Cop lecture: Cities and film

Cop lecture: Cities and film

City in modernism

Georg simmel

Dresden exhib 1903

effects of the city on an individual 

Lonely metropolitan 

resistance of the individual compared to being swallowed up

mechanism of the city

how to live/how to be/how to survive

Urban sociology

People had to learn how to live in a city the etiquette and crossing roads safely etc

Guaranty building

Really detailed embellishment on the facade of the building

buildings got burnt to the ground so this fella re-modelled NY

sky is the limit

Manhatta 1921

City of tall facades of marble and iron

Video shows people first coming to Manhattan to start work. Fresh of the boat.

Charles Scheeler

Ford motor company's plant at River route, Detroit

Workers work for minimal wage making Ford cars just so they can spend their wages on a Ford car

Modern Times 1936 Charlie chaplin

Satirical film where Charlie works in the Ford factory and has a breakdown

Performance art

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

Georg Simmel (1858 -1918)

German sociologist

Write 'Metropolis and Mental Life' in 1903

Dresden Exhibiton - 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

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

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

Carson Pririe Scott store in Chicago (1904) - 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

Manhatta (1921)

Fordism - Coined by Antonio Gramsci in his essay 'Americanism & Fordism' (1934)

'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)

Also explored in 'Modern Times' (1936) Charlie Chaplin

'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 foes up dramatically - leads to the great depression

Maragret Bourke-White

Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

Flaneur

The term flaneur comes from the French noun which has the basinal meaning of 'stroller', 'lounger'

Charles Boudelaire

The 19th century Boudelaire proposes a version of the flaneur that of 'a person who walks the city in order to experience it' - Art should capture this

Walter Benjamin - Adopts the concept of the urban observer as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle as soon in his writings

Photographer as flaneur

Susan Sontag - The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitring, stalks, cruising the organ inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovered the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.

Daido Moriyama (1970's) Skinjuku district of Tokyo - influenced by William Klein's work

Flaneuse

The invisible Flaneuse. Women and the literature of modernity

Janet Wolff

The literature of modernity, describing the fleeting, anonymous, ephemeral encounters of life in the metropolis, mainly accounts for the experiences of men.

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

Arbus - Woman at a couter smoking NYC (1962)

Hopper - Automat (1927)

Sophie Calle 'Suite Venitienne' (1980)

Venice - city as a labyrinth of streets and alleyways in which you can get lost but at the same time will always end up where you begin

'Don't look Now' (1973) Nicolas Roeg

The Detective (1980) - wants to provide photographic evidence of her existence - his photos are notes on her are displayed next to her photos and notes about him - set in Paris

Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Stills (1977-80)

Here is New York book/exhibition

Weegee (Arthur Felig) - press photographer in the 1930's/40's - signature style is photographing emergencies in the city

The Naked City - book of Weegee's images (1945) - develops into a film (1948)

LA Noire (2011) - the first video game to be shown at the Tribecca Film Festival - Incorporates 'Motion Scan', where actors are recorded by 32 surrounding cameras to capture facial expressions from every angle. The technology is central to the games interrogation mechanic, as players must use the suspects reactions to questioning to huge whoever they are lying or not.

Cities of the future/past - Fritz Lang 'Metropolis' (1929)

Ridley Scott 'Bladerunner' (1982/2019) LA

Lorca di Corcia 'Heads' (2001) NY - investigates idea of the individual and the relation to the crowd

Public/Private - lawsuit against Corcia

Walker Evans 'Many are called' (1938) - concealed camera