|
Film-Philosophy Journal | Salon | Portal
(ISSN 1466-4615) Vol. 8 No. 29, September 2004 |
|
|
|
|
|
Michele Braun Modern Dreams and Postmodern Realities: The City as Spatial Archetype in _Screening the City_ _Screening the City_ Edited by Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice London: Verso,
2003 ISBN 1-85984-476-6 312 pp. In their Introduction to _Screening the City_ the
editors describe the volume as addressing the reciprocal relationship between
cinema and the city: the way cinema influenced the construction of the city,
and the way the city is represented within cinema. In recent years film
studies has found fruitful crosspollination with architecture, geography,
sociology, and urban studies in its turn to questions of spatiality. The
editors describe this spatial turnı as coinciding with an intensified
recognition within film studies of the city (and the city-film) as the
archetypal ground for examination of visual and sensory experience, form and
style, perception, cognition, and the meaning of the filmic image and filmic
textı (1). The book is divided into two sections, the first containing essays
on what the editors describe as the modern cities of Central and Eastern
Europe, and the second, the postmodern cities of North America. _Screening the City_ is the second volume edited by Mark
Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice resulting from the _Cinema and the City_
conference held in March 1999. The fact that a second volume was published
from the same conference is what first drew my attention. Why was a second
book warranted? The first volume, titled after the conference, _Cinema and
the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context_, was published as
part of the Studies in Urban and Social Changeı series. The focus of the
book reflects its inclusion in the series, as the essays focus primarily on
what might be described as non-narrative interrelationships between cinema
and the city. In one of the introductory chapters to the volume, Fitzmaurice
describes the volume as emphasizing film as a fundamentally spatial rather
than as a textual mediumı. [1] This spatiality is located within the cities
that are represented in the book (Los Angeles, Tampa, Montreal, Paris,
London, Johannesburg, Sydney, Dublin, Manila, Saigon) rather than the films
discussed. The emphasis is on the relationship between cinema and city that
takes place outside of the narratives within film. The project of the first volume, to form a sociology of
cinema that recognizes the practices of sociology and of film studies,
focuses more on the practices of film studies, and its historical and
theoretical development. In _Screening the City_, the emphasis more
frequently is focused on the representation of the city within film, rather
than the economic relationship between cinema and the city; as the editors
indicate in the Introduction, the city is the archetypal groundı for
producing meaning in the filmic image and filmic *text*ı (1). The difference
between this volume and the previous is not a rigid one though, since essays
that interpret the text of particular films are present in the first volume
and essays that explore the economic and social relationships between cinema
as a cultural production and the cities in which is it produced (and to some
extent in which it is disseminated) are present in the second volume. The differences
are rather best described as a tendency, which makes the first volume more
interesting to sociologists, and the second to film studies scholars. _Screening the City_ is a tightly focused volume: the
first part describes Central and Eastern European cinema of the first half of
the 20th century that responds to the political and social upheavals of that
period, and the second half describes realist cinema in North America in its
expression of postmodernity, a term the editors recognized as charged and
evidence of a distinction (between modernity and postmodernity) that is at
times inadequate in describing the social realities of the latter half of the
century. The volume begins with Carsten Strathausenıs Uncanny
Spaces: The City in Ruttman and Vertovı, which discusses the uncanny in
modernity using Walter Ruttmanıs _Berlin, the Symphony of a Great City_
(1927) and Dziga Vertovıs _Man with a Movie Camera_ (1929) as examples.
Strathausen locates the cinema and the city at the center of the schizophrenia
that haunts modernity and finds its symptomatic expression in and through the
uncannyı (16-17), which operates by bringing the dead back to life through
cinema and through the uncanny in urban landscape and its architecture.
