ABSTRACT
In a 1933 lecture, Moholy-Nagy said of his Marseille film that he had a limited amount of material and thought it useless to try to present such a huge city in so few meters of film. Moholy-Nagy's first film strikes us with its harsh imagery of poverty in the slums of Marseille: a drooling clochard, people urinating in the streets, stray cats and loose dogs, dirt, open sewers, et cetera. The film includes footage of the lively boulevards filled with pedestrians, street vendors, cars, and tramways. In his Marseille film, Moholy-Nagy emphasizes the transparency of the bridge and plays on the contrasts between the sunlit squares and shadowy alleys, between dark interiors and sunny streets. Opening with an image of a Marseille street map in which the Vieux port part is cut out by a pair of scissors, Moholy-Nagy's Marseille film— an example of "semi-social reportage," as he put it— is the perfect synthesis of constructivism and social realism.
