Lecture 4 - Cities & Film - Helen Clark

The 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

Georg Simmel (1858-1918)

•German sociologist

•Writes Metropolis and Mental 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 intellectual life in the city but instead reverses the idea and writes about the effect of the city on the individual

How the body functions in a new space, that envolves things like traffic.
How u negotiate the environment and other people and how this effects the identity.

•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.
Vulnerable body in relation to the vastness of the city. Relationship with the body to the city. 
He is swallowed up by the city so to speak.

•— Georg Simmel The Metropolis and Mental Life 1903

Architect Louis Sullivan (1856-1924)

•creator of the modern skyscraper,

Form always follows function.

•an influential architect and critic of the Chicago School

•mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright,

•Guaranty Building was built in 1894 by Adler & Sullivan in Buffalo NY

Organic decoration influenced by the arts and crafts movement. 
The building is divided into four zones. Reflective and organising of the body. The building dictates how the person moves through space using the building.

Represented the american dream where everything is up for grabs. People migrating into factories etc.

Commissioned to photo the plant for a huge campaign. Typical modern aesthetic in the photos.
Celebration of the shape of injury. Abstract imagery.

Working this way to produce the most amount of goods. In a affordable way.

Stars and Directs the film. Lots of chaos in the film, underlying comment on the aspect of modernity.
The body is swallowed by the machine. He deals with a political message in a humorous way.

Looking at the ideal society and the figure on the street.

He is a upper class gentlemen, strolling around the city. Idealess is put across as creativity.

sitting back watching the social interaction and making notes. Art should capture aspects of the city.

He thinks about the flaneur and he applies the ides to his own life as a kind of self portrait
How is the city used by people, how can it be arranged to maximise the experience.
Outside and inside simultaneously. - encourages you to purchase things. Not stopping your
consumerist desires.

Use of the camera to document their experience of the city.

Feminists investigate that a Flaneuse is a female.

Isolated woman dwarfed by the environment.

She records the mans every move and writes a diary of his behaviour. Kind of
stalking love story.

The architecture of the city envites a certain relationship. Your in a kind of maze
that allows you to get lost but be in a fixed defined space.

Record of photographic images made by a mixture of professionals and ordinary people also.
Democracy of photographs. 3000 plus photos.

Almost identical, similar buildings, exactly the same camera angle and a similar
facial expression.

1930's - he was a press photography in lower east New York. He always appears
at the murder scene. Only photographer with a police radio. The Nake City

They turned his work into a tv series / book. You see the investigation of the murder of a young model.

Set in the same era as WeeGee. Same styling but set in a contemporary LA police Dept.

Mix of the Past and the Future. Typical Post Modernist Style.

Faces represent an interior life. Hard to Pin Down...

Its ok to do this if its for arts sake. If the image was used for advertising he could of
done something about it.

Photographing on the sly with a concealed camera. Nice exposure of interior city life.

Representation of the city as a bombardment of information. Saturated colour and depth of field is used.
None of the people are the subject of the image.

People are just looking on to the drame in a normal sense....Not a big deal.

Theere is no person who can remain detached from the city. The destruction of the twin towers was the destruction of the American Dream.

Turner Prize 2008. Uses footage of 9/11 backwards so its rebuilt.

Hand Out

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 Capitalism Verso, 1991