Lecture 6// Cities and film: Notes..

// Cities and film

This lecture looked at:

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

// Georg Simmel (1858-1918);

German sociologist; writes Metropolis and Mentak life in 1903; influences critical theory of the Frankfurt school thinkers eg Walter Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno and Horkheimer

- Dresden Exhibition 1903:
Simmel is asked to lecture on the role of the interllectual 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.'

: Georg Simmel The Metropolis and Mental Life 1903

// 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 and Sullivan in Buffalo NY

Detail from the Guaranty Building

// 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

// Fordism: mechanised labour relations

- Coined by Antonio Gramsci in his essay 'Americanism and Fordism'
- ' The eponymous manufacturing system designed to spew out standardized, low cost goods and afford its workers decent enough wages to buy them'

: De Grazia 2005 p.4

// Modern Times (1936) Charlie Chaplin

// Stock market crash of 1929

- Factories close and unemployment goes up dramatically
- Leads to ' the Great Depression'
- Margaret Bourke- White

// Flaneur

- the term flaneur comes from the French masculine noun flaneur- which has the basic meanings of 'stroller', 'lounger', 'saunterer', 'loafer'- which itself comes from the French verb flaner which means 'to stroll'

// Charles Baudelaire

- The nineteenth century French poet Charles Baudelaire proposes a version of the flaneur- that of 'a person who walks in the city in order to experience it'

- Art should capture this
- Simultaneously apart from and a part of the crowd

// Walter Benjamin

- Adopts the concept of the urban observer as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle as seen in hos writings.

- (Arcades Project, 1927-40), Benjamins final, incomplete book about Parisian city life in the 19th century.

- Berlin Chronicle/ Berlin Childhood (memoirs)

// Photographer as flaneur

- Susan Sontag on photography

'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 flaneur finds the world picturesque'

(pg.55)

// Flaneuse

- The invisible Flaneuse. Woman and the literature of Modernity
- Janet Wolff
- Theory, Culture and Society November 1985 vol.2 no.3 37-46

// Susan Buck- Morss

Dialectics of seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.)

- Susan Buck- Morss
In this text suggests that the only woman on the street can be is either a prostitute or a bag lady

// Venice

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

- Dont look now (1973) Nicholas Roeg

// 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

// LA Noire (2011)

- The first video game to be shown at the Tribecca Film Festival
- Incorporates 'Motionscan', where actors are recoreded 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 judge whether they are lying or not.