LECTURE NOTES - CITIES AND FILM

• The city in Modernism.
• The beginnings of urban sociology.
• The city as public and private space.
• The city in Postmodernism.
• The relation of the individual to the crowd in the city .

Geirg Simmel - 1858-1918

• german sociologist
• Metropolis
• Dresden Exhibition - 1903
• Talks about the effect of the city on the individual - reverse of what he is asked to lecture on.
• Same time as Freud's first essays/lectures

URBAN SOCIOLOGY

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

Lewis Hine - 1923 

Architect Louis Sullivan - 1856-1924

• Creator of the modern skyscraper
• Influential architect and critic of the Chicago School
• Mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright
• Coined the phrase 'from follows function'
• Guaranty Building

Carson Pririe Scott store, Chicago

• Skyscrapers represent the upwardly mobile city of business opportunity.
• Fires cleared building in Chicago in 1871 and made way fo aspirational new buildings.

Charles Scheeler

• Was commissioned to photograph the plant in Dearborn, Michigan as part of a larger $1.3 million advertising campaign. 

Fordism: Mechanised labour relations

• Antonio Gramsci
• "The eponymous manufacturing system designed to spew out standardized, low-cost goods and afford its workers decent enough wages to buy them'
• Sought to gain maximum productivity with minimum effort through repetitive mechanical action

Modern Times (1936) - Charlie Chaplin
Triumph of art over industry

'In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him' (Marx cited in Adamson 2010 p75)

STOCK MARKET CRASH OF 1929

• Factories close and unemployment goes up dramatically.
• Leads to 'the Great Depression'.

Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

• World as a machine

FLANEUR

• stroller
• lounger
• saunterer
• loafer
• bousiore figure of literature
• walks around the city and experiences from a removed point of view
• an observer
• class defined

Charles Baudelaire

• "A person who walks the city in order to experience it"
• Simultaneously apart from and a part of the crowd.

Walter Benjamin

• Adopts the concept of the urban observer as an analytic tool and as a lifestyle.
• Arcades Project - 1927-40

Photographer as Flaneur

Susan Sontag

"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 flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.'"

Being allowed to look.

Daido Moriyama - 1970's - Shinjuku district of Tokyo 

Sacination with the darker side of the city.
Pursuance.
Investigation of Americanisation in Tokyo.
Influenced by William Cline.

FALNEUSE

Janet Wolff - Theory Cilture & Society Novembe 1985 col.2 no. 3, pages 37-46

"The literature of modernity, describing the fleeting, anonymous, ephemeral encounters of life in the metropolis, mainly accounts for the experiences of men. It ignores the concomitant separation of public and private spheres from the mid-nineteenth century, and the increasing segregation of the sexes around that separation. The influential writings of Baudelaire, Simmel, Benjamin and, more recently, Richard Sennett and Marshall Berman, by equating the modern with the public, thus fail to describe women's experience of modernity. The central figure of the flâneur in the literature of modernity can only be male. What is required, therefore, is a feminist sociology of modernity to supplement these texts."

Susan Buck-Morss

The Dialects of seeing: walter Benjamin and the Arcades

Women are either bag ladies or prostitutes.

ARBUS/HOPPER

Woman at a Counter Smoking NYC (1962)

Automat (1927) 

Sophie Calle - Suite Venitienne  - 1980

‘For months I followed strangers in the street. For the pleasure of following them, not because they particularly interested me. I photographed them without their knowledge, took note of their movements, then finally lost sight of them and forgot them.

At the end of January 1980, on the streets of Paris, 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

VENICE

City as a labyrinth - Can get lost in but at the sames time will always end up back where you started.

Don't Look Now - 1973 - Nicholas Roeg  

The Detective - 1980

'Detective (1980), consisted of Calle being followed for a day by a private detective, who had been hired (at Calle's request) by her mother. Calle proceeded to lead the unwitting detective around parts of Paris that were particularly important for her, thereby reversing the expected position of the observed subject. Such projects, with their suggestions of intimacy, also questioned the role of the spectator, with viewers often feeling a sense of unease as they became the unwitting collaborators in these violations of privacy. Moreover, the deliberately constructed and thus in one sense artificial nature of the documentary ‘evidence' used in Calle's work questioned the nature of all truths'

Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Stills - 1977-80

Film Noire

Weegee - Arthur Felig

Weegee worked in the Lower East Side of New York City as a press photographer during the 1930s and '40s, and he developed his signature style by following the city's emergency services and documenting their activity.

nickname: a phonetic rendering of Oujia, because of his frequent, seemingly president arrivals at scenes only minutes after crimes, fires or other emergencies were reported to authorities.
 

Originally from the Ukraine.

Weegee developed his photographs in a homemade darkroom in the back of his car.

The Naked City

1945

1948

L.A. NOIRE - Video games

Metropolis (1929)

Bladerunner (1982/2019)

Lorca Dicorcia - Heads - 2001

Photographer has a ticket/passport into other peoples lives.

Public/Private

•In 2006, a New York trial court issued a ruling in a case involving one of his photographs. One of Diorcia's New York random subjects was Ermo Nussenzweig, an Orthodox Jew who objected on religious grounds to Dicorcia's publishing in an artistic exhibition a photograph taken of him without his permission. The photo's subject argued that his privacy and religious rights had been violated by both the taking and publishing of the photograph of him. The judge dismissed the lawsuit, finding that the photograph taken of Nussenzweig on a street is art - not commerce - and therefore is protected by the First  Amendment.

•Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Judith J. Gische ruled that the photo of Nussenzweig—a head shot showing him sporting a scraggly white beard, a black hat and a black coat was art, even though the photographer sold 10 prints of it at $20,000 to $30,000 each. The judge ruled that New York courts have "recognized that art can be sold, at least in limited editions, and still retain its artistic character.

•First Amendment protection of art is not limited to only starving artists. A profit motive in itself does not necessarily compel a conclusion that art has been used for trade purposes."

 Walker Evans - Many are called - 1938

Voyeur

Hidden Camera

Joel Meyerowitz - Broadway and West 46th Street NY - 1976 

• Taken at street level this offers an eye level view of incipient confusion. 
• The eye is overwhelmed by signs, and colour adds to the effect of chaos.  
• Although the image is full of deail there is no sense of tradition or of unity. 
• Indeed it is difficult to find a solid building at all.  

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

Adam Bezer 2001

Liz Wells says that phrase is 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.

The destruction of the skyscaper, in the Twin Towers is the destruction of the American Dream as Andrew Grahame Dixon figured earlier.

Where issues of the body the city the built environment the man of the crowd the stranger/immigrant collide catastrophically.

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 nineteenth century saw the automation of picture making , in the 21st century we now seek machines to look at pictures on our behalf.” (Wells: 09: 339)

Content more important than the image itself.