helen.clarke@leeds-‐art.ac.uk
Ci#es and Film
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 rela>on of the individual to the crowd in the city
Georg Simmel (1858-‐ 1918) • German sociologist • Writes Metropolis and Mental Life in 1903 • Influences cri>cal theory of the Frankfurt School thinkers eg: Walter Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno and Horkheimer
Dresden Exhibi>on 1903 • 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 • Herbert Bayer Lonely Metropolitan 1932
Urban sociology Lewis Hine (1932) • 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 influen>al architect and cri>c of the Chicago School • mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright, • Guaranty Building was built in 1894 by Adler & Sullivan in Buffalo NY
Details from Guaranty Building
Carson Pririe Scob 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 aspira>onal buildings
Manha;a (1921) Paul Strand and Charles Scheeler
youtube
Charles Scheeler
Ford Motor Company's plant at River Rouge, Detroit (1927).
• Ford Motor Company's plant at River Rouge, Detroit (1927).
Fordism: mechanised labour rela>ons • 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: 2005:4)
Modern Times (1936) Charlie Chaplin
Stock market crash of 1929 • Factories close and unemployment goes up drama>cally • Leads to “the Great Depression” • Margaret Bourke-‐White
Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
hbp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00ZciIC4JPw
Flaneur • he term flâneur comes from the French masculine noun flâneur —which has the basic meanings of "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", "loafer"—which itself comes from the French verb flâner, which means "to stroll"
Charles Baudelaire • The nineteenth century French poet Charles Baudelaire proposes a version of the flâneur— that of "a person who walks 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 analy>cal tool and as a lifestyle as seen in his wri>ngs • (Arcades Project, 1927– 40), Benjamin’s 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 voyeuris>c 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.' (pg. 55)
Flaneuse • The Invisible Flâneuse. Women and the Literature of Modernity • Janet Wolff • Theory, Culture & Society November 1985 vol. 2 no. 3 37-‐46
•
The literature of modernity, describing the flee>ng, anonymous, ephemeral encounters of life in the metropolis, mainly accounts for the experiences of men. It ignores the concomitant separa>on of public and private spheres from the mid-‐nineteenth century, and the increasing segrega>on of the sexes around that separa>on. The influen>al wri>ngs of Baudelaire, Simmel, Benjamin and, more recently, Richard Senneb and Marshall Berman, by equa>ng 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 Dialec>cs of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.)
• Susan Buck-‐Morss, in this text suggests that the only figure a woman on the street can be is either a pros>tute or a bag lady
Arbus/Hopper Woman at a Counter Smoking, N.Y.C. (1962)
Automat (1927)
Sophie Calle Suite VeniRenne (1980)
Venice • City as a labyrinth of streets and alleyways in which you can get lost but at the same >me will always end up back where you begin • Don’t look Now (1973) Nicholas Roeg
The Detec>ve (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
Cindy Sherman Un>tled Film S>lls (1977-‐80)
Here is New York book/exhibi>on
2001/1977
Weegee (Arthur Felig)
The Naked City 1945
1948
LA Noire (2011) • the first video game to be shown at the Tribecca Film Fes>val • Incorporates “MoRonScan”, where actors are recorded by 32 surrounding cameras to capture facial expressions from every angle.The technology is central to the game's interroga>on mechanic, as players must use the suspects' reac>ons to ques>oning to judge whether they are lying or not.
Ci>es of the future/past-‐ Fritz Lang Metropolis (1929)
Ridley Scob Bladerunner (1982/2019) LA
Lorca di Corcia Heads (2001) NY
Public/Private •
•
•
In 2006, a New York trial court issued a ruling in a case involving one of his photographs. One of diCorcia's New York random subjects was Ermo Nussenzweig, an Orthodox Jew who objected on religious grounds to diCorcia's publishing in an ar>s>c exhibi>on 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 Ammendement. Manhaban state Supreme Court Jus>ce Judith J. Gische ruled that the photo of Nussenzweig—a head shot showing him spor>ng 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 edi>ons, and s>ll retain its ar>s>c character. [F]irst [A]mendment protec>on of art is not limited to only starving ar>sts. A profit mo>ve in itself does not necessarily compel a conclusion that art has been used for trade purposes."
Walker Evans Many are called (1938)
Youtube
Postmodern city
Postmodern City in photography: Joel Meyerowitz Broadway and West 46th Street NY 1976
9/11 Ci>zen journalism: the end of the flaneur? Adam Bezer 2001 • Liz Wells says that phrase is first seen in an ar>cle 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.
Surveillance City • “Since the aback 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 automa>on of picture making , in the 21st century we now seek machines to look at pictures on our behalf.” (Wells: 09: 339)
•
S>lls from the video, Un>tled, 2003, by Runa Islam shown in the Interven>on exhibi>on 2003, John Hansaard Gallery. Islam uses BBC news footage of the collapse of the World Trade Centre, 11 September 2001. Slowed down and in reverse, the back to front collapse of the towers aquires a ‘terrible beauty’. The viwer is forced to contemplate events in a manner which is very different from any earlier responses they might have had to the ubiquitously show news footage. The ‘sublime’ quality of the panorama is dealt with in such a way as to make the viewer ask if Katherine Stockhausen wasn’t perhaps touching on some unmen>onable aspect of any viewers experience I describing the collapse of the WTC as “the greatest work of art ever”?
Further Research • Cityscapes of modernity: criRcal exploraRons By David Frisby • Art of America: Modern Dreams (2/3) Andrew Grahame Dixon BBC 4 21/11/11 • De Grazia, Victoria (2005), IrresisRble Empire: America's Advance Through 20th-‐Century Europe, Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press • Susan Buck-‐Morss, The DialecRcs of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989) • Grahame Clarke (1997) The Photograph, Chapter 5 The city in photography • h;p://hereisnewyork.org/ • Art in the Age of Terrorism, Terrible BeauRes, Bernadebe Buckley, (2005)