Lecture:4 Citys and film

The lecture looks as the city as represented on and in film: through both photography and in various film types (experimental silent cinema, contemporary video works, a Chaplin comedy, Film Noir and Cult Classics). In doing so it looks at the differences in the representation and theorization of urban existence in first Modernism and then Postmodernism.

This inevitably involves consideration of the body in the city. Beginning with Simmel, as the Frankfurt School do, the figure of the flaneur is explored in art, literature and in feminist theory.

To investigate or illustrate some of these ideas, the lecture offers readings of photographers like Sophie Calle, Joel Meyerwitz and Phillip Lorca di Corcia whose work can be critically investigated through theory.

Finally the lecture proposes a post Postmodern city where the body, the psyche and the city are intertwined by the threat (whether experienced or internalised) of terrorism. Lastly looking at how this may be represented through photography, film and video, the lecture considers Citizen Journalism as a visual response which democratises image making and starts to define the experience of the city.

We need to remember that photography established itself in a period when the growth of the city and industry had already provoked a formidable literature and art in response to the increasing influence of urban areas, especially cities such as London, Paris and New York. Photography takes it place in this process, but it does so in a consistently active sense, simultaneously responding to the variety and multiplicity of urban life and experience, and to the question s of how urban space was to be perceived and represented. In brief, its underlying response has been in relation to the visual complexity of a city as both an image and an experience.

(Clarke:1997: 75)Biblography •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 Project (1989) •Grahame Clarke (1997) The Photograph, Chapter 5 The city in photography •http://hereisnewyork.org/ •Art in the Age of Terrorism,Terrible Beauties, Bernadette Buckley, (2005)

Fredrick Jameson Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late CapitalismVerso, 1991

•The city in Modernism

•The possibility 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 (1858-1018)

•German sociologist
•Writes Metropolis and Mental Life in 1903
•Influences critical theory of the Frankfurt School thinkers eg: Walter Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno and Horkheimer

This lecture looks at:

The city in Modernism

The possibility 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

looking at the figure in the urban crowd.

First person to write about the urban society.

In the essay he writes about the effect of the city in the built environment.

involves dealing with traffic 

fragemnted body surrounded by apartment buildings 

windows ad eyes 

image looks back at the spectator

Documentation:

vunerable body in comparison to the vastness of the city - theme is relations ship with the body to the city - risks in construction. No health and saftey equipment.  looking at the possibility of resistance of the individual  being swallowed by the city.

Form follows function:

'Form ever follows function'

Develops and applies the idea of form follows function this is shown with the layout of the building

reflective and organising of the body. building dictates movement through space in the building.

The sky scrapers represent upwardly mobile - city represents the idea of the american dream everything is up for grabs. 

Manhatta (1921) Paul Strand and Charles Scheeler

Notes from clip:

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Images here are typical of the modernist aesthetic. celebration of steel industry represented in the abstract photography -

Movements that the workers make are very repetitive - the relationship between the movement of the machine and the movement of the worker. this repetitive motion is also represented outside the workplace affordable goods been produced then bought by the worker. 

Struggles to be part of the machine, strugles with this aspect of modernity - body is swallowed by the machine. 

People queuing for food, difficult social situations

Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

Observing the social interaction:

Applies these ideas to his life: self portrait - a type of personal memoir a critique of modernity:

experience of strolling through arcades.

how the city is used by people and how it is arranged to enhance this for the people 

Someone who records their social experience:

voyeuristic stroller

photographer looks for beautiful moments in the urban environment:

feminists explore the woman in the city:

femenist 

suggests the only figure of of a woman on the street is a prostitute:

the image of the isolated woman - dwarfed by the cafe : situated in the far right of the image - alone in the city - dreading anticipating. sense of in between moment:

Following a man in the city - diary style entries - following him like a detective this turns into a love story.

Maze that allows you to get lost. the couple go to venice to recover from the loss of a child and woman believes she sees the child in a red dress - cleverly plays with the time line. unsure if it is a mental experience from him or her.

Hires a detective to follow her round the city - both photographing each other 

Snapshot of isolated figure lost in the city: era implied by the clothing reference to the past with the styling: this evokes the past era

No sense of the rest of new york - in this image the images where meant to be mysterious we project our experience into this - use of buildings that could be found anywhere not specific to the actual location:

re fare to the collection of the work as a democracy: democrotise the practice of image making -  

Shot from bellow

similar building 

similar facial expression 

female experience in the city 

Illustration of life directing art or the other way round?

Press photographer  - always appeared at emergencies and murders - arrives at the murders so quick because he has the short wave radio in hand: Always has the first images 

Book was then turned into a tv series - film follows the murder of a young woman

The game is set in LA - solve crime scenes for clues interrogate suspects - set in a contemporary 

Film is made in 1929 - 

Mixing up of the past and the future - depicts LA in 2019 - predicting the future

Investigation of public and private through the representation of portrait photography 

trip flash was used to photograph people during the normal social activities

Represents the lost feeling - lost expression - facial expressions are hard to pin down

almost a representation of an interior life what is going on in our headas:

Crossing the line between public and private 

Traveling on the tube photographing people on the tube - displays the interior social life - 

alone and together at the same time: 

Postmodern city

Again a representation of the city being a bombardment of information - 

not asking us to pick a person from the crown there is not one person who is the subject of the image:

- disorientation- 

Body on the floor is the focus of attention: 

the availability of photographic and video documentation of the city 

the destruction of the american dream - the twin towers 

Uses footage from the disaster  from the BBC and the plays this in reverse the process is undone 

sublime quality of the panorama - colapse of the world trade centre - greatest piece of art of all time.