Cities and Film

Cities and film

•The city in Modernism

•The beginnings 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

George Simmel 

German sociologists 

Writes Metropolis and Mental Life in 1903

Influences critical theory of the Frankfurt School thinkers eg: Walter Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno and Horkheimer  

Invited to talk at the Dresden Exhibition   

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 

the resistance of the individual to being levelled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.

Urban sociology  

•         can see how high he is 

•         vulnerability in the images 

 

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

Form follows function 

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 

celebration of the city workforce 

workforce, scale of the manpower needed 

intermingling of transport and people 

Manhatta (1921) Paul Strand and Charles Scheeler

America built on immigration

Manhatta (1921) is a short documentary film which revels in the haze rising from city smoke

stacks. With the city as subject, it consists of 65 shots sequenced in a loose non-narrative

structure, beginning with a ferry approaching Manhattan and ending with a sunset view 

from a sky scraper. The primary objective of the film is to explore the relationship between 

photography and film; camera movement is kept to a minimum, as is incidental motion

within each shot. Each frame provides a view of the city that has been carefully arranged

into abstract compositions.

It was an attempt to show the film makers' love for the city of New York. The interspersed

title cards include exceprts from Whalt Whitmans poetry

 

Charles Sheeler

 fordism mechanized labor relations

 

Coined by Antonio Gramsci in his essay "Americanism and Fordism” of 1934

"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)

Episode looks at the work of artist/photographer

on the occasion of the introduction of the new Ford Model A. Sheeler was commissioned

to photograph the plant in Dearborn, Michigan as part of a larger $1.3 million advertising

campaign.

 Modern times charlie chaplin 

Mimicking the production line 

triumph of art over imdustry 

FBI spied on him believing him to be a communist 

Wrote directed and starred in

Modern Times 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.

 Stock Market Crash 

American Dream goes out the window 

Factories close and unemployment goes up dramatically

Leads to “the Great Depression”

Margaret Bourke-White   

Man with a movie camera 

Russian silent documentary film, with no story and no actors, by Russian director Dziga Vertov, edited by his wife Elizaveta Svilova. Accompanied by live music originally many contemporary versions of the soundtrack have been recorded

his film is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invents, deploys or develops, such as double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, stop motion animations and a self-reflexive style (at one point it features a split screen tracking shot; the sides have opposite Dutch angles).

Vertov strove to create a futuristic city that would serve as a commentary on existing ideals in the Soviet world. This imagined city’s purpose was to awaken the Soviet citizen through truth and to ultimately bring about understanding and action. Celebrates industrialisation mechanisation transport communication.  The camera has access to intimate moments bed/birth as well as public street life.  World peopled by mannequins.