However, Ruttmanıs and Vertovıs films fail to exorcise the uncanny because of
their emphasis on aesthetics. The two films do not have distinct plots, and
as non-narratives Strathausen accuses them of not being able to mount a
critical analysis of the city or of city life -- the camera becomes an
instrument for amusement only. Modernityıs desire to see everything, to
exorcise the uncanny, to make everything transparent, fails in these films,
in part because the camera and the metropolis itselfı (29) are the
protagonists of the film. In Ruttmanıs Berlin: Filming in a 'Hollow Spaceı?ı,
Martin Gaughan seconds the failure of Ruttmanıs film to accomplish a critique
of the city, instead it represents a fascination with modernity that is
evidenced by a series of images that simply reflect, rather than comment
upon, the city. Ruttmanıs emphasis in promoting his film was on the formal
innovation of its rapid montage, designed to capture the speed of life in the
city, was criticized by Siegfried Kracauer when it was first released for
failing to look below the surface of the city and distinguish between
technological development in the city and its representation. Berlin is again
the topic in Peter Jelavichıs The City Vanishes: Piel Jutziıs _Berlin
Alexanderplatz_ı, which follows on Gaughanıs historical account of the
critical response to Ruttmanıs film with a historical account of the mode of
production and response to Jutziıs adaptation of Alfred Doblinıs popular
novel of the same name. Jelavitch notes that Doblinıs novel was described as cinematicı,
a feature that should have made it amenable to adaptation, but cites
censorship, preconceptions of audience taste, the conventions of realism, and
casting choices, all elements unique to the time and place of the filmıs
production, as reasons why the film failed to excite its audience in the way
the novel had. Addressing the problems of adaptation is continued in
Tyrus Millerıs Cut out from Last Yearıs Moldering Newspapersı: Bruno Schulz
and the Brothers Quay on _The Street of Crocodiles_ı, though for Miller, the
Brothersı animated puppets succeed in adapting Bruno Schulzıs story of his
provincial dreamworldı (81) by subjecting it to the transformative force of
timeı (80). While Schultzıs story was published in 1933, the American
Brothers Quayıs film was not produced until 1986, a displacement across time
that reflects the division of the book into European modernistı and American
postmodernistı sections, and which Miller in part credits for the success of
the adaptation. The placement of the next essay, David Sorfaıs
Architorture: Jan Svankmajer and Surrealist Filmı, seems to offer up the
Surrealist movement in Prague that began in the 1920s and 30s as a potential
solution for the difficulty experienced by filmmakers such as Ruttman, Vertov,
and Jutzi in capturing the essence of the city in the Europe of their time.
The Surrealist fascination with the ruined and threatening spaces of the
city, its approach to urban life as civilization and simultaneously as
destroyer of the civilizedı (101), is found in many of Svankmajerıs films; it
is a destruction that Sorfa describes as architortureı, a theatrical
representation of painı, to borrow Foucaultıs description from _Discipline
and Punish_. In Svankmajerıs _Flora_, a short film produced for MTV in 1989,
the goddess, whose body is composed of fruit and vegetables, disintegrates in
close-ups of hands, feet, and torso, a snuff movie with vegetablesı (108).
The city is implicated in this wordless death through a soundtrack of traffic
noise overlying the sound of the rotting vegetables. Sorfa reads the rotting
figure as the death of nature and the impossibility of belonging in the city,
something that reveals the relationship between the construction of the self
and the structure of the city. It is this absolute and necessary
relationship between self and architecture that, in denying any prior or
privileged existence to the subject, underlies the sense of loss and lostness
in Surrealist filmı (109). The sense of loss produced by the cityıs architecture in
Svankmajerıs films is not unique to Surrealism but is also present in
Krzysztof Kieslowskiıs series of feature films depicting contemporary Polish
life, _Dekalog_ (1989). The Polish housing-project that is the site for the
ten stories, loosely based on the Ten Commandments, was repeatedly described
as drabı by reviewers (117). For Jessie Labov in Kieslowskiıs _Dekalog_,
Everyday Life, and the Art of Solidarityı, this attention to the physical
texture of the city connects the series to the politics of Solidarity in
Poland. The architecture of the city is more than simply a backdrop to the
action of the characters; it supercedes the generic characters and becomes
the central agent of political comment within the film. The overall effect of the first section of the book is
to use the social, economic, and political environments of Europe in the
first half of the 20th century to read the sign of the city in the film of
that period (though some of the readings venture into the latter half of the
century, crossing the temporal boundary initially laid out in the
Introduction without explanation). At the beginning of the second half, Alan
Siegelıs After the Sixties: Changing Paradigms in the Representation of
Urban Spaceı recognizes the reverse of that relationship between city and
film as well. He begins with a definition: The processes of cinema specify
representations of the city, refract memory, and shape perspectives of
history that engender the formulation and reading of social space -- re-generating
processes of spectatorship -- and thereby changing a societyıs cultural
vocabularyı (137). The essay ranges across themes as Siegel describes how the
economic and historical changes in cinematic production and distribution
since the 1960s caused a shift in the reception of film. Urban space came to
be seen as mutable, subject to innovation and sometimes a contested space
that was viewed differently by different, often marginalized groups. Siegel
relies upon Foucaultıs description of discourses as practices that
systematically form the objects of which they speakı (143) to describe not
only the experience of the cinematic city in the 20th century, but to also
explain how societal changes caused a genre like film noir, so closely linked
to the city, to change as well. The moral order of Phillip Marlowe and Sam
Spade is replaced in response to the pressures of the increasingly chaotic
city with the morally ambiguous actions of characters like Clint Eastwoodıs
in _Dirty Harry_ (1971). A parallel to this generic transformation is hinted
at in the final paragraphs as Siegel turns his attention to digital media and
the internet, though how these alternative social spacesı will
counterbalance the corporate homogenization of urban realityı (156) is not
made clear. Siegelıs far ranging essay is followed by Mark Shielıs
tightly constructed A Nostalgia for Modernity: New York, Los Angeles, and
American Cinema in the 1970sı, which focuses on Woody Allenıs _Annie Hall_
(1977) and Sidney Lumetıs _Network_ (1976). Following David Harvey and
Frederic Jameson, Shiel describes a geographic shift that traces a line from
European cities, to the cities of the Northeast coast of the United States,
and finally to its West coast, as capitalism moves from its early imperialist
stages, through modernism, and finally to postmodernism, or late capitalism.
