in its time as a work with a distinct aura of auteur cinema with a strong underlying message amplified by its partial inaccessibility. After its festival release in 1982, Koyaanisqatsi received limited American distribution, mainly in arthouses and university theatres, but it came to wide awareness through festival screenings, including 1983 in Berlin, 1984 in Sāo Paolo, 1985 in Budapest, and 1988 in Warsaw. It was also a film frequently discussed in critical and academic circles and recognized as a continuation of the developmental line of city films phenomenon.²⁸

Popularity of Koyaanisqatsi in the late 1980s triggered a subsequent wave of short auteur films responding mainly to its ecocritical dimension. These were films produced in the Soviet Bloc countries as “Eastern Koyaanisqatsi” under the conditions of declining late socialism. It is, according to Keynesian economy, the infrastructures that create the so-called multiplier effect. Under this economic theory, infrastructure investment delivers automatic rewards in the form of a chain effect of economic growth. For Western countries, the application of the theory has meant substantial growth in times of economic crisis. What Koyaanisqatsi captures are the manifestations of economic growth such as urban electricity grids, complex highways, robotic manufacturing and the rise of consumerism, virtually all aspects in which the Eastern Bloc lagged behind. Based on the mechanisms of a state planned economy, Eastern socialism in the 1980s fell far short of the performance of American neoliberalism. The Eastern Bloc films that directly draw inspiration from Reggio’s film are rather its antithesis. They emphasize the absence of functional infrastructures, the fading modernist architecture, or monuments of power both physical in the form of statues and performative in the form of military parades.

Technological dominance and high level of consumerism in the US, unparalleled in many other countries. Still from Koyaanisqatsi.

These films were made in different countries and under different circumstances, but in all instances the filmmakers are from the opposition or counter-culture circle. In East Germany these include the films Raster+Psyche (Jana Milev, 1988), Report – Kommentar über einen Kommentar – Titus (Report – Commentary on a Commentary – Titus, Via Lewandowsky, 1987), Dresden: Eine blühende Stadt am Strom (Dresden: A Blossoming City on the Water, Via Lewandowsky, 1985).²⁹ Both Milev and Lewandowsky approach film from a fine art practice, or rather performance art. The central theme for them is identity and its relationship to authority and state power, in many cases manifested through the direct physical experience of the body. Their films are shot from a subjective position, often using a handheld camera as “gestural” interface for shooting that evokes the perspective of the citywalker. Here, the physicality of the body, its sensory experience and its vulnerability are tools for confronting the mechanisms of oppression and control embedded in both physical infrastructures and rituals of power. They refer specifically to Koyaanisqatsi, which Milev, for example, had the opportunity to see in that time at the Leipzig Documentary Film Festival.³⁰ While Reggio, following the spirit of the city film genre, depicts human society as an inarticulate mass or an organism made of bodies, Milev and Levandowski’s films, on the contrary, focus on individuality and subjective corporeality, which forms the contrast to the infrastructural dystopia. Lewandowsky, for example, shoots architecture representing the official centre of power in a distressed state and from the chaotic perspective of a pedestrian, alternating in his films with images of a military parade, a naked female torso, chemical production factory, fighter jets flyovers, and, through the use of the re-filmed TV screen, various personalities of world politics. Milev’s films juxtapose images of cities, industry, the military and close-ups of poultry slaughterhouse.

An example of a similar approach in Czechoslovakia is Na věčné časy (For Eternity, Pablo de Sax, 1986), which captures the impact of heavy industry on the natural environment. In 1960s fair films, the radical development of heavy engineering and chemistry was seen as a sign of social prosperity. In the 1980s, on the contrary, the industrial pollution was a frequent agenda of civil movements and led into citizen protests in several cities. Shortly after De Sax was introduced to Reggio’s film in 1985 at the Budapest Film Festival, he began work on a similar film later that year that would explore the dystopian state of Czech industrial towns. Filmed largely from a moving train, the film captures views of the decaying manufacturing plants around Prague and the lime factory in Králův Dvůr, combined with footage of popular festivals and the comics-like figure of the executioner. Meanwhile, the title of the film is a sarcastic reference to the slogan “With the Soviet Union for eternity,” which was part of the façade of one of the city’s factories in the centre of Prague.³¹

Heavy industry and fragility of the body. Two stills from For Eternity.

