Cities and Film COP

Lecture 4 – Cities and Film

Helen Clarke – 8/11/2012

Lecture looks at:

- the city in modernism

- the possibility of an urban sociology

- the city as a public and private space

- the city in postmodernism

- the relation of the individual to the crowd in the city

Georg Simmel (1958 – 1918)

-       German sociologist

-       Writes metropolis and mental life in 1903

-       Influences critical theory of the Frankfurt school thinkers eg Walker Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno and Horkeimer

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 and individual

Herbert Barer Lonely Metrololitan 1932

Urban sociology

The resistance of the individual to being leveled, swallowed up in the social technological mechanism

Georg Simmel The Metrolopis and Mental Life 1903

Architect Louis Sullivan (1856-1924)

Creator of the modern skyscraper

An influenctial architect and critic of the Chicago school

Carsom Pririe Scott store in Chicago (1904)

Sky scrapers represent the upwardly mobile city business opportunity

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

Fordism: mechanized 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”

In 1936, Charlie Chaplin wrote directed and starred in Modern Times. It portrays Chaplin as a factory worker, employed on an assembly line. After being subjected to such indignities as being force-fed by a "modern" feeding machine and an accelerating assembly line where Chaplin screws nuts at an ever-increasing rate onto pieces of machinery, he suffers a mental breakdown that causes him to run amok throwing the factory into chaos.

Gets accussed of being a communist, goes to jail, meets a girl, ends up working as a waiter ends up performing a kind of pantomime which is a hit and saves the day for the two of them.

Stock market crash 1929

Factories close and unemployment goes up framatically

Leads to the great depression

Margatet Bourke White

Man with a movie camera (1929)

Walter Benjamin

Adopts the concept of the urban obsetver as an analytical tool as…

Photographer as Flaneur

Susan Sontag On Photography

The photographer is an 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 flaneur finds the world ‘picturesque’

Flaneuse

The invisible Flaneuse. Women and the literature of Modernity

Janet Wolff

Theory, culture and society November 1985 vol. 2 no. 3 37-46

Susan Buck Morss. Suggested that the only figure a woman on the street can be is either a prostitute or a bag lady.

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)

Always turns up at murder scenes, minutes after the crimes to get the first pictures and publish them

The naked City – 8 million stories

LA Noire (2011)

The first video game to be scown at the Tribecca Film Festival

Incorporates ‘motionscan’ wherer actors are recorded by 32 surrounding camera to capture facial expressions from every angle. The technology is central to the games interrogation mechanic, as players must use the suspects’ reactions to questioning to judge whether they are lying or not.

L.A. Noire is set in Los Angeles in 1947 and challenges the player, controlling a Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detective, to solve a range of cases across five crime desks. Players must investigate crime scenes for clues, follow up leads, and interrogate suspects, and the players' success at these activities will impact how much of the cases' stories are revealed.

As the title suggests, the game draws heavily from both plot and aesthetic elements of film noir – stylistic films from the 1940s and 1950s that shared similar visual styles and themes including crime, sex, and moral ambiguity and were often shot in black and white with harsh, low-key lighting. The game uses a distinctive colouring-style in homage to the visual style of film noir, including the option to play the game in black-and-white. The post-war setting is the backdrop for plot elements that reference the detective films of the '40s (as well as James Ellroy's novel L.A. Confidential and the Curtis Hanson film based on it), such as corruption and drugs, with a jazz soundtrack. L.A. Noire is also notable for using Lightsprint's real-time global illumination technology, as well as Depth Analysis's newly developed technology for the film and video game industries called 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 mechanic, as players must use the suspects' reactions to questioning to judge whether they are lying or not.

L.A. Noire was the first video game to be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival. Upon release, the game received critical acclaim.

Cities of the future/past – Fritz Lang Metropolis (1929)

Ridley Scott Bladerunner (1982/2019) LA

Very retro, set in Noire style with 1980s edge to it, and predicting the future.

Lorca di Corcia Heads (2001) NY

 Private/public

Case with orthodox Jew

Walker Evans Many are called (1938)

Postmodern City in photography: Joel Meyerowitz Broadway and West 46^th Street NY 1976

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

Adam Bezer 2001

Liz Wells says that phrase is seen in an article by Stuart Allen Online News: Journalism and the internet 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 19^th century saw the automation of picure making, in the 21^st century we now now seek machines to look at pictures on our behalf”.