Duck Soup & Der Lauf der Dinge

The Marx Brothers' movie Duck Soup can be considered an intervention on the traditional narrative structure of cinema as it had been established to that point. For one thing, it is difficult to consider any of the characters -- even any of those played by the Marx Brothers -- as protagonists. Each of the characters is presented as a broad caricature with a loose set of motivations that gives them a reason to be part of the plot. These character goals almost invariably put them at odds with every other character. Only two pairs of characters operate with any sort of cooperation, those being the ambassador and the famous singer, as well as the characters played by Chico and Harpo Marx. And in the case of the latter, the cooperation is haphazard and uncoordinated (at least as characters) at best.

But even in these circumstances, the adherence of the various characters to their goals and motivations is tenuous at best; few, if any, opportunities to make a joke or prank at the expense of forwarding the narrative go unused. The narrative itself becomes a mockery of normal continuity. Since none of the characters are really intent on seeing their goals through, the sequence of events that define the plot tend to be either simplistic or outrageous.

To me, it felt much more like the movie was merely a vehicle for carrying the antics of the Marx Brothers to the silver screen. I consider characters and plot progression to be the core of any movie I am prone to enjoy. Since those aspects of this film are specifically abused, I found it very difficult to engage in Duck Soup.

If Duck Soup is an exercise in destroying the normal cause and effect of narrative, then Der Lauf der Dinge ("The Way Things Go") is an exercise in building a narrative where one would never expect to find one. This film was made by Swiss film makers Peter Fischli and David Weiss, and it features a massive linear machine that recreates the same sort of incidental complexity of Rube Goldberg's famous cartoons. The basic nature of narrative -- that is, a series of events in which one follows as a direct consequence of one or more events before it -- is made visible and tangible by a collection of wheels, jugs, pans and levers.

While it is easy to make the superficial assumption that the elements of the machine in the film are simply arranged as a matter of convenience, I got the vague sense that there was a theme to the sequence in which one machine element triggers the next. I would actually liken Der Lauf der Dinge to the visual equivalent of a symphony, with its "notes" (the individual gimmicks for transferring kinetic energy from the previous to the next) that are arranged in sensible patterns. The machine is divided into "movements" (long sections which repeat specific gimmicks in a theme, such as "weighted wheels" or "ignition sources") that experience fast rhythms and slow, crescendos and decrescendos of kinetic energy. The movements are given identifiable transitions, which to me seemed to be the large chemical pans which took several extra moments to foam up and spill over (and also giving the artists a practical place to pause the filming -- I suspect that each "movement" of the machine was assembled and filmed seperately, and assembled via editing to grant the illusion of one long, contiguous assemblage).

In many ways, the two films Duck Soup and Der Lauf der Dinge are complimentary images of one another. One seeks to deconstruct a sequenced narrative into a haphazard collection of gimmicks, while the other seeks to construct a haphazard collection of gimmicks into a sequenced narrative.