Lecture Notes - Cities and Film

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

George Simmel 1858-1918
German sociologist who wrote Metropolis and Mental Life in 1903
Dresden Exhibiton 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
How you negotiate traffic, other pedestrians etc
Herbert Bayer Lonely Metropolitan 1932
Fragmented subject, fragmented body - surrealist, influenced by psychoanalysis and Freud

Urban Sociology
Lewis Hine 1932
Picturing a vulnerable body in relation to the vastness of the city
George Simmel: 'The resistance of the individual to being levelled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.
How to survive it, or adapt to it.

Architect Louis Sullivan 1856-1924
Creator of the modern skyscraper.
Guaranty Building
Organic decoration influenced by the arts and crafts movement
As Sullivan's work progresses, he works on the modernist principle of form following function.
Beginning to dictate how people use the space he creates.

A fire in Chicago in 1871 cleared buildings, giving Louis Sullivan the chance to create new aspirational buildings. Skyscrapers represent the upwardly mobile city of business opportunity.

Charles Scheeler worked at Ford Company. Commissioned to photograph the plant at River Rouge, Detroit.
Abstract images of industrial forms. Arrangement of the forms in space, influenced by the art of the time.
Fordism: mechanised labour relations
A phrase coined by Antonio Gramsci in his essay "Americanism and Fordism".
"The eponymous manufacturing system designed to spew out standardised, low cost goods and afford its workers decent enough wages to buy them"
A repetitive cycle in which you work to buy the products you produce.

Modern Times (1936) Charlie Chaplin

Stock Market Crash of 1929
Factories close and unemployment goes up dramatically
Leads to the "Great Depression"
An extreme between the haves and the have nots.

Flaneur
French word, means stroller, lounger, saunterer, loafer - upper class gentleman. Has to have time to observe and stroll around the city.
Idleness deemed as creativity.

Charles Baudelaire
The nineteenth century poet Charles Baudelaire proposes a version of the Flaneur that of a person who walks the city in order to experience it.
The idea that art should capture it.

Walter Benjamin
Adopts the concept of the urban observer as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle as seen in his writings.
Berlin Chronicle/Berlin childhood

Photography as Flaneur
Susan Sontag
Photographer armed version of the solitary walker, stalking and cruising the urban inferno, a voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.
Street photography - Paul Strand modernist street photography.

Flaneuse
The invisible Flaneuse. The experience of a woman in the city.
Janet Wolff
Theory Culture and Society November 1985 vol.2 no 3 37-46
Women didn't have the same freedom as men to walk around experiencing the city. Flaneur fails to describe the female experience.

Susan Buck-Morss
The Dialietics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades

Arbus/Hopper
Woman at the counter smoking NYC 1962
Automat 1927
By themselves, in a vast space. Overwhelmed by the space.
Sense of forboding. Sense of dread, anticipated negativity.

Sophie Calle Suite Venitienne 1980
Photographer

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
Snap shot moments of an isolated individual in a vast urban setting.

Shots of the world trade centre.
Doesn't look like New York, mysterious, unidentifiable locations. The individual projects their own images into the image themselves.

Postmodernism

LA Noire
Incorporated MotionScan, actors were recorded the capture facial expressions from every angle. You as the player must investigate and judge the people you meet to see who is responsible for the crimes being committed. Set in LA in the 40s/50s.

Ridley Scott Bladerunner - Mix between the past and the future, LA in 2019.

Walker Evans Many are Called (1938)
Concealed camera
People going about their daily business
Haunting quality

Postmodern City