Cities and Film

Georg Simmel (1858-1918)
- German sociologist

- Writes Metropolis and mental life in 1903

- Frankfurt school thinkers: Walter Benjamin, Fracauer, Adorno and Horkheimer

Talks about the effect of the city on an individual instead of writing about life in the city as a human.

1903.

Architect Louis Sullivan (1856-1924)
- creator of the modern skyscraper

- an infulential architect and critic of the chicago school

- mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright

- Guaranty Building was built in 1894 by Alder and Sullivan in Buffalo NY

The Tall Office building artistically considered - 'form never follows function'

 

Four Zones.

Basement- mechanical and utility area - didn't show on the face of the building, was underground.

Ground floor- public areas, shops, entrances and lobbies.

Office floors- identical office cells around elevators.
Final zone- terminating zone, elevator equipment utilities and few offices.

Terracotta blocks covered the steel structure. Different styles of block were on each of the four zones. "It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line."

“The numerous parallels between Sullivan’s ornament and the architectural decoration of Furness make it clear that Sullivan’s ornament came directly from Furness and, through him, from earlier ornament by English architects.” (Sprague 1979)

Carson Pririe Scott stro in Chicago (1904)

- skyscrapers represent the upwardly mobile city of business opportunity

- Fire cleared buildings in  Chicago in 1871 and made way for Louis Sullivans new aspirational buildings.

Manhatta (1921) Paul Strand and Charles Scheeler

Manhatta (1921) is a short documentary film which revels in the haze rising from city smoke stacks. With the city as subject, it consists of 65 shots sequenced in a loose non-narrative structure, beginning with a ferry approaching Manhattan and ending with a sunset view from a sky scraper. The primary objective of the film is to explore the relationship between photography and film; camera movement is kept to a minimum, as is incidental motion within each shot. Each frame provides a view of the city that has been carefully arranged into abstract compositions.

It was an attempt to show the film makers' love for the city of New York. The interspersed title cards include exceprts from Whalt Whitmans poetry

Ford Motor Companies plant at River Rouge, Detroit (1927)

Fordism- coined by antonio Gramsci in his essay "Americanism and Fordism"

maximum productivity and minium effort

Modern Times (1936) Charlie Chaplin

Wrote, directed and starred in 'modern times'
factory worker, employed on an assembly line. 

After being subjected to such indignities as being force-fed by a "modern" feeding machine and an accelerating assembly line where Chaplin screws nuts at an ever-increasing rate onto pieces of machinery, he suffers a mental breakdown that causes him to run amok throwing the factory into chaos.

Gets accussed of being a communist, goes to jail, meets a girl, ends up working as a waiter ends up performing a kind of pantomime which is a hit and saves the dy for the two of them.

Stock Market Crash 1929. the Great Depression

Man with a Movie Camera (1929) Dziga Vertov and Elizaveta Svilova

Russian silent documentary film, no story or actors. 

cinematic techniques Vertov invents: double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeza frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angels. extreme close ups, tracking shots, backward footage, stop motion animations and a self-reflexive style (at one point it features a split screen tracking shot; the sides have opposite Dutch angles).

futuristic city that would serve as a commentary on existing ideals in the Soviet world. This imagined city’s purpose was to awaken the Soviet citizen through truth and to ultimately bring about understanding and action. Celebrates industrialisation mechanisation transport communication.  The camera has access to intimate moments bed/birth as well as public street life.  World peopled by mannequins.

Flaneur - french for masculine.

Susan Sontag- On photography

solitary walker, flaneur, discovering the city.
Street photographer

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

Weegee )arthur Felig)

Lower east side of NY. Press photographer 19030s and 40s.
Developed his photographs in a homemade darkroom in the back of his car in 1938.

LA Noire 2011

L.A. Noire is set in LA in 1947 and challenges the player, controlling a Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detective, to solve a range of cases across five crime desks. Players must investigate crime scenes for clues, follow up leads, and interrogate suspects, and the players' success at these activities will impact how much of the cases' stories are revealed.

As the title suggests, the game draws heavily from both plot and aesthetic elements of film noir – stylistic films from the 1940s and 1950s that shared similar visual styles and themes including crime, sex, and moral ambiguity and were often shot in black and white with harsh, low-key lighting. The game uses a distinctive colouring-style in homage to the visual style of film noir, including the option to play the game in black-and-white. The post-war setting is the backdrop for plot elements that reference the detective films of the '40s (as well as James Ellroy's novel L.A. Confidential and the Curtis Hanson film based on it), such as corruption and drugs, with a jazz soundtrack. L.A. Noire is also notable for using Lightsprint's real-time global illumination technology, as well as Depth Analysis's newly developed technology for the film and video game industries called MotionScan, where actors are recorded by 32 surrounding cameras to capture facial expressions from every angle. The technology is central to the game's interrogation mechanic, as players must use the suspects' reactions to questioning to judge whether they are lying or not.

L.A. Noire is the first video game to be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival.Upon release, the game received critical acclaim.

Walker Evans Many are Called (1938)
Clarke says Evans used a concealed camera hidden beneath his trench coat. The result is one of the most incisive series of photographs of city life ever taken.  There is a haunting quality appropriate to the environment in which figures are placed. Everyone appears alone and separate.