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

Task 4 - Essay Propposal

Title
- A discussion on the works of photographer Ryan McGinley in relation to the definitions of portraits and nudes.

Points
- Basic definitions of the terms nude and portrait and introduction of photographer
- Nudes as an object - Berger
- The presentation of an image and its effect on the way it is received
- Artists own feelings
- Implied nudity
- Neither definition is applicable - snapshots?
- Specific series - Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
- Photographs

Book List
- Ways of Seeing, Berger
- The Nude, Clark
- Arts in Society, Rayner, Berger, etc
- Photography After Fank, Gefter
- The Pleasure of Good Photographs, Badger
- How to Take Good Pictures, Kodak

Possible images to explore

Walter Benjamin and Mechanical Reproduction

Richard Miles

Walter Benjamin – The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Frankfurt School – Critical Theory
University of Columbia New York, 1933-47
University of Frankfurt, 1949
others – Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Lowenthal

‘The Ancient Craft of the Beautiful’
‘In Principal the work of Art has always been Reproducible’ – Guttenberg Press
Manual Production/Technical Reproduction
- reproduction results in the demeaning of the value of Art

Technological reproduction of art removes –presence, authenticity, authority – Aura

Taken to another stage by digital reproduction an the internet
- best example – The Mona Lisa – reproduced worldwide in various ways and forms, defaced and even put onto t shirts and tea towels etc
- ruins your impression of it – no longer, ‘look at this piece of artwork’ but more – ‘its that photo I saw on a coffee mug’
Dependant on the copies you have seen and creating your own interpretation of the given art work

Cult Value
essentially putting something onto a pedestal
art galleries – not dissimilar in architectural values to that of religious buildings
large stairs, lifted from ground level, plinths etc
Rothco’s depressing paintings, followed by his suicide, crying ritual in Tate

Louise Lawler – ‘Pollock and Tureen, arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine, Conneticut’, 1984
Warhol – Marilyns, 1962

To an even greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility

Taking a photograph of a photograph, demeaning the original picture
Walker Evans, Hale County, Alabama, 1936
Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans, 1979

the internet changing out interpretations of the world?
The Mongrel Project - hacked the Tate website and replaced artists pictures to that of syphilitic sores, text also replaced

The Cult of the Beautiful

Exhibition Value
The invention of photography meant that painting had to change, it was threatened with irrelevance, thus resulting in a move away from realism in painting and an attempt to revive its aura

Ad Reinhardt
‘Abstract Painting’, 1960-1961

‘Mechanical reproduction changes the reaction of art, the reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into a progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert.’
Collective Experience

Meaning can be produced at the point of consumption, consumption is political?

‘A pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are consumed by their worries…, a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence…, which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other than the ridiculous one…’

‘Communism responds by politicizing art’

Key Points
- Aura
- Originality
- Cult Value
- Exhibition Value
- Auratic Culture to Democratic Culture