one Asian under a groove

Frans Masereel - The City

The similarities between the woodcut-print collection Die Stadt (1925) and the city symphonies that were briefly popular around the same time are probably indirect but not coincidental. The development of montage surely suggested a large organism could be depicted by visualising its components, and the city was the least abstract of the new species artists felt it necessary to depict. Masereel pulls off tricks of perspective you’d think were impossible for live cinema to match, unless you’ve seen Man with a Movie Camera. The woodcutter’s advantage, then, is subject: Masereel got away with a much less rosy view of sex and death than anyone who had to get past a state film board. He gives as comprehensive a pro-working class picture of Weimar Berlin as has any artist.

(via captain-sonic)