The archetypal city thus changes as capitalism changes -- New York is the
paradigm of modernity, and although human relationships may be difficult in
Allenıs _Annie Hall_, in New York they are still meaningful, unlike his
depiction of L.A. as shallow and inauthentic. In _Network_ the morally
shallow efforts of the television executives, as they respond to the
pressures of global capitalism, are read as emblematic of the postmodern condition.
_Annie Hall_ and _Network_ each express a nostalgia for modernity that is
intimately connected with the cities in which the narratives take place. The next three essays of the section move away from
historical or sociological descriptions of the city in cinema to provide
theoretical interpretations of the films they discuss. Paul Gormleyıs The
Affective City: Urban Black Bodies and Milieu in _Menace II Society_ and
_Pulp Fiction_ı describes the relationship between the body and urban space
in these films through an immediacy of sense experience of the cinematic
body. This affectı begins with an othering of the images of the black body,
such as that identified by Judith Butler and Fritz Fanon, but moves beyond it
to mimic the spatial and temporal relations between the body and urban
spaceı characteristic of New Black Realism (182). This othering embodies
white fears of the black body, and in particular the black urban male body as
a dangerous a violent body. The emotional and physiological response of the
audience to the image in the screen is used to explain the visceral response
in the white cultural imaginationı (189) in response to the perceived
underlying violence of the hood film. While for Gormley, Tarantinoıs _Pulp Fiction_ deconstructs
this dangerous black body of the hood film through its invitation to view the
black body as more than fetish through the affective shock of the rape scene,
in Masoodıs City Spaces and City Times: Bakhtinıs Chronotrope and Recent
African-American Filmı the space of the urban neighborhood is the center of
meaning-making, not the body. In particular, it is the Black neighborhoods of
New York and Los Angeles that accrete the most meaning. Bakhtinıs
chronotropeı, a place that embodies a time, is a way of understanding New
Black Realism that acknowledges the history of black cinema while at the same
time recognizing the immediacy of the city neighborhood as a powerful site of
representation in films of the genre. The specificity of the chronotrope offers
a more complex understanding of the relationship between the spatio-temporal
discourses that generate genres and the world outside the textı (207), which
introduces an extradiegetic dialectic with the political and social
conditions of that world that lies outside the text. In other words, the
chronotrope of the hood in New Black Realism provides the means to theorize
difference, not just within the film, but within the larger cultural context
in which the film is produced and disseminated. In Against the Los Angeles Symbolic: Unpacking the
Racialized Discourse of the Automobile in 1980s and 1990s Cinemaı, Los
Angeles again is the symbolic overdetermination of the cityı (217). Jude
Davies uses Jean Baudrillardıs identification of the automobile as the
paradigmatic representation of the American city (Los Angeles in particular)
to interrogate the sexism and racism inherent in the automobile as status
symbol in three films: _Colors_ (1988), _Falling Down_ (1993), and _Devil in
a Blue Dress_ (1995). He reads the films as philosophical and cinematic
representation of Los Angeles [that] configure race, gender, and class
through the automobile as a symbolic objectı (234), films that complicate the
oversimplification of Los Angeles as a homogeneous and unified symbolic city. The next essay in the volume, Matthew Gandyıs Allergy
and Allegory in Todd Haynesı _[Safe]_ı, moves away from the city itself to
examine the relationship between city and country in Haynesıs 1995 dystopic
environmental story. In its depiction of the alienation of the protagonist
Carol White (not only from her environment, which makes her sick, but from
others surrounding her) Gandy describes how the antimony of city and country
are exploited in the film to reveal the anti-urban sentiment in much of the
New Age back-to-nature thought. The irrationality that surrounds discussions
of chemical sensitivity becomes another expression of the city as a metaphor
for disease and contagion. Finally, in Darrell Vargaıs The Deleuzean Experience of
Cronenbergıs _Crash_ and Wendersı _The End of Violence_ı, we return to the
body as the site of representation. This time, Varga draws upon Deleuze and
Guattariıs concept of the body-without-organsı as a desiring machineı that
only comes into its own as it is sexualized on the highways and in the car
crashes of Cronenbergıs _Crash_ (1996), and through its use in the
stuntwomanıs damaged body as a contributor to illusion of violence and the
real but invisible violence of the assassin who kills the renegade computer
scientist in Wim Wendersıs _The End of Violence_ (1996). In contrast to
Gormleyıs description of the Black urban male body that so clearly marks a
geographically-conscribed site of violence, limited to the clearly identified
neighborhoods it inhabits, in both _Crash_ and _The End of Violence_ there is
no clear connection between location and violence. The violence of the car
crash and the threat of silent surveillance are non-specific -- they could
occur in any city, in any population. The threat these films embody becomes
generic. In the final coda of the volume, The City Reborn:
Cinema at the Turn of the Centuryı, John Orr describes the cinematic city as
an imitation of the city itself. Just as a city is planned out, so the
cinematic city is designed and constructed, and thus spatial disconnection
becomes a key feature of the cinematic city. Because of the constructed
nature of both the cinematic and the actual city, with a reciprocal
representation of the city in cinema and the cinematic city in the actual
one, the city itself can be read through its cinematic representation. The editors describe the dividing line between the two
sections of the book as the potential differences between modernism and
postmodernism as reflected through the cinema of each era, and while they
recognize the geographic division between the sections, this division is
de-emphasized. This de-emphasis seems unnecessary, and perhaps even a bit
obscuring, since European avant-garde cinema described as modernist is (with the
exception of Svankmajerıs _Flora_) intimately connected with the cities it
imagines, whereas the role of the city in the postmodern American films
discussed in the second half is frequently subsumed to other visual demands.
The hoodı films of the New Black Realism only explore the spatial
representation of a small part of the city, while the automobile,
environmental poisons, and ubiquitous surveillance that are discussed in the
final essays of the volume are generic -- they could represent the experience
of the viewer in many cities of the new global cinema. The whole of any
individual city, whether it is European or American, is primarily envisioned
in the films of the early or mid-century, the ones that straddle the modern
and the postmodern. The sometimes arbitrary nature of the division of the
volume aside, the essays in _Screening the City_ provide a broad and varied
approach to the spatial representation of the city in cinema. As a whole,
with its theoretical, historical, psychological, and sociological
interpretations of films, the volume represents an interesting engagement
with the cinema of the city. Unlike its predecessor, this second volume tends
toward film studies rather than sociology, more frequently reading the
narrative of the film text in conjunction with the conditions of its
production than the previous volume, making it a more tightly focused volume
in many ways. It also makes the book more valuable to film studies scholars
in its close readings of the films it surveys. Its value lies in this very
focus, even while it ranges across genres, times, and geographic spaces to
theorize the influence of modernist and postmodernist thinking on the
production of cinematic representations of the city. Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA Note 1. Shiel and Fitzmaurice, eds, _Cinema and the City:
Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context_ (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p.
19. Copyright İ Film-Philosophy 2004 Michele Braun, Modern Dreams and Postmodern Realities:
The City as Spatial Archetype in _Screening the City_ı, _Film-Philosophy_,
vol. 8 no. 29, September 2004
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n29braun>. |
|
|
|
|
|
Save as Plain Text
Document...Print...Read...Recycle Join
the _Film-Philosophy_ salon, and receive the journal articles via email as
they are published. here Film-Philosophy (ISSN 1466-4615) PO Box 26161, London SW8 4WD, England Contact the Editor (remove Caps
before sending) Back to the Film-Philosophy homepage |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
