Our Life Together: Collective Homemaking in the Films of Ella Bergmann-Michel

Abstract

‘Persil – for all washing’. Consider a photograph of a painted advertisement for laundry detergent, emblazoned on the side of a multi-storey building and caught in the late afternoon light (Fig. 1). The brightest highlights come from the white lettering for the product and its slogan, as if to testify to the very power of the powder. The asymmetrical design enlivens the flat expanse of its architectural support and makes the rendering of the Persil packaging pop out in high relief. The kinship between these abstract forms and the blocky typeface show that the same angular units, differently configured, can serve as both text and image, field and vector. The grey vertical that bisects the advertisement works against the directionality of the text, and as our eyes follow it from top to bottom, these flattened forms start to move in and out of spatial depth, appearing adjacent on the same plane in one glance, and stacked and floating in another. Of course, the entire wall supporting this advertisement is itself canted against the picture plane of the photograph. This difference exaggerates the animation of the design, but as we look from left to right, it also encourages the photographic image to echo and reinforce the play between flatness and depth. Through it, we see how the modernity of the new typography belies the stubborn persistence of existing architectural form. This is not an architecture of glass transparency and intersecting planes, but instead an expression of bourgeois solidity held over from the previous century. Once the sun sets, a gas light will still illuminate the streets.