Cities and Film

Helen Clarke
helen.clarke@leeds-art.ac.uk

The city in modernism
The possibility of an urban sociology
The city as a public and private space
The city in postmodernism
The relation if the individual in the crowd in the city

Georg Simmel 1858-1918
- German sociologist
- writes Metropolis and Mental life in 1903
- influences critical theory of the Fankfurt School thinkers
- asked to lecture on the role of intellectual life in the city but instead reverses it and writes about the effect of the city on the individual

Urban Sociology
- the resistance of the individual ti being levelled or swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism – The Metropolis and Mental Life
example – Lewis Hine 1932

Architect – Louis Sullivan 1856-1924
- creator of modern skycraper
- coins the phrase 'form follows function'
- writer of 'The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered'
- detail in Guaranty Building – physical and visual organisation of the building

Carson Pirie Scott store in Chicago 1904
- skyscrapers represent the upwardly mobile city of business oppurtunity

Manhatta 1921 Paul Strand and Charles Scheeler
- unstructured as such – a series of shorts played consecutively and interrupted by quotes and stills

Charles Scheeler
- Ford Motor Company's plant at River Rouge, Detroit 1927 – hired to paint the building, celebration of the building's form as opposed to the work that happens within it

Fordism: Mechanised Labour Relation
- coined by Antonio Gramsci in his essay “Americanism and Fordism”
- essentially mass producing low cost goods and giving decent wages to buy the products they are making – constant cycle of making and buying

Modern Times – Charlie Chaplin 1936

Stock Market Crahs of 1929
- factories close and unemployment rises
- leads to 'The Great Depression'

Man With a Movie camera Dziga Vertov 1929
- silent film showing various new types of filming and editing skills that has otherwise been unused or unheard of
Flaneur
- the terms comes from a French masculine noun which has the basic meanins of stroller, lounger, saunterer, loafer etc which in turn comes from the French meaning of 'to stroll'

Charles Baudelaire
- extends this idea to give the flaneur a creative purpose
- 'a person who walks the city in order to experience it'

Walter Benjamin
- adopts the concept of the urban observer as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle in his writings
- Arcade Project 1927-1940 – book about Parisian city life in the 19th century, his final and unfinished work
- Berlin Chronicle - Berlin Childhood memoirs

Photographer as a Flaneur
- Susan Sontag On Photography
- ' the photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker...the flaneur finds the city picturesque'

Flaneuse
- The Invisible Flaneuse – Women and the Literature of Modernity
- Janet Wolff
- Theory, Culture & Society November 1985 vol. 2 no. 3 37-46
- the idea that the literature is based on and for men almost exclusively and that this should not be the way

Susan Buck-Morss
- the concept that the only 'lady' on the street is presented as either a prostitute or a homeless person
- one extreme or another

Arbus
- Woman at Counter Smoking, NYC 1962

Hopper
- Automat 1927

Sophie Calle – Suite Venitienne 1980
- essentially stalks a man around Venice, romanticises the story making a fictional attachment to the man

The Detective 1980
- wants to provide photographic evidence of her existence
- his photos and notes are on display next to her photos and notes about home
- set in Paris and again fictionally romanticised

Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Stills 1977-1980

Weegee Arthur Felig
- documentary of murder and injuries involved in police investigations in New York
- intercepted police radio signals in order to get to scenes quickly

The Naked City 1945 – collection of photos
The Naked City 1948 – Film Noire film based around the narrative from the previous photos
La Noire 2011
- the first video game to be shown at the Tribecca Film Festival

Cities of the Future/Past – Fritz Lang

Ridley Scott – Bladerunner

Lorca di Corcia Heads, NY 2001
-series of photos of police offers,criminals, businessman etc taken in secret with a tripwire set up for lighting and and taken from a great distance with a telephoto lense
- give the images a film still quality taking the individual out of the crowd and making them seem separate from the crowd
- One of the subjects, Ermo Nussenzeig an orthadox Jew, was against his photograph being taken and published against his view – this was taken to court and fell in favour of the photographer due to its presentation of art

Walker Evans Many Are Called 1938
- concealed cameras to take unknows pictures of city dwellers

Postmodern City
- suggests the city as a place to get lost in – not dissimilar to the example of Vencie mentioned earlier

Postmodern City in Photography – Joel Meyerowitz
- vivid colour and lack of composition gives an impression of being lost and enveloped in a city
- documenting the chaos of the city in some ways

9/11 Citizen Journalism – the end of the flaneur?
- Liz Wells talks about this and the effect of disasters or terrorism on individuals and the concept of citizen journalism
- results in the end of the flaneur and the unity of all of the people within the city

Surveillance City
- terrorism has resulted in much higher levels of CCTV and documentation, in theory for our safety but also as a means of constantly watching us – links with Panopticism