The final example of Eastern Koyaanisqatsi is Memories of a City (Peter Hutton and Andás Mész, 1984). This portrait of Budapest was co-produced by Béla Balász Studio and made by the American filmmaker Peter Hutton, the author of several previous urban films set in New York and other American cities. Hutton’s style of filmmaking was characterised from the beginning by compositional perfection, referencing avant-garde photography of the 1930s, and a focus on empty architecture to the point where his cities resemble ghost towns. In the case of Budapest, this approach is amplified by the obscurity of Stalinist monuments, the deserted boulevards and liminal urban corners in the architecture of the 1950s. Hutton captured Budapest as an empty city of monumental architecture frozen in time. The dystopian impression is reinforced by the night filming of most of the scenes, or the shots of the sleeping inhabitants of Budapest. In addition to its link to Koyaanisqatsi, the film can also be seen as the antithesis of the lesser-known commissioned city symphony Budapest fürdőváros (Budapest: City of Baths, István Somkúti and László Kandó, 1935).

Of course, during the 1980s in the Eastern Bloc there existed industrial films commissioned by the state to promote infrastructural agendas. The examples given show how this agenda was turned into an infrastructural critique driven from the perspective of political and cultural opposition. In particular, the mechanism of this inversion is the performative turn of the perspective back to the individual actors and their corporeality, often emphasizing the vulnerability in the face of the infrastructural violence of state power, which is represented through various signs as underdeveloped and declining, yet still powerful and threatening. What is remarkable about these films is that, although they focus on infrastructures and place the human perspective at the centre, they still retain the formal markers of a film symphony, or quote its visual themes, such as the night lights of cars, cityscapes at sunset, or close-up views of machines in operation. These are also films that were intended for a very particular type of distribution, shown in private settings in dissident circles, community film festivals, or as part of exhibition openings. Unlike the state infrastructure symphonies, their reach was limited and they were intended for specific audiences, although it should be noted that only state-controlled film distribution was standard in the Eastern Bloc in the 1980s.

Conclusions

By the late 1930s, infrastructure symphonies had become an effective tool for the transmission of state politics. They borrowed their language from the city films of the 1920s and 1930s and further transformed it into an international style that was used in various contexts in both the Eastern and Western worlds from the 1940s onwards. Its form partly merges with the rise of the documentary genres in the 1940s, in contrast to which it maintains to a certain point the typical form of a “musical composition of visual forms” as defined by city symphonies. They were successfully used to enforce infrastructural dominance and played an important role in promoting the technologies of the “new world“ of modernity as the counterpart of traditional pre-modern life. Frequently, they are aimed at the efficiency of mineral and energy extraction, or the efficiency of production and transport, with these mechanisms being of specific value on their own. Although their primary goal is the promotion of technical tools, they possess a strong ideological framework in which infrastructures often merge with ideas of the state and the nation. While the individuality of human actors is often suppressed, they implicate certain patterns of behaviour and value systems. These include an emphasis on temporality (e.g., fulfilling plans, delivering products or shipments on time), symbolic rewards (the status of “hero of labour”), or, through individual micro-narratives, the consolidation of geopolitical relations between Europe and its colonies. At the end of the 1950s, when their style of engagement was partly exhausted, their new form emerged in the form of films for world exhibitions. Although these are considered as “moderate modernism,” on the other hand they claim a modernist legacy through their formal construction and through the involvement of some already successful avant-garde artists. Their “soft” form of communication is expressed through infrastructure spectacles where themes of production, transport and consumer behaviour are mediated as part of national identity. At the same time, these films are designed for the political encounter between West and East in the Cold War conflict. For this purpose, they create infrastructural fictions linking themes of production with history and cultural symbols. Their significance ends with the period of economic crisis of the 1970s. At the end of the crisis, the film Koyaanisqatsi is an influential example of a next type of infrastructural symphony. For this film, infrastructures are still a central subject, but it adopts ambivalent attitudes towards them. Subsequently, this film has served as an important point of reference to ecocritical and politically oppositional auteur films made in Eastern Bloc countries, which again follow the format of the urban symphony but apply its devices as critical tools. The various uses of the genre of the infrastructure symphony illustrate flexibility of the originally modernist concept and how effective an instrument of infrastructural state politics it became, including its final turn towards critical and engaging positions.

Endnotes