Lecture Notes: Cities & Film

helen.clarke@leeds-art.ac.uk

Cities & Film

The lecture looks at modernism in the city. Urban sociology. The city as a public and private space, the city in postmodernism.  And the relation of the individual to the crowd in the city

Georg Simmel 

German sociologist. Wrote 'metropolis and mental life' in 1903. Influenced critical theory of Frankfurt school thinkers, people like Walter Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno etc

Presented pioneering analyses of social individuality

Dresden Exhibition

1903.

Simmel asked to lecture on intellectual life in the city but reverses idea and writes about effect of city on individual. 

Herbert Bayer lonely metropolitan 1932. 

Coined the phrase "Form ever follows function:

"Skyscrapers represent the upwardly mobile city of business opportunity"

America built on immigration.

Manhatta 1921. Short documentary film revels in the haze rising from city smoke stacks. City as subject. 65 shots sequenced in a non-narrative structure.

Modern Times (1936) by Charlie Chaplin.

Wrote directed and starred in. Chaplin plays factory worker on assembly line. Being subjected to stuff like force-fed by a "feeding machine" and an assembly line he can't keep up with anymore. Chaplin snaps and runs around doing chaois. Gets accused of being a communist, goes to jail, meets a girl, becomes a waiter and becomes a pantomime performer to success.

Stock Market crashed in 1929. Mass unemployment, closure of factories. The Louisville Flood 1937.

Russian silent documentary film. Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

No story and no actors. Accompanied by live music.

'Flaneur' - Frenchc masculine noun, meaning 'lounger', 'saunterer', meaning "to stroll" in French. Being a bit of a Flan. Bourgeois.

Charles Baudelaire  - French Poet. Proposes a version of the flan, a person "who walks the city in order to experience it".

Walter Benjamin - The concept of an urban observer as an analytical tool. Similar to Victorian arcades in Leeds. Cafe society, for the bourgeoise of Leeds to sit around and enjoy the city and drink and eat expensive food. Flan about.

Harmonising the environment with the human experience of the city.

Following strangers in the street. For the pleasure of following them. Photographing without knowledge. Voyeuristic.

"I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd. That very evening, by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice.’ Frieze magazine

First game to be shown at Tribecca Film Festival.

Set post-war, noir style of filmmaking referenced.

Blade Runner. 1982. Dystopian future, references Tokyo, neon lights. Comments on the future, commercialism, modernism, mass production and technology with the idea of humanoid replicants walking next to us.

Fredrick jameson Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Verso, 1991

Eye is overwhelmed by signs. Doesn't know where to look, confusion. Overloaded culture, overload of information and exposure to selling. Consumerism. No sense of tradition, or community. No proper traditional buildings that are inviting.

Destruction of Twin Towers - destruction of the American dream?