Lecture 4 Cities and Film

Cities and Film    

• The city in Modernism

• The possibility of an urban sociology • The city as public and private space • The city in Postmodernism

• The relation of the individual to the crowd in the city

Georg Simmel (1858- 1918) 
• German sociologist
• Writes Metropolis and Mental Life in 1903
• Influences critical theory of the Frankfurt School thinkers eg: Walter Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno and Horkheimer

Dresden Exhibition 1903

• Simmel is asked to lecture on the role of intellectual life in the city but instead reverses the idea and writes about the effect of the city on the individual

• Herbert Bayer Lonely Metropolitan 1932

Lewis Hine (1932)

• theresistanceofthe individual to being levelled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.

• —GeorgSimmelThe Metropolis and Mental Life 1903 

Urban sociology

Lewis Hine (1932)

• theresistanceofthe individual to being levelled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.

• —GeorgSimmelThe Metropolis and Mental Life 1903
 

Architect Louis Sullivan (1856- 1924)

• creator of the modern skyscraper,

• an influential architect and critic of the Chicago School

• mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright,

•Guaranty Building was built in 1894 by Adler & Sullivan in Buffalo NY

Details from Guaranty Building  

Carson Pririe Scott store in Chicago (1904)

• Skyscrapers represent the upwardly mobile city of business opportunity

• Fire cleared buildings in Chicago in 1871 and made way for Louis Sullivan new aspirational buildings

Charles Scheeler

Ford Motor Company's plant at River Rouge, Detroit (1927) 

Fordism: mechanised labour relations
• Coined by Antonio Gramsci in his essay "Americanism and Fordism”
• "the eponymous manufacturing system designed to spew out standardized, low- cost goods and afford its workers decent enough wages to buy them” (De Grazia: 2005:4) 

Modern Times (1936) Charlie Chaplin

Stock market crash of 1929
• Factories close and unemployment goes up dramatically
• Leads to “the Great Depression”

• Margaret Bourke- White

Flaneur

• he term flâneur comes from the French masculine noun flâneur—which has the basic meanings of "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", "loafer"—which itself comes from the French verb flâner, which means "to stroll"

Charles Baudelaire

• The nineteenth century French poet Charles Baudelaire proposes a version of the flâneur—that of "a person who walks the city in order to experience it".
• Art should capture this

• Simultaneously apart from and a part of the crowd

Walter Benjamin

• Adopts the concept of the urban observer as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle as seen in his writings
• (Arcades Project, 1927–40), Benjamin’s final, incomplete book about Parisian city life in the 19th century
• Berlin Chronicle/Berlin Childhood (memoirs)


Photographer as flaneur

Susan Sontag On Photography

• Thephotographerisan armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.' (pg. 55) 

Flaneuse

• The Invisible Flâneuse. Women and the Literature of Modernity

• Janet Wolff

• Theory, Culture & Society November 1985 vol. 2 no. 3 37-46
The literature of modernity, describing the fleeting, anonymous, ephemeral encounters of life in the metropolis 

Susan Buck-Morss, 
in this text suggests that the only figure a woman on the street can be is either a prostitute or a bag lady. 

Arbus/Hopper

Woman at a Counter Smoking, N.Y.C. (1962) Automat (1927)

Sophie Calle Suite Venitienne (1980) 

Venice

• City as a labyrinth of streets and alleyways in which you can get lost but at the same time will always end up back where you begin

• Don’t look Now (1973) Nicholas Roeg

The Detective (1980)

• Wants to provide photographic evidence of her existence

• His photos and notes on her are displayed next to her photos and notes about him

• Set in Paris

Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Stills (1977-80) 

Here is New York book/exhibition

Weegee (Arthur Felig)   

The Naked City    

LA Noire (2011)

• the first video game to be shown at the Tribecca Film Festival

• Incorporates “MotionScan”, where actors are recorded by 32 surrounding cameras to capture facial expressions from every angle.The technology is central to the game's interrogation 

Cities of the future/past- Fritz Lang Metropolis (1929

Ridley Scott Bladerunner (1982/2019) LA 

Lorca di Corcia Heads (2001) NY    

In 2006, a New York trial court issued a ruling in a case involving one of his photographs. One of diCorcia's New York random subjects was Ermo Nussenzweig, an Orthodox Jew who objected on religious grounds to diCorcia's publishing in an artistic exhibition 

Walker Evans Many are called (1938)

Postmodern City in photography: Joel Meyerowitz

Broadway and West 46th Street NY 1976

9/11 Citizen journalism: the end of the flaneur? 

Adam Bezer 2001    

LizWellssaysthatphrase is first seen in an article by Stuart Allen Online News: Journalism and the Internet in 2006. She discusses the 7/7 bombings in London and the immediacy of the mobile phone images which recorded the event as commuters travel to work. These images were online within an hour of the event. 

Surveillance City

• “Since the attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in 2001 and the ensuing ‘war on terrorism’ there has been an enormous ramping up of investment in machine reading technologies. If the nineteenth century saw the automation 

Stills from the video, Untitled, 2003, by Runa Islam shown in the Intervention exhibition 2003, John Hansaard Gallery. Islam uses BBC news footage of the collapse of the World Trade Centre, 11 September 2001. Slowed down and in reverse, the back to front collapse

Further Research • Cityscapes of modernity: critical
explorations
By David Frisby
• Art of America: Modern Dreams (2/3) Andrew Grahame Dixon BBC 4 21/11/11
• De Grazia, Victoria (2005), Irresistible Empire: America's Advance Through 20th- Century Europe, Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
• Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades