Lecture 4: Cities and Film (Helen Clarke Thurs 8.11.2012)

This lecture looks at...

• The city as a part of Modernism
• The possibility of an urban sociology 
• The city as public and private space 
• The city as a part of Postmodernism
• The relation of the individual to the crowd in the city

Investigating how the city is a figure in photography and film, we'll be looking at how the city is portrayed in Modernism & how it's used as a public space but at the same time experienced privately by individuals.

Georg Simmel - German sociologist - Urban sociology, Writes Metropolis and Mental Life in 1903 Influences critical theory of the Frankfurt School thinkers eg: Walter Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno and Horkheimer.

Georg Simmel. What he does in his literature is write about the intellectual life in the city but actually turns that idea round and writes about the effect of the city on the individual. "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"

Simmel, recognises the whole kind of negotiation with the physical environment and other people and how this effects your collective, fragmented body.

The resistanceofthe individual to being levelled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.
—Georg Simmel The Metropolis and Mental Life 1903 

Lewis Hine - projected this theory in a different way, documented by nature. Very vulnerable body in relation to the technological mechanism, the theme is based around the relationship between the body and city, investigates the resistance of humans and how they negotiate with their surroundings.

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 

Louis Sullivan - Form follows function - Artistically considered. His buildings are very reflective and organised in a way that dictates how a person would move through a building. 

Charles Scheeler // River Rouge, Detroit (1927) - Commissioned to photograph the Ford Motor Company's plant, they represent the industrial site in a very abstract manner, almost a celebration of the steel forms and their arrangements. Also looked at how the factories effect the people that work there. How the body almost becomes a part of the body in a factory, mechanical in nature, people are working in this manner in order to profit maximise. Its not just about producing the goods but providing them with enough money to purchase what they've constructed. 

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” (De Grazia: 2005:4) 

Charlie Chaplin plays on this factor in 'Modern times' (1936) His boss ends up being trapped in one of the machines following a critical point of view, portraying the body being swallowed by machines...could this be a political message?

Flaneur - Upper class frenchman... the term flâneur comes from the French masculine noun flâneur—which has the basic meanings of "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer"

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 idea of the urban observer, uses it as an analytical tool, applies these idea to his own writings, a critique of modernity and the experience of it, how the cities used by people and how to maximise these 'experiences' for people in order to purchase and stimulate consumer desires. 

(Arcades Project, 1927–40), Benjamin’s final, incomplete book about Parisian city life in the 19th century. Berlin Chronicle/Berlin Childhood (memoirs) 

Susan Sontag - Experiences the city as oppose to just taking notes - Stealing images from society, moments to identify with individuals, empathising with their characters. Susan Sontag On Photography The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitring , 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) 

As the figure of the 'Flaneuse' is observed, Janet Wolff is trying to expand on the infamous debate, targeting how women feel. The literature of modernity, describing the fleeting, anonymous, ephemeral encounters of life in the metropolis.

Automat 1927 - dwarfed by the urban environment, the lighting gives us an idea of the vastness, swallowed into darkness with a larger proportion of black draped around her figure - Sophie Calle follows the same fundamentals, presented as a series of 'diary entrants' recording her journeys, following & stalking strangers.

Venice// Example of where architecture invites a certain type of character. 'Don't look now' adopts this idea...Concept;  Women looses her child, thinks she see's the child everywhere, cleverly plays with time, are we seeing her imagination or her primary viewpoint...

This kind of detective motif also comes up in Sophie Calle's other work, she becomes the followed as they both photograph each other. 

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 - Isolated figure in an urban environment - kind of ERA implied by the style of clothing, Could be 70/80's? "I wanted to take photographs that were identified as mysterious places in order to project a personal experience, choosing locations that looked similar to so many others."

Here is New York - An attempt to Democratise the process of image making - Is this life imitating art or is it art imitating life?

Weegee// Arthur Felig - Press photographer - Signature style - Always appeared at the incident of an emergency, Minutes after crimes were committed, 'Weegee / Naked City' = Literature. Fundamentals echoed in the video game - L.A.NOIRE.

Cities of the future - Metropolis// Depicts a futuristic city as Ridley Scott also does, mixing the past and future to create a very strange, mixture of typical post-modernism, a very retro style with a fairly 90/80s edge to it.

Photographs - facial expressions are hard to pin down, almost representations of interior life mixing with the urban life, sense of bewilderment.

Public/ Private... 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 

Adam Bezer 2001 - Liz Wells says that the phrase was 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.

Citizen Journalism - A vague theme of democratisation, the destruction of the twin towers - the destruction of the American dream, it was previously 'untouchable'. Joining together of the body and city in the most dramatic and horrific way.

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."

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 

The Myth of Progress - 'The Dialectics of Seeing'

Walter Benjamin, rejects the premise of progressive development, he criticizes Darwinian natural selection because it makes people think that progress is automatic and he also blames natural selection for making the idea 'progress' seem related to all human activity. "Progress" is demonstrated as a positive outcome here: and natural history in Benjamin's eyes, does not necessarily have to have a positive outcome, moreover, it might not have a social outcome because class relations might stay the same although there is a progress in terms of industry, and technology vice versa (Buck-Morss, 1991). So if we could accept that progress is automatic and ordered then we would be able to say that natural history should be accepted as it is and it is God given, also human beings are not responsible for the history they make. Thus Benjamin's work has a political side which asserts that, blindly accepting this myth of progress would be dangerous for people since it would make people ignore what is not progressing, and make people accept a situated bourgeois discourse which covered up class inequality. According to Benjamin, the world fairs and new urbanism served the same purpose; former did this by creating some kind of "utopian fairyland" full of expositions which showed this historical progress and the latter modified the streets and buildings which deluded the proletariat as if Paris was a city of equal people. Benjamin wrote that the state's purpose was to prevent any revolution that might have arisen from the lower class (Buck-Morss, 1991).

Benjamin sees Paris as the "capital of nineteenth century" and "a looking glass city", which becomes the dream world of a newly emerged capitalist society. This is a world made out of "commodity fetishes" (Buck-Morss, 1991).

What he describes in Passegen Werk is the changing city of Paris full of people with the illusion of unity in front of the "myth of progress", which is the city exactly where "heaven on earth" is created. Then he creates another metaphor in his mind, which is "modernity, the time of hell". What he means by this metaphor is a situation where the "newest" doesn't change and comes with a "sadistic craving for innovation" (Buck-Morss, 1991). Benjamin probably means that there is always a "newest" that shifts from one commodity to another until it drives the person who desires the "newest" crazy. Moreover he might be referring to a continuous meaning generation and the simultaneous and actual lack of meaning in things. Since it is the people who construct the meanings of objects, we are the ones who attach meaning to the dazzling new object which might lose its light in our eyes pretty soon. It is always us, who make ourselves believe in its value, and again it will be us who will think that it is outmoded, and when this object would lose its value is determined by the "measure of time" as Buck-Morss calls it, which is fashion.

http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/The-dialectics-of-seeing-Walter-Benjamin-and-the-Arcades-Project.php

Modern Dreams 

Displaying how the ambitions of visionary artists and architects helped America remove itself from the shadow of Europe and become the most advanced civilisation on earth.

"In the second part of his fascinating journey exploring American art, Andrew Graham-Dixon gets under the skin of the modern American metropolis. Starting his journey at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, which he describes as a pioneering early skyscraper, Andrew discovers how the ambitions of visionary artists and architects helped America remove itself from the shadow of Europe and become the most advanced civilisation on earth.

Andrew travels to downtown Manhattan to explore the grimy world of early 20th century painters John Sloan and George Bellows, and visits Stockbridge in Massachusetts to find out how the world of Norman Rockwell is not as sentimental as it first seems. In Chicago, he explores the visionary mind of architect Louis Sullivan and travels to the decaying outskirts of the city to see the underside of the American dream.

He uncovers the impact the Great Depression had on artists such as Edward Hopper and Arshile Gorky, and finds out how this struggle inspired America's first internationally-acclaimed art movement - Abstract Expressionism. He pays a pilgrimage to Jackson Pollock's perfectly-preserved studio in Long Island to discover the secrets of his unique drip technique, before flying across America to take in one of modern art's most moving experiences, Mark Rothko's chapel in Houston, Texas."